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P.K. Joy

Marketing is the most important management task in all successful business organisations. It emerged as an organised management discipline and gained importance a little after the end of World War II when large companies which had been engaged in mass production of goods for meeting the war-time demands realised that for surviving and succeeding in business in the post-war period, they need to create customers and hold them. Since that time, companies have started doing their business planning by identifying customers first and assessing the types and sizes of their demands, before designing products or services and determining production or generation capacity. That was the time when consumer orientation concept and its key role in business received recognition in the American business history. It was in 1952 that the first ever business philosophy incorporating consumer-oriented marketing concept was heralded, and that was by General Electric.

Different authors and professional bodies have defined `marketing' variously. To replace an earlier definition of its own, the American Marketing Association has in 1985 defined it as the "process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion and distribution of ideas, goods and services to create exchanges that will satisfy individual and organisational objectives." Selling is just one of the many components of marketing.

Regardless of varying definitions, marketing plays a dominant role in all successful organisations. It is because of this importance that marketing management education is in greater demand than all other management disciplines in all countries. Books on marketing are equally in great demand.

In the last 20 years or so, more than fifty thousand books on different aspects of marketing have been published in the English language alone. Of them approximately sixteen thousand are listed on popular Web sites with tables of contents, sample chapters, author profiles and even review summaries. Among them there are large number of good books. By and large, all of them cover the same topics, namely: historical perspective of marketing discipline; marketing research, forecasting and planning; customer behaviour and market segmentation; products/services strategy; pricing strategy; distribution strategy; promotional strategy; and contemporary marketing in the globalised market environment.

While most of the books cover the same theories or techniques, the determinant factors that lead to selection of books by readers and instructors are: the quality of writing; the extent and quality of the local context covered; and the educative value in the case studies included in the books.

The book under review is a relatively thin volume written by a practicing Indian marketing consultant, with a brief foreword by the renowned US-based Indian author and professor of marketing Philip Kotler. Its contents are: understanding marketing; customer value; cost to the customer; convenience; communication; control of marketing operations; new techniques in marketing; ethical issues in marketing; service and customer satisfaction; strategic marketing issues, and a marketplace changed by the net.

Almost all aspects to be covered in a book on total marketing are listed in the table of contents, by chapter titles and section headings. The author appears to have started with a good book plan. But he has not succeeded in writing it according to the plan. The text in many sections fails to satisfy serious readers. A typical example is the whole of Chapter 7 entitled `New Techniques in Marketing'. Any eager reader who has a modicum of marketing knowledge and still interested in contemporary marketing would naturally like to read this chapter first to know what the new techniques are. He will be disappointed to find that there is hardly any new technique discussed in the chapter except the sketchy mention of Critical Path Analysis (CPA), Programme Evaluation & Review Technique (PERT), besides a few other theories of probability Simulation Technique. The text is incomprehensible, and the techniques mentioned are old planning tools (developed in 1958-60). They are not new marketing techniques. In fact, the marketing planning and forecasting techniques are not discussed in the book.

In many sections where the author has advised the reader to use `scientific methods' or `proper systems', he has not explained what those methods or systems are or how they work, to educate the reader. Under the section entitled `A 21st Century View of Marketing', the discussion covers only a brief historical perspective of marketing and a 1960 definition of marketing developed by the American Marketing Association.

The grass root level local case studies and insights covering the fruit juice stall of Udumalpet bus stop, the job typists of Dhobi Talao Court area, the Sulabh Sauchalayas, and similar successful tiny enterprises, side by side with the examples of large Indian business houses, are quite interesting to the Indian readers.

There are proofreader's lapses in the book. Misspelling the foreword writer's name as `Kotter' instead of `Kotler' under the caption is a glaring example.

The quality of the book can be improved in the subsequent edition by revising the text in many sections keeping the target readers in mind, including the latest marketing and distribution techniques, updating information and definitions, adding visuals and graphic illustrations, annexing a bibliography, adding a subject index, and doing a more careful proof-reading.

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