– What are metamarkets?

A metamarket facilitates all of the activities involved in obtaining an item for use or consumption. To buy a car, I must choose the car, finance it, and obtain insurance. Edmunds.com is an online metamarket where I can get information about all cars, search for the best dealer for the car that I want, arrange for a loan, and buy insurance. Another example is theknot.com, an online metamarket for obtaining everything connected with preparing a wedding, including gowns, invitations, gifts, etc.

– What are the most significant challenges marketers face today?

I would list the following challenges:

1. Getting better financial measures of the impact of marketing programs. Marketing has been lax in developing marketing metrics to show what particular expenditures and campaigns have achieved. CEOs are no longer satisfied with measures of how much awareness, knowledge, or preference has been created by marketing programs. They want to know how much sales, profit, and shareholder value has been created. One step in the right direction is at Coca-Cola, where its marketers must estimate the financial impacts of their programs before getting a budget and after spending the money. This will produce a financial mindset in Coca-Cola’s marketers.

2. Developing more integrated information about important customers. Customers come in contact with a company at various touchpoints: by e-mail, by snail mail, by phone, in person, and so on. Yet if these touchpoints are not recorded, the company won’t have a 360-degree view of a prospect or customer and therefore is handicapped in developing sound offerings and communications for that customer.

3. Getting marketing to be the company’s designer and driver of market strategy. Too much marketing today is 1P marketing; that is, marketing deals only with promotion, with other departments heavily determining the product, the price, and the place. I remember a major European airline at which the VP of marketing confessed that he doesn’t set the fare or the product conditions (food, staff, decor) or the flight schedules, but only the advertising and the sales force. How can marketing be effective if the 4Ps are not under unified planning and control?

4. Facing lower-cost/higher-quality competitors. As China continues its rapid growth, U.S. firms will face a repeat of the Japanese threat, which consisted of competing with Japanese companies that were able to offer better products at lower costs. This will force more U.S. companies to shift their production to China, and this will reduce jobs at home.

5. Coping with the increasing power and demands of mega-distributors. Mega-retailers such as Wal-Mart, Costco, Target, Office Depot, and others are commanding a larger share of the retail marketplace. Many mega-retailers are carrying store brands that are equal in quality to national brands and lower in price, thus forcing down manufacturers’ margins. National-brand companies feel more than ever at the mercy of mega-retailers and are desperately searching for defensive and offensive strategies.

– You say that the main economic problem plaguing companies is industry overcapacity. What are the main causes of this problem? How can companies cope with it?

Almost every industry suffers from overcapacity. The world auto industry could probably produce 30% more cars without adding another factory. The same can be said for the steel industry and many chemical industries. Customers are scarce, not products. Overcapacity is the result of companies’ overoptimism about economic prospects and about their prowess in the marketplace. I have seen many companies plan for a 10% increase in sales when the total market is growing by only 3%. When this happens, the result is overcapacity and hypercompetition. Hypercompetition can only result in falling prices. The main defenses include (1) building a superior brand, (2) developing more loyal customers who will pay a higher price, (3) and acquiring or merging with other companies to rationalize the supply.