Total Access: Giving Customers What They Want in an Anytime, Anywhere World

by Regis McKenna

Book Overview

Total Access: Giving Customers What They Want in an Anytime, Anywhere World. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1578512441
• ISBN13: 9781578512447
• Release Date: March 2002
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Perspective Pays

While I'm not one for too many business books, I took the recommendation of a respected friend and read the book.I wear two hats in a web development and multimedia production company; owner and sales. The content of Total Access satisfied both brains. We provide our clients with communication tools that are focused at internal and external audiences. I found myself head nodding and matching many of our company and client experiences to concepts discussed in the book. The book helped me recognize (and hopefully capitalize on) patterns that we see occurring with our clients. Regis may not see the future (cause it's already happening), but he may be the first reporting on it. I'd recommend Total Access if you are able to "apply" valuable insight and knowledge to your business life. Stick with Tom Peters if you just like to read.

Marketing Prescience

Technological change is often manifested in disruptive market shifts and can be characterized by a redefinition of 'playing fields'. From a business and societal perspective, each technology shift brings with it new rules, new business logics, and changing market dynamics. Regis's new book is one that addresses what is unarguably the most fundamental shift of all: "Total Access" At a big picture level here are three points of view to contextualize the fundamental shift resulting from Total Access:Firstly, traditionally products and the information/services promoting them followed the same channels. Advertising and the notion of influencing consumers served to separate information into media specific broadcast channels (Radio, TV, etc). Today the disentanglement of information and product channels still exist, however we are experiencing channel convergence and seeing a transformation of new information channels into transaction channels. This creates for the first time "en masse", in any industrialized economy 'a direct dialogue between Producer and Consumer' and the ability to directly action a marketing message 'anytime, anywhere' and with anyone. In Regis McKenna's words, 'New forms of information media enable both Producer and Consumer access, changing the nature of that relationship and also the traditional roles and responsibility of marketing'. The active realtime management of actionable information flows across a myriad of networks and access devices (to increasingly mobile consumers) places new pressures on the discipline of marketing: how to sustain continuous consumer dialogue. Secondly, in our world of relatively free access to capital competition undoubtedly intensifies, and the quest for constant market differentiation increases - a driver of current day branding practices. The corresponding marketing noise often leads to a desensitization of the consumer to marketing messages and consequently to declining loyalty. And what happens when there is a disembodiment of brand and image from the actual value propositions of the business? In Regis McKenna's words, 'When brand and image are considered independent creations and are only referentially related to the tangible competencies of a business or competitive technology, they lose all meaning and relevance and marketing is often reduced to vapor.'Finally, If you consider that a key tenet of western civilization, as we know it, is the right to ownership - from which we derived the notion of transferring titles and hence the concept of transaction. And that the foundation of industrialized economies is laid with the pivotal 'Producer Consumer relationship ' - from the study of which the discipline of marketing (a means of promoting, accelerating and optimizing product specific transactions) was born. You'll appreciate why Total Access, which addresses the changes in this relationship, is a must read. Business today is faced with diminishing returns of its marketing dollars when deploye

Regis McKenna does it again

After the dot-com boom and bust of the 1990s, many people questioned the value of "marketing." In this new book, Regis McKenna indicates, through a wealth of examples and persuasive logic, that marketing goes beyond simple dot-com-style advertising and branding exercises, and emerges from the customer experience of the product or service being sold. Successful marketers, he argues, are found everywhere within the company -- in the research lab, the distribution network, and even the CEOs office, since effective marketing is not a "vertical function," but a process extending across the enterprise.He examines not only techniques for success, but also the key elements of marketing infrastructure that successful organizations use to gain persistent presence and market dominance. If you're in a position of responsibility within any business, you owe it to yourself and your organization to read this book.

Regis Still Has The Touch!

Regis still has the touch. His new book looks at how technology has changed marketing forever, and what we marketers must do to win at this new game. Throw out what you thought you knew about marketing and grab hold of the new technology tools fast, before some IT person beats you to it -- and takes your job.

No more silo marketing

Total Access presents some interesting ideas about how today's marketeers should approach their work. Their long-held beliefs in the mystery and art of branding need to be replaced with a deep knowledge of technology, logistics, distribution, and operations. Those of us in marketing will be forced to understand issues we've been able to avoid in the past. And some won't survive. On the flip side, executives from other departments will have to embrace and better understand marketing. No more working in a marketing silo. I really liked this new definition of marketing: "Marketing is an integrated architecture that enables the continuous process of organizational learning, whereby the enterprise gains knowledge by continuously interacting with customers and the market place to learn, adapt, and respond creatively and competitively."