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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 definesa framework and theory for lateral marketing and the development of breakthrough ideas that will succeed in a consumer market already over-saturated.

"Chinese people should consume Chinese products!" This slogan was the catchphrase of a movement in early twentieth-century China that sought to link consumption and nationalism by instilling a concept of China as a modern "nation" with its own "national products." From fashions in clothing to food additives, from museums to department stores, from product fairs to advertising, this movement influenced all aspects of China's burgeoning consumer culture. Anti-imperialist boycotts, commemorations of national humiliations, exhibitions of Chinese products, the vilification of treasonous consumers, and the promotion of Chinese captains of industry helped enforce nationalistic consumption and spread the message--patriotic Chinese bought goods made of Chinese materials by Chinese workers in factories owned and run by Chinese. In "China Made, Karl Gerth argues that two key forces shaping the modern world--nationalism and consumerism--developed in tandem in China. Early in the twentieth century, nationalism branded every commodity as either "Chinese" or "foreign," and consumer culture became the place where the notion of nationality was articulated, institutionalized, and practiced. Based on Chinese, Japanese, and English-language archives, magazines, newspapers, and books, this first exploration of the historical ties between nationalism and consumerism reinterprets fundamental aspects of modern Chinese history and suggests ways of discerning such ties in all modern nations.