Creating A Company for Customers: How to Build and Lead a Market Driven Organization [Hardcover]

Malcolm Mcdonald (Author), Martin Christopher (Author), Simon Knox (Author), Adrian Payne (Author), Jane Simms (Author)

Book Description

Series: Ft | Publication Date: April 2001

Competitive advantage comes from service and added value. The competitive arena has shifted towards an emphasis on people: employees and customers. Now, in order to command that crucial customer preference, the company must be focused on customers, service and employee communication at all levels.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Competitive advantage comes from service and added value.

The competitive arena has shifted towards an emphasis on people: employees and customers. Now, in order to command that crucial customer preference, the company must be focused on customers, service and employee communication at all levels.

Pan-company marketing is a new concept that demonstrates the power of diffusing this focus throughout the whole organization. It is a way of focusing everyone, from the chief executive to the telephone sales person to the company accountant, on winning customer preference and loyalty.

Creating a Company for Customers explains this business rationale and how it can help your company to deliver more effectively.

Key ponts:

• interviews with the CEO of major organizations on pan-company marketing
• preface from Sir Michael Perry, President of the Marketing Council
• case studies from top companies which are putting into practice the principles of pan-company marketing

"At last a marketing book which is an antidote to the theoretical 'faddism' that sometimes makes marketing disciplines abstract and irrelevant. A practical and eminently readable guide which should be widely subscribed."

—Jane Frost, Sales & Marketing Director, BBC Technology

About the Author

Martin Christopher is Professor of Marketing and Logistics and Deputy Director of Cranfield School of Management with special responsibility for management development programs. He is also Chairman of the Cranfield Centre for Logistics and Transportation and head of The Marketing Group.

He has worked as a consultant for major international companies in North America, Europe, the Far East and Australasia, and is a non-executive director of a number of companies.

He has held appointments as Visiting Professor at the Universities of British Columbia, Canada; New South Wales, Australia; and South Florida in the USA.

Martin Christopher is a Fellow of The Chartered Institute of Marketing, and a Fellow and council member of The Institute of Logistics and Transport, which in 1987 awarded him the Sir Robert Lawrence medal for his contribution to the development of logistics education in Britain.

Simon Knox is Professor of Brand Marketing at Cranfield School of Management, and consultant to a number of multinational companies including McDonald's, Levi Strauss, DiverseyLever and the Ocean Group. Before joining Cranfield he worked for Unilever, where he held a number of senior roles marketing international brands in both detergents and foods.

Since joining Cranfield, Simon Knox has published over 60 papers on branding and customer purchasing styles and is a regular speaker at international conferences. He is the Director of the Institute for Advanced Research in Marketing at the School and is currently leading a research team on Customer Relationship Management on behalf of Computer Science Corporation (CSC). He is the co-author of the book Competing on Value (http://www.competingonvalue.com) published by Financial Times Pitman Publishing in the UK, Germany and the USA.

Malcolm McDonald is Professor of Marketing Strategy and Deputy Director of Cranfield School of Management with special responsibility for e-business.

He has extensive industrial experience, including a number of years as marketing director of Canada Dry. During the past 20 years he has run marketing seminars and workshops in the UK, Europe, Japan, India, the Far East, Australia, South America, South Africa, Brazil and the USA.

He has written 30 books, including the best selling Marketing Plans: How to prepare them; how to use them, and many of his papers have been published.

His current interests center around the use of information technology in advanced marketing processes.

Adrian Payne is Professor of Services and Relationship Marketing and Director of the Centre for Relationship Marketing at Cranfield School of Management. Before joining Cranfield he held a number of positions in industry, including that of chief executive officer (CEO) of a manufacturing company and senior roles in corporate planning and marketing.

He is an authority on customer relationship management, relationship marketing, customer retention and services marketing, and has written nine books on these subjects. He works internationally as a consultant, keynote speaker and educator in marketing.

About the editor

Jane Simms is a freelance writer and editor, specializing in marketing, management and business. She was previously editor of Marketing Business, the magazine of The Chartered Institute of Marketing, and before that edited Financial Director. She has contributed to a wide range of publications, including the national newspapers, and now writes regularly for Marketing and Director.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Financial Times Prentice Hall; 1st edition (April 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0273642499
• ISBN-13: 978-0273642497
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #705,685 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Promises Much - Doesn't Deliver, February 25, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Creating A Company for Customers: How to Build and Lead a Market Driven Organization (Hardcover)

One of the editorial reviews of this book should serve as a warning. "...an antidote to the theoretical 'faddims' that makes marketing disciplines abstract and irrelevant'.

Unfortunately, the book has steered so much away from a theoretical approach that it comes across more as a collection of aphorisms. For example (opening the book at a random page): '...it is the positioning of the company brand in conjunction with its core processes that creates and delivers customer value throughout the organisation'.

The most disappointing aspect is that there is so little new in this book. Reading The Loyalty Effect or The Service Profit Chain would be time better spent.

Cranfield has a great reputation in the UK as a business school, so I really had high expectations for a book written by four of its academics. The dearth of references in this book (even if the excuse is that it is written for time poor CEOs) is embarrassing, and revealing.

The central thesis is that everyone in an organisation needs to be involved in marketing; or that marketing is broader than the functional role of marketing. Again this is far from new, and a subject which is treated much better in Peter Doyle's Value Based Marketing.

I read this book in a few days of bedtime reading; buy Doyle's book instead for a more detailed and considered treatment of this topic.