Strategic Marketing Management (Practice of Management Series)

I am not a marketing professional, so I bought this book hoping to learn something useful. I am glad I bought it. It's packed with high-quality essays that cover the topics I always wanted to read about.I work as a software developer in a company that doesn't really know what market it is in. I felt that way for a while, but the essays in this book really drove it home for me. The book contains 40 essays, of which I read about 10 so far. My two favorite essays are "Marketing Myopia" (#2) and "The New Product Development Map" (#17). The first one hits the issue of a "customer-oriented" company head-on. It's the most honest and brutal examination of what it means to be such a company. Just what I needed! The second one is a perfectly balanced case study of a particular company and its products over 30 years. It shows how market segmentation and targeting should influence new product generations. I have a new long-term outlook on the products I'm developing after reading this chapter.This book does not go into esoteric sales or financial topics. Instead it sticks to the ubiquitous 4 P's of marketing and product development. I'm glad it does, since, as a non-marketing professional, these are the topics I need to understand.I learned so much from this book I can go on and on and on. I heartily recomment it.

Strategic Marketing Management is an essential guide to gaining fast insight into the critical factors of successful marketing. Each chapter deals with a seperate isolated issue which faces all marketers regardless of industry. Most of the chapter authors have abstracted key business elements and also provided real world examples to back their points. This book has wide breadth, but obviously trades off depth. It is excellent for non-business school majors who need to learn the critical marketing issues in a hurry. Main topics organized around the four P's of marketing: Product, Price, Place (Distribution) and Promotion. I recomend it to all our our new hires.