Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses Are Turning Marketing Cost Into Profit - Hardcover

by Joe Pulizzi (Author), Robert Rose (Author)

Killing your current marketing structure may be the only way to save it

Two of the world's top marketing experts reveal the next level of breakthrough success--transforming your marketing strategy into a standalone profit center.

What if everything we currently know about marketing is what is holding us back? Over the last two decades, we've watched the entire world change the way it buys and stays loyal to brands. But, marketing departments are still operating in the same, campaign-centric, product-led operation that they have been following for 75 years. The most innovative companies around the world have achieved remarkable marketing results by fundamentally changing their approach. By creating value for customers through the use of owned media and the savvy use of content, these businesses have dramatically increased customer loyalty and revenue. Some of them have even taken it to the next step and developed a marketing function that actually pays for itself.

Killing Marketing explores how these companies are ending the marketing as we know it--in favor of this new, exciting model.

Killing Marketing provides the insight, approaches, and examples you need to understand these disruptive forces in ways that turn your marketing from cost center to revenue creator. This book builds the case for, literally, transforming the purpose of marketing within your organization. Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute show how leading companies are able sell the very content that propels their marketing strategy. You'll learn how to:

* Transform all or part of your marketing operation into a media company

* Integrate this new operation into traditional marketing efforts

* Develop best practices for attracting and retaining audiences

* Build a strategy for competing against traditional media companies

* Create a paid/earned media strategy fueled by an owned media strategy

Red Bull, Johnson & Johnson, Disney and Arrow Electronics have succeeded in what ten years ago would have been deemed impossible. They continue to market their products as they always have, and, through their content-driven and audience-building initiatives, they drive value outside the day-to-day products they sell--and monetize it directly.

Killing Marketing rewrites the rules of marketing--enabling you to make the kind of transition that turns average companies into industry legends.

Back Jacket

Joe and Robert take us, once again, to the bleeding edge of marketing . . . but importantly help us understand how to stay there. Their bold thinking, matched only by their bold personali- ties, jumps off of each page.--Jonathan Mildenhall, Chief Marketing Officer, Airbnb
"Sometimes the manual needs to be thrown out the door. This book rewrites the rules of marketing, putting content front and center to create value and brand loyalists. Push the envelope, change the approach, and don't be afraid to be disruptive."--Jeffrey Hayzlett, primetime TV and radio host, speaker, author and part-time cowboy
"Pulizzi and Rose have unlocked the puzzle of what marketing should be in the 21st century. Their focus on the two key elements, customers and the income flows those customers create, turns traditional product marketing thinking on its head."--Don Schultz, Professor Emeritus of Service, Northwestern University's Medill School
"Loaded with ideas to turn content marketing into profit centers. Read it and you'll become a believer, as I have."--Al Ries, co-author, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind
"World renowned marketing experts Pulizzi and Rose partner to author prescriptive advice to help marketing executives transcend purchased media and ascend to owned media prominence."--Kathy Button Bell, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Emerson
"Killing Marketing is the senior executive handbook for what the marketing function should always have been and now can be."--Stephanie Losee, Head of Content, Visa Corporate Communications, from the Foreword
"Killing Marketing will challenge you to look beyond your known toolkit and change the structure of strategy that will fundamentally and profitably reshape the purpose of marketing in business."--Timothy McDonough, Vice President Global Brand Marketing, Moen Incorporated
"Killing Marketing is a controversial idea. But controversial marketing is exactly what is needed to profit successfully in the killing crossroads of traditional and new age business."--Raj Munusamy, Vice President, Content Marketing & Messaging, Schneider Electric
"Imagine marketing as a profit center, not a cost center. Sound crazy? Nope. This is the blueprint you need to flip marketing on its head, drive innovation, and claim your spot as a business leader."--Ann Handley, Wall Street Journal bestselling author & Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs
"Killing Marketing brilliantly demystifies the full implications of content as a pre-eminent force in customer experience and business transformation in the post-Internet era."--Carlos Abler, Global Content Marketing & Strategy Lead, 3M
"Buy this book and transform where the marketing budget lives on the balance sheet!"--Rebecca Lieb, Analyst, Advisor and author of Content: The Atomic Particle of Marketing
"RIP marketing. It's been real. Killing Marketing just put the final nail in your cost center coffin."--Jason Miller, Global Content Marketing Leader, LinkedIn

Author Biography

Joe Pulizzi is founder of the Content Marketing Institute, which Inc. magazine named the fastest-growing business media company in 2012, 2013, and 2014. He is the recipient of the Content Council's John Caldwell Lifetime Achievement Award for Content Marketing.

Robert Rose is Chief Strategy Advisor for the Content Marketing Institute. He has provided strategic marketing advice to some of the world's most innovative companies, including Capital One, Dell, Caterpillar, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and UPS.