"Today's Marketers face a dire situation. CEOs name marketing challenges such as retaining customers and avoiding price wars as top priorities, yet they increasingly doubt whether marketers can handle those challenges. Marketing's traditional goal - getting close to customers - has become the organization-wide mandate, yet marketing as a function has lost importance. Once viewed as a critical expenditure, marketing is now considered a cost sink. What happened? More important, what can marketers do to regain a prominent role in their organizations?" "Nirmalya Kumar argues that the only way for marketers to get back on the CEO's agenda is to tackle issues that merit the CEO's attention - and conducting market research and placing ads don't make the cut. The fate of marketing hinges on elevating the role of marketing executives from promotions-focused tacticians to customer-focused leaders of transformational initiatives that are strategic, cross-functional, and bottom-line oriented."--BOOK JACKET.