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Book Review: A Review of Legal Aspects of Marketing Strategy: Antitrust and Consumer Protection Issues

This is an important book, on a subject most marketers are not as well-informed on as they should be. What differentiates it from the other volumes available on marketing and the law is its orientation on court decisions and case law. Most of the major legislation and regulation covering marketing decisions is included, but this book goes beyond just describing these and discusses the major court cases that have helped interpret what the laws acually mean in terms of marketing practice. The book also provides a good taste of the process of regulation of marketing activities, describing, for example, the impact of changes in the Administration every four or eight years. The focus is on federal statutes and the court cases related to them, and the authors warn the reader about the limitation concerning state laws by stating, "It is vitally important that the reader be forewarned about the myopic nature of this text because state law can be as equally constraining as federal law." This is particularly true for product liability law. Also, by design, the text does not go into detail on credit-related or franchise disclosure laws. Coverage is oriented around marketing mix decisions made by marketing managers. After an introductory chapter describing the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, the FTC and legal remedies for violations of federal law, the authors present two chapters on marketing law related to product decisions. Chapter 2 is devoted to law associated with the internal development of new products including trade secrets, trademarks, patents, and copyrights. The second product chapter covers product quality issues for existing products, discussing such topics as warranties, product liability, and government safety issues. The section on warranties is particularly valuable, thoroughly listing all the requirements necessary to be in compliance with warranty regulations. The next three chapters are devoted to antitrust issues. Chapter 4 covers antitrust issues related to adding products through mergers and acquisitions, concentrating on horizontal mergers. An appendix to the chapter contains the Reagan Administration's philosophy on mergers, reprinting the "U.S. Justice Department Merger Guidelines" and the "Statement of the Federal Trade Commission concerning Horizontal Mergers." Pricing issues are examined in chapter 5, with discussions of discriminatory pricing, predatory pricing, and pricefixing. The section on the Robinson Patman Act is especially valuable. The final antitrust chapter reviews issues regarding