Product Description

A revolutionary new system for generating the next big marketing ideas and opportunities
According to Philip Kotler, the widely acknowledged "father" of modern marketing, and Fernando Trias de Bes the marketing techniques pioneered in the 1960s and ′70s have worked too well. Fierce competition among products with little or nothing to distinguish one from another, along with modern product positioning and targeted marketing techniques, have led to increasing market segmentation. If the trend continues, individual market segments soon will be too small to be profitable. In Lateral Marketing, Kotler and Trias de Bes unveil a revolutionary new model to help readers expand beyond vertical segmentation and generate fresh marketing ideas and opportunities.
Philip Kotler (Chicago, IL) is the S. C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at Northwestern University′s Kellogg School of Management. Fernando Trias de Bes (Barcelona, Spain) is the founder of Salvetti & Llombart whose clients include Pepsico, Sony, Hewlett–Packard, Nestlé, Credit Suisse, and other top corporations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #338859 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 206 pages

Review
“…He is challenging the conventions; coaching marketers to broaden our horizons; delivering a new set of solutions; thinking the unthinkable…” (Interactive Marketing, Vol 5, No 4, April/June 2004)

These two marketing innovators provide effective and practical concepts and tools to help readers create new products and services based on thinking across rather than within markets. Understand the power of marketing creativity and how "lateral marketing" can expand thinking and profits. (Best Business Books 2003, Library Journal, March 15, 2004)

Review
“…He is challenging the conventions; coaching marketers to broaden our horizons; delivering a new set of solutions; thinking the unthinkable…” (Interactive Marketing, Vol 5, No 4, April/June 2004)

From the Inside Flap
Today’s marketers face a difficult challenge: how to innovate in a hypercompetitive, super–segmented marketplace. In a consumer economy saturated with homogeneous products and inhabited by customers who are more and more immune to advertising messages, traditional vertical marketing–with its fundamentals of market segmentation and brand proliferation–is beginning to fail us.

Now, renowned marketers Philip Kotler and Fernando Trias de Bes present a new system for developing breakthrough opportunities–lateral marketing. Lateral marketing complements traditional marketing by providing an alternative route to generating fresh new ideas. Whereas vertical marketing helps us find increasingly smaller subgroups for which a product might be developed, lateral marketing lets marketers develop an entirely new product that finds a much wider audience. Instead of offering just another diaper for newborns in a cutthroat market, for example, Pull Up diapers are designed for an older child.

Kotler and Trias de Bes show numerous examples of how lateral marketing leads to products that succeed even in the face of hypercompetition and product homogeneity. These innovations include new products like Honey Nut Cheerios Milk ’n Cereal bars, a quick alternative to actual cereal with milk, or Gillette’s Venus, a razor with a wider head made just for women’s curves. Lateral marketing also includes using old products in a new way, such as promoting Bayer aspirin as a heart attack preventative. The new marketing concepts that led to these products are the direct result of a different creative process than the endless vertical segmentation of yesterday.

This book defines a framework and theory for lateral marketing and the development of breakthrough ideas that will succeed in a consumer market already over–saturated. By removing the limitations of traditional marketing as a mechanism for developing new ideas, Kotler and Trias de Bes show marketers how to beat the high odds of product failure and achieve breakthrough success.

Customer Reviews

Develop New Products through de Bono and Hamel Concepts
If you are a marketing executive and want to make your new products efforts more successful, Lateral Marketing can be a five-star book for you. If you are a CEO, entrepreneur, or a general manager, you will see the book as falling short of providing a method for creating major strategic advantages and innovative business models.

Lateral Marketing looks at the tendency of traditional marketing to segment markets into ever smaller units as a way to create differentiation and help repel new entrants and existing competitors. The authors provide lots of statistics to point out that it's getting harder and harder to launch successful new products, and the prospects are getting worse.

That kind of a finding could leave any serious marketer feeling depressed, but Professors Kotler and Trias de Bes go on the propose a solution: Focus on expanding the scope of what you consider as having new product potential by using Edward de Bono's
concept of lateral thinking (as developed in his book by the same name first published in 1970). Although lateral thinking was designed to expand all types of creativity, the authors show how it can be specifically applied marketing. They provide a convincing case that many of the more innovative new products and services (cereal bars, Kinder Surprise toy-filled chocolate eggs, 7-Eleven in Japan becoming a depot for ordering and packing up e-commerce products, Actimel, food stores in gas stations, cyber cafes, reality TV contests, and Huggies Pull-Ups) in recent years could have been developed using lateral thinking. Traditional marketing thinking and lateral thinking are compared in a helpful table on pages 92 and 93.

On page 97, they define "lateral marketing" as "a work process which when applied to existing products or services, produces innovative new products and services that cover needs, uses, situations, or targets not currently covered and, and therefore, is a process that offers a high chance of creating new categories or markets."

Many people can do lateral thinking intuitively by thinking about what could be different about products or services that customers would like. The book makes this intuition more analytically based by breaking it down into routine steps that anyone can use individually or in a group to come up with innovative perspectives.

You begin by selecting a focus (say, a flower). You make a lateral displacement (an interruption in the middle of a logical thought sequence) for generating a stimulus. You might think about flowers that "never die" instead of flowers that "always die." Then, you make a connection. In this case, artificial flowers are one such connection. The authors then go on to explain how your initial focus can be a market, a product or the rest of the mix of serving customers. To make lateral displacements (let's look at sending roses on Valentine's Day), you should use substitutions (send lemons on Valentine's Day), inversions (send roses on all days except Valentine's Day), combinations (send roses and a pencil on Valentine's Day), exaggerations (send dozens of roses), eliminations (don't send roses) and reorderings (the beloved sends the roses to the admirer). Substitution turns out to be the easiest method to use at the market level. They provide many examples of how to do each one, and how to create products and services from these perspectives. You also get lots of tips on how to make connections. You are encouraged to "solve the gap" by applying a valuation technique by imagining the purchase process, extracting the positive elements, and finding the right setting for the new offering. All of these points are nicely summarized on pages 201-202. They go on to show how to create new business concepts beginning on page 149.

How do you implement lateral marketing in your company? They draw on three suggestions made by Gary Hamel from his article "Bringing Silicon Valley Inside" (Harvard Business Review, September 1999). The three suggestions involve creating internal markets for ideas, capital and innovative talent.

If this summary makes Lateral Marketing seem like a thought experiment derived from the work of others, you have understood my summary well. In putting these new combinations together, the authors have been innovative . . . but they have also missed important lessons that could have been gained by doing field work in the subject.

I began to see how the authors were going wrong when I read their description of appropriate situations for vertical versus lateral marketing. Rather than seeing lateral marketing as potentially the lead process in all situations, they chose to keep vertical marketing as important in newly developing markets. If you look instead at where new business models come, you find they are much more likely to be present in newly developing markets.

The second element that is missed is that lateral marketing is seen as something that marketing people do, separate from the rest of the organization for the most part. Category innovations and new business models, by contrast, often come from combined efforts of those with many functional perspectives. They are often focusing as hard on creating competitive advantages as they are on customer advantages. You won't hear much about strategy, competitive advantage or outperforming competitors in this book.

Those observations made me realize that the majority of the examples were for low-price point consumer products. If the authors had considered more services and nonconsumer products, they would have seen the need to draw on more disciplines collectively in developing new products, categories and business models. Although they see a glint of the possibility of new business models, they miss the point that a valuable new business model is worth a great many successful new products and actually makes the new product development success rate easier to improve.

I recommend the book as a way to help marketing executives who find themselves in a canoe without a paddle when it comes to considering new markets. The process here will help them extend their vision in new directions . . . and that's a good thing.