Marketing: An Introduction, Sixth Canadian Edition

Book Preface

The Sixth Canadian Edition of Marketing: An Introduction: Creating More Value for You! Top marketers all share a common goal: putting consumers at the heart of marketing. Today’s marketing is all about creating customer value and engagement in a fast-changing, increasingly digital and social marketplace.

Marketing starts with understanding consumer needs and wants, deciding which target markets the organization can serve best, and developing a compelling value proposition by which the organization can attract, keep, and grow targeted consumers. Then, more than just making a sale, today’s marketers want to engage customers and build deep customer relationships that make their brands a meaningful part of consumers’ conversations and lives. In this digital age, to go along with their tried-and-true traditional marketing methods, marketers have access to a dazzling set of new customer relationship–building tools—from the Internet, smartphones, and tablets to online, mobile, and social media—for engaging customers any time, anyplace to shape brand conversations, experiences, and community. If marketers do these things well, they will reap the rewards in terms of market share, profits, and customer equity. In the sixth Canadian edition of Marketing: An Introduction, you’ll learn how customer value and customer engagement drive every good marketing strategy.

Marketing: An Introduction makes learning and teaching marketing more productive and enjoyable than ever. The sixth Canadian edition’s streamlined approach strikes an effective balance between depth of coverage and ease of learning. Unlike more abbreviated texts, it provides complete and timely coverage of all the latest marketing thinking and practice. And unlike longer, more complex texts, its moderate length makes it easy to digest in a given semester.

Marketing: An Introduction’s approachable organization, style, and design are well suited to beginning marketing students. The sixth Canadian edition’s learning design helps students to learn, link, and apply important concepts. Its simple organization and writing style present even the most advanced topics in an approachable, exciting way. The sixth Canadian edition brings marketing to life with deep and relevant examples and illustrations throughout. And when combined with MyMarketingLab, our online homework and personalized study tool, Marketing: An Introduction ensures that students will come to class well prepared and leave class with a richer understanding of basic marketing concepts, strategies, and practices.

What’s New in the Sixth Canadian Edition?

We’ve thoroughly revised the sixth Canadian edition of Marketing: An Introduction to reflect the major trends and forces impacting marketing in this digital age of customer value, engagement, and relationships. Here are just some of the changes you’ll find in this edition:
■■ More than any other developments, sweeping new online, social media, mobile, and other digital technologies are now affecting how marketers, brands, and customers engage with each other. The sixth Canadian edition features new and revised discussions and examples of the explosive impact of exciting new digital marketing technologies shaping marketing strategy and practice— from online, mobile, and social media engagement technologies discussed in Chapters 1, 6, 12, 13, and 15 to “online listening” and research tools in Chapter 5, online influence and brand communities in Chapter 6, and location-based marketing in Chapter 8, to the use of social media in business-to-business marketing and sales in Chapters 7 and 14, and to consumer Web, social media, and mobile marketing, as well as other new communications technologies, in Chapters 1, 6, 13, 15, and throughout.

A new Chapter 1 section, The Digital Age: Online, Mobile, and Social Media Marketing, introduces the exciting new developments in digital and social media marketing. A completely revised Chapter 15, Direct, Online, Social Media, and Mobile Marketing, digs deeply into digital marketing tools such as websites, social media, mobile ads and apps, online video, email, blogs, and other digital platforms that engage consumers anywhere, any time via their computers, smartphones, tablets, Internet-ready TVs, and other digital devices. The sixth Canadian edition is packed with new stories and examples illustrating how companies employ digital technology to gain competitive advantage—from traditional marketing all-stars such as Nike, P&G, Southwest, and McDonald’s to new-age digital competitors such as Google, Amazon.com, Apple, Netflix, Pinterest, and Facebook.

■■ The sixth Canadian edition features completely new and revised coverage of the emerging trend toward customer engagement marketing—building direct and continuous customer involvement in shaping brands, brand conversations, brand experiences, and brand community. The Internet and social media have created better- informed, more-connected, and more-empowered consumers. Thus, today’s marketers must now engage consumers rather than interrupting them. Marketers are augmenting their mass-media marketing efforts with a rich mix of online, mobile, and social media marketing that promotes deep consumer involvement and a sense of customer community surrounding their brands. Today’s new engagement-building tools include everything from websites, blogs, in-person events, and video sharing to online communities and social media such as Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter, and a company’s own social networking sites.

In all, today’s more engaged consumers are giving as much as they get in the form of two-way brand relationships. The sixth Canadian edition contains substantial new material on customer engagement and related developments such as consumer empowerment, crowdsourcing, customer co-creation, and consumer-generated marketing. A new Chapter 1 section—Engaging Customers—introduces customer engagement marketing. This and other related customer engagement topics are presented in Chapter 1 (new sections: Customer Engagement and Today’s Digital and Social Media and Consumer-Generated Marketing), Chapter 5 (qualitative approaches to gaining deeper customer insights), Chapter 6 (managing online influence and customer community through digital and social media marketing), Chapter 8 (crowdsourcing and customer-driven new-product development), Chapter 13 (the new, more engaging marketing communications model), and Chapter 15 (direct digital, online, social media, and mobile marketing).