Choices should and have to be made when presenting information about marketing. In this fourth edition (the first appeared back in 2003, before web and digital got going; the third edition of 2011 was previously reviewed in these columns [RR 2012/219]), Charles Doyle (marketing and communications director at Jones Lang LaSalle, the commercial real estate company) takes a practitioner approach to marketing, nodding to the wealth of theoretical commentary out there. This is a down-to-earth and practical dictionary for students studying marketing on business courses, as well as for professionals starting out in marketing (and its allied services) needing a quick desk-reference tool. At £12.99, it makes both a useful addition to the reference shelves of the public and school/college library, as well as being within the student price-range. It is part of the well-established and impressive series of Oxford Quick Reference works. More can be discovered about this series by going to the website www.oxfordreference.com
The editor rightly alerts us to the changes made for this new edition. Above all, these changes reflect the growth of the internet for shaping and delivering marketing products and services. Web and digital marketing are commonplace currently, and this emphasis is reflected in the entries in the dictionary (which consists conventionally and helpfully of alphabetical entries). We find entries not only on topics such as PayPal and Yahoo and YouTube, pod casting and search engines but also on new marketing practices and techniques (which in turn have spawned neologisms such as Pinterest and PageRanking and folksonomy – respectively, an image social website, a ranking process on Google and a form of social tagging which enables users to classify websites). Adding to this, we find clusters of interconnected concepts (using simple cross-referencing) such as interactive marketing: this re-directs the reader on to data and direct, e-mail and permission and viral marketing. Another linkage hinges on the concept of segmentation, connecting up with central narratives such as marketing plan and strategy.
An interesting and attractive feature of the dictionary is the way in which it picks out key marketing scenarios and processes, dedicating several pages (in the form of distinct box entries) to them. Examples include marketing demand, marketing plan, family life cycle, buyer/buying behaviour, competition, public relations and pricing. These are central ideas in the professional field, unlikely to disappear for all the fast changes taking place digitally. In fact, they are hospitable to change, morphing like amoebas to address and accommodate new understandings of consumer motivation and aspiration and new insights into interactive marketing. By this token, then, the dictionary is strong on traditional concepts – like market positioning and marketing mix, loyalty affect and focus group, value added and propensity to buy, high street and sampling, weaving in new terms for new things – like green washing (highlighting the brand’s green credentials), flighting (media strategy choice sensitive to seasonality) and mindshare (the awareness and recall potential for specific brands).
Doyle is right to point out in his helpful introduction that organizations will continue to need to explain themselves and what they stand for, and this is where marketing matters. He acknowledges the suspicion marketing instils in many customers (manipulating children, colonizing the global marketplace with things we think we want but do not really need); yet, as he says, modern marketing enables consumers to act smart, it gives them choice and up-front information, and protections exist in law. In a sense, never has it been clearer that the customer is king. Marketing uses interactive media to enable and encourage individualized forms of consumption, and marketing and public relations companies utilize and exploit these subtle (and some would say invasive) techniques to know their markets better and get stronger market share and offer better shareholder value. Marketing is pervasive of business strategy and, for that reason, is best driven by holistic coherent thinking: the box-entry scenarios (for example, discussing marketing plan and price transparency) are particularly good at re-affirming this idea. A range of contextual terms (like consumer society) is also offered by the dictionary.
Of value, too, are the scenarios for iconic modern brands such as BMW and Apple, Nokia and Xerox, Coca Cola and Kellogg’s, McDonald’s and Guinness and Heinz and even the Barack Obama political campaign of 2008. These appear in one of several helpful appendices. Others provide a chronology, a listing of effective slogans (such as Toyota’s “Drive Your Dreams”) and a listing of relevant web links. In the dictionary itself, a wide range of personalities – Steve Jobs, Michael Porter, Nielsen and Ogilvy and others can also be found. All in all, then, a very helpful reference work for the marketing practitioner and student, cannily anticipating, in a world, where such works obsolesce speedily, a likely need for a fifth edition in the middle term ahead and so offering it in paperback format.
