Preface for Executives

To The Marketing Executive...
Happy Plotting...

This is not your usual professional reading. And given your busy work life, a 750-page book is the last thing you want to read. Fair enough.

But if your work entails, in one way or another, influencing your consumers, do you want to spend a whole lifetime trying to do it without knowing why it works or how you can make it work better?

You can read it one chapter a week. In 25 weeks, you will have put under your belt a comprehensive body of knowledge—a master template to guide your thinking about consumers.

I wrote it to be easy enough for college students, but also practical enough for the “Tell-me-something- I-can-use-on-Monday-morning” Marketing Executive.

I know, I know, when you graduated, you said, happily, a goodbye to textbooks. I will let you in on a secret: this is popular nonfiction in the guise of a textbook. I have “translated” a lot of things that were textbookish. Now it is a knowledge book that could genuinely compete with your other weekend reading. And something to bring to work on Monday. If your work on Monday will require thinking about consumers, that is.

Happy Plotting!
Ban Mittal, Ph.D.