Through Kotler's profound insights you will quickly update your skills and knowledge of the new challenges and opportunities posed by hypercompetition, globalization, and the Internet. Here you will discover the latest thinking, concisely captured in eminently readable prose, on such hot new fields as database marketing, relationship marketing, high-tech marketing, global marketing, and marketing on the Internet. Here, too, you will find Kotler's savvy advice, which has so well served such corporate clients as AT & T, General Electric, Ford, IBM, Michelin, Merck, DuPont, and Bank of America. Perhaps most important, Kotler on Marketing can be read as a penetrating book-length discourse on the 14 questions asked most frequently by managers during the 20-year history of Kotler's worldwide lectures. You will gain a new understanding of such age-old conundrums as how to select the right market segments or how to compete against lower-price competitors. You will find a wealth of cutting-edge strategies and tactics that can be applied immediately to such 21st-century challenges as reducing the enormous cost of customer acquisition and keeping current customers loyal.

Whether it is the TV commercial that breaks into our favorite program, or the telemarketing phone call that disrupts a family dinner, traditional advertising is based on the hope of snatching our attention away from whatever we are doing. Seth Godin calls this Interruption Marketing, and, as companies are discovering, it no longer works.

Instead of annoying potential customers by interrupting their most coveted commodity -- time -- Permission Marketing offers consumers incentives to accept advertising voluntarily. Now this Internet pioneer introduces a fundamentally different way of thinking about advertising products and services. By reaching out only to those individuals who have signaled an interest in learning more about a product, Permission Marketing enables companies to develop long-term relationships with customers, create trust, build brand awareness -- and greatly improve the chances of making a sale.

In his groundbreaking book, Godin describes the four tests of Permission Marketing:

1. Does every single marketing effort you create encourage a learning relationship with your customers Does it invite customers to "raise their hands" and start communicating

2. Do you have a permission database Do you track the number of people who have given you permission to communicate with them

3. If consumers gave you permission to talk to them, would you have anything to say Have you developed a marketing curriculum to teach people about yourproducts

4. Once people become customers, do you work to deepen your permission to communicate with those people