When there’s something strange happening in Welch’s neighbourhood, “Who’s he gonna call?”
Ram Charan! An individual consultant. An individual international consultant. Or rather, an individual international strategic marketing consultant. Jack Welch once described Ram Charan to Fortune as a person who has “this rare ability to distill meaningful from meaningless and transfer it to others in a quiet, effective way without destroying confidences!”
And this is Jack, considered the unarguable numero uno CEO in the history of global capitalism, who’s been a self-confessed
‘marketing guru addict’ for almost 37 whopping years! And if you thought even for a ghost of a moment that this trend was restricted to a handful of global CEOs who perhaps could ‘afford’ such marketing gurus for their companies (and marriage counsellors for their divorces), allow us to bring you face to face with the thundering reality: It’s a massively growing movement out there, and not just restricted to corporate America but spreading electrifyingly across all continents!
Singular strategy wizards are rampantly rewiring selling concepts, promotional ideologies, awareness quotients, loyalty parameters, in short, marketing strategies; and we repeat, these are not behemoth consulting firms, but individual whiz geniuses.
DuPont, EDS, Ford, Duke Energy, Verizon, Fedex, American Airlines, P&G, Intel, Unilever, Nike, Audi, Wal-Mart, Sprint, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and innumerably more Fortune 500 corporations have dug into the resolute and growing knowledge base of these marketing legends, and not just for one year, or two, or three, or even a decade; unbelievably, some of these corporations’ marketing strategies have been guided by these leaders for more than a smashing three decades. 4Ps B&M caught up with Ram Charan and similar global marketing intellectuals to deeply understand and unravel this movement.
Take this for a short take. What’s common between these top ranked gurus: C. K. Prahalad, Michael Porter, Gary Hamel, Guy Kawasaki, Chan Kim, Jim Collins, Philip Kotler, Robert Kaplan, and Stephen Covey? Well, if it wasn’t that obvious, the fact is that all these virtuosos have sparkling university backgrounds, that is, at one point or the other, they’ve taught at world-class institutions. But is that what it takes to be a champion thought leader globally? In reality, not quite.
The renowned Forbes magazine in November 2007 quoted a global survey that ranked the world’s top business thinkers. While the exemplar C. K. Prahalad (professor at University of Michigan) comes in at a spectacular global rank of #1 – and Porter, Hamel, Chan, Collins, Kaplan, Covey, Ram Charan, Vijay Govindarajan and many such professors occupy the glorious list in the top 25 positions – fact is that management practitioners like Bill Gates (rank #2), Alan Greenspan (#3), Tom Peters (#4), Jack Welch (#8), Donald Trump (#20), et al also come thumping into the top 25!
And such global rankings bring with them
classy representation retainer fees. When Planman Media caught up with the top of the top marketing strategy gurus, the figures hit us hard. Eat this. If you wished to have just one speech or workshop session with the captain of the marketing battalion, C.K. Prahalad, he’ll charge you a straight up $60,000, apart from other expenses (1st class airfares, five star suites and all that jazz). Our favourite Ram Charan would set you off by a classy $30,000; Guy Kawasaki – $30,000; Jack Trout – $25,000 and so on.
The fundamental premise on which this industry thrives is that perception, rather than consumer, is king. From Porter (who describes ‘competitive strategy’ in one word – ‘positioning’) to Kotler (who is the indisputable father of modern marketing strategy), from Kahneman (the 2002-03 Noble Prize winner for his Prospect Theory – where he proved almost all consumers are irrational) to the world’s warfare gods Al Ries and Jack Trout (who made CEOs understand the war behind occupying consumers’ minds), the power of marketing has been tub-thumped, bragged about and even statistically proven beyond any argument. It is not at all the actual quality or price leadership that matters in a product getting industry leadership, but rather the ‘perceived’ quality and the ‘perceived’ price leadership in the consumers’ minds that strikes the gold kitty.
For Complete IIPM Article, Click on IIPM Article
Source : IIPM Editorial, 2008
Ram Charan! An individual consultant. An individual international consultant. Or rather, an individual international strategic marketing consultant. Jack Welch once described Ram Charan to Fortune as a person who has “this rare ability to distill meaningful from meaningless and transfer it to others in a quiet, effective way without destroying confidences!”
And this is Jack, considered the unarguable numero uno CEO in the history of global capitalism, who’s been a self-confessed
‘marketing guru addict’ for almost 37 whopping years! And if you thought even for a ghost of a moment that this trend was restricted to a handful of global CEOs who perhaps could ‘afford’ such marketing gurus for their companies (and marriage counsellors for their divorces), allow us to bring you face to face with the thundering reality: It’s a massively growing movement out there, and not just restricted to corporate America but spreading electrifyingly across all continents!Singular strategy wizards are rampantly rewiring selling concepts, promotional ideologies, awareness quotients, loyalty parameters, in short, marketing strategies; and we repeat, these are not behemoth consulting firms, but individual whiz geniuses.
DuPont, EDS, Ford, Duke Energy, Verizon, Fedex, American Airlines, P&G, Intel, Unilever, Nike, Audi, Wal-Mart, Sprint, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and innumerably more Fortune 500 corporations have dug into the resolute and growing knowledge base of these marketing legends, and not just for one year, or two, or three, or even a decade; unbelievably, some of these corporations’ marketing strategies have been guided by these leaders for more than a smashing three decades. 4Ps B&M caught up with Ram Charan and similar global marketing intellectuals to deeply understand and unravel this movement.
Take this for a short take. What’s common between these top ranked gurus: C. K. Prahalad, Michael Porter, Gary Hamel, Guy Kawasaki, Chan Kim, Jim Collins, Philip Kotler, Robert Kaplan, and Stephen Covey? Well, if it wasn’t that obvious, the fact is that all these virtuosos have sparkling university backgrounds, that is, at one point or the other, they’ve taught at world-class institutions. But is that what it takes to be a champion thought leader globally? In reality, not quite.
The renowned Forbes magazine in November 2007 quoted a global survey that ranked the world’s top business thinkers. While the exemplar C. K. Prahalad (professor at University of Michigan) comes in at a spectacular global rank of #1 – and Porter, Hamel, Chan, Collins, Kaplan, Covey, Ram Charan, Vijay Govindarajan and many such professors occupy the glorious list in the top 25 positions – fact is that management practitioners like Bill Gates (rank #2), Alan Greenspan (#3), Tom Peters (#4), Jack Welch (#8), Donald Trump (#20), et al also come thumping into the top 25!
And such global rankings bring with them
classy representation retainer fees. When Planman Media caught up with the top of the top marketing strategy gurus, the figures hit us hard. Eat this. If you wished to have just one speech or workshop session with the captain of the marketing battalion, C.K. Prahalad, he’ll charge you a straight up $60,000, apart from other expenses (1st class airfares, five star suites and all that jazz). Our favourite Ram Charan would set you off by a classy $30,000; Guy Kawasaki – $30,000; Jack Trout – $25,000 and so on.The fundamental premise on which this industry thrives is that perception, rather than consumer, is king. From Porter (who describes ‘competitive strategy’ in one word – ‘positioning’) to Kotler (who is the indisputable father of modern marketing strategy), from Kahneman (the 2002-03 Noble Prize winner for his Prospect Theory – where he proved almost all consumers are irrational) to the world’s warfare gods Al Ries and Jack Trout (who made CEOs understand the war behind occupying consumers’ minds), the power of marketing has been tub-thumped, bragged about and even statistically proven beyond any argument. It is not at all the actual quality or price leadership that matters in a product getting industry leadership, but rather the ‘perceived’ quality and the ‘perceived’ price leadership in the consumers’ minds that strikes the gold kitty.
For Complete IIPM Article, Click on IIPM Article
Source : IIPM Editorial, 2008
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist)
No comments:
Post a Comment