2011 Book Review #3: Marketing Management

[jethrien]

Title: Marketing Management
Author: Russell S. Winer
Genre: Marketing textbook
Thingummies: 2

Synopsis: It's a marketing textbook. Called Marketing Management. Did you think it would be about ponies?

Thoughts: Eh. I read it because I wanted the information inside it. Some of that information is now in my head, so mission semi-accomplished. It's old, which isn't its fault, but it was kind of out-of-date even when it was published, I think. There's a lot of useful info, even if everything it knows about the Internet isn't really true anymore.

The layout, though, gah. Whoever laid out this book should be smacked upside the head. The figures and graphs are so badly done that some of them are incomprehensible. I particularly liked one where they reversed the axes from the logical way for absolutely no good reason. (Things increase from down to up and left to right. It's the convention. The point of a graph is to make data intuitive. If you reverse your badly-labeled axes, everything looks backwards and it's no longer intuitive. Also, graphs are regularly two or three pages away from where they're discussed in the text, making reading this into a frickin' scavenger hunt.

Bad textbook editor. Bad. No cookie for you.

Comments

[cubby-t-bear.livejournal.com]

Somebody should write this kind of textbook to be about ponies. Or at least about cutely-named couples. Like Alice and Bob!

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Eh, we're bored with Alice and Bob. Ponies it is.