Read on

Philip Kotler: Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning and Control, Prentice Hall, 1996, now in its 9th edition. A market leader among marketing textbooks.

J H Davidson: Even More Offensive Marketing, Penguin, 1997. Very good, among other things, on what characterises people in apparently non-marketing functions in market-oriented companies.

Rocket Marketing, Economist Books/Hamish Hamilton, 1993. Concise definitions of key terms.

Theodore Levitt: Marketing Myopia, Harvard Business Review, Jul-Aug 1960. A seminal text still often reprinted and quoted for its examples of industries that failed to identify and respond to changes in customer needs.

Nicolas Ind: The corporate Brand, Macmillan, 1997

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3. Travel

The most visible part of business travel is the airline industry. Everyone who travels, and these days that means almost everybody, has opinions about it. These opinions are often robust, perhaps because there is such a gap between the sophistication promised in airline advertisements and the reality of crowded terminals, endless waiting, limited legroom and inedible food served at unlikely times of day (or night).

People use cars as status symbols; governments use airlines in the same way. Every government wants one, and the national flag carrier is a visible sign of international status. But managing them is often in the hands of people who got their jobs through political patronage, they have no long-term business strategy, and many of them lose money.

Governments, negotiating with others in bilateral agreements, also have the power to decide who is allowed to fly where, when and how often, and can allocate take-off and landing slots at airports: the number and timing of these slots is a key factor in an airline's profitability.

This is still largely the picture in Europe, despite the partial or total privatisation of some airlines, part of the process of deregulation and liberalisation driven by the competition laws of the European Union. (A similar process took place in the United States nearly 30 years ago. Since then, many airlines have been founded and gone bankrupt, or both, and there is debate about the role of deregulation in this). In Europe, deregulation means that airlines have the right to sabotage, picking up passengers in a second country and flying them to another place in that country or to a third country.

Another result of deregulation in Europe is no frills airlines offering basic in-flight service and selling tickets direct by phone, avoiding travel agents and the need to give them commission. Larger airlines are increasingly worried about these upstarts, as they are used not only by people who might have used low cost charter flights but also by cost conscious businesspeople who are fed up with paying full 'economy' fares on the usual scheduled airlines. Some of these airlines, such as BA, are trying to get in on the act by running no-frills operations themselves.

Airlines have very high fixed costs: with all the ground infrastructure required, it costs as much to fly a plane full as three-quarters empty, and the main aim is to get as many passengers on seats as possible, paying as much as possible to maximise the revenues or yield from each flight.

This has led to the growth of alliances, such as the one between BA and American Airlines, or looser forms of cooperation such as cost sharing, where the same number is shown on your ticket for the second part of a two-flight journey, giving you the impression when you book that you will be on the same airline for the whole trip. Cooperation means that airlines can feed passengers into each other's hubs for onward journeys and costs of marketing and logistics are not duplicated. The logic of this is that for intercontinental travel there may eventually be half a dozen global airlines, in the same way that there are half a dozen global computer companies, but while governments continue to bail out their national airlines 'one more time', this process will be long drawn out.