Marketing for Managers is the new reference manual for professionals written by Professor Michele Costabile with Philip Kotler, Kevin Keller and Fabio Ancarani. The book, along with Marketing Management and Marketing Principles (all edited by Pearson Italia), represents the second part of a three-book series on marketing, which goes from the introduction of Principles (to be released in early 2015) to the “flagship” volume Marketing Management, which came out at the end of 2012 and is by the same four authors.
Marketing for Managers is a professional book with an academic bent. It is based on guiding models and implicit references to marketing management theories, but above all contains a wealth of case management tools for managers that are immediately “actionable.”
The initial assumption of the text, as well as of the entire series, is that "marketing is everywhere": a phrase that, according to Costabile, a full professor of Marketing at the Department of Business and Management at LUISS, captures the essence of the discipline. "Marketing is a process of economic exchange that is immersed in social contexts from which it cannot be isolated. Goods, products, services, but also symbols and emotions, knowledge and relationships; all that can be exchanged, either explicitly or implicitly, deliberately or involuntarily, individually or in an organized way, for strictly economic purposes or markedly social ones, is subject to a marketing process."
This dependency on social contexts makes marketing, more than other economic and managerial disciplines, subject to changes in the zeitgeist. To prove this, Costabile cites the differences encountered in semantic analyses between the first and latest editions of the well-known manual Marketing Management. "In twenty years, terms such as 'customer,' 'brand' and 'value' have become central, whereas in the past they were 'product,' 'company' and 'sales.' The effect of the internet era and the growing importance of the customer has led to a transition from supply-side to consumer-side economics and recently has been moving towards social-side economics." It is a transition that has changed the perspective of many organizations, which are increasingly aware that "economic processes are inextricably linked to social ones" and that "the value of individual goods and services is determined by the social factors in which they are embedded."
The ever increasing attention paid to customer opinions and the values conveyed by the brand is, according to the professor, a consequence of growing competition, "which has intensified (see globalization and the speed with which innovations are copied) and become more varied (for example, more and more often food companies are competing with pharmaceutical companies and vice versa)", and a consequence of the diffusion of technology, "which has accelerated economic processes, first and foremost, the conversion of scientific and technological discoveries into commercial innovations."
One of the most noticeable changes over the last twenty years is how marketing has built its most important strategies in interaction and multimedia: "today’s reality is multi-channel, multi-media, multi-device and multi-screen, and the real capacity of companies is in experimenting and innovating with a mix of channels and devices (mobile and fixed) that can better realize their relational and competitive strategy."
The book also highlights the new ways these relational marketing strategies are implemented. "The future is in customer engagement, or in the ability to get customers to participate in (social) communication and business innovation." To this end, Costabile cites the ideas of the expert in digital marketing Jonah Berger, who, when he came to LUISS for a conference on social marketing, argued that we are now in the era of social side economics, where "acts of consumption are not conducted by ‘hermits’ and therefore the social dimension is essential, as is consumer and customer involvement in innovation and communication.”