New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America

It is a truism that successful firms change with the times, responding to the marketplace and to the competition. This central theme is driven home with pith and historical perspective in an exhaustive, lively casebook that is especially timely in light of the reported near-bankruptcy of many of the nation's top retailers. Prime examples of companies that have lost their way, on Tedlow's scorecard, are ``honest, clunky old'' Sears Roebuck, too slow to adjust to a world of market segmentation and competitive discounters, and A & P, which ``kept trying to sell everybody everything'' with its own name-brand products while specialty stores and local chains scored big with nationally distributed brands. Harvard Business School associate professor Tedlow also draws marketing lessons in studies of how Coca-Cola bested Pepsi and how General Motors vanquished Ford, only to succumb to the disarray and entropy that grips America's industrial heartland. (Apr.)