Book Description
Marketing as we know it today is about image. It's about
getting consumers to love your products. It's about producing
award-winning commercials and promotions, and creating ads
people like. It's about buzzwords like "events,"
"relationships," and "intimacy."
Problem is, it's not working.
So says the "Aya-Cola," Sergio Zyman, two-time
marketing czar of Coca-Cola and today quite possibly the most
famous marketerand marketing gadflyin the world. Brilliant
and irascible, Zyman is best known for reinventing The
Coca-Cola Company's marketing approach by spearheading the
launches of such world-class global brands as Diet Coke, New
Coke, Classic Coke, Fruitopia, and Sprite. Over a combined
thirteen-year period, Zyman directed a zestful
multibillion-dollar marketing effort, masterminding such
timeless campaigns as "Coke Is It!" and
"Always Coca-Cola," that resulted in sales of more
than 15 billion cases of Coke products per year to over 5
billion consumers in 190 countries.
In The End of Marketing As We Know It, Zyman
reveals, with characteristic flair, the counterintuitive and
often provocative marketing strategies and tactics that
earned him the nickname "Aya-Cola" on Madison
Avenue and helped to increase the market value of The
Coca-Cola Company from a mere $56 billion to an astounding
$193 billion in just five years. Shattering the mystique
surrounding the discipline of marketing and upending the
tradition of creating popular, crowd-pleasing ads and
promotions, Zyman recounts such illuminating anecdotes as why
he decided not to rerun the much-loved "I'd like to
teach the world to sing" Coke commercial and why
"feel-good" marketing is pointless unless it
results in sales. He also explores:
Why marketing isn't an art but a science
How a well-honed strategy is more important to your
success than what your ads say
How everything communicatesand what that means to
consumers
The rise of consumer democracyand the threat of consumer
communism
How marketing locally is necessary to build global equity
Why marketing is too important to be left to the marketing
department
How ad agencies are fixated on the wrong things
And why:
It's crucial to increase your marketing budgetnot to cut
itwhen sales are down
Megabrands are a terrible idea, but huge brands are a
great idea
It's suicide to base your sales projections on previous
performance
You must be focused on profit, not volume for volume's
sake
It's sometimes necessary to enter a category just to kill
it
All marketers must be accountable to shareholders
Visionary and rogue, The End of Marketing As We Know It
captures a seismic shift in marketing, from the master of the
trade.
