The End of Marketing as We Know It

Marketing as we know it today is about image. It's about getting consumers to love your products. It's about producing award-winning commercials and promotions, and creating ads people like. It's about buzzwords like "events," "relationships," and "intimacy."

Problem is, it's not working.

So says the "Aya-Cola," Sergio Zyman, two-time marketing czar of Coca-Cola and today quite possibly the most famous marketer--and marketing gadfly--in the world. Brilliant and irascible, Zyman is best known for reinventing The Coca-Cola Company's marketing approach by spearheading the launches of such world-class global brands as Diet Coke, New Coke, Classic Coke, Fruitopia, and Sprite. Over a combined thirteen-year period, Zyman directed a zestful multibillion-dollar marketing effort, masterminding such timeless campaigns as "Coke Is It!" and "Always Coca-Cola," that resulted in sales of more than 15 billion cases of Coke products per year to over 5 billion consumers in 190 countries.

In The End of Marketing As We Know It, Zyman reveals, with characteristic flair, the counterintuitive and often provocative marketing strategies and tactics that earned him the nickname "Aya-Cola" on Madison Avenue and helped to increase the market value of The Coca-Cola Company from a mere $56 billion to an astounding $193 billion in just five years. Shattering the mystique surrounding the discipline of marketing and upending the tradition of creating popular, crowd-pleasing ads and promotions, Zyman recounts such illuminating anecdotes as why he decided not to rerun the much-loved "I'd like to teach the world to sing" Coke commercial and why "feel-good" marketing is pointless unless it results in sales. He also explores:

• Why marketing isn't an art but a science

   

• How a well-honed strategy is more important to your success than what your ads say

   

• How everything communicates--and what that means to consumers

   

• The rise of consumer democracy--and the threat of consumer communism

   

• How marketing locally is necessary to build global equity

   

• Why marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department

   

• How ad agencies are fixated on the wrong things

  And why:

   

  • It's crucial to increase your marketing budget--not to cut it--when sales are down

     

  • Megabrands are a terrible idea, but huge brands are a great idea

     

  • It's suicide to base your sales projections on previous performance

     

  • You must be focused on profit, not volume for volume's sake

     

  • It's sometimes necessary to enter a category just to kill it

     

  • All marketers must be accountable to shareholders

  Visionary and rogue, The End of Marketing As We Know It captures a seismic shift in marketing, from the master of the trade.