WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• Marketing today is all about image, but it isn’t working properly
• Marketing is a science, not an art
• Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department
• Marketers must be accountable to shareholders
• Focus on results, not activities
• Megabrands are a rotten idea

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• It is full of ballsy assertions such as Traditional marketing is not dying, it’s dead, and Why have marketing? To make money
• The section on How to sell the most stuff and make the most money has some helpful steps you can copy:
• How to make positioning a two-way street
• How branding creates identity
• How to stop brands becoming static
• How to compete against yourself
• How to define consumer expectations that your competitors can’t meet
• All the quotes you want are in bold for easy picking:
• “When you start looking at exactly how much things cost and how much profit you are getting…you become a much better marketer”
• “Narrow how your competitor is defined to a single trait or quality whilst simultaneously broadening yours”
• “The old conventional thinking that said that if you grab people’s hearts, their wallets will follow is dead, kaput, finished…people need reasons to buy”
• At the end there are the 28 principles of new marketing (see list)

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• The author is the former Chief Marketing Officer of Coca-Cola, so there are a lot of Coke examples
• He has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about being disliked by creative ad agencies, which can make some of his points defensive (“Agencies can never make smart, fully informed decisions because they are never going to be fully informed”)
• The 28 principles of new marketing aren’t exactly new
• Implementing his approach might encourage machismo in the office

Podcasts are back!  This week Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae.

Download Meatball Sundae

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• Sub-titled The Antidote for Today’s Marketing Mess, this is a pointed polemic about the state that marketing has got itself into. He gives a thorough pasting to marketing, advertising, research, Wall Street, the internet, and several named client companies.
• Instead of concentrating on segmentation, customer retention or search engine optimisation, marketers should be looking for that simple, obvious differentiating idea.
• Particular culprits are people and organisations that deliberately put complication in the way of the obvious – and shoot themselves in the foot.
• Many people fear the activity of thinking so they follow suggestions made by others to avoid it.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• We seem to have no time to think any more. Many meetings are little more than gadget envy sessions.
• “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” William James
• Mission statements are denounced as bunk. A survey of 300 revealed that the words used in them are all the same: service (230), customers (211), quality (194), value, employees, growth, environment, profit, leader, best.
• Sales, technology and performance leadership are all valid concepts. Thought leadership is not – it doesn’t mean anything.
• If you want to solve a problem, try: substitute, combine, adapt, magnify, minimise, eliminate, and a range of other angular thinking techniques
• The biggest blunders these days are: Me-too product or idea, unclear what you are selling, untruthful claims, arrogance brought on by success

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• All the examples are American, so you have to work with them.
• He has quite a rant. There are moments when the vitriol appears to outweigh rational analysis, but some may find that fun.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH