Today, market professionals face a difficult challenge: how to innovate in an ultra-competitive and highly fragmented market.

In a consumer economy that is bombarded with homogeneous products and impeded by consumers who are increasingly immune to advertising messages, traditional vertical marketing – with its core principles of segmenting the market and multiplying product offerings – has begun to disappoint us.

Now, the renowned marketing experts Philip Kotler and Fernando Trias de Bes present a new system for creating revolutionary opportunities: alternative marketing. Alternative marketing complements traditional marketing by providing an alternative way to generate new, fresh ideas.

Whereas vertical marketing helps us find the growing small subgroups for which a product may be designed, alternative marketing encourages marketers to develop a brand-new product that appeals to a much larger audience.

Instead of offering the relentless market yet another diaper for newborns, for example, Pull Up diapers were designed for adults. Kotler and Trias de Bes provide numerous examples of how alternative marketing leads to products that succeed even amidst competition and product homogeneity.

These innovations include new products such as Cheerios with honey and hazelnuts, or milk-based cereal bars, or Gillette Venus, a razor with a larger head, specifically designed for women's curves.

Alternative marketing also includes using old products in a new way, such as promoting Bayer Aspirin as a preventive measure for heart attacks.

The new marketing ideas that lead to these products are a direct result of different creative processes, rather than the result of the endless vertical segmentation of the past.

This book defines the framework and theory of alternative marketing, as well as the creation of revolutionary ideas that will succeed in the already over-saturated consumer market.

By removing the constraints of traditional marketing as a mechanism for generating new ideas, Kotler and Trias de Bes show marketers how to overcome the great odds of failure and achieve tremendous success.