Peter F. Drucker on Practical Leadership

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Four Marketing Lessons for the Future

OF THE TOP MARKETING lessons for the highly competitive ’90s, the most crucial one may well be that buying customers doesn’t work. Witness two spectacular marketing failures of the past few years: the collapse of the Hyundai Excel and the fiasco caused by the discounts and bonuses offered by the Big Three U.S. auto makers.

The Excel was the Wundercar of 1987-88. Fifteen months after the Korean car’s introduction into the U.S. market, it was selling at an annual rate of more than 400,000 cars—the fastest growth of any automobile anywhere in history. But by mid-1990, only two years later, ...