Drucker on Marketing: Lessons from the World's Most Influential Business Thinker Hardcover – October 17, 2012

Perfect companion reader for Marketing Graduates, especially for MBAs. Marketing, says Drucker, is much more encompassing that simply advertising and selling. Great leaders are also saavy marketing managers.

I was required to read this for a marketing class and disliked it. While I am sure that William Cohen can be regarded as a management expert, he should leave writing books to those of us who know how to construct straightforward, cohesive chapters and can write meaningful, useful prose from which information can be easily gleaned.

Good quality and delivered quickly.

Those of us who have read Peter Drucker on management spend our lives wishing every manager would read him and apply the wisdom, so this is book starts off with a great pedigree. But Drucker was far more than mere management. Sprinkled throughout were huge object lessons for marketing as well. This book pulls together the best of the marketing advice in one compact package. Peter Drucker used to say that management gurus come and go, and as soon as he died, he would be forgotten like all the rest. It is Bill Cohen's mission that this not be so, and that the work of Peter Drucker must help influence managers and entrepreneurs of all stripes for all time. Thank goodness for Bill Cohen.The simple, direct style of Peter Drucker is replicated in this book. We get the message and we get examples. It doesn't bother Bill Cohen that he repeats himself again and again; the message must be imprinted, and the reader must not be diverted to some previous page for a reference or story. It's an example of Peter Drucker's influence.The essence of it all is that marketing is the entire enterprise as seen by the customer. As such, marketing is not only not Sales, it can be and often is in actual conflict with Sales. Sales is focused on selling, to the exclusion of all else. Marketing carries responsibility for customer service, brand, reputation, labor relations, shareholders - basically everything everyone thinks they know about the product and the company.This is how I've always looked at business in my career in marketing, and it was often frustrating because of the traditionalists who would not hear of such heresy. Early in the book, Cohen touches that nerve when he says "It is sometimes difficult to get the idea across without seeming to appear to be saying you want to run everything." That's the conflict in a nutshell. It has been my life for 35 years. Cohen cites the example of Fedex Zapmail, a fax service in the 1980s. I was marketing manager for a similar service at Canada Post, and my eight page analysis of why it was doomed to fail within three years caused no end of aggravation, and was of course, totally ignored. I left rather than watch the agony. Fedex also learned the hard way, losing well over $300 million on their version, right on cue. Whenever I felt outgunned, I read some more Drucker and renewed my faith - in myself and the the job I was doing. He's good. He's important.Drucker showed that customers don't purchase goods or services; they purchase satisfaction, and if your company is not about providing satisfaction, trouble lies ahead. Turn it around and Drucker puts it another way: there is only one valid reason for a business to exist - to create a customer. Not bend a market to your product, not find a way into the psyche of the consumer, but create a customer. That's a different mindset - a real marketing mindset.Would that every entrepreneur could see these words. But clearly they don't. We have banks that look at their clients in terms of lock-in, airlines that feel free to be as obnoxious and abusive to customers as they see fit on any given day, and elected representatives who represent only their own ideologies and not the voters who put them there. There is need for this book.My only disappointment was in the examples, which I often found annoying. They are simplistic and superficial to put it mildly (Hillary Clinton simply had to beat Barack Obama for the nomination because she had a longer track record). Companies that have stumbled and faltered are cited for their brief moment when they might have made a good decision (e.g. Rolls Royce, which later went bankrupt, was broken up and the pieces sold off). It takes away from the strong clear message of the master: business of any kind, goods services, nonprofits, government - all have only two missions:innovation and marketing. Everything else is a cost. Leadership itself is marketing. Until and unless managers start looking at themselves this way, we will not realize anything like our potential.Let me give the last word to Drucker: What "everyone knows" - is usually wrong. Thank you Peter Drucker, and thank you Bill Cohen.

Unlike the other reviewer, I did not find the illustrations in this book to detract from its basic thesis that effective marketing depends of innovative leadership and sensitivity to change. We live in an age where enterprenurial success is coming more and more to rely on 'marketing marketing' to achieve optimal results. It is no longer good enough to promote a great product. Now the company has to be aware of where advantages can be lost on a turn of a dime because of an undetected weakness in design, poor timing, unhappy workforce, changing fundamentals, or new competitors. Cohen looks at how the great business management expert Peter Drucker addressed this challenge to take marketing to a new level in his day. Much of Drucker's writing on building a more effective corporate business model looks at the need to think internally and externally, to examine carefully, to seek understanding, and respond in a timely manner when opportunity knocks. In the business world questionable decisions are often made that lack the best information, are poorly tested, inadequately communicated, and are unethically sound. Since creative innovation or imaginative tweeking is critical to beating the competition to the consumer's heart, Drucker would likely suggest a company to start small, think simple and be patient in rolling out new product lines, remembering that the customer or consumer usually has the last word. When something doesn't work the way it is supposed, get rid of it before iapitalit ends up harming the bottom-line. Capitalizing on what looks like new knowledge to save an old concept might be just buying into someone else's mistakes and misfortune. Central to all this whole philosophy is the idea that a successful business will be built on clearly defined principles that encourage dependable strategies and workable tactics. Over all, Drucker saw leadership as essential for making the key decisions in bringing together all the various parts in the process at the right time. Taken together, these facets add up to a high standard of quality based on integrity or the ability to be transparent each step of the way. As this book attests to, the business world is full of cases where products failed because quality took second place to speed of production in the rush to beat the competition at all costs.

I found the book to be an excellent resource and definitive authority on Peter Drucker's expressed views around marketing. For me the book challenged a number of longstanding assumptions and advice that had been passed or forced upon me over the years relating to marketing. The focus on marketing and innovation I found to be the highlight of the book, closely followed by observations and recommendations around pricing.

As a huge Drucker fan, I was interested in this title. However, too much time was spent summarizing in less than creative ways. It is not a bad book, not one I'd readily recommend. Go to the source.