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Book
Summary: Predatory Marketing - What Everyone in Business Needs
to Know to Win Today's Customers
Printed
with permission from TCI
Management Consultants. A group of senior-level management
consultants, offering strategic planning and marketing services
to a wide range of public and private sector clients.
Predatory Marketing - What Everyone in Business Needs to
Know to Win Today's Customer
by C. Britt Beemer (with Robert L. Shook)
Broadway Books, New York, 1997
C. Britt Beemer is the founder and chairman of America's
Research Group, a market research company headquartered
in Charleston, South Carolina. His book is essentially a
primer on how to develop a marketing strategy in the retail
sector (most of Beemer's clients are retail businesses so
it is no surprise that this is his predominant focus). There
are chapters on how to conduct market research; how to identify
trends; the importance of having and communicating a vision;
how to develop a marketing strategy; how to assess the competition;
and how to develop a sustained long term vision. Most of
this is pretty standard stuff, not too different from the
substance of most books on strategic marketing.
Where
Beemer is different is in his insistence that marketing
strategies must be predatory in nature: that is, they must
be oriented towards increasing market share by taking business
away from competitors. This approach further implies that
competitors of a business are acting also in a predatory
manner, which is why market strategies should never be complacent
or stand still:
"The
theme that every marketing strategy ultimately fails recurs
throughout this book. An explanation of why mediocre marketing
strategies fail is, I believe, unnecessary. But why is even
the best marketing strategy doomed to fail? Because, if
it is good, competitors won't stand idly by: they will copy
the strategy and, in time, improve it, rendering the original
version obsolete. For this reason, a market leader must
be continually tweaking his winning strategy - ideally at
the peak of the trend when profit margins are high."
(p.xiv)
At the
end of each chapter of the book, Beemer presents what he
calls 'consumer mind readers'- results of recent surveys
into various aspects of consumer behavior, conducted by
his firm. While totally unrelated to the subject matter
of the particular chapter that it is tacked on to, there
is some interesting material contained within these mini-surveys.
The topics addressed in these 'consumer mind readers' are:
the
10 highest-rated products for which consumers have brand
loyalty (would you believe, for example, that the highest
is soft drinks, and the second-highest is insurance?)
the
most common things that Americans do check out or think
about before making a purchase (the top-rated item here
is 'check product quality')
shopping
preferences of adults and teens (adults prefer shopping
in person, teens prefer shopping on the internet)
what
American consumers would do if they won $100,000 in a lottery
(the top choice was "put the money in the bank")
the
top ten uses for the internet (number one: to do 'personal
research' - Beemer doesn't tell us if this means looking
up family histories or surfing the net for porno pictures)
ways
in which teenagers are influenced by advertising (the most
persuasive ploy appears to be giving away CDs or posters
of rock groups)
twenty-five
things that store appearance conveys to customers (quality,
pride and selection are rated as the top three)
the
top ten issues that parents are concerned about (topping
the list: drugs at school)
five
ways to predict the level of consumer spending (including
things like: how many people are saving their tax refunds?)
how
consumers think the drug problem in America should be
handled (topping the list: mandatory prison sentences
for those convicted)
One
must be careful, though, with Beemer's facts and figures -
he presents no information on survey selection procedures,
respondent types, sample sizes, potential bias in the data,
etc. This is quite annoying and significantly limits the practical
utility of the information.
Despite
all this there are some useful tidbits throughout the book.
An example:
"If
you can log only one number into your memory, it should
be the 1.3 stores per major purchase that the American consumer
will shop in the year 2000. Coupled with the fact that there
will undoubtedly be more stores with more choices than ever,
this alarming number substantiates that if you are not the
first store shopped, your prospects are severely limited...All
customers are demanding more, and if you don't give them
what they want, it is certain your competition will."
(p.273)
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Management Consultants
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