Targeted Tactics - Hardcover

Cobb, William ($Bill) R

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1425749909 ISBN 13: 9781425749903

Publisher: Xlibris, 2007

Synopsis

"If you were ever in doubt about how important marketing is to the success of your business, read this book. If you want to know how to develop, implement, and track a successful marketing plan, read this book. If you want to ground your organization's marketing efforts in reality instead of arm-waving, read this book." Donald J. McCubbrey, Ph.D., Clinical Professor, Daniels College of Business, University of Denver

About this title

About the Author

William R. ($Bill) Cobb is a successful Fortune 100 Executive who has held various senior management assignments throughout his career. He has served as VP & General Manager for a billion dollar division of a Fortune 50 Company and President & CEO of technology start-up companies. Throughout his career, Bill has always grown operating revenues at rates that exceeded the industry norms, acquiring the nickname "$ Bill." He attributes this to his disciplined approach that he inserted into the annual planning and budgeting cycle that connected the actions taken, and the resources applied, to the markets and customers he served. He founded Targeted Tactics® in 2006 as a means to share this knowledge and his experience with developing businesses and to encourage established organizations to adopt and implement an integrated marketing approach.

From the Back Cover

William R. ($Bill) Cobb is a proven and successful Fortune 100 Executive who has held senior management assignments ranging from Vice President & General Manager of a billion dollar division of a Fortune 50 company, to President and CEO of technology start-ups. The author developed, and utilized successfully, the Targeted Tactics® model to achieve success repeatedly.

From the Inside Flap

"Great ideas are the seeds of creation that cause many businesses to be formed. But much like lemmings going over a cliff, they will be doomed to failure if they don't first figure out how to strap on a good marketing engine to give it flight. For most businesses, this is the difference between success and failure, and Targeted Tactics is the Rolls Royce standard for marketing engines." Thomas Frey, Ph.D., Executive Director and Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute

"Every day is a new challenge and I constantly ask myself, what would Bill Cobb do? I can't tell you how much I appreciated your program." Bill Koziel, President & CEO, Site Acquisition Consultants

"Utilizing this program has allowed us to communicate information more effectively to team members, client partners, and potential customers." Scott Kunze, President & CEO of DataSplice

If you are looking to develop a roadmap for getting things done in a meaningful and disciplined way, Targeted Tactics provides the processes and methodology to drive results." Michael R. Webb, Chairman and Co-Founder, Aubice.

"This program offers all the tools needed to run a sustainable, profitable business venture." Diane Garcia, President, 2G Associates

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In the opening chapter of the Marketing Managers Handbook, Edward Bursk and William Morton reminded us of some of the challenges that we are all facing in today's increasingly complex world. They offered ten reasons, at the time, in support of the need to strengthen the marketing discipline and improve the processes we apply to executing this function. I have taken the liberty of adding two more reasons to their already compelling list, and suggest we need to remain aware of the following:

1) The buying and selling relationship is a subtle, fluid interaction between two people, (multiplied by the hundreds, or thousands), and those on both sides continually effect each other.

2) Those on the buying side are so many and so various, and so far out of the direct control of the seller, that the seller has to rely on persuasion to lead them. Yet persuasion itself can never be 100% applicable to all the people - far from it!

3) The seller has at his or her command, and therefore must choose among, a whole array of possible ways and combinations of ways to affect the buyers that he or she is trying to persuade.

4) The information at the seller's disposal is, at best, so imperfect that he or she can never be more than partly sure how prospective approaches will work, particularly since the market that he or she is going to deal with will be changing as the result of those particular efforts.

5) General conditions are continually changing, both in terms of economic forces and social trends, so that even what is attractive when it is on the drawing board may have lost its appeal by the time it reaches the market two or three years latter.

6) Every seller has competitors who are always trying to outguess and outmaneuver him or her, often deliberately taking action just to spoil their carefully planned efforts.

7) Now that buyers, the public, live comfortably above the level of physical needs, competition is broadened. Every seller must contend not just with rival products of the same kind, but with rival uses for the same money.

8) Differences between rival products and rival uses of money have become more difficult to discern and more psychological in nature, thus putting an extra premium on the penetration and persuasiveness of the selling. Differences which otherwise would be barely noticeable can be made stronger in the buyer's eyes by the efforts of the seller.

9) Because of the state of competition, it has become more difficult for many individual firms to continue to grow. In the effort to reach certain customers more directly, traditional channels of distribution have become scrambled. Companies find themselves using mixes of wholesalers, retailers, etc., with some by passing others, and they sometimes end up competing with some of their own customers.

10) Another disturbing trend is that costs have been so dramatically cut that organizations wind up diluting their sales focus, and spreading their sales effort across a multitude of product lines, particularly for products with fewer unique features or differentiation. This has increased their promotional costs, and as a result, margins have deteriorated to the point where there is not much leeway in which to make marketing errors.

11) Investments in mechanization, and correspondingly the effort to move large quantities of products out into the market, have created more opportunity for the small business to find a market among the buyers who have become dissatisfied with standard products and services. This can make it more expensive for large business to be off target just a little when aiming at mass markets and depending on volume.

12) Global trading has introduced a whole new set of competitive conditions, as overseas engineering and manufacturing costs can be considerably lower and patent and intellectual property rights are not always rigidly enforced.

These twelve observations sum up the fact that today's marketing problems deal with more subtle and complex variables. This calls for a more systematic and analytical approach to managing the marketing process. The Targeted Tactics® program has been developed to specifically help organizations adapt to these changing conditions and incorporate discipline into the planning cycle and resulting execution plans.

Edition details

• Publisher: Xlibris
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1425749909
• ISBN 13: 9781425749903
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176