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Book
Review
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The
fall of advertising & the rise of PR, Ries,
Al and Ries, Laura, Harper Business, 2002
The era of advertising has come to an end and
the practice of PR must take its rightful place
in the scheme of marketing, insist the authors
of this book. The book says that advertising
has become an art and, like any worthwhile art,
its effect and worth lies in the eyes of the
beholder. With various examples, the authors
explain that advertising has never been able
to establish a brand. |
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Advertising wins awards for its creativity.
But what is expected of advertising is promotion
of the product or enhancing the knowledge about
the brand. PR, the authors suggest, is a neutral
voice and thus helps better to build a new brand
or even rebuild an old brand. What the writers
feel is that both the advertising and PR should
work in tandem. Often the advertising message
contradicts the work done by the PR campaign;
hence it is essential that advertising keep
on course. This is an ongoing process as building
a brand is a matter of decades and not months. |
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The
“e” change, Norman, David J., John
Wiley and Sons, 2002
This book discusses electronic trading with
a multidimensional view and gives one a vivid
idea about the mechanics, technology and challenges
involved in electronic trading. Segmented into
eight chapters, the book introduces electronic
markets and provides a backgrounder of such
markets and trading networks and a quasi-technical
treatise. |
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Among many other things it discusses global
securities, derivatives market infrastructure,
various trading platforms, stock exchanges and
products that suit electronic markets etc. The
author here puts forward some interesting observations:
The future will see dissemination of real time
prices to millions of investors over a multiplicity
of electronic lines and devices, a majority
of which will be wireless and portable. And
traditional bricks and mortar exchanges and
centralised marketplaces will be disbanded by
legislation. |
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New
product planning, Kahn, Kenneth P., Response,
2002
In this book the author has presented a
broad interdisciplinary view of product planning.
Product planning is formally defined as the
process of envisioning, conceptualising, developing,
producing, testing, commercialising, sustaining,
and disposing of organisational objectives.
In other words, the author says, it is the up-front
(product development) and the back-end process
(product management). And these two processes
are interlinked. |
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To get a grip on product planning, the author
discusses strategic planning, product strategy,
the product planning process and the product
development charters. The author talks about
the product planning terms and discusses opportunity
identification. Concept generation, which is
also discussed, represents a string of activities
that an organisation should complete to amass
multiple product concepts. Each concept is evaluated
once a set of product concepts has been generated.
The author ends the book with a section on best
practices. The book is written in a lucid language
to make it easily understandable by all.
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