If your organization has customers, you need to understand marketing. And to achieve the best results from your marketing requires a subtle blend of art and science. It can also benefit from recommendations for practice rather than lists of options from which to choose.

The art of marketing comes from the doing of marketing - implementing programs to attain and retain customers, and seeing what actually works. This is the province of marketing managers, direct marketers, advertisers, and consultants. The examples of good and bad practice used throughout this book illustrate this approach. The science of marketing comes from research - about markets, customers, competitors, and how effectively various types of marketing programs work. This is the province of academics and market researchers.

The science of marketing provides the foundations for good marketing practice. Sometimes this science is ignored in the rush to embrace new ideas and technologies. For example, the long scientific history of the adoption and diffusion of innovations says that the Internet will take a long time to fundamentally change the way large numbers of customers buy their products and services. If more managers and investors had understood this, then many dot.coms would not have become dot.bombs.

This book blends art and science to provide insight for marketing managers about how to implement marketing more effectively to both create and capture the value of the offers they make to their target customers. In the process it questions the usefulness of some of the more recent marketing fads.