Business and marketing executives have realized for a long time that it’s a new day in marketing. Customers, both potential and actual, don’t want to be talked at or preached to, or put at the center of a bull’s eye. They want to be engaged, to make their needs and wants known, in ways that suit their particular needs.

That’s what The New Marketing Conversation does: It gives the reader a strategic blueprint for creating the kinds of dialogs customers want in ways that those customers want to be engaged. In Part I the authors, veteran marketers for a broad spectrum of firms, including consumer, business-to-business and not-for-profit organizations, survey the kinds of preparation needed to create and build effective marketing conversations. They cover insightful new ways to use testing and research more effectively and the best ways to build winning communications and creative strategies.

In Part II they dissect each of the media of the marketing conversation—direct mail, radio and television, newsletters, e-mail, the Web and Wireless communications forms—and show how to sue the strengths, avoid the weaknesses and capitalize on particular characteristics to build winning dialogues with customers.

In Part III—Marketing Conversations in Action—they show how to integrate marketing media for maximum results and give a sample Action Plan for your new marketing conversation. Then the book concludes with a series of cases that show successful companies that followed the ideas and models in the book to build better relationships with their customers and better bottom lines for their stakeholders.