Customer Reviews

Tips and Traps for Marketing Your Business (Tips & Traps)

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

 

 

Competition is too intense to make mistakes and most chief marketing and marketing and sales leaders are too busy to train younger talent. This book addresses both issues by offering its readers lessons learned from the authors' decades of experience creating brand strategies and writing marketing plans for multiple products, markets and types of companies. Even if you have your own marketing planning process down flat, plans are rarely as good as they can be. With the book as a guide, you'll improve your skills and plans, something we all need in today's challenging economy.

This book was OK. Thus the low rating. It is well written and since its chapters pretty much follow the "Marketing Planning Model" it is well outlined. But my gripe with this book is I don't see why we needed a book on the following marketing planning model in 2008:

MARKETING PLANNING MODEL
Step 1. Gather information
Step 2. Define scope
Step 3. Define brand
Step 4. Define target
Step 5. Define message
Step 6. Measure performance
Step 7. Build awareness
>>Advertising and promotion
>>Traditional media
>>Publicity
>>Interactive
Step 8. Create customer experience
Step 9. Manage customer relation
Step 10. Innovate

The above model is generic. It is common sense. It is simple. It is ancient history! Today steps 1 through 5 are givens. If a business owner cannot do them, then the business will never get off the ground, much less stay in business. What we need is a "Tips and Traps" book on Internet marketing and the ins and outs of navigating the Social Web that exists online today. Now that would have been a good book. But no, we got a book that only covers a little on the Web in Chapter 10 (Interactive Marketing).

The coverage of "Interactive Marketing" was shallow. And since that kind of marketing is so important today this book has little value for today's business world. Skip it and check out an old book on marketing from your pubic library that will cover the same material. 3 stars!

I have run several small companies, and frankly, we could have used the straightforward guidance I found in this book. One of the most valuable parts of the book was the section on brand definition. "Brand" is a buzzword everyone uses, but I'm not sure the concept is really understood, even by some very bright business people. In my past businesses, our successful brands were created more by luck than by plan. As part of our sales presentations, everyone in the company from owner to sales rep told the same unique story of how our products were developed without realizing how powerful that particular story was and how well it defined our company and brand. This section of the book helped me understand why those brands were successful, and offers a very specific approach to developing and keeping messages on track which is crucial for creating long term brand value.

As head of strategy of a global advertising and communications firm, I would recommend this to anyone who wants to understand how clients think about marketing and how to execute a solid marketing plan in any company, of any size. These guys are all marketing professionals who have done a terrific job of demystifying the complexity of marketing in a very thorough, yet readable manner.
John Gerzema
Chief Insights Officer
Young & Rubicam

This great book connects the esoteric with the practical. Should be required reading for all sales, marketing and executive management. In today's fast-paced business environment, it is easy to forget the basics, and this book helped get us focused quickly with simple straight talk. I don't have time to be a marketing expert. I ordered this book for our senior executives after reading it over the weekend to get our brand focused and aligned with our business objectives. We now have a clear and exciting brand story and a solid marketing plan to tell it. It provides a logical and reasonable approach with many case references of real best practices. Regardless of your company's size, this is good common sense marketing review.

Cooper Grutzner and Cooper have come up with a book that is sets out a GREAT framework for smaller business marketing efforts. The approach to the book gives "the masses" a simple and straightforward look into insights that usually cost THOUSANDS of dollars to obtain. Will this book write your business' marketing plan? NO. Will it force you to think constructively about where the "traps" are, and how to learn from other's mistakes? ABSOLUTELY. That's the purpose of it in my view and it delivers on that mission.

In short, I think this is required reading for anyone who's got a "great idea" but doesn't have the "next step" to take that idea into the marketplace. You'll definitely be able to save yourself from some of the traps, and the tips will work for you. Well worth the read.

It took me 25 days to recieve this book that in the start cost me $8. But, since it took so long, I was already back to school when the book FINALLY arrived. So, my parents had to overnight it so I could have it for class. That costing $17 more dollars. So all in all, it cost me more to get that book from here than I could have purchaced it at my school.