Lateral Marketing:New Techniques for Finding Breakthrough Ideas

Today’s marketers face a difficult challenge: how to innovate in a hyper-competitive, super-segmented marketplace. Traditional vertical marketing – with its emphasis on market segmentation and brand proliferation – is leading to one failure after another.

Now, in Lateral Marketing, renowned marketers Philip Kotler and Fernando Trias de Bes present a new system for developing breakthrough opportunities. While vertical marketing helps companies find increasingly smaller subgroups for which a product might be developed, lateral marketing points the way to developing an entirely new product that finds a much wider audience.

Philip Kotler is the S.C. Johnson Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. He is considered the father of modern marketing and is the author of two dozen books. Fernando Trias de Bes is founder and Partner of Salvetti & Llombart, a firm specializing in consulting and market research with an international scope and clients such as PepsiCo, Sony, Hewlett-Packard, McKinsey & Company, Nestle, and Dannon.

Among the many examples of lateral marketing we’ll explore in this summary are innovations like cereal bars, pull-up diapers, and Barbie dolls.

The new marketing concepts that led to these products are the direct result of a different creative process than the endless vertical segmentation of yesterday. This does not mean that we need to discard traditional marketing thinking. Instead, the goal is to incorporate lateral thinking as an additional platform for discovering marketing ideas. As we explore these new concepts, you’ll learn how to beat the high odds of product failure and achieve breakthrough success.