Market-Based Management (3rd Edition)

Rating:
Summary: A real treasure, an intro marketing book with substance
Review: I really like this book. There are around 10 intro marketing textbooks, and they're almost all either (co-)authored by Kotler, or shameless rip-offs of his books.

Hats of to Roger Best for coming up with a book that's truly different. The approach is refreshingly down-to-earth, almost nerdy, including a lot of frameworks for financial or qualitative analysis that would be useful to any marketing manager in his or her daily life. Although it can be used as an introductory marketing textbook, you'll find a lot of material here that you don't find in Kotler and Kotler-clones, so I also recommend it to people who've had an intro marketing course, and who want to move beyond the basics. Likewise, this would be a great book for practicing marketing managers who've been out in the field a couple of years, and want to brush up on the basics, without wading through the usual definitions and useless frameworks in other intro textbooks.

The entire book is in black and white, lacking the usual fancy graphics, and it is only about half the length of other textbooks. I actually find that refreshing, and it is an extension the substance-over-hype approach behind this book.