Price: 60 INR
ISBN: 81-8368-103-4
Being a techie, I have only exposure to ‘software development life cycle’ and it constitutes only 15% of the ‘product life cycle’. To put it in other words if any product is sold at $100 at the shop, only $15 is spent towards ‘engineering’ that particular product. Assuming that $15 is the profit margin, the next simple and obvious question is where the remaining $70 constitutes to? Also in my previous company we had a wonderfully ‘engineered’ product, but it became a big time ‘failure’ in the market. Why did it fail? What was wrong with our product? These questions have been lingering in my mind for a long time and this book gave me answers. The answer is ‘marketing’ 🙂
The author (Satheesh Krishnamurthy) starts the book with the answer for my question by saying ‘Marketing is the only difference between the success and failure of your business’ and goes on explaining various aspects of marketing. Starting from the 4Ps of marketing (Product, Pricing, Place and Promotion) and author clearly explained how the marketing has got the prime importance in any organization because of the ‘open market’ situation. The author also gave pretty good perspective of consumer behavior, market influencing factors in the following chapters. I particularly liked the chapter on STP (Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning), in which he has given nice examples ranging from Colgate paste to cars and explained the concepts. This book also covers topics on pricing, distribution and marketing communication.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book because of two particular reasons. Firstly, the book is written in Tamizh and I have never seen such a high ‘quality’ book in the topic of ‘marketing’. Second the book is very ‘simple’ to read and understand. I know very well that marketing is a huge large subject, but this book really gave me a ‘bird’s eye view’ of marketing. To put in simple words I am in a position to understand where the $70 is spent in software products 🙂
