Sales & Marketing Books

This book provides a synthesis of research perspectives on customer engagement through a collection of chapters from thought leaders. It identifies cutting-edge metrics for capturing and measuring customer engagement and highlights best practices in implementing customer engagement marketing strategies. Responding to the rapidly changing business landscape where consumers are more connected, accessible, and informed than ever before, many firms are investing in customer engagement marketing. The book will appeal to academics, practitioners, consultants, and managers looking to improve customer engagement.

Drawing on the expertise of leading marketing scholars, this book provides managers and researchers with insights into the fundamentals of customer centricity and how firms can develop it. Customer centricity is not just about segmentation or short-term marketing tactics. Rather, it represents an organization-wide philosophy that focuses on the systematic and continuous alignment of the firm’s internal architecture, strategy, capabilities, and offerings with external customers. This philosophy means that to be truly customer-centric, firms need to make multilevel transformations in internal architecture and organizational design, including leadership, metrics, incentives, structure, processes, and systems. These reorganizations are often accompanied by reshaped relational strategies, such as customer loyalty programs and marketing channel strategies that make customer centricity a reality. These changes also need to be backed by reconfigurations of brand and technological capabilities, as manifested in healthy customer-centric brands and in technology systems and skills that enable customer centricity at scale. The contributors to this book provide current thinking and cutting-edge research to further scholars’ understanding of this key concept in marketing. Academics teaching or researching customer centricity, consultants implementing customer centricity and managers directly implementing customer centricity in their organizations will come to rely on the Handbook on Customer Centricity. Marketing associations, industry associations and local and university libraries will find the insights within offer critical reflection on the key features of customer centricity and the detailed roadmap to achieve it.

The primary goal of this book is to create a comprehensive, research-based, action-oriented guide for an international audience of practicing managers and managers-in-training to understand, implement, and evaluate real-world marketing analytics. Many marketing analytics texts take a statistic- or model-centric perspective and are organized around different modeling techniques, which can leave the student with little guidance on when to use each approach or how the different techniques fit together. This lack of a “big-picture” structure can leave the student marketers without a working framework or understanding on how to integrate marketing analytics into their day-to-day work. This approach – as captured in the title, Marketing Analytics: Based on First Principles – has been applied and refined at multiple universities by the authors for undergraduate, MBA, and EMBA students. The companion book, Marketing Strategy: Based on First Principles and Data Analytics edition received resoundingly positive feedback from over 200 instructors around the world, CEOs of major Fortune 500 companies, and was featured in the 2018 Forbes Summer Reading List for Marketers. This new book uses the same First Principles Approach, but rather than focusing on marketing strategy with some supporting data analytics, the focus is reversed, where the new book focuses primarily on marketing analytics and offers just enough marketing strategy and decision making to provide a meaningful context for understanding the analysis tools. The book can support classes focused solely on marketing analytics at both the undergrad and graduate levels or as a supporting book for other more topical classes (e.g., marketing strategy, sales management, digital marketing) that need to utilize some marketing analytical techniques relevant to a specific problem.

The primary goal for this Eighth Edition, as reflected in the change in the title—from Marketing Channels to Marketing Channel Strategy—has been to create a comprehensive, research-based, action-oriented guide for practicing managers and managers-in-training with an interest in how to adopt and apply real-world channel strategies. This edition of the book is structured to provide background knowledge and process steps for understanding, designing, and implementing high performing channel strategies.

This is one of the first books to offer a completely unique, updated approach to channel marketing. This classic text has been adapted for the modern marketing reality by building a model that shows students how to engage customers across multiple marketing channels simultaneously and seamlessly. The omni-channel is different from the multi-channel. It recognizes not only that customers access goods and services in multiple ways, but also that they are likely doing this at the same time; comparing prices on multiple websites, and seamlessly switching between mobile and desktop devices. With the strong theoretical foundation that users have come to expect, the book also offers lots of practical exercises and applications to help students understand how to design and implement omni-channel strategies in reality. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students in marketing channels, distribution channels, B2B marketing, and retailing classes will enjoy acquiring the most cutting-edge marketing skills from this book.

Marketing strategy is the pursuit of solutions to four fundamental marketing problems: 1) all customers differ, 2) all customers change, 3) all competitors react, and 4) all resources are limited. Structured around these four First Principles of Marketing Strategy, this important new book offers a unique and extensively classroom-tested approach to marketing strategy. It gives you a structured framework to develop effective strategies to deal with diverse marketing problems while integrating state-of-the-art data analytic techniques into all aspects of the strategic planning process to allow managers to make more effective data-based decisions.

The concept of relationship marketing has been discussed among marketing academics and managers since the early 1980s. But instead of reaching its maturity stage, relationship marketing is nowadays encountering its next upsurge. Due to a confluence of trends driving the global business world―including the transition to service-based economies, faster product commoditization, intensified competition worldwide, growth among emerging markets, aging populations, advertising saturation, and (above all) the digital age―strong customer relationships are more than ever vital to company strategy and performance. Relationship Marketing in the Digital Age provides a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art of relationship marketing, offering fruitful insights to marketing scholars and practitioners. In seven chapters, divided into two main sections on understanding (Part I) and effectively applying (Part II) relationship marketing, an introductory and a concluding chapter, readers learn how to successfully manage customer–seller relationships.

Firms are collecting and analyzing customer data at an ever increasing rate in response to evidence that data analytics (precision targeting, improved selling) generates a positive return. Yet efforts often ignore customers’ privacy concerns and feelings of vulnerability with long-term effects on customers’ trust, relationships, and ultimately financial performance. Big data, privacy, and cybersecurity often is relegated to IT and legal teams with minimal regard for customer relationships. This book fills the void by taking a customer-centric approach to privacy. It offers both defensive and offensive marketing-based privacy strategies that strongly position firms in today’s data-intensive landscape. The book also helps managers anticipate future consumer and legislative trends. Drawing from the authors’ own work and extant research, this book offers a compelling guide for building and implementing big data- and privacy-informed business strategies. Specifically, the book, 1) Describes the consumer psychology of privacy, 2) Deconstructs relevant legal and regulatory issues, 3) Offers defensive privacy strategies, 4) Describes offensive privacy strategies, and 5) Provides an executive summary with the Six Tenets for Effective Privacy Marketing. Moving beyond summary privacy insights, the book also offers a detailed and compelling action plan for improving performance by protecting against privacy threats as well as developing and implementing offensive privacy strategy. In the future, many firms will be competing through an integrated, customer-centric big data privacy strategy and this book will guide managers in this journey.