Beyond the Brand: Why Engaging the Right Customers is Essential to Winning in Business [Hardcover]

John Winsor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2004

Branding reached its zenith in the dot-com era, when as much as 90 percent of the venture capital raised by start-ups was budgeted simply to establish corporate identity and earn a spot in the public’s awareness. Since then, however, it has become increasingly clear that companies were approaching things backwards. And so the time has come to adopt a new set of objectives-to move Beyond the Brand.

Marketing expert John Winsor makes a powerful case that consumers have developed a "brand immune system" that only magnifies the problems involved with branding today. Instead of focusing on branding efforts, he explains, companies must learn to use "bottom-up" tools to co-create new products and marketing strategies with their customers. It’s about getting out in the streets and spending time with right customers in their worlds, creating essential foundations for breakthrough innovation.

While many recent titles-The Tipping Point, Crossing the Chasm, and The Idea Virus-have highlighted the importance of certain customers in the marketplace, Beyond the Brand takes readers one step further, providing case studies, as well as practical step-by-step methods to engage these key voices in a dialogue that can fuel real product and marketing innovation. Readers will learn: • The Eight Steps to develop a bottom-up strategy • How to identify and find new ways to listen to the key voices in the marketplace • How to hone intuition and find inspiration to drive innovation • How to find the company’s center of gravity The tools John Winsor outlines in Beyond the Brand are the very ones his company, Radar Communications, uses to help some of the most forward-thinking companies today to develop more aggressively, innovative growth.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Most experts on branding emphasize how a brand owner spreads his or her message to consumers, but Winsor believes that genuine success can only come from reversing the line of communication as well. His "bottom-up" approach weds branding to customer research, but the resulting mixture is rather thin, continually circling around a handful of talking points concerning the need for a deeper relationship with customers. Companies are urged repeatedly to "find the key voices" in the market and re-center their brands on those customers in order to break through their "brand immune system," a disdain for being coerced attributed, with what feels like undue emphasis, to rising antiglobalization sentiment. Yet many of the case studies fail to provide real insight into the process, asserting that certain companies have such relationships without offering enough detail on how they established them. And though he touts the Internet as an effective tool for listening to consumers, Winsor offers examples that feel already dated. A closing chapter full of generalizations about "Millennial" youth reinforces the impression that the book reads like a client prospectus, and the "anthrojournalism" he touts as a key research methodology comes off as cool hunting under a new name, despite all protestations.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

John Winsor started Radar Communications in l998. His goal has been to help companies listen to and learn from the key voices in their communities by using organic, bottom-up anthro-journalistic tools to help them co-create new marketing and product development strategies. In l986, he founded Sports & Fitness Publishing, well known for being ahead of the trends, which he sold off in l998 to Condé Nast and Emap. Winsor holds an MBA from Denver University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Kaplan Publishing (October 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0793188369
• ISBN-13: 978-0793188369
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,030,562 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Winsor is a leading strategic marketing and product innovation thinker especially known for his work in collaboration, co-creation and crowdsourcing. He is also a respected author of Baked In: The Power of Aligning Marketing and Product Innovation, Spark: Be more Innovative through Co-Creation and Beyond the Brand: Why Engaging the Right Customers is Essential to Winning in Business. His next book, Flipped: How Bottom-Up Co-creation is Replacing Top-Down Innovation, will be released in April 15, 2010 (Agate). Recently, Baked-In was named as an award winner in the Marketing category for the 800-CEO-Read 2009 Business Book Awards.

Currently, he is the CEO of Victors & Spoils, the world's first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles. V&S provides businesses with a better way to solve their marketing, advertising and product-design problems by engaging the world's most talented creatives. Victors & Spoils launched two months ago, and has been one of the most talked about agency launches of the last decade. Several international media outlets have covered the launch, including Stuart Elliot wrote in the New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/business/media/29adco.html?_r=1

Before V&S, Winsor was the VP/Executive Director of Strategy and Innovation at Crispin, Porter + Bogusky helping the company become the most awarded advertising agency in the world for the last two years. In 2007, Winsor sold his company, Radar Communications, to CP+B. He founded Radar in 1998 with Nike as its first client. Using strategy and academic-based market intelligence tools, Winsor helped some of the country's most progressive companies learn from key voices in their communities through methods he gleaned from his years as a journalist.

Prior to founding Radar, Winsor built a magazine publishing company devoted to sports such as mountain biking, in-line skating, and extreme skiing. In 1990, he acquired the rights to publish a then-struggling magazine, Women's Sports & Fitness. Within three years he turned the magazine around and launched several other highly profitable titles and events including The Gravity Games, selling the business to Conde Nast in 1998.

He also writes a well-known blog, John Winsor, www.johnwinsor.com, and is a regular speaker at marketing and business conferences.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must Read!, October 18, 2004

By 

a reader - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beyond the Brand: Why Engaging the Right Customers is Essential to Winning in Business (Hardcover)

Smart and accessible, Beyond the Brand is the definitive text on reaching consumers in today's hyper-competitive and brand-inundated marketplace. Marketing guru and founder of Radar Communications, John Winsor guides the reader through an evolutionary field trip from a time when brands acted as cultural creators (the Volkswagon Beetle) through a time when they attempted to align with cultural epicenters in effort to be seen as credible and authentic. He emphasizes the need in today's world for companies to really listen to consumers - engaging in a journey of learning, rather than a mission to find "right" answers.

Using anecdotes about some of the best consumer brands out there, like Nike, Oakley and Burton Snowboards, Winsor proclaims that the only way to stand out in today's marketplace is for a company to find inspiration and hone its intuition, by finding key voices and truly listening to those voices tell their stories. If I had to choose one book to help me connect with customers, this would be it. Beyond the Brand will become one of those rare, classic points of reference.

5.0 out of 5 stars A new methodology for research marketing, May 9, 2006

By 

Louise McCauley (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Beyond the Brand: Why Engaging the Right Customers is Essential to Winning in Business (Hardcover)

Everyone knows that word of mouth is the most persuasive selling asset a product can have. But how many marketers are aware of how word of mouth is generated and sustained? What makes it effective and how can you find out what will work for your product?

Windsor details a research methodology, "anthro-journalism" designed to elicit stories from customers about where they find value in your products. Such research can be used to fuel innovation as well as sales. What is important here is to find common ground with your customers on their own turf. The value of this approach is that often, your customers are more savvy about your products than your marketing staff. Capturing that value from customers, however, is not as easy as sending out a survey.

Storytelling is a powerful and evocative tool for marketers. But like journalists, if marketers want to get the best stories, they'll need to go to the customer. Even a focus group is too artificial an environment and too removed from the lived reality in which your customers use your products. You need to know, not just how your customers behave, but to understand why they behave as they do. To this end, you'll need to get as close to the context in which they use your products as possible.

Beyond the Brand is a fascinating read, with an equally fascinating methodology.

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommended!, May 31, 2005

By 

Rolf Dobelli "getAbstract" (Switzerland) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beyond the Brand: Why Engaging the Right Customers is Essential to Winning in Business (Hardcover)

Most marketing books discuss how marketers should relate to their customers. Some use a formal, objective approach to penetrate the wall that separates the service or product provider from the consumer. This book promotes a very different, softer "anthro-journalistic" tactic: learning consumers' desires by hearing their stories and reflecting those wishes in the product's design. This leads to giving the product its own stories to "tell" potential customers, in a mutual social network based on shared meaning. The idea borrows the power of the oral tradition from anthropology and applies it to word-of-mouth product promotion. Author John Winsor stresses listening and storytelling as ways for trained marketers to understand customers and sell to them. Although his treatise dips occasionally into slightly airy New Age sensibilities, Winsor's information on the flaws of focus groups and the importance of heartfelt, meaningful customer feedback tells a story of its own. Of course, applying a cultural anthropologist's perspective to marketing will work better for some businesses than others. We think this book will intrigue and possibly challenge marketers who want to break out of branding buzz and explore new ideas.