Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing (Hardcover)

by Bryan Eisenberg (Author), Jeffrey Eisenberg (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
The Eisenberg brothers (Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results) dub the guiding principles behind their marketing consultancy "Persuasion Architecture," but their methods have more in common with Hollywood screenwriting. Observing that one message no longer fits every audience, they create "personas" representing broad consumer patterns, based on the types identified in the Keirsey personality tests, renamed here as "methodical," "spontaneous," "humanistic" and "competitive" shoppers. Then the authors "storyboard" marketing scenarios guiding each type to the point of sale. Although 20th-century advertising was based on the Pavlovian model of instilling a desired reaction to stimuli, like the dog that expected dinner whenever a bell rang, the Eisenbergs say that increasing media fragmentation prevents advertisers from creating that sort of conditioned response. Anyway, they add, people have always been more like cats, occasionally distractable but for the most part independent-minded. Their solution—developing interactive relationships—is fairly standard in contemporary marketing circles, but by keeping the message simple, with short chapters low on jargon and high on real-world examples, the Eisenbergs just may push themselves to the front of the crowd. (June 13)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Description

Good marketers know that customer-centered marketing is mandatory. However, we are not the customer. What the customer perceives as relevant is the thing successful marketers must anticipate, plan, and deliver on. Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing offers Persuasion Architecture, a proven Persona-based methodology. Persuasion Architecture enables marketers to anticipate different angles from which customers frame their questions and then coordinate messaging across multiple channels so that marketers can create predictive models of customer behavior. Don't miss out on learning about this six-sigma marketing approach that can skyrocket the effectiveness of your interactive marketing.

"There's some big thinking going on here-thinking you will need if you want to take your work to the next level. 'Typical, not average' is just one of the ideas inside that will change the way you think about marketing."-Seth Godin, Author, All Marketers Are Liars

"Are your clients coming to you armed with more product information than you or your sales team know? You need to read Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? to learn how people are buying in the post-Internet age so you can learn how to sell to them."-Tom Hopkins, Master Sales Trainer and Author, How to Master the Art of Selling

"These guys really 'get it.' In a world of know-it-all marketing hypesters, these guys realize that it takes work to persuade people who aren't listening. They've connected a lot of the pieces that we all already know-plus a lot that we don't. It's a rare approach that recognizes that the customer is in charge and must be encouraged and engaged on his/her own terms, not the sellers. Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? takes apart the persuasion process, breaks down the steps and gives practical ways to tailor your approaches to your varying real customers in the real world. This book is at a high level that marketers better hope their competitors will be too lazy to implement."-George Silverman, Author, The Secrets of Word of Mouth Marketing: How to Trigger Exponential Sales Through Runaway Word of Mouth

"We often hear that the current marketing model is broken-meaning the changes in customers, media, distribution, and even the flatness of the world make current practices no longer relevant. Yet few have offered a solution. This book recognizes the new reality in which we operate and provides a path for moving forward. The authors do an outstanding job of using metaphors to help make Persuasion Architecture clear and real-life examples to make it come alive. Finally, someone has offered direction for how to market in this new era where the customer is in control."-David J. Reibstein, William Stewart Woodside Professor, Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania and former Executive Director, Marketing Science Institute

"If you want to learn persistence, get a cat. If you want to learn marketing, get this book. It's purrfect."-Jeffrey Gitomer, Author, The Little Red Book of Selling

"In 1999, the Wachowski brothers revolutionized moviemaking with stunning new angles and special effects revealed in The Matrix. Now the 'Eisenbrothers' have done the same for business in Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? Stunning new angles! Techniques that will be copied for decades. Cat is sure to be remembered as the genesis of an important new direction in marketing."-Roy H. Williams, New York Times Best-Selling Author, The Wizard of Ads Trilogy

"The Web is a democratizing force as the world's largest global brain. It educates everyone

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson (June 13, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0785218971
• ISBN-13: 978-0785218975
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (56 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #205,425 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Waiting For Your Cat To Bark , June 2, 2006

By	Chuck Mckay - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

When I was a kid, the Reader's Digest published an article that described how to build a mechanical computer and "teach" it to play hexipawn, a really watered down version of chess in which each player's pieces consisted of three pawns on a nine square board. The mechanical computer had to be told every possible move to make. One programmed it by removing the bad choices that led to losing the game. The remaining good choices let the computer become exceptionally good a winning.

I hadn't thought of that Reader's Digest article in at least four decades, until I opened Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg and Lisa Davis' Waiting for Your Cat to Bark to Chapter 10, The Design of Persuasive Systems. The authors describe a customer clicking on to a web site, and then not finding the next click to help her buy what she's trying to buy. Why does this happen? Because the web designer isn't thinking like a customer. Because the web designer built a logical, linear, sequential model of the selling experience, and the customer needed an intuitive, non-linear, non-sequential buying experience.

And just as the Reader's Digest mechanical computer proved, it's not enough to eliminate the bad moves; one must provide the good moves to "win." The authors have described the good moves. They've told exactly how to determine who your customers are, what influences their decisions, and the way they negotiate the buying process.

They call the process Persuasion Architecture (Chapter 16). It's a discipline which integrates the buying with the selling processes and ties it all together with communications flow. The focus is always on persuading the customer to take action. In 243 pages Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Lisa Davis will take you step by step through the Persuasion Architecture process, and help you convert more web site visitors into web site purchasers.

If you're marketing on the web, or if you intend to, you need this book.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How Business Is Done, June 3, 2006

By	Kenneth Anderson - See all my reviews

One of the most gratifying things about Waiting For Your Cat To Bark: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing by Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Lisa T. Davis is that their observations of the buying process are equally applicable both on and off-line.

In fact, this book isn't a marketing book at all... it's much more than that. This book is a guide to how business will be done in the age of the consumer.

If you're not taking your customer's personality into account, if you're not salient, of you're not letting the customer take charge and tell you how she wants to do business with you, you're about to be left behind.

38 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Entering the "Customers Are in Control" Marketing Age, June 19, 2006

By	Meryl K. Evans "Content Maven behind meryl.net" (Plano, TX) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Customers drive marketing, not the other way around. No longer do customers accept products as designed. They expect and demand products to be molded to their needs. Just like you can't turn a cat into a dog; marketers can't turn a customer into a buyer by convincing them that they need product or service `as is.'

"Waiting for Your Cat to Bark" is a fitting title for this book. Cats tend to see the world revolve around them while dogs are eager to please their masters by doing whatever they want. Today's customers are in charge-much like cats.

"As is" might work in the bargain bin, but not in the majority of today's markets. The authors guide the reader in reaching the audience, persuading them to take the right action and feeling confident about that action, and giving the audience results that match their demanding expectations.

Those growing expectations come from the Web reaching new levels. You may have heard a lot of talk about Web 2.0. No matter how anyone feels about the term, one thing it is clear -- the Web has reached a new stage: interactivity. Users do something, and the Web page immediately reacts to the user's commands. It's also about creating online experiences, which often represent site's brand. All of this together adds to users' increasing expectations when they're online.

Marketers can lend a hand to their sites' visitors with persuasion architecture, a concept the Eisenbergs developed. Fancy words, perhaps, but the only words that will do. Before starting any marketing effort, the authors recommend asking three questions:

* who is it you want to persuade?
* what action do we want them to take?
* what information is needed to motivate them to take that action?

Building effective persuasion architecture requires more than knowing who your audience is -- but who they represent. The authors show how to create audience personas and weave the persuasion architecture to satisfy the different personas' needs.

The first chapters dig into the changes in the marketing world; how and why marketing has changed. The middle chapters uncover the minds of customers and why they've changed as they respond to products and services. The latter part the book enlightens the reader on persuasion architecture and how to use it to influence customers. The book closes with a chapter on getting started with persuasion architecture, which, in practice, shrinks the gap between customer and marketer.

What differentiates the authors and the book from others is their treatment of marketing and the Web as one? Too often, marketing and Web design teams don't work as a unified group and end up banging their heads. Organizations that plan to use the Web to market products or services stand to reap rewards in terms of user actions and higher profits with the advice from the book.

The book comes with a CD containing 80 minutes of the authors in a question and answer session (here's a clip), the full-text of the book in PDF format, online sales and marketing reports from Shop.org and the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), and a $50 credit on Yahoo! Sponsored Search (for new users only). You can read an excerpt from the book.

Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? is the right length (240 pages) and avoids heavy-duty or textbook language, which makes for a smooth and easy read. The authors have hit their stride with this one. Those who haven't read any of the Eisenbergs' books should start with this one and if there's room for another, check out Call to Action.