Total Access

Marketing as we know it is disappearing, declares industry legend Regis McKenna. As marketers focus on advertising and promotion, the chief information officer is automating their core functions. As they obsess over brand, the chief strategy officer is dispersing their responsibilities throughout the organization. And as they squabble over whether marketing is an art or a science, McKenna argues that they're completely overlooking what marketing has become: a technology.

What does this displacement mean for the future of marketing and its role in today's increasingly networked organizations? Who will manage the all-important customer relationship-and how? In this bold new book, McKenna marshals over forty years of experience as a marketing innovator, investor, and industry visionary to explore an emerging-and essentially different-marketing paradigm.

In this unconventional model, says McKenna, computers and the network do most of the work, from data gathering to customer care and response. The marketing function disappears into a network of relationships and responsibilities between man and machine throughout the value chain. Total consumer access to-and interaction with-the marketplace replaces the archaic broadcast model. For marketers, the end goal changes from creating brand awareness to satisfying customers. And brand itself becomes a "persistent presence" which sustains the customer dialogue however and whenever the customer chooses.

McKenna argues that marketers must shed their marginal role as image creators and take on the brave new role of managing this new infrastructure. They must learn to operate with one foot in marketing and one foot in information systems-integrating the people and technological tools necessary to deliver value and novelty to every customer anytime, all the time. Competitive advantage will come from engaging the entire business in this total access network-making marketing a mission-critical, enterprise-wide responsibility.

A rousing manifesto by a renowned pioneer of high-tech marketing, Total Access will remake marketing and redefine success in our networked world.

AUTHORBIO: Regis McKenna is Chairman of The McKenna Group in Palo Alto, California. He has worked with more than 300 start-ups, including Apple and Intel, and is the bestselling author of Real Time (HBS Press, 1997).