Greetings from Romania !
I'm writing this book review for different audiences:
economic teachers, conflict simulation and military
history amateurs; all of them may be interested by:
_Marketing Warfare_ by Al Ries and Jack Trout.
Published by McGraw-Hill in 1996 and in Romania
by Antet in 1997.
It is a penetrating, combative learning handbook.
Simple and clearly-worded, it has a nice synthesis
of military history of all times, recent business history
and a current doctrine of competitive management.
Many historical battles and business cases are
compared, with their theoretical lessons and theorists:
Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Jomini; H.Ford, Kotler, Iaccoca etc.
The authors advocate a return to competent
economic behaviour by all firms, oriented to *know
the competitors*, preempt them and/or react to them,
instead of vague organizational wishful thinking and
traditional demographics and customer-surveys.
The new economic battleground is vividly described as
"wet, dark, tricky, less than one foot wide, but yet unmapped":
the customer's mind with its images and "high grounds" of
habits and inertia.
Four effective modes of competition are compared:
1) Defensive - the advantage of keeping #1 in a market
with the 'courage to attack oneself' with improved products
and planned obsolescence.
2) Offensive - emphasises the need to concentrate most
resources to overcome the leader's advantage, and
seek weaknesses in established competitors
with the aim to enjoy #1 status in selected markets.
3) Flank moves - to open first completely new markets
with radical innovations, prepared in surprise, and then
exploited to form a stable, profitable market position.
4) Guerilla - when unable to compete with larger competitors,
seek profitable niche products, avoid repeating others'
behaviour, and stand always prepared to change the line
of activity when the current one is strongly contested.
It ends with a statement of the psychological qualities
required of the new 'market generals': a clear purpose,
weighed deliberation then resolute action, and the moral
courage to accept one's past decisions while improving
future ones in the face of uncertainty.
Although the concepts in this book are brilliantly
presented, I have yet to see systematic, quantitative
models of business to match and explain them.
Personally I recommend the simulation game
_Business Tycoon_ by Stardock / Ubi Soft, in which
one can practice many of the ideas in this book.
Mircea-Valer Pauca (mpauca@fx.ro)
Preparator, Academia de Studii Economice, Bucuresti, Romania
Faculty of Economic Cybernetics, Informatics and Statistics
teaching: Economic Simulation, Microeconomics
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Jul 04 2001 - 12:44:05 CDT