Marketing As Strategy-1

"The business enterprise has two and only two basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results;all the rest are costs." -Peter Drucker

In the book Marketing As Strategy, Nirmalya kumar says that in todays world marketing is loosing its importance as for todays CEO customer loyalty and retention is the most important issue even before reducing cost, developing leaders, increasing innovation, and improving stock price.
According to him for marketer to capture the imagination of CEO's they must break from the tactical 4 Ps and associate instead with organization-wide transformational initiatives worthy of the CEO's agenda. Marketing must never limit its scope to implementation issues. It must aspire to participate in those conversation that shape the firm's destiny.

Cross functional approach:

Marketing leaders have to think across multiple dimensions and levels of abstraction by targeting problems that involve multiple products, countries, brands, channels, and functions. A cross functional orientation requires marketers to understand the entire value chain thoroughly, including engineering, purchasing, manufacturing, and logistics, as well as the enabling functions of finance and accounting-and not simply advertising, promotion, and pricing.
Marketer must be- more strategic, more cross-functional, and more bottom-line oriented.

I will write on series to topics from different areas covered in the book.