European Manngonent joumal Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 381-383, 1993. Perg.%mon Press Ltd. Printed in Great Britain.

Books for Marketing Places by PHILIP KOTLER, DONALD HAIDER, IRVING REIN, The Free Press, 1993, US$35.00, 346 pages

In a world in which marketing is being applied in steadily broader ways and to new areas, it is not surprising if still intriguing, to see the discipline’s approaches and techniques used to promote cities and states. The world is becoming more competitive and this means that increasingly towns and locations are having to draw attention to their merits so as positively to attract businesses and residents to themselves. This trend is particularly in evidence in the United States, long the home of efforts designed to get a planned new factory development to come to a particular community.

In this context it is timely for Marketing Places to be published, especially as the team of three professors from Northwestern University who are the authors is headed by Philip Kotler, long dominant in the field of marketing textbooks.

This background gives a good understanding of Marketing Places, which is a thorough step- by-step approach to going about marketing a location set within a predominantly American experience.

Interestingly, the authors start with the premise that many places are in trouble and that they need to improve themselves before they can be effectively marketed. This approach leads them to start by promoting self- assessment - a ‘Place Audit‘ on say how your city is currently judged by the outside world, leading to recommending a SWOT Analysis from which a vision of the future for your community can arise.

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Consistent with their original premise, Marketing Places moves on to outline ‘A Place Improvement’ approach, supported by market research, designed to help practitioners raise the quality of their ‘product’ and hence its potential image. The process of positive image building then becomes the next step in the book, which links it to four target markets - tourism, business, foreign investment and potential residents. The methodology they propose then concludes with a review of all the different media that can carry the locations message.

The points that this way of handling the topic reinforce are that places are peculiarly prone to being judged from afar and hence the role of image and being flexible enough to eliminate any negatives in one’s reputation become critical.

This book is well put together and gives a full coverage of the issues involved with a rich selection of live examples from around the world, both successful and unsuccessful. It offers an approach that clearly has merits in that it is logical and warns of the need to understand one’s current standing and the need to be proactive in eliminating the less attractive features of a location. Reading about the problems of trying to promote Haiti as a tourist resort compared to the success of the Israeli tourist authorities in attracting American Jews to Israel certainly brings home the need for a basically attractive proposition supported by an active programme to make the ‘visit experience’ fully satisfying.

The only strengthening the text might benefit from would be firstly greater coverage of competition analysis since a real

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battle can take place between, for example, two towns each trying to attract the same business project. Secondly, the ways a Place Marketer could go about getting all concerned in his location to support his efforts and make any required changes could be described in more detail since, from the authors’ analysis, this must be critical to his success.

Overall this is a good text for someone coming new to this subject and would provide an excellent basis for marketing discussions with practitioners or anyone asked to market a specific location. It would be relevant for both private and public sector organisations.

Peter Owen

Foundations of Corporate Success by JOHN KAY, Oxford University Press, 1993, fZ9.95, hardback, 416

Pages

In the preface to his new book, John Kay poses the main question he intends to address - What are the origins of industrial success? From the beginning, he had trouble defining corporate success. In approaching companies he found there were many answers to the meaning of corporate success - profitability, return on capital, market share, and so on. But few people disagreed over which the successful companies were - they all pointed to the same ones.

Kay’s view, and the central argument of his book, is that the key measure of corporate success is added value. He defines this simply - it is the difference between the value of a firm’s output and the cost of its inputs

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(all properly accounted for). This is how the achievement of a company is measured - by its ability to add value, and it involves more than just scrutinising the firm’s financial statements. Kay introduces the notion of the added value statement and analysis of the value chain to measure a firm’s operating activities in quantitative terms.

An organisation has to match its capabilities and the challenge it faces, and the skill with which it does this is a clue to understanding corporate success or failure. How should it do this? There are no recipes. Each firm has unique foundations for corporate success. They are, in turn, made up of a firm’s unique set of relationships between its various stakeholders - employees, clients, investors and shareholders. A firm should attempt to beat the competition by using its distinctive capabilities, especially in the form of innovation, reputation, architecture (structure) or strategic assets, and applying them to the most relevant market. Matching capabilities to markets requires skill.

Kay then deals with the way firms manage their competitive strategy, i.e. their relationships with competitors, suppliers and customers in their chosen markets. Examples of such strategies are market position and product price. He concludes with a suggestion for a strategic audit of an industry and an analysis of the current status and future for business strategy.

For this reviewer, the book is an outstanding example of new thinking. It is synthetic, but focuses the reader’s attention on hitherto under-researched sources of competitive strength in a firm - the network of relationships between stakeholders. It then links into more conventional thinking in the way this competitive strength is applied in relevant markets. It eschews

single-sentence prescriptions for corporate success, but although pointing in the direction of the successful alternative - distinctive relationships - only explores these to a certain depth. Perhaps subsequent research will do this.

It is helpful that the book is written clearly, with an absence of jargon, and that examples of companies are brought in frequently. Hardly a page exists without linking an idea or concept to the practice of an actual company. Minor criticisms are that the cultural and social aspects of competitive strength in a firm - expressed through its network of relationships - are not explored in much depth, and cultural differences between firms with different national backgrounds are not given sufficient weight.

The author has been given good service from Oxford University Press, the book is printed on high-quality paper, and is not expensive at today’s prices.

Paul Stonham

European Competitiveness by KIRSTY HUGHES (Editor), ~~~~dge University Press, 1993, f29.95, burdock, 293 pages

This book is based on papers presented at Wissenschaftszentrum, Berlin, in 1989 and 1991. The papers are grouped into three main topics - internationalism and corporate control, technological specialisation and international trade, and European integration and structural change.

Perhaps reflecting the backgrounds of most of the authors (economics) the emphasis is more on the macro than the micro. The editor states,

‘We recognise fhaf European competitiveness may be analysed af various levels, and that if is necessary fo analyse firms, countries

and groups of countries to obtain an understanding of patterns of co~~titjv~ess both within Europe and between Europe and ifs main competitors, particularly the USA and Japan I.

The general method of investigation is to observe data on ‘patterns’ e.g. technological specialisation, patents, manufacturing exports, investment, role of the public sector, culture, and industrial structure, and then draw out implications for competitiveness. There is no grand theory here, such as proposed by Michael Porter. Rather, by the analysis of particular countries, markets, industrial sectors and features of business activity, conclusions are made about the effects of these background frameworks and patterns on competitiveness in the European context.

The papers make easy reading and cover interesting aspects of European competitiveness. Naturally, a book made up of papers written by different authors involves some seiectivity. The topic of ‘Internationalisation and corporate control‘ is covered by four papers: Location decisions of Japanese multinational firms in European manufac~ring industries; New forms of international involvement, competition, and competitiveness - the case of Italy; Strategic technology partnering and international corporate strategies; and Corporate control and competitiveness - the French case.

Prescriptions made are perhaps of greatest interest to public policy-makers, and particularly those in the European Commission. But the interested manager can be alerted to features and developments on the broad industrial scene in Europe of some relevance to corporate strategy. For example, the peculiarly French organisation of ‘industrial groups’ is shown to be more efficient than

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independent firms; strategic technology alliances are shown not to be a sure way of improving a firm’s competitive position, and differences in culture between countries can aflect competitiveness through

their effect on wage bargaining.

Perhaps what is missing is a framework which ties these disparate individual studies on competitiveness together. In its absence, we are not really made

aware of the relative importance of these various aspects of competitiveness, which makes the formulation of broad strategy difficult.

Paul Stonham

EUROPEAN ~NAG~ME~ JOURNAL Vol11 No 3 September 1993