Customer Reviews

Lateral Marketing: New Techniques for Finding Breakthrough Ideas

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If you are a marketing executive and want to make your new products efforts more successful, Lateral Marketing can be a five-star book for you. If you are a CEO, entrepreneur, or a general manager, you will see the book as falling short of providing a method for creating major strategic advantages and innovative business models.

Lateral Marketing looks at the tendency of traditional marketing to segment markets into ever smaller units as a way to create differentiation and help repel new entrants and existing competitors. The authors provide lots of statistics to point out that it's getting harder and harder to launch successful new products, and the prospects are getting worse.

That kind of a finding could leave any serious marketer feeling depressed, but Professors Kotler and Trias de Bes go on the propose a solution: Focus on expanding the scope of what you consider as having new product potential by using Edward de Bono's
concept of lateral thinking (as developed in his book by the same name first published in 1970). Although lateral thinking was designed to expand all types of creativity, the authors show how it can be specifically applied marketing. They provide a convincing case that many of the more innovative new products and services (cereal bars, Kinder Surprise toy-filled chocolate eggs, 7-Eleven in Japan becoming a depot for ordering and packing up e-commerce products, Actimel, food stores in gas stations, cyber cafes, reality TV contests, and Huggies Pull-Ups) in recent years could have been developed using lateral thinking. Traditional marketing thinking and lateral thinking are compared in a helpful table on pages 92 and 93.

On page 97, they define "lateral marketing" as "a work process which when applied to existing products or services, produces innovative new products and services that cover needs, uses, situations, or targets not currently covered and, and therefore, is a process that offers a high chance of creating new categories or markets."

Many people can do lateral thinking intuitively by thinking about what could be different about products or services that customers would like. The book makes this intuition more analytically based by breaking it down into routine steps that anyone can use individually or in a group to come up with innovative perspectives.

You begin by selecting a focus (say, a flower). You make a lateral displacement (an interruption in the middle of a logical thought sequence) for generating a stimulus. You might think about flowers that "never die" instead of flowers that "always die." Then, you make a connection. In this case, artificial flowers are one such connection. The authors then go on to explain how your initial focus can be a market, a product or the rest of the mix of serving customers. To make lateral displacements (let's look at sending roses on Valentine's Day), you should use substitutions (send lemons on Valentine's Day), inversions (send roses on all days except Valentine's Day), combinations (send roses and a pencil on Valentine's Day), exaggerations (send dozens of roses), eliminations (don't send roses) and reorderings (the beloved sends the roses to the admirer). Substitution turns out to be the easiest method to use at the market level. They provide many examples of how to do each one, and how to create products and services from these perspectives. You also get lots of tips on how to make connections. You are encouraged to "solve the gap" by applying a valuation technique by imagining the purchase process, extracting the positive elements, and finding the right setting for the new offering. All of these points are nicely summarized on pages 201-202. They go on to show how to create new business concepts beginning on page 149.

How do you implement lateral marketing in your company? They draw on three suggestions made by Gary Hamel from his article "Bringing Silicon Valley Inside" (Harvard Business Review, September 1999). The three suggestions involve creating internal markets for ideas, capital and innovative talent.

If this summary makes Lateral Marketing seem like a thought experiment derived from the work of others, you have understood my summary well. In putting these new combinations together, the authors have been innovative . . . but they have also missed important lessons that could have been gained by doing field work in the subject.

I began to see how the authors were going wrong when I read their description of appropriate situations for vertical versus lateral marketing. Rather than seeing lateral marketing as potentially the lead process in all situations, they chose to keep vertical marketing as important in newly developing markets. If you look instead at where new business models come, you find they are much more likely to be present in newly developing markets.

The second element that is missed is that lateral marketing is seen as something that marketing people do, separate from the rest of the organization for the most part. Category innovations and new business models, by contrast, often come from combined efforts of those with many functional perspectives. They are often focusing as hard on creating competitive advantages as they are on customer advantages. You won't hear much about strategy, competitive advantage or outperforming competitors in this book.

Those observations made me realize that the majority of the examples were for low-price point consumer products. If the authors had considered more services and nonconsumer products, they would have seen the need to draw on more disciplines collectively in developing new products, categories and business models. Although they see a glint of the possibility of new business models, they miss the point that a valuable new business model is worth a great many successful new products and actually makes the new product development success rate easier to improve.

I recommend the book as a way to help marketing executives who find themselves in a canoe without a paddle when it comes to considering new markets. The process here will help them extend their vision in new directions . . . and that's a good thing.

Marketing guru Philip Kotler borrowed Edward De Bono's Lateral Thinking framework for this book, and focused it with laser accuracy on the problem presented by the need to extend a market, a product or some other component of the marketing mix. By applying a very simple set of steps, Kotler accomplishes the goal, opening outstanding avenues consisting of fantastic ideas that normally don't pop up, unless they are induced, as is the case thanks to the Lateral Marketing framework.

The only downside I found to the book was that it could have accomplished the same goal in much less space. A lot gets repeated, so by the time you're 2/3 into the book, you start to rehash some previous concepts. Otherwise, it's a pearl for anyone new or foreign to marketing, to help develop the ability of "thinking outside the box" to come up with some fantastic ideas for new brands and products.

Although I do appreciate the effort of the authors to offer a structured and systematic means "for finding breakthrough ideas" by incorporating de Bono's lateral thinking concept into the marketing management arena, I can hardly agree that they are "new techniques" at all. This can be a good textbook for undergrads, but far from satisfying veteran marketers who fought hard daily on the front line for new means to satisfy the ever increasingly demanding customers, or readers who had finished more than five marketing books, probably with over half of them by Kotler himself.

Instead of buying this book, I strongly suggest you to read the review by Donald Mitchell who had written a very good summary of it. Perhaps you can simply read de Bono's Lateral Thinking, a move that will give you higher returns on both time and book cost.

Among the wide variety of marketing books it is extremely diffcult to find something really new, surprising, practical and perfectly constructed. If you want to know a powerfull and innovatve way to expand your market (and your marketing creativity), this is the book you're looking for. Thanks and congratulations to the american + european talent of the authors.

Easy reading. The book delivers exactly what it promises: good techniques to develop creative ideas. I was expecting a little bit more of a case study, but the examples helped me understand the concepts and see how they worked. Some information on how the new ideas made it through the company, from the marketing department to the final product, would be a fine addition.

This book is a good instructional manual for how to be creative in marketing. The book explains clearly the differences between traditional vertical marketing and lateral marketing, which is based largely on creativity guru Edward de Bono's concept of lateral thinking. The authors make a very clear case as to why lateral markting is essential, primarily because modifying existing products will not generate the kind of profit required to grow significantly, instead entirely new products or new uses for existing products need to be created. Kotler and Tres de Bas teach clearly the techniques for applying lateral marketing.

The main problem with the book is with how it is written, using a very stilted style that suffers from the very infrequent use of the active voice. Oddly, this is the way De Bono's books are written, and the reader gets the impression that the authors were imitating De Bono or that De Bono had a major hand in editing. If there is a future edition, the writing could use a helpful dose of e-prime analysis, where uses of forms of "to be" are minimized.

If you work in Marketing and haven't read this book, you could be in trouble.

Kishore Dharmarajan
Author of Eightstorm: 8-Step Brainstorming for Innovative Managers

This is a serious book focused in marketing innovation. The authors offer well explained practical methods to generate innovation in marketing.