Right Side Up

By Alan Mitchell

Alan Mitchell’s Right Side Up is a textbook of “new” marketing. It seeks to be to the Information Age what Kotler was to the mass-marketing age. The key difference is that marketing is moving towards being driven by consumers not marketers. This is the complete reverse of the traditional marketing process.

The consumer in control is the central theme that underlies much of the new marketing. This is the new reality with which marketers now have to work. No longer will they be able to produce a product or service and sell it to as many people as possible using tools of mass communication. Instead they will have to become highly focused on the consumer, individual consumers, producing what they are looking for, when they want it and at the price they demand.

The old system of wealth creation is breaking down. The Internet is often cited but that is just way in which, for example, consumers are able to increase their knowledge. The knowledgeable consumer is no longer a pawn in the advertiser’s game. Consumers are becoming increasingly marketing aware, they can dissect marketing strategies and look beyond the brand to learn more about the company. Brands no longer represent a mask for companies to hide behind. This places them in the driving seat in the relationship with marketers. They want to control the dialogue while marketers tend to only know how to conduct a monologue. This is one of the major changes in the buyer seller relationship. The new relationship is focused on the buyer (the consumer) not the seller (the marketer).

The new marketing territory is up for grabs. There is a shift, albeit slow, away from traditional marketing tools. Seller-centric marketing becomes buy-centric marketing. This is a product of the information age where consumers have more information at their disposal, enabling them to make informed choices. The consumer is organised. They are better organised individually bit also in groups. We are seeing the rise of consumer agents. These are organisations, often on-line, that represent consumers' interests, not the manufacturers. Examples are services that compares prices or that enable consumers to group together to obtain lower prices from manufacturers. 

While this major underlying shift has origins far wider than the Internet, the move towards on-line communications has certainly speeded up the changes.

Alan Mitchell has written a book that addresses the new and evolving marketing landscape. It covers a multitude of topic areas. It can be criticised as it relies too heavily on quotes from other books and does not have enough examples to illustrate the different concepts. Nevertheless, it acts as a useful guide to marketing in the near future.

Review by Martin Payne