So, the author cuts through the maze of definitions and presents the core process of marketing-strategy-making as a blend of three things — understanding the market, choosing the strategy, and creating the action plan. A chapter on the first factor, ‘understanding the market’, begins with this quote from H.H. Williams: ‘Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.’

Market understanding process, which comes “before the market audit or any less rational method of identifying opportunities and threats,” involves a comprehension of market complexity and turbulence. Complexity is “the intricacy and convolution of that external environment with which we are trying to align our company,” and turbulence, according to Smith, is “change and instability in the external environment” we are trying to align with.

Choosing the strategy is about ‘biocongruence,’ says the author. This demands companies to: “blend rational planning, visionary command and incrementalism” to cope with market complexity and turbulence; ensure that culture supports rather than hinders the process; and adopt “a sophisticated approach to a difficult problem in contrast to more naïve marketers who think that unskilled use of simple tools will give the result they want.” And, action plan, the third component, helps make marketing happen.

For the practitioner in doubt.

Gender in media

Ed: Eoin Devereux>

Why bother with gender in media studies? Thus asks Joke Hermes in an essay included in ‘Media Studies: Key Issues and Debates’ edited by Eoin Devereux ( www.sagepublications.com). Why gender, because so much has changed in society since the Second World War, reasons Hermes.

“In the early 1960s, to be a woman meant that you lived in a fake world. A husband, a home and children were supposed to provide instant gratification but did not. It left women wondering whether that was all there was to live for.” The ‘fakeness’ of the world was mostly produced in and through the media, she argues. “Women’s magazines counselled readers that to be a mother was difficult but fulfilling. Romantic stories promised that heterosexual marriage was a state of bliss. News stories showed solely men who were politicians or important figures in the world of business…” At least, till things began to change.

Yet, the rules guiding representation of gender are complex, concedes the author. For instance, though “newsreaders need to have neutral faces,” the Netherlands had a different consideration when it recruited ‘a host of women newsreaders’ in the 1980s: “They were busty maternal types, putting the nation to bed after a hectic day.”

Ideal read, after a hectic day.

D. Murali

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

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