BOOK REVIEW

Your Marketing Sucks,
Mark Stevens, Crown Publishing Group, July 2003
Mark Stevens is the best friend of anyone with a product or service to sell who wants to use marketing as a basis for growing the business. In this book what he provides both entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 types is a hard-nosed, "prove it to me" program that demands accountability for every dollar spent on marketing so that it brings in more revenue or customers, preferably both. Use his program and you won't be throwing money out the window. This book is chock-full of practical ideas such as: marketing is not about advertising, public relations, or direct mail; the marketing moratorium; why the worst ads are actually the best; reverse engineer your marketing so that it starts at the point-of-sale; employ a swarming office; and pick the low-hanging fruit.
Most companies don't have a clue about good marketing, argues the author in his slender but vociferous book. What they need are the principles of "extreme marketing," in which every dollar "is set in a strategic context," is part of an integrated plan and brings in more than a dollar in return-strategies Stevens lays out in his readable, thought-provoking and sometimes outrageous book. He bashes marketers' "conventional wisdom" with an almost immoderate glee, and proposes big changes too: stop all marketing if you can't prove it works; don't use your competitors' marketing as a benchmark; don't depend on the results of focus groups; fire sellers that don't sell; cross-sell to consumers; and try direct mailings are just a few of his ideas.

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Conceptual Issues in Consumer Behaviour: The Indian Context, 1/e
S. Ramesh Kumar, Pearson Education, 2003
Ramesh Kumar attempts to link behavioural concepts with real examples from Indian marketing. The book does not offer part-breaking frameworks; nor is it intended for scholars. But it hopes to enable a student of marketing in understanding the use of concepts in the backdrop of a familiar, identifiable environment. The book will also help practicing marketing executives to understand the utility concepts in triggering thought processes that eventually produce marketing strategies. This "trigger" is the value, which concepts can add to the decision-making process of an executive. The book provides a comprehensive coverage of the various conceptual aspects concerned with consumer behaviour. Several Indian examples across categories have been included to explain the utility of consumer behaviour concepts in the Indian context. You will find several topical consumer behavioural issues like celebrity advertising, managing brand associations, cultural practices and their implications on FMCG products, consumer loyalty, relationship marketing and internet marketing which may be of interest to academicians and practitioners.

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In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of
High-Tech Marketing Disasters
Merrill R. Chapman, Marc F. Richard, and Joel Spolsky, A Press L.P., June 2003
In 1982, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman kicked off the modern business-book era with In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies. The book was a runaway bestseller, and soon authors from all corners of business life were exhorting companies and the people who worked in those companies to get out there and be excellent, control chaos, worship wow, and grasp greatness. Unfortunately, as time went by it became painfully obvious that many of the companies Peters and Waterman had profiled, particularly the high-tech ones, were something less than excellent. Firms such as Atari, Data General, DEC, IBM, Lanier, NCR, Wang, Xerox, and others either crashed and burned or underwent painful and wrenching traumas you would have expected excellent companies to avoid. What went wrong? The authors of this book think they have an answer. They believe that high-tech companies periodically melt down because they fail to learn from the lessons of the past and thus make the same completely avoidable mistakes again and again and again. This book chronicles high-tech stupidity from the past to the present so that we can all move on to create new and unique catastrophes of our very own in the future. The reader will weep (or perhaps laugh, if they are so inclined) as he will examine exhibits of some of the worst high-tech marketing collateral and programs ever created. And he will experience much, much more.