VALUE ACCELERATION

Seasoned manager Goozé and marketing theorist Mroz introduce an integrated process model to bring marketing into synch with sales and product development in a post-industrial business environment.

The authors contend that while sales and product development have structured, repeatable models to chart and measure their courses, marketing has mostly been left to the crystal-ball gazers. They seek to remedy that by applying existing management methods used in manufacturing to marketing in a seamlessly integrated flow. Their model purports to manage marketing by delineating all its activities, organizing them into manageable cells, defining interactions and information flow among sections and using measurable criteria. They consider marketing/sales a manufacturing process, and, by extension, a process that produces customers. The authors deploy time-tested techniques already used in marketing and sales–spins on research, strategy, product management and tactical marketing–in conjunction with process-management principles that identify limitations and constraints, eliminate waste and unnecessary steps, and quality specifications and control. The model feels unsatisfactorily muzzy at times. For example, how to map customers’ buying processes–to support their theory, the authors should have cited specific examples, even when it is understood that this is a template designed to work across different enterprises. Few readers will challenge the central idea that ushering marketing into the process will only produce positive results.

A common sense, if confusing at times, approach to business through creative recycling of management methods and a holistic vision that everything, from innovation to creating loyal customers, proceeds from one process.