Market-Driven Management

The Portable MBA

Starting out as a support function for sales in the 1990s, marketing has evolved over the past four decades into the driving force behind business strategic planning for the 1990s. The past decade has brought a proliferation of rediscovered management concepts, including the quality movement, corporate culture, customer-orientation, strategic alliances, and network organizations. Now, in the hypercompetitive global economy of the '90s, when the number one priority is to develop customer-focused, market-driven organizations, the crucial next step is to fuse the best of the old and new ideas into one cohesive model for doing business.

In Market-Driven Management, Professor Frederick E. Webster of the Amos Tuck School of Business, takes that next big step. Combining cutting-edge research with the latest advances in a wide range of industries around the world, he offers managers a bold new approach to integrating the marketing concept with all phases of corporate strategy, structure, and culture — from R&D and manufacturing, to finance, human resources, and sales. And, most importantly, he shows you exactly how to make it work in your company today!

In addition to being a respected business scholar and educator, Frederick Webster is also an extremely successful international business consultant. All of the ideas in this book are based on his decades of research at leading companies worldwide, and they have been tested with thousands of managers in his world-famous seminars and through his consulting practice. Over the course of nine chapters, using dozens of case studies and real-world examples, Professor Webster offers his incisive analysis of what works, what doesn't, and why, and he provides workable solutions that can easily be adapted to virtually any organization.

Like all of the books in The Portable MBA Series, Market-Driven Management is dedicated to bringing sharp business people the brightest and best ideas now being taught in top business schools.

1. Putting the Customer First—Always!
   • The Evolution of Marketing and Business Strategy
   • Customer Orientation as a New Idea
   • Problems in Adopting the Marketing Concept
   • Summary
2. Strategic Planning and Marketing
   • Emergence of Long-Range Strategic Planning
   • Key Elements of Strategic Planning
   • PIMS: The Profit Impact of Market Strategy
   • Competitor-Centered versus Customer-Centered Planning
   • A New Balance: Customers, Company, and Competitors
   • Summary
3. Quality Equals Customer Satisfaction
   • How Not to Define Quality
   • Quality Is Defined by the Customer
   • Quality Is Delivering Superior Customer Value
   • Quality as a Way of Doing Business
   • The SERVQUAL Model
   • Analyzing Customer Needs and Wants
   • Analyzing Competitors through Benchmarking
   • Analyzing Your Company's Internal Resources
   • Measuring Company Performance by Obtaining Customer Feedback
   • Summary
4. Market Targeting and the Value Propositio
   • The Siren Song of Sales Volume
   • Bigger Is Often Not Better: The Republic Airlines Case
   • Segmenting the Market and Targeting Customers
   • Market Targeting: Selecting Market Segments
   • Positioning a Product to a Prospective Customer
   • Developing the Product Offering
   • Communicating Value to the Target Market
   • Summary
5. Relationship Marketing
   • The Economist's Marketplace: Transactions
   • Repeated Transactions: Creating a More Advanced Marketplace
   • Establishing Buyer-Seller Relationships
   • Interactive Marketing: Treating Each Customer as an Individual
   • Developing Marketing Alliances
   • Building Strategic Partnerships
   • Developing the Partnering Strategy
   • Summary
6. Strategic Alliances and Network Organizations
   • Strategic Alliances
   • The Value Chain Revisited
   • Working with Resellers as Partners
   • Defining the Customer
   • Creating a "Boundaryless" Organization
   • The Role of Marketing in Network Organizations
   • Summary
7. Organizational Culture and Customer Orientation
   • Origins of the "Corporate Culture" Idea
   • How Strategy, Organization Structure, and Corporate Culture Relate to the Marketing Concept
   • Three Definitions of Organizational Culture
   • Five Perspectives on Organizational Culture
   • Corporate Culture, Customer Orientation, and Innovativeness
   • Implications of the Study of Corporate Culture
   • Summary
8. Developing a Customer-Oriented, Market-Driven Company
   • Marketing with a View toward the Year 2000
   • Marketing to the Global Customer
   • The Value-Delivery Concept of Strategy
   • Selecting Customers: The Critical Strategic Choice
   • Managing Customer Loyalty
   • Innovation and Customer Retention
   • From Mass Production to Mass Customization
   • Customer Orientation as Organizational Culture
   • Customer Orientation as Market Intelligence
   • Creating a Learning Organization
   • Strategic Alliances and Network Organizations
   • What Does It Mean to be "Market Driven"?
   • Summary
9. Implementing the New Marketing Concept
   • Fifteen Guidelines for the Market-Driven Manager
   1. Create Customer Focus throughout the Business
   2. Listen to the Customer
   3. Define and Nurture Your Distinctive Competences
   4. Define Marketing as Market Intelligence
   5. Target Customers Precisely
   6. Manage for Profitability, Not Sales Volume
   7. Make Customer Value the Guiding Star
   8. Let the Customer Define Quality
   9. Measure and Manage Customer Expectations
   10. Build Customer Relationships and Loyalty
   11. Define the Business as a Service Business
   12. Commit to Continuous Improvement and Innovation
   13. Manage Culture along with Strategy and Structure
   14. Grow with Partners and Alliances
   15. Destroy Marketing Bureaucracy
   • Summary

Sounds like obvious things. No surprises in this book.