Lateral Marketing: New Techniques for Finding Breakthrough Ideas

Today’s marketers face a difficult challenge: how to innovate in a hypercompetitive, super-segmented marketplace. In a consumer economy saturated with homogeneous products and inhabited by customers who are more and more immune to advertising messages, traditional vertical marketing with its fundamentals of market segmentation and brand proliferation is beginning to fail us.

Now, renowned marketers Philip Kotler and Fernando Trias de Bes present a new system for developing breakthrough opportunities lateral marketing. Lateral marketing complements traditional marketing by providing an alternative route to generating fresh new ideas. Whereas vertical marketing helps us find increasingly smaller subgroups for which a product might be developed, lateral marketing lets marketers develop an entirely new product that finds a much wider audience. Instead of offering just another diaper for newborns in a cutthroat market, for example, Pull Up diapers are designed for an older child.

Kotler and Trias de Bes show numerous examples of how lateral marketing leads to products that succeed even in the face of hypercompetition and product homogeneity. These innovations include new products like Honey Nut Cheerios Milk ‘n Cereal bars, a quick alternative to actual cereal with milk, or Gillette’s Venus, a razor with a wider head made just for women’s curves. Lateral marketing also includes using old products in a new way, such as promoting Bayer aspirin as a heart attack preventative. 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 book defines a framework and theory for lateral marketing and the development of breakthrough ideas that will succeed in a consumer market already over-saturated. By removing the limitations of traditional marketing as a mechanism for developing new ideas, Kotler and Trias de Bes show marketers how to beat the high odds of product failure and achieve breakthrough success.

PHILIP KOTLER is the S. C. Johnson Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Considered the father of modern marketing, he is the author of twenty-five books, including Marketing Insights from A to Z, also available from Wiley. He has worked as a consultant to corporations such as IBM, Bank of America, General Electric, and AT&T.

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 & Co., Nestlé, and Dannon. He is also a consultant on innovation in marketing. He is an Associate Professor of the Marketing Department at ESADE Business School in Barcelona.