As soon as the St Louis Cardinals' new batting coach Mark McGwire told reporters at spring training that he had used steroids only to stay healthy, not to improve his performance, the statisticians pounced.
Analyzing his power numbers, they demonstrated what we all already knew: performance enhancers work. With economic recovery and renewed competition around the corner, marketing executives need some powerful performance enhancers of their own — of the non-pharmaceutical kind.
In conversation after conversation, CEOs, presidents, and CMOs tell me that their companies are looking to marketing to lead the business into the customer-centric future. nd in a future that looks vastly different from the past, natural talent no longer suffices.
Looking ahead, they say they want to supplement the indispensable four P's of the traditional marketing mix (product, price, placement and promotion) with some powerful new elements. They describe this potent brew in various ways, but I think its essential ingredients can be summed up in the easily remembered acronym: ROIDs.
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http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/03/putting_marketing_on_roids.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE Dick Patton leads the Chief Marketing Officer Practice at Egon Zehnder International, one of the largest privately-held executive search firms in the world. Previously, he was a Senior Marketing Executive and General Manager with The Coca-Cola Company, Frito-Lay, Affinnova and Able Human Ventures. Mr. Patton is a graduate of Brown University and received an MBA from The Wharton School at The University of Pennsylvania. 
