Marketing Management

This volume reflects the dynamic environment inhabited by today's marketers, helping readers understand the marketplace and the impact of technology on making strategic marketing decisions. Its modern, integrated presentation and strategy-based approach covers critical, fundamental topics required to succeed in professional work.Subjects include marketing philosophy and strategy such as market research, customer behavior and market structure, and marketing decision-making and analysis, including product decisions, advertising strategy, pricing and customer relationship management.For marketing professionals, product and brand managers.

Overview: Levi Strauss Until the 1990s, American visitors to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe could be almost certain that they would be approached by young people asking whether they had any extra pairs of Levi's jeans they were willing to sell. Such was the strength of Levi's as a worldwide brand. Since the 1990s, however, something has changed. Levi's made up 31 percent of the jeans sold in the U.S. market in 1990, a market share that had shrunk to 16.9 percent by 1998 and to 12.1% by 2002. Today's young people do not want to be seen in the same jeans that their parents wore. Levi's advertising campaigns now receive one star out of four inAdvertising Age.What happened in so short a time? How could a world-renowned brand from a world-renowned company have stumbled so badly? In order to recover, in 2002 Levi's decided to supply Wal-Mart, the largest company in the United States, with a low-end brand, called Signature, and created two new brands-the high-end Red and more classic Type 1 and Blue. Can this multiple-brand strategy revive the value of Levi's products and lead the company back to the status it had prior to the 1990s? Marketing Management: A Strategic Perspective To understand fully what happened to Levi's and to give prospective marketing managers guidelines for how to be effective in their jobs, we need a marketing management textbook that goes beyond an explanation of basic concepts--it must present a strategic, integrative perspective. After teaching a core marketing management course for more than 20 years, I wroteMarketing Managementbecause I came to understand how important the strategic perspective is and I observed that no textbook provided it. Readers of this book will find a strategic framework set up in Chapter 2 which is used throughout the rest of the text. Using strategy as a framework for the entire course is the chief distinguishing feature of this book. The strategic framework in this second edition ofMarketing Managementpromotes understanding of the second distinguishing feature of this text: its emphasis on the rapid changes thrust upon marketing managers by information technology in general, and the Internet in particular. Today every marketing textbook includes numerous references to the Internet, and despite the crash in Internet company stocks, it remains the most fundamental change in marketing in the last decade. The Internet is a place where products and services are sold, it is a communications and information medium, it facilitates customer service, and it provides other benefits and opportunities to marketing managers and customers. The fundamental nature of this new, information-intensive technology is interactivity, the ability of customers to be active participants in the exchange between consumers and companies (for more than money for goods). This book also discusses at length the many ways that companies' investments in information technology have changed the marketing manager's job, in areas such as information gathering, communications, pricing, and product development. While looking at the transformations that information technology has brought, this second edition ofMarketing Managementalso integrates the issues involved with marketing technology-based goods and services. What led me to include material on this topic was not only the 14 years I spent near Silicon Valley teaching at the University of California at Berkeley. In discussions with business students at a variety of schools, I have found that many are interested in careers in computer software, biotechnology, semiconductors, and other technology-based industries. While the basics of marketing are the same across all industries, there are some features of high-technology markets (for example, short product life cycles) that make being a marketing manager for high-tech companies a somewhat different experience than being a brand manager for, sa