Book Summary Preview : The End of Marketing As We Know It

The Big Idea
The best-selling author of “The End of Advertising As We Know It”, Sergio Zyman, gives us his irrepressible, irreverent but charismatic style of telling us the real score in marketing: It is not only to create an image that consumers could fall in love with but one that will drive consumers to buy more products and services for as often as possible.

His provocative and counterintuitive approach which he impresses upon us throughout his book is that producing award-winning commercials and promotions, and creating ads that people like are not an end by itself. What is far most important to marketing is to move customers and consumers to buy those products and services that are being promoted and advertised.

Sergio Zyman is a proven successful marketing guru that earned his sobriquet “Aya-Cola” in Madison Avenue, New York by boosting Coca-Cola’s market value from $56 billion in 1993 to $193 billion in a span of five years and selling 15 billion cases to 5 billion people in 190 countries.

Zyman demolishes traditional myths and beliefs in marketing. He professes the idea that marketing is a serious business discipline and a science that marketing professionals can effectively use to promote and sell products and services while measuring the effectiveness of ads and promotions in terms of sales results.

He also debunks the belief that marketing should create and produce crowd pleasing ads and promotions solely for the purpose of pleasing viewers of those ads. Zyman upholds the belief that the main objective of marketing is to sell products and services to its customers and consumers for as often as possible for as more money as possible.

Part 1: Marketing Is No Mystery
Introduction: Smashing The Black Box

• Marketing is supposed to sell stuff. Zyman doesn’t care about making award-winning commercials. The only thing that any marketing person should care about is real consumption.
• The marketing business is supposed to make money. Zyman says Marketers should stop fooling around with the marketing-is-an-inscrutable-mystery hogwash and get down to the real business of marketing.
• There is nothing mysterious or magical about marketing since it wasn’t always in the best interest of marketers to explain what they were doing to their employers.