Targeting and Positioning. The interdependence of these two fundamentals lies at the heart of every successful marketing initiative. Strategic Marketing Management looks into the marketing programs of today’s most consistently successful marketers-from Procter & Gamble to Amazon.com-to reveal how they treat targeting and positioning as interdependent efforts, vitally linked at every level. Strategic marketing authority and educator Mark Parry shows you how to identify your most important customers, then position yourself in relation to your closest competitors. Built around the precepts of the proactive Means-End Theory, and developed from materials created for executive education courses at the Darden School, Strategic Marketing Management provides you with the information and strategies you need to: • Create a benefit framework that encompasses functional, experimental, financial, and psychosocial benefits • Present evidence and support to make promised benefits both credible and valuable • Separate intrinsic from extrinsic attributes, and correctly capitalize on each • Use customer decision maps to ?ladder? from concrete product attributes to benefit to personal values • Create and employ creative strategies that speak only to those values considered most essential • Foster and nurture appropriate brand meanings that retain value in the marketplace-and over time • Overcome unintended and undesirable product associations in the minds of your customers Strategic Marketing Management goes straight to the heart of marketing, providing a logical approach for targeting and positioning products that is easy to implement and proven successful in today’s marketplace. A concise, focused guide written for executives and executives-in-training, it describes today’s top tools for assessing market trends, making essential decisions to capitalize on those trends, and executing those decisions with authority and confidence.