Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses Are Turning Marketing Cost Into Profit

Killing your current marketing structure may be the only way to save it

Two of the world's top marketing experts reveal the next level of breakthrough success--transforming your marketing strategy into a standalone profit center.

What if everything we currently know about marketing is what is holding us back? Over the last two decades, we've watched the entire world change the way it buys and stays loyal to brands. But, marketing departments are still operating in the same, campaign-centric, product-led operation that they have been following for 75 years. The most innovative companies around the world have achieved remarkable marketing results by fundamentally changing their approach. By creating value for customers through the use of owned media and the savvy use of content, these businesses have dramatically increased customer loyalty and revenue. Some of them have even taken it to the next step and developed a marketing function that actually pays for itself.

Killing Marketing explores how these companies are ending the marketing as we know it--in favor of this new, exciting model.

Killing Marketing provides the insight, approaches, and examples you need to understand these disruptive forces in ways that turn your marketing from cost center to revenue creator. This book builds the case for, literally, transforming the purpose of marketing within your organization. Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute show how leading companies are able sell the very content that propels their marketing strategy. You'll learn how to:

* Transform all or part of your marketing operation into a media company

* Integrate this new operation into traditional marketing efforts

* Develop best practices for attracting and retaining audiences

* Build a strategy for competing against traditional media companies

* Create a paid/earned media strategy fueled by an owned media strategy

Red Bull, Johnson & Johnson, Disney and Arrow Electronics have succeeded in what ten years ago would have been deemed impossible. They continue to market their products as they always have, and, through their content-driven and audience-building initiatives, they drive value outside the day-to-day products they sell--and monetize it directly.

Killing Marketing rewrites the rules of marketing--enabling you to make the kind of transition that turns average companies into industry legends.

Joe Pulizzi is founder of the Content Marketing Institute, which Inc. magazine named the fastest-growing business media company in 2012, 2013, and 2014. He is the recipient of the Content Council's John Caldwell Lifetime Achievement Award for Content Marketing.

Robert Rose is Chief Strategy Advisor for the Content Marketing Institute. He has provided strategic marketing advice to some of the world's most innovative companies, including Capital One, Dell, Caterpillar, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and UPS.