Like many other commodity-type industries, steel has a reputation—largely deserved—for lackluster marketing and product promotion. With steel, however, the cyclical nature of demand, the complexity and asset intensity of the production process, and the political sensitivity of operating in a sector essential to the development of most modern economies focuses managers’ attention with special force on questions of volume, not responsiveness to customer needs. And even when attention does shift to marketing, the industry’s deep-seated "tonnage mentality" often continues to dominate—and distort—the decision-making process. This need not be the case. An effective marketing orientation in steel is possible—if it is based on careful attention to mix management, customer segmentation, and margin assessment.

Steel industry marketing does not have to be a contradiction in terms. In recent years, for example, British Steel has reversed builders’ preferences for concrete in the construction of UK car parks through an aggressive promotion campaign that both trained civil engineers in how to use steel and documented its superior lifecycle economics. Similarly, in the US, the Steel-Automotive Partnership has reestablished steel as the premier automotive material. As a result, mid-1980s forecasts of the growing usage of...