Drucker on Marketing: Lessons from the World's Most Influential Business Thinker

Chapter 24Why Buying Customers Won’t Work

Drucker was always thinking about the future, and much of his reputation and success was the result of his uncanny ability to predict almost exactly what was going to happen. In The Daily Drucker, published in 2004, he wrote: “Of the top marketing lessons for the highly competitive twenty-first century, the most critical one is that buying customers doesn’t work.”¹ Even though we’re well into the twenty-first century today, the original version of this sentence was one that he wrote even earlier for an article in the Wall Street Journal appearing in 1990. It was published again in his book Managing in the Future two years later. In both publications this read, “Of the top marketing lessons for the highly ...