Creative Marketing lifts marketing theory and practice to a higher order,-a third level above Operational and Strategic Marketing. It provides a new mapping structure, rationale, market research methodology and a new unifying philosophical basis. It involves a new and highly proactive approach to superior market value creation. A secondary objective of the text is to draw marketing back into the province of general management, acknowledging that it has for too long been divorced from its roots and thereby become dominated by an academic perspective.
The author argues that the discipline is currently unable to provide any definitive set of strategies that offer some prospect of guaranteed success under all possible market conditions. This is because traditional marketing has been predicated on the basis that incremental improvements in a company’s marketing mix is the only way to build and defend some sort of competitive market advantage. In practice, this advantage is often easily and quickly eroded by the actions of competitors. Contrary to this common (organizational development) wisdom, long-term empirical evidence clearly demonstrates that it is the companies that dominate their particular industry,-that in fact own the industry standard, that enjoy the highest profit margins and enjoy the longest periods of largely uncontested market supremacy.
Creative Marketing as described in this book offers a means whereby any company can, given sufficient creative imagination, come to dominate its industry, irrespective of its present market status. This is because the processes involved are not contingent upon some sort of technological superiority or extensive financial or other resources. The text provides the methodology for realizing the long-sought envelope curve path of corporate growth and profitability, that means never having to complete an industry life cycle,-perhaps the Holy Grail of Marketing.
