This book rethinks the basic building blocks of marketing with an entrepreneurial perspective. Asks questions suing a "what if?" compass in which the emphasis is on asking the right questions, rather than finding the right answers. For entrepreneurs looking to make sense of the many new contributions that have redefined marketing. NOTE: The print may appear lighter in some copies due to the print method used.

Thoroughly updated, this much anticipated new edition provides students with a comprehensive, state-of-the-art view of industrial marketing. With a focus on strategic thinking and acting, the authors examine the distinct challenges of the business-to-business marketplace. These include: faster product and service development; shortened product life cycles;, new processes for selling, distribution, and customer service; increase in entrepreneurial firms; and the need to create and sustain long-term customer relationships. Separate chapters are devoted to buying decisions, market research and analysis, and purchasing practices, including treatment of the latest technological developments in just-in-time systems, Web-based procurement, and enterprise resource planning and manufacturing systems. Each chapter includes illustrations of real world marketing issues, key concepts, learning objectives, and discussion questions.

An instructor?s manual test with items is available.

This edition of Marketing for managers - A practical approach introduces readers to the fundamental issues underlying marketing concepts and strategies. Building on two successful previous editions, the title adds new material that covers many of the latest developments in technology that affect marketing. There is also a new chapter on marketing strategy implementation - critical, because in these days of well-formulated marketing strategies, failure is often the result of poor implementation. This renewed and reader-friendly text, debunks the notion that marketing is an overly complicated discipline shrouded in mystery, offers readers strategic insights into marketing, shows that marketing is not as simple as merely giving customers what they want - it also has to do with creating offerings that create customers, encourages readers to question conventional wisdom, integrates the best of marketing theory with cutting-edge practicality; includes not only the Internet and related technologies in marketing strategies, but also the latest developments related to interactive and social media, focuses on the challenges of writing viable, usable and well-considered marketing plans, provides a number of checklists for managers to use in considering and implementing marketing strategy, is conversational and non-technical, incorporates the latest thinking from research published in the world's major marketing and management journals.