The Subject Is Marketing

At the end of the day, we believe that marketing should be both interesting and fun. In the span of the 14 or so weeks of a typical Canadian semester, the underlying creativity and knowledge necessary to be a good marketer, that is, the stuff that makes marketing interesting and fun, needs to be studied. That’s a lot of great stuff to squeeze into a relatively short amount of time. But if students get a solid grounding in marketing, and pick up the "bug" too, well, that’s the whole idea.

That’s what this book is all about. Marketing: a modern, dynamic, and vital business activity that is a critical foundation topic in the business curriculum. If it also happens to be fun and exciting, then so much the better.

To get hooked on marketing, you don’t necessarily need to know it all. It’s all in Lamb/Faria if you do, but gaining a solid foundation of what marketing is all about, and how it is changing in this ever more specialized and digital world, is just as important.

The aim of this text is to give students an interesting overview of the discipline, covering off both the core, foundation topics, as well as some of the newer topics that are fundamentally changing how the marketing function is performed. Likewise, a Canadian context is critical, so we’ve spent more time on Services Marketing and some of the particularly good Canadian examples of marketing innovations that are out there today.

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Market-Driven Innovations for the Second Canadian Edition

The guiding principle of this edition of The Subject Is Marketing is that of building relationships. Relationship marketing is discussed early on, with a full chapter dedicated to the topic later in the text. We seek to build long-term relationships with our customers (both students and professors) that result in trust and confidence in our product, and we recognize that this is an ongoing, long-term proposition. To that end, we feel a strong sense of responsibility to provide you and your students with the most exciting and up-to-date text, as well as the most useful supplement package possible.

We’re introducing "Extended" Web Exercises, one per chapter, that use each of the Chapter Opening examples as a starting point for web-based activities, which are designed to help students understand the chapter theory in a different way. Instructors are provided with grading guidelines and the opportunity to assign a simple or "extended" version of the exercise. The point is to provide faculty and students with web-based assignments that can be fitted practically into one semester. And we certainly don’t expect that faculty will use all of them in that short a time period; even using a few of them each semester will broaden the experience for students, and further immerse them in one of the most dynamic elements of marketing right now.

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Shorter and Sweeter

We have tried to manage the length of the text without sacrificing key content. Pricing has, therefore, gone from two chapters down to one. While Strategy is now covered in two chapters, they are both fairly short: an early introduction to strategy is followed by another strategy chapter at the end of the book to tie things together for students.

The chapter on Internet Marketing is, not surprisingly, available on the Internet (as well as the Student CD-ROM)

Services are a key component of the Canadian economy, so we’ve looked at that topic in a little greater depth within the chapter, as well as having added several focus boxes on services where appropriate throughout the text.

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A New Table of Contents Based on Market Feedback

Clearly, as consumers are faced with more and more choices for each buying decision they make, the need for the seller to establish strong relationships with customers becomes increasingly critical. With this in mind, we have added a new chapter (18) that deals exclusively with one-to-one marketing. Likewise, we have added in some one-to-one marketing focus boxes to help illustrate the increasing prevalence of this relatively recent trend.

In this age of intense competition and an explosive growth of information, outsmarting your competitor becomes ever more critical to business growth. To address this, we’ve included a chapter (8) on Competitive Intelligence. This chapter will help students use competitive information intelligently and ethically.

“Ethics and Social Responsibility” has been integrated into Chapter 3 on the marketing environment, signifying its importance in all aspects of marketing decision making.

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