Customer Reviews

Speak Human: Outmarket the Big Guys by Getting Personal

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It's going to be hard to do this book justice in a review. It certainly wasn't what I was expecting, which was some chearleading about social media.

Instead, the book is a frequently philosophical tract on the inherent challenges of how the little guy goes about marketing anything well in today's super-noisy marketplace.

What surprised me early on was how adroit Karjaluoto is with language. You can get a taste of it on his blog, but the book is structured in generally longer chapters where he really gets going. Even as a blogger Karjaluoto is given to long-winded screeds, but in this book he really lets loose.

Karjaluoto deconstructs our expectations from page one. Throughout the book he's challenging why we expect blah-blah tactic or approach to work to build our businesses. Fundamentally he's asking why we expect a method of marketing or presenting our businesses to succeed and if the way we are marketing is actually aligned with what we are about. This is an important question and it has been asked before but Karjaluoto gets real specific.

I don't know if the author's full intent was to have a book to present to prospective clients, but this is one helluva calling card. If a prospect doesn't read the book and agree with most of it, that client would be a poor match for Karjaluoto's services (and mine as well I'll add).

The honesty here is brutal and discouraging to those people looking for quick fixes and easy ways to make money on the 'net. Marketing well has costs and usually requires significant analysis of problems and prioritizing before the creative work even starts. If you're a web marketing consultant you know too well how often clients want champagne on a beer budget - it doesn't matter how much you want to help them, you can't pay your bills and deliver the result they want on what they want to spend.

The author sent this book to me as a review copy. I think in a way it covers the same topic as Guy Kawasaki's recent, "Enchantment" (also sent to me as a review copy), but in a substantially deeper, more challenging way. While "Enchantment" is a pleasant airplane read type of thing "Speak Human" is sincere, authentic and challenging.
If the Karjaluoto wants to become a big-shot pop-marketing author/speaker dude, he'd do well to dumb it down... But as written, I'm thankful. The thinking is critical and the way he expresses his doubts and wrestles the issues give real credence to just how hard these real world marketing problems are to solve in a lot of cases.

Honestly, just awesome.

I'm giving Speak Human: Outmarket the Big Guys by Getting Personal five stars because it is a business book every marketer and business owner should read. It's an appeal to getting back to business on the human level where people are treated not only as individuals, but as someone the people running the business truly care about. The book is also a celebration of small business. Being a small business is an advantage in today's impersonal and busy world so, rather than rue the fact that your business is small you should celebrate because you have distinct advantages in the marketplace. Small businesses are more flexible, can focus better on a target niche and get much, much closer to the customer.

Let's sum up the key message of the book - Deal with people on a human level.

The title of the book confused me at first. What exactly was the book about? What did "Speak Human" mean? Was this a book on body language or some esoteric communication method? No, this is a solid book about business and marketing that advocates connecting and communicating with people on a human level. Connecting with people, dealing with them like they matter and using new technologies, like social media to stay connected is what this book will teach you. The whole point of the book is that you need to build and manage your business' relationship with your customers and clients. As the author states on Pg. 147 - "People like to feel special."

Kurjaluoto is clearly a cheerleader for the small business person and beats the drum throughout the book that it is small business that has the advantage when it comes treating people like they matter. Small businesses operate close to the customer and have the knowledge, or the means to acquire the knowledge, to relate to customers on a personal level. Large businesses often are too far removed from the actual customer to deal with people on a individual or "human" basis. The bigger a business gets the more they are forced to deal with a demographic representation of that customer instead of the individual.

We like people that treat us special and, given the choice, prefer to deal with them. Large businesses, along with businesses that are unfocused, dilute their appeal and product offerings in an effort to please the mass of people instead of focusing on a small, clearly defined segment of the market. Let's face it, they have to in order to support their larger staff's. What they end up with are homogenized products and services that are nothing special and that tend to be bland and "simply OK". When there is there is nothing to separate you from competitive "me too" offerings other than price it's easy to fall into "commodity hell", where no business wants to be. How to avoid this? Be different and, as the author explains, your business can be different simply and easily by relating to people on the human level.

The book is chock full of fun, educational stories that drive the authors points home. "Speak Human" reads different than your traditional marketing tome - it is actually engaging and fun to read rather than a boring academic-like text. The tone and language of the book is conversational, which appealed greatly to me. People learn best through stories and Karjauoto (the author) communicated his message well with engaging and entertaining ones.

This book reached out to me on several levels. Personally I love the type of personal interaction recommended in the book when I deal with any business or service. (Come to think of it, we would all benefit greatly if the Government would read and follow this advice. Imagine a Government office that really cared for you as a person instead of merely another number to be serviced as fast and efficiently as possible!) Taking that little extra effort to connect with me on a personal level makes all the difference in the world and is the deciding factor in my decision whether or not to re-patronize an establishment. I am sure others feel the same way.

Following Karjaluoto's advice will position any small business well with their customer base and go a long way towards making your business the preferred customer choice. I highly recommend this book to every marketer,small business person, or the person simply interested in bringing business back to the personal level.

The marketing section of the bookstore (online or bricks & mortar) is a usually a painful section to navigate, full of rehashed messages and hire-us pitches. Eric Karjaluoto's, Speak Human is none of that. It is personal, yet practical. Honest but bereft of piousness. Funny and rewarding. There are only a handful of marketing books I would dare recommend to anyone. Speak Human is at the top my list. Really superb.

--Ian

The title says it all; if you are interested in how to run your company and how to market it well, you must read this book. It's well written and will inspire you to get your marketing off the ground.

Karjaluoto writes in a way that makes it easy to understand why the consumer landscape has been declining in quality over the years. What's more, he takes both sides with ease: that of the consumer, and that of the businessperson who understands how to make things right. During a time when magazines like Fortune, Forbes, and Fast Company taut the value of design and the importance of the creative class, Karjaluoto digs deep and lets us know why those attributes are only one part of the equation.

My employer gave me Speak Human to read - I must admit, I wasn't exactly enthusiastic at the idea of reading yet another marketing and branding book. It was however my favourite read of 2011, by a good mile. It's honest, entertaining, easy to read and really, really engaging.

Speak Human doesn't offer new gizmos, techniques or gadgets for snagging an audience but rather reminds that mutual respect, care, thoughtfulness and direct communication are just as valuable in business as they are in our private lives. Speak Human didn't necessarily tell me anything mind-blowingly new, it's value lies in that it is an excellent, and required reminder, to well, communicate in a language (action, words, visual messages etc.) that everyone can relate to, 'human'.

To top it all off, the Speak Human folk seriously practice what they preach! It's astonishing and commendable. I'm a fan.

If you buy one book this year, especially if you're a small business (but big guy's, you'll most certainly benefit too), buy this one.

A Vancouver marketing firm SmashLAB was started in 2000 by Eric and his partner Eric Shelkie. This book is a compendium of lessons learned (perhaps ordeals by fire) working in the industry. What results is a very human book that contains his unique views on the communication business. His comments resonate well with what Rocket Builders has found over the years, as we seem to share a common world view with the author. Good phrases that stuck with me (likely I have mashed them together in my memory) :

positioning means...to get known for one thing
selling is all about numbers and sincerity
social networks give you access to a broader set of great individuals with different and unique skill sets
marketing is a long haul endeavor
Unlike many younger authors, Eric creates a very good set a of chapter notes that provides good "proof" to what he is saying. It speaks to a thoughtful work that is worth you taking the time to read it.

I'm a graphic designer, and while reading Eric Karjaluoto's book I felt as if he were personally reminding me of things we tend to forget in the day-in, day-out world of running a small business--simple things like behavior and etiquette that can make all the difference between you and your client. I recommend this book to individuals who really want to speak human.

My failing: I look at a book's length first. This one is around 294 pages total.

See, I just wonder if -- right now: post-Internet, post-fragmented, pre-Buddha -- the usual reader is really to accept 294 pages of advice.

No question: Eric Karjaluoto writes well. There were times when I cursed him: "You write better than I do, you .... "

But I am also a HUGE fan of good how-to books. It's an art form.

Eric likes to write. And he's good at it: very entertaining. If I had an infinite desert island of time and cocktails, I'd love to walk with him, beginning to end. Let's chat. Until we expire.

Still. That time has passed. Long time ago. About mid-1990s. Today, if you can glue someone to 500 words, you're a first-level wizard. Today's world has no time, I suspect, for books 294 pages long.

Eric taught me a few things. He's one of the special people: he has insights no one else has. I predict, though: You, the reader, will not finish this book, despite its charms. Eric: my challenge: What are the fewest # of words necessary to convey the same important message?

Eric Karjaluoto really does "speak human." The new marketing is all about telling stories that resonate with your target audience. Eric is a master at this. The book opens with Eric's wonderful experience with espresso at Starbucks and how his experience became not as wonderful as Starbucks became bigger. The book is filled with vignettes from Eric's life, as well as other examples from other companies.

The book's premise is that small companies have big advantages over big companies because they are closer with their customers.

The key points in the book:

**small can be powerful
**find your voice so you can be authentic
**build and foster real relationships
**connecting to customers using trust
**how to do all this.

I especially enjoyed these parts of the book:

**how to create a simple marketing plan, using an inverted pyramid approach. Even small companies may spend too much time on fancy plans and not enough time actually implementing a plan, or they may not plan at all. This approach enables companies to create a plan that they can use.

**the 10 examples of successful companies that have used the principles in the book. There's nothing like real-life examples to show something works.

**ways you could mess up and what to do about it. The new marketing can appear deceptively easy, but you can still overdo it.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to build close relationships with their customers and potential customers.