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This book considers how the sales function informs business strategy. There are many books that address how to manage the sales team tactically, however, this text addresses how sales can help organizations to become more customer-oriented. Many organizations are facing escalating costs and growing customer power, making it necessary to allocate resources more strategically. The sales function can provide critical customer and market knowledge to help inform both innovation and marketing. Sales build customer knowledge; network both internally and externally to create additional customer value; and manage customer relationships and selling. The text considers how sales organizations are responding to increasing competition, more demanding customers, and a more complex selling environment. Possible solutions to the many challenges facing organizations are discussed. The book considers the changing nature of sales and how activities can be aligned within the organization, as well as market-sensing, creating customer focus, and the role of sales leadership. Short case studies by a range of organizations operating in various industries are provided. Sales and senior management play an important role in ensuring sales teams’ activities are aligned to business strategy and in creating an environment that allows salespeople to successfully new business opportunities and build long-term profitable business relationships. The book also considers how academic sales literature has changed in the last five years and integrates it with examples from sales practice to provide a more complete picture of the role of sales within the modern organization.

If an organization has customers, it needs to understand marketing. To achieve the best results from marketing requires a subtle blend of art and science. It can also benefit from recommendations for practice rather than lists of options from which to choose. The art of marketing comes from the doing of marketing — implementing programs to attain and retain customers, and seeing what actually works. This is the province of marketing managers, direct marketers, advertisers, and consultants. The examples of good and bad practice used throughout this book illustrate this approach. The science of marketing comes from research — about markets, customers, competitors, and how effectively various types of marketing programs work. This is the province of academics and market researchers. The science of marketing provides the foundations for good marketing practice. Sometimes this science is ignored in the rush to embrace new ideas and technologies. For example, the long scientific history of the adoption and diffusion of innovations says that the Internet will take a long time to fundamentally change the way large numbers of customers buy their products and services. If more managers and investors had understood this, then many dot. coms would not have become dot. bombs. This book blends art and science to provide insight for marketing managers about how to implement marketing more effectively to both create and capture the value of the offers they make to their target customers. In the process it questions the usefulness of some of the more recent marketing fads.

Structural semiotics is a hybrid of communication science and anthropology that accounts for the deep cultural codes that structure communication and sociality, endow things with value, move us through constructed space, and moderate our encounters with change. Doing Semiotics: A Research Guide for Marketers at the Edge of Culture, shows readers how to leverage these codes to solve business problems, foster innovation, and create meaningful experiences for consumers. In addition to the basic principles and methods of applied semiotics, the book introduces the reader to branding basics, strategic decision-making, and cross-cultural marketing management. The guide can be used to supplement my previous books, Marketing Semiotics (2012) and Creating Value (2015), with practical exercises, examples, extended team projects and evaluation criteria. The work guides students through the application of learnings to all phases of semiotics-based projects for communications, brand equity management, design strategy, new product development, and public policy management. In addition to grids and tables for sorting data and mapping cultural dimensions of a market, the book includes useful interview protocols for use in focus groups, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic studies. Each chapter also includes expert case studies and essays from the perspectives of Marcel Danesi, Rachel Lawes, Christian Pinson, Laura Santamaria, and Laura Oswald.

This book shows how to fuse marketing, finance, and other disciplines to improve performance for the corporation or organization. Specifically, it shows decision makers at different levels in the organization and in different functional areas (e.g., marketing, finance, new product development, and human resources management) how to overcome the problems resulting from function- and discipline-based “silos.” The book has several novel features. All concepts are presented in a simple and easily accessible question-and-answer format. The book provides an in-depth analysis of a broad spectrum of important managerial topics (e.g., how to allocate advertising funds between Internet and conventional advertising, how to evaluate brand equity for mergers and acquisitions, and how to coordinate product design, marketing strategy, and production). In addition, because of its fusion-based methodology, the book provides decision makers with new tools to address familiar managerial problems (e.g., resource allocation and the design of managerial contracts in multiproduct or multidivisional firms). Throughout the book, the focus is on providing managers with actionable theories and metrics that are rigorous yet practical, and that allow the firm or organization to fuse — not merely interface — different functional areas.

This book offers a theoretically informed, critical perspective on contemporary marketing practice and its growing cultural, economic, and political influence worldwide. With marketing activities intensifying, the public has become much more aware of its status as consumers. Yet, the relentless visibility of marketing materials and messages in our everyday life contrasts sharply with the mystery surrounding the inner workings of the marketing profession. The silence on the subject is surprising, particularly because the nefarious effects of rampant marketing are widely recognized and marketers are generally identified as key agents in shaping the face of global capitalism. This collection of essays brings together leading scholars and practitioners from the fields of history, business, economic sociology, and cultural anthropology, who share an interest in inspecting the inner workings and outer effects of marketing as a material social practice, an ideology, and a technique. Their work raises some important and timely questions. For example, how has marketing transformed the pharmaceutical industry and what are the consequences for our lives? How does marketing influence the way we think of progress and modernity? How has marketing changed the way we think of childhood? Or, how does marketing appropriate the creativity of consumers for profit? Scholars, policymakers, and practitioners interested in the question of how marketing ‘works’ need to acquire a profound theoretical and conceptual understanding of the institution as well as its practices and believe systems.

This book explores the shifting institutional arrangements that since the seventeenth century have protected the production and distribution of news in Britain and America. These institutional arrangements have taken many forms: advertising, sponsored content, cartels, administrative regulations, and government monopoly. The book's theme can be simply put: institutions matter. To understand how news was made, neither markets nor technology, but institutions hold the key. By institutions the book means the relatively stable configuration of laws, administrative protocols, organizational templates, and cultural conventions that facilitate or impede the production and distribution of news. Institutional arrangements have been, on balance, more important than market incentives and technological imperatives in creating and sustaining the organizational capabilities necessary for high-quality journalism. High-quality journalism is built on independent reporting and independent reporting rests on a solid base of financial support.

Everyday consumers buy into the concept of brands and their associated meanings—the perception of quality, a symbolic relationship, a vicarious experience, or even a sense of identity. This book suggests that the extent to which consumers recognize, internalize, and relate to brand meanings is not only an academic question. These meanings contribute to “brand equity”, the financial value of intangible brand benefits that exceed the use value of goods, and impacts upon a firm's financial performance. Therefore, the management of brand equity demands first and foremost the management of brand meanings, or semiotics. The book uses structural semiotics, a discipline that extends the laws of structural linguistics to the analysis of verbal, visual, and spatial sign systems, to shed light on the cultural codes and discourse of brands. It proposes that semiotic research should form the cornerstone of brand equity management, since brands rely so heavily on sign systems that contribute to profitability by distinguishing brands from simple commodities, from competitors, and engaging consumers in the brand world. The book includes dozens of global business cases where semiotics has been used to refocus, reposition, or extend the brand to new products, customers, and markets. Drawing upon twenty years of academic and consulting experience, the book provides actionable direction for steering brands through technological and cultural change, differentiating brands in the competitive environment, and counteracting the natural depletion of brand meaning over time.

This book presents a history of the UK’s persuasion industries (marketing, advertising, public relations, and branding) between 1969 and 1997. It examines developments in practice, methodology, and application to provide empirical support for the proposition that persuasion played a key role in the making of modern Britain. This period was one of significant change. Persuasion, in a variety of forms, increased in importance and effectiveness to become the driving force within many commercial enterprises. Through a proliferation of new media channels and applications it was also able to penetrate into more areas of everyday life. The impact of these developments on British society was profound and enduring. Historical sources used to undertake this investigation include trade media, academic journals, reports from professional bodies, manuals and memoirs, and archival materials from some of the key advertising agencies, public relations consultancies, and marketing departments of the period. Moreover, this is the first detailed historical examination of developments within the persuasion industries, and also the first that places emergent concepts such as planning, positioning, corporate branding, emotional attachment, and consumer targeting into a historical context. By studying the differential effects of persuasion, this study seeks to develop a better understanding of both the mechanisms that underlay these various applications and their impact on consumer behaviour.

This book proposes a novel research agenda for marketing to reconnect with markets. The historical link between marketing and markets, prevalent until the 1960s, gave way to a view of marketing as addressing generic rather than economic exchange. By focusing on generic exchange, marketing portrays itself as portable set of tools applicable to markets and non-markets alike. This book challenges this view, proposing instead a close examination of what makes exchanges economic in nature, and how economic exchanges aggregate to produce markets. By re-establishing the connection between marketing and markets, this book argues that marketing produces markets: marketing practices and theories play a significant role in the production of markets and in the configuration of the entities and phenomena that populate markets. The book brings together scholars from the fields of marketing, organization studies, economic sociology, and science and technology studies, who share an interest in markets as socio-technical constructions and the performative role of academic and lay theories in producing economic orderings. The chapters cover a wide range of empirical settings including consumption, traditional and online retailing, product development, category management, trading zones and obstacles to exchange, business associations and political actors, liberalized markets, loyalty schemes and competition rules, and Fair Trade goods. These chapters illustrate the variety of agents, beyond buyers and sellers, that partake in the construction of markets such as the specialist trade press, business associations, regulatory bodies, and NGOs.