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Informationen zum Autor William H. Davidow is a general partner with Mohr Davidow Ventures in Menlo Park, California. Before forming this venture capital firm, he was senior vice president of sales & marketing for Intel Corporation and shepherded the renowned Intel 8080 and 8086 to success. Prior to joining Intel he was a marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard's computer group. Davidow graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College and holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University. Klappentext Marketing is civilized warfare. And as high-tech products become increasingly standardized-- practically identical, from the customer's point of view -- it is marketing that spells life or death for new devices or entire firms. Leseprobe Chapter 1: Crush the Competition Marketing is civilized warfare. If you find that metaphor too brutal, or if you are not prepared to fight, you should not enlist. As long as aggressive competitors exist -- and in this rich and dynamic world they always will -- you will be under attack. Your competitors' job is to capture business and then defend that new perimeter. So is yours. Now, a lot of marketing is creative. It's strategic. Cerebral. But eventually you must make a move -- and then the fighting begins. Even the most brilliant campaigns suffer occasional setbacks, and it is during those moments of crisis that the true mettle of the marketing team is tested. MARKETING CRISIS Every company faces marketing crises at intervals throughout its history. A company that fails to surmount one can slow to a halt, even atrophy, for many years. Just surviving such a test usually means only a return to the status quo ante. But to triumph over such a crisis, to turn possible disaster into a resounding victory, can accelerate a company's growth in a burst of sustained business momentum. Meanwhile, such an unexpected turnabout can demoralize the competition or -- at the very least -- cause considerable discomfort. Winning, beating the odds, converting defeat to victory -- that's the point of marketing. The stories of such marketing coups are our business legends -- what Iacocca did at Chrysler and what Townsend did at Avis. It is what Apple is trying to do right now in office automation. And it is what Intel had to do in 1980. I know, because I was there. My career depended on a single victory. Intel Corporation was founded in 1968 by Robert Noyce, the inventor of the integrated circuit, Gordon Moore, a legendary high-technology scientist and business strategist, and Andrew Grove, a now famous manager and executive. Intel owed its success (Ben Rosen once called it the most important firm in America) to inventive genius, an ability to convert ideas into products (such as the famous microprocessor), Grove's dynamic management, and, not least, a talent for developing new markets for its new products. All those factors combined to give Intel one of the most remarkable starts in American business history. But not all of Intel's success derived from intrinsic strengths. For a long time the company had also benefited from the benign neglect of more powerful firms in the same industry. Like many hot young electronics firms, Intel had focused on new markets, pursuing a path the industry giants had no interest in following. But the day of reckoning had come. By the mid-1970s Intel's achievements had become an embarrassment to its competitors and the target for most of the largest semiconductor manufacturers in the United States, Europe, and Japan. The list of competitors poised for attack was more than a little daunting: Texas Instruments, Motorola, National Semiconductor, Philips, Siemens, Nippon Electric Corporation (NEC), Hitachi, and Fujitsu, among others -- the Billion Dollar Club of the semiconductor industry. Intel still prospered but was losing ground in some important markets and ...