Business Book Summaries

There is a saying famous in American business: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Famous and true, as it turns out.

Attributed to John Wanamaker, an American retail businessman, it has been paraphrased by any number in the decades since he first defined the primary problem every CEO faces in marketing. We all know our company must market. You only have to watch what happens when a company stops, to get the message.

Failure to market means becoming invisible, first in the eyes of your customers, then in reality. Yet, from the traditional print campaigns of the last century to contemporary Internet Pay-Per-Click, and Web 2.0 social media applications, CEOs of every size company still have no idea which part of their advertising/marketing budget works, and which part doesn’t.

What continues to remain elusive is knowing exactly which of their expenditures is getting the job done. And because of that, they spend more than necessary, squandering resources they could use elsewhere.

This is an issue that has never been more important. Significant changes have taken place in American companies in recent years, and these are certain to continue at a pace never previously experienced.

We are in an age of global markets with a digital presence that is increasingly becoming overarching. No one really knows the path ahead; it remains as murky as ever.

What worked just a year or two ago can already be obsolete, and what is successful today could be on the way out without our knowing it. Something new is always on the horizon, but which something new will make a positive difference is no clearer now than it has ever been.

This presents new challenges for marketing in ways that have never previously existed. But along with challenges are also opportunities — new Web 2.0 marketing communications tools such as corporate blogs, Wikis, and the increased specificity of marketing discussions through vertical channels as opposed to “talking to an invisible community.” All these are challenging every CEO to reexamine conventional practices.

For all the innovations of this brave new century, old issues remain. There exists, and has always existed, a fundamental disconnect between the CEO, sales, and marketing. Their personalities and objectives are quite different, and they profoundly affect the CEO’s functions.

This disconnect, about which I have much to say, is a result of our current economic corporate structure and culture, which were inadvertently fashioned to encompass it. The consequence is that it has an appearance of normalcy and a sense of permanence that are illusionary, but make it difficult to properly perceive, effectively manage and alter for the better.

In my experience, the CEO who follows the conventional and takes the commonly accepted management approach to the significant issues created by this disconnect, will never come to terms with the real issues. In most cases, in fact, the CEO will never even understand that the divide in these areas has been the fundamental cause of many, if not most, of his or her problems.

BusinessSummaries.com is a business book summaries service.Every week, it sends out to subscribers a 9- to 12-page summary of a best-selling business book chosen from among the hundreds of books printed out in the United States.For more information, please go to http://www.bizsum.com