The marketing Chief and the Chief Executive

PART IV

It is not a textbook. It is certainly not a dandy "How-to" book.Nor is it a book which, like a detective novel, proceeds with mathematical precision from some obvious beginning, step by to a clear resolution in the end. Only in fairy tales and pulp romances are things smoothly resolved in such a way that everybody "lived happily ever after," except  of course the evil villains, who get their just desserts. Real life is, as the real story goes, "one damned thing after the other," Hebce, this book makes no lyrical promises of liberating solutions. Nor does it present marketing in a highly structured order, as if to suggest that if we knew enough, we'd see both sense and other in the world with which we deal. Each day our scientists see how uncompromisingly non-Euclidian our world is. This explains why physicists working furthest out on the frontier of knowledge so often become philosophers. Science is too limiting- only speculation fulfills curiosity.

Our job in business is not to discover sense and order. It is to achieve other and more urgent ends. There is no presumption that sense and order are the roads to attaining these ends

This is a book with a point of view. It is designed to help men of high and awesome responsibility to think through the major problems of their corporate affairs in terms that have not always been accorded  the privileged place of such exalted activities as finance. Finance deals with the ultimate recording end- the famous "bottom of the line." Marketing deals with the meas- the generation of the customers whose patronage produces the revenues that go into the bottom of the line.

Every organization needs a purpose, some notion of why it exists and what it wants to accomplish- its goals, its objectives, and the kind of environment it wants to create for the people on whom it depends to achieve its purpose. Without some notion of purpose and detection  of knowing where it wants to go and why, it will drift in the competitive wind like a fallen leaf of an autumn day. It will do at any particular time whatever the transient pressure of the moment comas  Its life and posture will be determined not by what it has decided for itself but by what others have decides for themselves.