The book focuses exclusively on consumer products and does not addresss business to business marketing issues. Business to business marketing requires more focus on developing solutions that this book does not address.
The book addresses topics such as the importance of developing sound strategy, the impact of the Internet, and dimensions but then does not into the detail on how a marketing person should use these tools or develop strategies that will increase sales.
The book uses several examples from Coca Cola that talk about the decisions that were made but little about the needs of the marketplace at that time. This gave the book the feel of an autobiography.
I do think that the author has several good ideas but could have benefited from more depth that would provide more explicit answers on these issues.
Coca-cola's market share has stagnated in recent years, culminating in vast and well publicized layoffs. Additionally, one has to be leery of any business book published in the late 90's in the midst of an economic bubble when business types were treated like some sort of cross between rock stars and popular jocks. I was also skeptical of some of the advice he gives in the book, especially when he describes some of the other failures of the Coca-Cola company, including building massive production and distribution facilities in the old Eastern bloc following the fall of Communism, and then realizing that most of the people didn't have any money to buy cokes - duh.
Finally, I put aside as much of my distaste as I could for large, morally bankrupt corporations like Coca-Cola and read the book to learn something. There are great insights about the function of ad agencies in strategy, marketing and even some nuggets of interesting management ideas. However, the real gems of the information could have been condensed to a pamphlet you could read in 20 minutes. Good editors would have hacked through all the anecdotes about how to play major ad agencies against each other. I suspect that the people who need that kind of information could buy Sergio himself.
By the way, don't agree Coca-Cola is morally bankrupt?