ABSTRACT
Based largely on personal experience, this chapter cites no references even though I owe a huge debt to my academic colleagues. My sources are the twenty-five years spent marketing alcoholic drink brands, and other products, followed by fifteen years in academia trying to understand and explain that experience. Perhaps this perspective is moderated, for better or worse by age, but, rather in the manner we check later waves of responses to surveys against earlier ones, comparing these opinions with papers written thirty years ago did not reveal much change in the fundamentals. Technological developments such as data capture and processing, quantitative analysis, diversity of choice, and concepts such as the marketing asset, call it “brand equity” or what you will, have indeed changed, but how marketers spend their time has changed much less. Marketers no longer stagger into meetings with “guard books” of advertising and PowerPoint is a mixed blessing, but we are concerned with deeper human and corporate matters and those evolve more slowly than technology.
