Tilt

5. Extracting Value from the Big Picture

Marketing today faces a challenge no less significant than the one that jolted it into the mass era a little over a century ago. Then, factories that had adopted mass production were spewing out inexpensively manufactured products faster than the market could absorb them. The industrialization of agriculture created a glut of farm products. The mechanization and assembly-lining of various industries dropped productions costs of manufactured goods by 90 percent. The bottlenecks in the value chain were no longer in resource scarcity or manufacturing, but lay in demand: in the ability of consumers to understand, make sense of, and buy the products rolling out of the factories. Marketing and, in particular, ...