Cotton's Renaissance A Study in Market Innovation [Hardcover]

A history of Cotton Incorporated's impact on the cotton market in the United States.Cotton's Renaissance tells the remarkable story of how U.S. cotton growers struggled to grow, compete, and survive for more than two centuries through a series of challenges to their industry markets. It traces the rise of Cotton Incorporated, a unique public-private organization dedicated to marketing cotton, and tells the story of how commodity farmers, traditionally concerned with supply, learned to create and manage demand through entrepreneurial organization and innovative total marketing. Cotton's Renaissance tells the remarkable story of how U.S. cotton growers struggled to grow, compete, and survive for more than two centuries through a series of challenges to their industry markets. It traces the rise of Cotton Incorporated, a unique public-private organization dedicated to marketing cotton, and tells the story of how commodity farmers, traditionally concerned with supply, learned to create and manage demand through entrepreneurial organization and innovative total marketing. Cotton's Renaissance is the story of one of the more remarkable feats in the annals of enterprise. At its center, the book shows how U.S. cotton growers lost half their market share in the 1960s and 1970s and then won it back through highly innovative marketing and organization. To place this unprecedented achievement in perspective, the authors analyze and interpret the responses of cotton growers over two hundred years to the timeless problems of nature, technology, markets, and politics. The upshot is a dramatic history of how growers learned--after more than a century and a half of trying to manage supply--how to drive and shape demand for their commodity. This key change in perspective and behavior was accomplished by the creation of a unique public-private company that helped thousands of growers to cultivate demand and to survive in an increasingly competitive global marketplace. The imlCÃ