Mission-Based Marketing 2e: Positioning Your Not-for-Profit in an Increasingly Competitive World (Mission-Based Management Series) [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Mission-Based Marketing by Peter Brinckerhoff is a terrific example of one of those "helper" books. It does more than "help" me. It helps organizations look at their marketing programs, their missions, their customers and their staffs. It is very easy to read and very well organized with plenty of concrete examples and case histories. In fact, the examples were the biggest aspect of the book from which I was able to learn principles that Brinckerhoff was trying to teach. After reading this book the reader will have basic principles and concrete ways to write a marketing plan and to carry it out for a successful business. Although it is intended for not-for-profits it can easily be utilized by any business.

I wish that I had written "Mission-Based Marketing," Consultant Peter Brinckerhoff's smart, well-written book. Certainly the title is terrific, underscoring as it does that the only effective marketing a nonprofit can do is mission-based. But more than that Brinckerhoff has written a basic book on marketing that nonetheless propounds some very advanced views.

"Mission-Based Marketing," along with its companion workbook "Mission-Based Marketing: An Organizational Development Workbook," is largely a book for the reluctant and the novice nonprofit marketer, his board or staff. There's a lot of handholding here, including lengthy treatises on the subjects of `competition' (it's ultimately good, he says) and `flexibility' (it's even better). By the same token, "Mission-Based" is conspicuously free of basic marketing concepts like "four Ps." There's little of substance on pricing theory, and nothing much on branding, a pet subject of most for-profit marketing mavens.

Instead, Brinckerhoff starts by laying out in plain-spoken English why nonprofits who may have thought of marketing as `sales' and thereby unsavory, have to get past that idea. He calls such thinking the "non-profit marketing disability." It stems, he says, from knowing what your constituents "need" and caring little about what they "want;" filling wants being the defining and thereby unsavory element of for-profit marketing. But Brinckerhoff easily dispatches the non-profit marketing disability before the twentieth page. For that matter, he takes the starch out of the taint of sales while he's at it.

Imagine a would-be client at a treatment facility dangerous to herself or others, he suggests. The client needs treatment, but she doesn't want it. Since she's an adult, you can't force her into treatment. But you can market to her, in this case `sell' her on treatment. "The job of the mission-based marketer is to make the person want what they need," he says. Ergo, "good marketing is good mission." Nice!

Even with all the handholding, there's still plenty relevant here for more sophisticated mission-based marketers, especially the chapters on customer service and marketing planning.

But it's a testament to the value and validity of this book that I finished "Mission-Based Marketing" along the same time I was reading an issue of "Marketing Management," a magazine published by the American Marketing Association, and I found them markedly similar. Several scholar-members of the AMA have proposed changing the product-centric four Ps marketing mix to the customer-centric "SIVA," [solutions, information, value and access]. This is cutting-edge thinking from the leading lights of world's largest marketing membership group, and it mirrors in broad strokes Brinckerhoff's central themes.

I have quibbles, but they're minor. In chapter five on the marketing cycle, he takes his 6-part customer-centric approach, so similar to SIVA, out for a trot. The second stage "market inquiry" or "what do your markets really want?" presumes that you can actually discover what your markets really want. While Brinckerhoff soundly recommends "asking, asking, listening" it's not necessarily a given that you can discover what your customer wants simply by asking them. The customer may not know, or be able to articulate what he wants. And not all marketers or market researchers are capable of parsing out those hidden wants, either.

Plus, any customer-centric approach in not-for-profit or for-profit marketing runs the risk of being merely reactive; of not innovating. No focus group ever suggested the original Sony Walkman, for instance. Instead, it was birthed from the minds of engineers who knew what was possible, and sold by marketers who knew how to make people want something they never conceived of.

Mission-Based Marketing is well-wrought book, an excellent resource, and a terrific addition to any mission-based marketer's library.

This book is I suspect a really good introduction to what marketing is really all about for an individual or organisation who haven't had significant access to marketing experience or education. Of course it would be fair to say that this lack of knowledge seems to be more highly concentrated in the non-profit sector - so this book definitely has its role.

However if you have even a small amount of genuine non-profit marketing know-how this book might be a tad frustrating. The book covers everything in the traditional marketing portfolio but in no great depth and then attempts to cover other disciplines such as change management. Too much with no real depth.

While "branding" can be misunderstood and a bit trendy at times, this book does not mention it - except with a reference to brand loyalty in a case study on page 56. A genuinely useful marketing book has to at least take a look at branding - if only to define "brand" and dispel rumours.

The assertion that you can print your own high quality marketing materials in-house is highly debatable - in colour, sure, to a commercial standard in large cost-effective volumes - not normally! Again a fairly light over easy approach to something that is a bit more complex than the author gives credit for.

So if you want a book to make you really think and make you wrestle with ideas do not buy this book. Instead it is a broad brush, relatively simplistic approach by an author who seems able to be able to write numerous non-profit books but doesn't appear to have the requisite depth and expertise to really challenge the discerning marketing practitioner.