ANALYZING “CONTEMPORARY MARKETING WIRED” Essay, Research Paper

163

STUDENT ID#

ANALYZING “CONTEMPORARY MARKETING WIRED”

WITH THE USE OF ADDLER AND VAN DOREN’S “HOW TO READ”

Submitted in Partial Fufillment of the

Course Requirements of

BUS 120 Principles of Marketing

DUE DATE:Thursday, February 5, 1998

PLEASE NOTE:Submittal Time is of the Essence

INSTRUCTOR:

ANALYZING “CONTEMPORARY MARKETING WIRED”

WITH THE USE OF ADDLER & VAN DOREN’S “HOW TO READ”

By Student ID # 163

Instructor: Dr. Thomas A. Maroney

An Abstract of the Summary and Analysis Presented in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirement for

BUS 120 Principles of Marketing

February 5, 1998

In this paper I will use the methods of Kuhn’s “How to Read A Book” in order to correctly analyze and portray Boone & Kurtz “Contemporary Marketing Wired”. When using one person’s methods in order to analyze another’s work, it is very important to understand that the methods are only one persons view of how to correctly analyze the topic. In the brief time that I have to tell about “Contemporary Marketing Wired”, I am going to make sure that the key points of the text are addressed. Like in every text, the author does their best to make sure that the reader can remember and comprehend a bulk amount of the material that has just been read. The author also wants the reader to learn from their reading and therefore understand any concepts that they did not know before coming into the subject. After reading the chapter systematic skimming or pre-reading by Addler & Van Doren, I simply used their techniques in order to effectively analyze Boone & Kurtz marketing text.

When it comes to any form of reading, one must understand that reading is now a simple skill to most of the people in the world as long as they have fluency in the particular language. Reading is no longer the struggle for most people in the world today. The ability to be able to tell about the important parts of a text and then analyze the material still puzzles many people though. According to Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren they emphasize that it is very important to read material in certain levels. When a book is first picked up, a person should ask themselves whether or not the material really deserves analytical reading or not. One of the things that can be done to check and make sure whether the book should be fully read or not is to skim or pre-read the text. The main goal of this is to determine whether the book requires a more delicate and careful reading. Many people may take a book and believe that through skimming they are able to uncover all that the book was worth. That book will then sit in a useless space until one day another individual must read it from cover to cover in order to get the educational value that the author meant for the reader to obtain once finished.

Skimming is certainly an art to many people. For a person that believes that “time is money” and are never going to be seen spending any of their precious time reading a book then this method is perfect for them. It is a useful method as long as the reader only needs to know what the author’s main point is and what kind of book has been read. Skimming is a technique that can easily be learned and used in order to acquire as much information as possible on any particular text. There are many people who suggest how to go about using this method. The most well known might just be Addler & Van Doren so therefore I will use their methods out of “How To Read A Book”.

Suggestions for Systematic Skimming or Pre-reading:

1). Look at the book and it’s title page and, if it has one, look at it’s preface.

2). Study the table of contents

3). Check the index

4). Read the publisher’s blurb

5). Look at the pivotal chapters to its argument

6). Briefly go from page to page reading a few paragraphs and sometimes several pages in sequence, never more than that.

When I first picked up my marketing text in the bookstore at the University of Maine at Farmington, I instantly could see that the text was marketing based. The text was full of various bright colors just waiting to attract a wondering eye that just might happen to looks it’s way. Not only was I amazed at the color of the book but, also the words Contemporary Marketing wired. Those three simple yet complex word instantly put a message in my head that I would certainly be studying marketing this semester. The biggest thing that caught my eye though was the picture of a cable on the front cover of the book. It instantly meant technology to me and with the wavy lines coming out of the cable, I pictured the concepts of marketing spreading throughout the global environment.

As I turned the cover to see what was on the inside of the book, I was in awe at the bright green page that illuminated before me. This page is certainly meant to attract what is on it and I can honestly tell you that it did. As I slowly read down through the pages all that could be seen where measly Internet addresses to some, not to me though. Before me there are vast advertisements for many large companies in our world and therefore a marketing example for Boone & Kurtz. I think of this as almost a marketing experiment in some way or another. I could almost see the authors of this text say to one another, “I wonder how many students will actually look up the webpages of these companies”. I can easily answer that one, tons. There is no better place to put advertisements than right in front of a college students nose while they are trying to procrastinate on work that is due. I can honestly say that with Internet access on my computer, that bright green page in my book was just urging me on to try a few of those web addresses that lay there in front of me. The work can wait for later right? Obviously who ever made the decision to put these advertisements in plain view of the reader was very smart. Why not, it must have helped to keep the costs of the text low due to advertising costs.

The next place that I went in order to find out about the book was the preface. I discovered many interesting things in this portion of the text. I found that the Contemporary Marketing text is based around the principles of marketing for the future. Boone & Kurtz has gone “high-tech” and in the process of doing so, I believe that they have defined as well as set the standard of excellence in marketing. As time goes by everything is changing in the world as well as all of the marketing principles that apply. This book is trying to keep students on track through the use on online capabilities so that marketing can be taught and understood into the twenty first century. Through technology and the use of cd-rom and the Internet, Boone & Kurtz will be able to stay on top of the concepts of marketing as they emerge from the business world.

Even though I have never read or seen for that matter any of the previous editions of Contemporary Marketing, I fully believe that the new edition has been enhanced in order to teach marketing to its fullest. Boone & Kurtz have come up with many new ideas that allow for students to use that will keep them up to date on the concepts of marketing. This includes a complex website that can be used for marketing research, computer exercises that can be used to understand the concept of marketing, in text research examples and even the opportunity to interact with the text authors and marketing students that have made all of this technology possible.

After spending a very small amount of time skimming the preface, I have come to the conclusion that this text really does have the ability and resources to guide any student that wants to know more about the modern concepts of marketing. There has certainly been a large amount of work put into the text. Through this, I believe that the business world realizes that marketing is always going to play a large role in business. Due to it playing such a large role in business, corporations are forced to marketing themselves whenever possible in order to achieve a competitive advantage.

The most impressive thing that I came across while going through the minor details at the beginning of the text was the personal message to the student. Upon reading this I was given a feeling that the creators of this text actually did care and wanted the student to be aware of how they could correctly educate themselves in the topic of marketing for the twenty-first century. Marketing certainly has gone high tech and with all of the emphasis in today’s society on the correct procedure of how to market a product, the industry has become full of immeasurable opportunity. Boone & Kurtz swear behind the use of the Internet to use for advertising purposes and they are positively correct. The Internet is a way for companies to gather information about their competitors, suppliers and customers so that they can come up with a marketing plan that will beat the other guy.

After quickly skimming the title page and the preface I came upon the table of contents. The table of contents in this text is obviously a very important part of the book. It is in a way the entire back bone of the information that is displayed in the rest of this book. By looking through it, a person is able to gain knowledge of the book’s structure. I have personally always been one to make sure that I look at the table of contents before I digging more deeply into the contents of any book. Like in life, I am the kind of guy that feels it is important to know what you are getting into before you actually step on to the playing field. In fact, many authors spend a considerable amount of time in creating the table of contents, and it is sad to think their efforts are often wasted. (How to Read, 33)

In the “Contemporary Marketing wired” text, the table of contents plays a major role on how to effectively understand the ideas that are to be portrayed in the rest of the book. The importance of the table of contents is obvious, there is both a contents in brief and full table of contents in the beginning of the book. This proves that Boone & Kurtz are trying to emphasize the use of the table of contents to its readers. The contents in brief is broken up into seven marketing topics that the text is going to address. Underneath these seven topics or parts 1-7, there are separate chapters that contain information about the major topic of that section. For an example I will use part one out of “Contemporary Marketing wired”.

PART 1THE CONTEMPORARY MARKETING ENVIRONMENT Chapter 1Developing Relationships through Customer Focus, Quality,Technology and Ethical Behavior

Chapter 2Creating Value through Customer Satisfaction and Quality

Chapter 3The Marketing Environment, Ethics, and SocialResponsibility

Chapter 4Global Dimensions of Marketing

As a student reads the brief contents for part one of the text, they should see that there are many important issues in the Contemporary Marketing Environment. Due to all of these issues taking place, there will be separate chapters explaining each issue in the marketing environment. An example could be the focus of customer, quality, technological and ethical behavior in the contemporary marketing environment. The main part of each of these chapters though is that there is going to be more informative thoughts and ideas inside of each chapter therefore there must be a more specific table of contents.

In the larger more specific table of contents, the main points of every chapter are listed so that the student can know what the key points are in every chapter. These key points are the index of the book. When going through the index I was able to see that there were various amounts of topics that are discussed throughout the book. These topics are emphasized continuously throughout each section therefore should be in the index. Not only can the index be used as a quick reference to look up a page number of a certain topic which is to be discussed but, the chapter can also be analyzed by just briefly skimming the important mini-topics of a chapter in the index.

Though Addler & Van Doren have given solid advice on how to skim a book, I was unable to find a publisher’s blurb in the “Contemporary Marketing wired” text. According to the steps of how to properly skim a book in “How to Read a Book” I found one comment by Addler & Van Doren that I do not necessarily agree with. They say that the author often writes the blurb to try to summarize as accurately as they can the main points in their book. If there is no blurb to be found then perhaps the book does not say anything of importance at all. Even though there is no blurb to be found I think that Boone & Kurtz have done a fine job at summarizing the text through the uses of the preface and the chapter summaries. They are obviously trying to make as many improvements as possible for students that are interested at marketing for the twenty-first century.

Once I started reading more into the text I found interesting things about the way a marketing text should be written in order for it to be used as an educational tool. Marketing is a topic that will always be universal in the business world. There is no correct definition of marketing which means it is a very open ended topic. The first thing that should be shown in the beginning of any educational text, is a brief definition of the topic that is to be studied. Like I said before marketing is a term that has a different definition to everyone. One person might define it as a way to advertise the selling of a product, while another might say that it is advertising that happens once a good is produced. According to a 1985 definition by the American Marketing Association, marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion and distribution of ideas, goods and services to create changes that will satisfy individual organizational objectives. Indeed this is a very in-depth definition of what seems to be a rather simple topic but, it is not. There are many different forms of marketing in today’s world and everyone of them is going to have it’s turns of success as well as failure.

Due to marketing being such a broad topic in the business world of today, companies can no longer afford to keep their marketing strategy inside their own country. To remain competitive, companies must continually search for the most efficient means of production and successful markets in order to push their product. There are many examples of how a company can push their product and advertise by just looking at the pictures in this book. A large amount of the pages have colored pictures and slogans for companies such as Pepsi Cola and Polar-Tec. Even though these companies are being used in order to correctly teach various marketing concepts, they are also trying to push their products in the text.

I continued throughout the book and from chapter to chapter I found some amazing things in which a person could use to learn. Not only are the chapters full of colored pictures and graphs but, also there is a marketing dictionary on various pages. This dictionary is simply a place that definitions can be obtained from that have to do with the chapter that is being read. The most helpful thing that I found after completely skimming the text were the chapter objectives at the beginning of each chapter. These are simply topics that are gone over in each chapter that a person should be able to know after they have fully read the material. They are certainly a very positive means to study with due to most of the questions having to do with the key point of the chapter. These objectives are also a good means for conversation among students. Like I said before due to marketing being such a broad topic there is bound to be a wind variety of answers for each question.

In conclusion I feel that Boone & Kurtz “Contemporary Marketing wired” is a very educational text. It can easily be used in many ways in order to get the emphasis out about the concepts of marketing and how they should be applied. This book definitely portrays that marketing is a skill and in order to properly market a product it is going to take practice. Many people have had successes and failures through good and bad marketing approaches. The main thing that I would like to stress about marketing is that no matter how a good or service is marketed it must be sold in an efficient manner or the company is going to go under. I would like to leave you with a quote from George Foreman and I truly believe that he backs up what I am trying to emphasize. “I learned something early in life. If you sell, you’ll never starve. In any other profession, you can find yourself out on the street saying, ?They do not want me anymore.’ But if you can sell you will never go hungry.”