Just as we only use a fraction of our brains' capabilities, so I'm convinced, working with businesses in major industries, that people get just a fraction of the results they're capable of. Few businesses come close to achieving their potential results. That's because businesses are not marketing from the heart.

When I speak or the heart, I speak of that intuitive, emotional, feeling aspect of all of us. No question: Emotion drives business success. Clearly, people in business have to be skilled and knowledgeable about products, processes and programs. But simply having rational knowledge is not enough to get big increases in results. We must have emotional knowledge also. A fundamental truth of human motivation is that we define ourselves in terms of our emotions. Descartes didn't quite have it right; it's not, "I think therefore I am;" it's really, "1 feel therefore I am."

Yet most marketing strategies and programs focus on the rational -market share, target identification and validation, and customer needs analysis -and ignore the emotional. In doing so, such strategies ignore great opportunities.

To achieve the quantum leaps in results that most businesses are capable of, let's recognize that marketing, as we know it has come to an end. Such marketing served companies in relatively stable economies when businesses were like large ships, with captains giving orders to the mates, the mates to crews. But today businesses are in white-water canoeing races. In rapidly changing markets, exclusively rational marketing can't compete well.

What will replace marketing? To answer that, let's understand what marketing is all about. It's about one thing, growth. Growth happens through strategy and action.

Today's marketing activities are superficially linked to strategy and have little to do with action. The result; businesses rattle along not hitting on all cylinders.

Strategy: We grow in business or ultimately die. So it behooves each business to have a strategy for growth. We might develop a growth strategy. It might seem convincing on paper. It might interest security analysts. It might brighten an annual report. But unless people believe it passionately, wake up in the morning motivated by it, spend each day exciting others about it, see it as a key stimulant of their life, and zealously realize it in their work activities, then it is merely a recitation of dry postulates. It can only realize partial results.

When

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