Strategic Marketing Management

• Create a benefit framework that encompasses functional, experiential, financial, and psychosocial benefits
• Present evidence and support to make promised benefits both credible and valuable
• Separate intrinsic from extrinsic attributes, and correctly capitalize on each
• Use customer decision maps to "ladder" from concrete product attributes to benefits to personal values
• Create and employ creative strategies that speak only to those values considered most essential
• Foster and nurture appropriate brand meanings that retain value in the marketplace and over time
• Overcome unintended and undesirable product associations in the minds of your customers

Strategic Marketing Management goes straight to the heart of marketing, providing a logical approach for targeting and positioning products that is easy to implement and proven successful in today's marketplace. A concise, focused guide written for executives and executives-in-training, it describes today's top tools for assessing market trends, making essential decisions to capitalize on those trends, and executing those decisions with authority and confidence.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Ch. 1 Means-End Theory and Strategic Marketing 1
Ch. 2 Identifying and Analyzing Customer Benefits 15
Ch. 3 Making Benefits Credible 41
Ch. 4 Kinds of Attributes 65
Ch. 5 Personal Values 101
Ch. 6 Customer Decision Maps 125
Ch. 7 The Evolution of Brand Meaning 147
Ch. 8 Prioritizing Means-End Elements 173
Ch. 9 Evaluating a Customer Decision Map: A Case Study 197
Ch. 10 External Influencers and Undesirable Product Associations: A Case Study 221

Suggested Readings 243
Endnotes 245
Index 269