Develop Your Marketing Skills

by Ruth Gosnay, Neil Richardson

The combination of market fragmentation and over-supply means the need to understand customers is greater than ever.  This book addresses key contemporary marketing issues in a way that allows readers to implement real changes to their organizations.  Covering product management, market research, communications, and pricing perspectives, it gives insights into how theories and tools work in actual business scenarios.  It also shows how to improve customer satisfaction, and it highlights timely issues such as sustainability.  Summary pages at the end of each chapter contain questions and suggested activities.

176 pages, Paperback

First published November 28, 2008

Reviews

[James · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a non-fiction book by two senior lecturers in marketing who were teaching at Leeds Business School in the United Kingdom when it was published in 2008. In the introduction, the authors present it as a simplified textbook “aimed at practitioners who don’t have the time to trawl through 1,200-page tomes”. It really shows its age, as video streaming, networking via LinkedIn and even business websites are all presented as relatively new technologies, and there is nothing at all on the burgeoning e-commerce market. However, it does go through basic marketing concepts such as customers, research, products vs services, pricing, communication channels, marketing strategy, and sustainability – all topics still relevant in 2026.

That’s fine, but I read it to develop some skills, as the title suggests. But the main problem with this book is that it’s 154 pages of academic theory and should be labelled as such, because it doesn’t develop any skills. A few examples and a couple of easy exercises at the end of each chapter just help to illustrate the principles. Even the chapter “How to create a marketing plan” gives no practical advice on how to actually create a marketing plan. With no index, it’s hard to look up or check on anything, and although it cites several books and articles, it has no standardised academic reference list either, relying instead on mentions in the section at the back that provides answers to chapter quizzes. A number of odd grammatical errors suggest it was edited in a hurry, which does not inspire confidence in readers, as they wonder what else they got wrong.

So, it’s old. That’s forgivable, but to paraphrase a common idiom, it doesn’t do what is says on the tin. Presentation is sloppy. And although the authors claim it’s aimed at practitioners, it’s difficult to believe that something so basic would be useful to anyone already working in marketing. They would know most, if not all of it, already. Yet the best thing about this book is its simple language that anybody can follow. So it might be helpful to average members of the public unfamiliar with the topic who would like to boost their general knowledge, schoolkids doing a project on the principles of marketing, or a corporate marketing department trying to justify their existence to management.

“Develop Your Marketing Jargon” would be a much better title. Skills, not so much.

[Jin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good overview if you have got no marketing background at all.