The End of Marketing as We Know It

By Sergio Zyman

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0887309860
• ISBN13: 9780887309861
• Release Date: May 1999
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.11 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Pass it on...

Insightful and inspiring. As a Marketing Director for aNational publication, I spend a great deal of time helping advertisersfocus on their objectives, and delivering added-value based on theirpage schedule. It's amazing how many companies stick with a campaign for the sake of consistency, not results.The next time someone asks me for a "big, out of the box idea", I'm going to hand them a copy of Sergios book. In addition to the basic "result oriented" message here, the book covered management style, hiring practices, and ways to restructure the payment system when working with an ad agency. I LOVED it! I'm gettting copies for my entire staff, and my Publisher! END

Engineering was all I knew until I read this book

5 weeks ago I changed careers from electrical engineering to marketing. Until now, my only exposure to marketing has been a class I took 3 years ago in order to meet a grad school curriculum requirement. Mr. Zyman gives his readers a perspective that can't be taught in any classroom. The book is well written, easy to read, and not bogged down with a lot of boring graphs and industry terminology. The author never asks the reader to believe what he says on blind faith. Instead, he PROVES his points with personal experience. Although Zyman seems to "toot his own horn" at times, I don't get the sense that he wrote this book just so the world will know how great he his. I think he genuinely wants to be helpful. This book may be common sense to seasoned marketing professionals, but it's a great help to those of us just starting out. Don't throw away your marketing books, but do throw away the outdated ideas they sometimes teach.

Great info for all business people

When a colleague handed me a copy of The End of Marketing As We Know It by Sergio Zyman, former chief marketing officer of The Coca-Cola Company, I had two reactions. One was enthusiasm. I'd learn some things from a real pro and become better at what I do. The second was a wary feeling. Because Zyman is a pro, I was afraid the book would be full of "expert jargon" - over my head, dry, and reading like a textbook.After reading the book, I'm wholly enthusiastic about it. The End of Marketing As We Know It is a good read - Zyman teaches with plenty of good examples, encourages one to think about one's own experiences and methods, and has an entertaining, conversational tone that keeps the book from becoming dry or "heavy." It's the first book in a very long time that I've wanted to re-read right after finishing it. As someone who writes features for a business magazine and also does PR and advertising, I found Zyman's words relevant and invaluable.Everyone in business should read this book - and not just the folks in the marketing/advertising department, and not just the big companies. Its content is pertinent to overall business strategy, because it focuses on marketing as a business, or a science - producing measurable results in the form of increased sales rather than merely running some ads that may be appealing and even award-winning but aren't doing anything for the company's bottom line. Readers will learn why it's important to form a marketing strategy and make regular measurements to test its success. They'll learn ways to position a product - their own and their competitor's - in the minds of consumers. And that continually presenting a brand in fresh and different ways - and in different markets - is essential to keeping sales up. And much more. Whether or not you agree with all of Zyman's methods, this book will definitely make you think and may even rescue you from stale, dead-in-the-water viewpoints about marketing.

Easy read, great ideas

Zyman writes a book that is easy to read, simple to understand and useful. From someone who obviously understands successful marketing, he strips away the mistique and explains the simple truth; The purpose of marketing is to sell stuff. His methods are applicable not only to large mutinational sales companies but to virtually any business. Set your strategy and goals, find out what really works and what doesn't. Use those that work and stop using what doesn"t. Not rocket science but the best business strategy in the world.

A must read for anyone serious about marketing.

For about three years in the 1980's I worked very closely with Sergio Zyman when my firm created the packaging graphics for the launch of Diet Coke, New Coke and then Classic Coke. From that day to this, I've always said he was the smartest marketing mind I'd ever encountered. His stunning book The End of Marketing as We Know It, confirms that assessment. Zyman has a radical underlying premise: marketing's goal is to sell products. It's not about image, awareness, share of mind but about getting, to paraphrase what he used to say, "the dogs to eat the dog food." And significantly, continuing to give them more reasons to eat an ever growing amount. Profits are the objective and setting a cohesive scientific strategy is the marketer's responsibility and key to success. The book is vintage Zyman - his personality comes through, a man who refreshingly isn't into hiding who he is. Some will focus on that. Get over it. This is a must read for anyone serious about marketing. If it doesn't get you thinking and, more importantly, acting, it may be time to look for another line of work.