cover image Total Integrated Marketing: Breaking the Bounds of the Function

Total Integrated Marketing: Breaking the Bounds of the Function

James M. Hulbert, Noel Capon, Nigel F. Piercy. Free Press, $28 (368pp) ISBN 978-0-684-84867-9

This book begins with an exclamation point (""Marketing has lost its way!"") and continues with the same relentless drive throughout. The authors theorize that marketing departments have become ghettoized in most modern companies and are treated as an afterthought, and that it's high time the situation changed. The solution: recognize marketing's importance, and have it work in tandem with every other department, from finance to customer service. CEOs must be the most important marketers of all, constantly spreading the word and outmaneuvering the competition. The authors--Hulbert and Capon teach at Columbia Business School, and Piercy teaches at England's Cranfield School of Management--juice up leaden passages on organizational philosophy with actual narratives of business blunders (like IBM neglecting personal-PC manufacturing) and master strokes (Microsoft launching full-bore into the Web browser market, after a late start). The moral of those snippets, and the book as a whole, is that constant reinvention of your business model, paired with extreme brand awareness and marketing savvy, is what will keep you ahead of the game in this tough economy.