The End of Marketing As We Know It

by Sergio Zyman
Published by HarperBusiness, 1999

ESC Software Marketing Book Club's February, 2009 selection.

Zyman is probably best known as the guy responsible for launching New Coke.

Zyman left The Coca-Cola Company after the New Coke fiasco, returned six years later as Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, and increased the sales of Coke by fifty percent in five years, from ten billion cases per year to fifteen billion cases.

In the introduction, Zyman says that companies have gotten into trouble because the people running the place didn't keep their eye on the prize - they didn't remember that it's all about closing sales and making money.

Zyman doesn't have any of the fancy theories that you find in marketing books that are written by college professors. His method for selling more Coca-Cola - or more software - has to do with basic businesss strategies, and not abstract theories.

Even though selling soda and selling software are very different, Zyman's simple approach to sales and marketing makes it easy to translate his ideas into our industry.

Zyman says that marketing is about how your brand is positioned, how the product is designed and produced, how it is sold and delivered, and how consumers are serviced.

Many software developers spend months developing a new application, and then trying to figure out how to market it. Zyman believes that marketing shapes the product, and dictates how it's built and manufactured and delivered. Marketing is one of the first things that you do, and is never an afterthought.

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