Trawlers, snoopers and branding popes

Perhaps our generation will see the last of the encyclopedias. In an era of databases, CD-Rom and other technologies permitting the possibility of almost continuous updating, who needs a big fat book any longer except as a doorstop? The notion of a "companion" encyclopedia seems a little precious anyway. "I can be your mate because I know everything" is not an especially reassuring unique selling proposition. But those who approach this particular collection with world-weary cynicism will miss out.

Michael Baker has assembled a formidable team of contributors from a range of countries: the United Kingdom to Hong Kong to Sweden to New Zealand. The pedagogic philosophy is squarely in the Anglo-American optimistic tradition dating from the expansion of business education in the 1960s and 1970s when marketing was flavour of the month. Then it was believed that Britain had the engineering and design talents: all that was needed to complete the virtuous circle was a methodology for identifying the routes into specific markets to which native inventive genius would then deliver a stream of goods. This now seems to have been deluded utopianism.

All emergent disciplines in the social sciences go through an imperialistic phase of needing to prove that they are the sovereign source of all other branches of the trade. Marketing is no exception. There is some earnest tracing of authentic ancestral origins. Baker quotes with approval Adam Smith's maxim "Consumption is the sole end and purpose of production".

Inevitably the contributions are mixed in quality, range and grasp. The academics are generally better value than the practitioners and that is a pity.

The consumer is usually glimpsed through producers' binoculars. But a revolution is foreshadowed. Now the customer has a chance to be king and from the unexceptional generalisation that "the supplier should keep very close to the customer", much else follows. Too few articles come to terms with the depressing reality of many marketing campaigns, that after comprehensive market research, panel testing, test marketing, and carefully orchestrated launch, the customer simply decides to do something else that day. The secret history of marketing, like that of most management, is one of crisis, failure, confusion, misunderstanding, and occasional joyous, inexplicable, successful hitting of the jackpot.

People - infuriating, unpredictable and bloody-minded - have come back into the marketing perspective. As Baker says, "relationship marketing has come to dominate the field", but he adds mystifyingly "'twas ever so". Well maybe it was but most marketing theory did not acknowledge it.

Many contributors relabel customers not as those to whom something is done but as those for whom something is done. But clients and customers increasingly understand their power to do something to organisations supplying goods and services they do not appreciate. Brent Spar and Yorkshire Water do not figure in this book's credits.

The chapter on branding makes grand claims. "Marketing . . . the central business discipline . . . the marketing function as a gearbox making a profitable connection between a company's core competencies and the needs of the market. Brands the cogs in the gearbox . . . brands and brand marketing lie at the heart of business . . . many of the world's best-known companies [are] structured around their brands."

But while the author mentions the importance of brand values in justifying the attractiveness of companies as take-over targets, he shies away from the important issues of brand valuation. This is disappointing in view of the wide-ranging claims that "Oxfam is as much a brand as Coca Cola, charities are brands, the Louvre is a brand . . . even the Pope is a brand".

The chapter on market segmentation refers to important new developments in data mining, and the identification of patterns and structures in data, using neural nets and fractal analysis. Surprisingly it ignores Hanan Selvin's breakthrough article on data dredging with its classic identification of researcher styles, the trawlers, fishers and snoopers. These orientations to data might be related to the "multivariate jungle" described by Graham Hooley, aptly quoted by John Saunders.

The same article quotes J.D.C. Little's work on model building, identifying the vital importance of the relationship between the scientist who builds the model and the manager who will use it and concludes that "unless trust and mutual understanding occur, any model built is likely to fail or be unused". Understanding on the part of the modeller is mirrored by ownership on the part of the manager. Good models are simple, robust, useable, adaptive and comprehensive.

It would be sad if this insightful, scholarly, timely, and yes, almost encyclopedic volume were to be restricted to specialist practitioners of marketing. There is much in it for the general manager and still more for the business and management academic. Like a good "companion" it can make you think a bit. Is the pope a brand? Is the pope a Catholic?

David T. H. Weir is director, University of Bradford Management Centre.