Book Review: Marketing Moves, by Philip Kotler, Dipak C. Jain, Suvit Maesincee, ISBN 1-57851-600-5, Harvard Business School Press.

Marketing Moves presents a new framework for conducting marketing strategy and operations developed in the context of corporate strategy. It aims to help companies:

• Identify new value opportunities for renewing their markets;
• Efficiently create more promising new value offerings;
• Use their capabilities and infrastructure to deliver the new value offerings efficiently.

The book's main thesis is that marketing needs to change to cope with the overcapacity found in a range of manufacturing industries. Customers are scarce, leading to hypercompetition. Previously the company had been the hunter searching for customers, now the consumer has become the hunter. Markets, and marketing media such as the Internet, are changing faster than marketing methods.

The book is organised into two parts. The first considers the digital economy, positions marketing as a driver for innovation and suggests a series of ideas based on the digital economy that would renew marketing strategies.

The second part is a systematic framework to implement what the authors term holistic marketing in the digital age. This begins with the identification of market opportunities; the design of market offerings; understanding the business models to provide these profitably; the business infrastructure required to execute; the design of marketing and operational activity plans and finally the need to re-iterate the whole process to remain competitive.

Despite a clear structure and positive examples I found this book disappointing. Though published in 2002, it had clearly been written in the euphoria of the dot.com boom. I was distracted by the continual implication that the Internet and information technology solutions would solve every difficulty. For me, the technology is the easy part. It's changing the people's mind set that is the hard bit.

The idea that marketing needs to change from support of selling products to become the identification of customer needs for organisations to devise solutions to satisfy is attractive and well argued. The authors bring into a coherent framework a number of practical ideas to develop a sales and marketing strategy.

However, I can't recommend this book. It was not an easy read. The examples don't deal with the implementation issues. They read like propaganda or "spin". There is no balance. It reads like a checklist and might serve that purpose in a marketeers' library.

.Mike Evans

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