A marketing plan built from the four Ps alone, without the analysis that should precede them, is a plan built on assumption dressed up as strategy.

This book works through marketing strategy formation in the order it actually has to happen: analysis of the customer, the company, the collaborators and competitors, and the surrounding context; aspiration, in the form of segmentation, targeting, and positioning; and finally action – the product, price, place, and promotion decisions that make the aspiration real.

It closes with the discipline most plans skip: monitoring what happened against what the plan predicted, and revising honestly from there.