The Marketing Doctor has a diagnosis for a full range of marketing ills, and a prescription in mind to help you build a healthy, robust, marketing organization. The following are just some brief excerpts from this comprehensive marketing guidebook . . . With over thirty years of marketing experience to draw upon, author Dave Poulos puts a wide range of strategies and tactics into perspective, covering philosophy of marketing, use of research, customer service as a marketing tool, and a host of tactical executions, including direct mail, e-mail, sponsorships, social media, promotions, tradeshows, web traffic and more. Useful as classroom guide, marketing primer for new hires, career-changing introduction, or refresher for marketing veterans, this volume is a must-have for your professional library. On Marketing's Value to Business . . . Clearly, the knowledge of the practice and theory of marketing is a valuable, nee critical skill to have in your bag of management tricks. And indeed, it seems the more input from the marketing folks you get, the faster and bigger the success is Ramp up times are shorter, development and product lifecycles reduce, launches are more dramatic, and alternate product applications and uses surface faster and are more often taken advantage of, when the marketers get heavily involved in the upper echelon decision making. On Customer Behavior . . . Companies who are honest with their customers, setting realistic expectations of their products, service and respect for the customer's intelligence and privacy, find that customers are more loyal, last longer, spend more on average, and are better brand evangelists, than companies who are less so. On Brand Power . . . A few iconic brands have managed it - Disney, L.L. Bean, Johnson & Johnson, and a few others come to mind. Every single employee must "drink the brand cool-aid" and live by the credo the company stands for, day after day, day in and day out. From the pick-and-pack temporary employee to the CFO, each employee must believe so wholeheartedly in the company's mission, in the company's inherent "goodness" and be able to honestly portray it in their daily lives, that they project that same ethos to everyone they meet, it almost becomes part of their personality. On Marketing's place in the business panoply . . . Product development is sometimes seen as Indian territory for the marketing department, but in these high-profit companies, our studies show that marketers are deeply involved in not only accumulating consumer data to feed product development, but provide assistance and expertise on consumer preferences, brand extension and alignment, and even assessing product features and elements, to be sure they meet consumer preference and demand. On Teambuilding . . . Really good teams at their root have a level of respect for the challenge and for each of the members that keeps things moving forward and fosters trust. The more difficult the challenge, and the more exclusive the team, the better this works. Setting the stage for this starts with the team's nominal leader, showing an even-handed, rational and realistic approach to how they handle the others. On Research . . . Like most things, especially marketing, it all starts with research. Figure out what others are doing, and improve upon it. Find out what the audience wants, and give it to them. Find out what causes your customer's pain, and alleviate it. On Planning . . . It appears that there is a correlation between how effective these companies' marketing efforts are, and wait for it, the specificity and thoroughness of their marketing plan. It's not budget, it's not necessarily vision, it's not brilliance in creative execution - it's how well they draw up a plan and stick to it.