INTRODUCTION
One of the more stunning insights in the theory of management came from Peter Drucker, a practical visionary who changed business discourse with his 1973 book The Practice of Management. He said that a business has only one valid purpose: to create a customer.
What’s more, he said, if the purpose of a business is to create a customer, then it has only two basic functions—innovation and marketing. Innovation produces the products, and marketing tells the stories that sell them. These two activities drive results, and all the others are costs.
Drucker was ahead of his time. The discipline of branding had been stuck in the Industrial Age, and lacked strategic subtlety. He couldn’t have known that someday it would gather up the very ...
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