Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(40)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This book basically brings forth two strong notions. The first one is, Become your own customer and go through your own company's buy process. Pretend that you're a prospect just at the beginning of a purchase, searching for information and solutions. You don't enough know enough to fully articulate the problem; you know only that you have a need. What search terms would you use? What stores would you visit? What questions would you ask the salesperson? Then, how does your business line up to this?

Next, the most innovative portion of the book, the authors demonstrate how to attract the customers you want by creating personas. Essentially, this breaks down customer types into classes, such as the ever popular soccer moms. Then, it asks, what do you need to do to attract this persona? What questions are they asking? Why are they interested in making this purchase at all? How would they use your companies website?

So, all-in-all, it's solid and actionable advice on how to really focus on your customers and figure out what needs to be done to make your business inviting to them.

Why I take off one star: While this is a great book, its strength doesn't translate into other categories. The sweat spot for this book are businesses engaged in mass consumer marketing, with both a strong online and physical presence. Also, the target purchase has some emotional component, such as a BMW making the driver feel successful and powerful. However, if you're in the business-to-business space, then the book's lessons are harder to apply. For instance, if an engineer is searching to purchase a resistor, and is only concerned about performance characteristics, then the book's philosophy starts to become a stretch.

Also, it's not as clear how the lessons of the book are applied to smaller and service oriented firms. Say, if you're a Certified Public Accountant trying to recruit three new customers over the next three months in your town, again, the book doesn't offer as much of a lesson.

So, I would still recommend this book. You just need to read it aware of how its appropriate to your particular marketing challenges.

Have you ever seen a movie, when you see & wait that something gonna happen and it never happens till the end? That's the "Waiting for you cat to bark?" is about.
There are lots of the background information - ideas and developments of Hippocrates, Myers-Briggs, Freeman, Frank Lloyd Wright and Sir Tim Berners-Lee; BMW ,Best Buy and other big companies marketing experiences; left brain and right brain responsibilities, etc. etc.

There are lots of well known ideas, like think about your customers, see your business from your customers point of view, provide good service, provide relevant information, measure a campaign effect etc. etc.

There are lots of marketing complexity examples, that make you feel like "oh my God, who can get all this"?

I tried my best to follow the line and split potential clients into smaller groups I may treat in a very special way, according to the book advices. The only point is the book does not give any practical idea about all those ideas implementation. Not a single one! There is nothing you can do coming back to your office after reading this book.

What it has? Plenty of "we do this" and "persuasion architecture". This book is one big advertisement you paid for. We developed, we understand, we compared, according to our experience, persuasion architecture we've invented, etc. etc and it's endless!

The only conclusion a reader is suppose to do according to authors is to admire persuasion architecture, realize that just genius can deal with this and apply to Future Now to let those sophisticated guys to do their job! Don't get me wrong, there is a good chance Future Now people know how to make you reach and can help you out, but I would not recommend to buy the printed ad and spend time on reading.

I'll give a chance to "Call to Action" I purchased together with "Waiting for you cat to bark?". I truly hope I can find something useful there and if not, sorry Bryan and Jefferey, your books are out of my book shelf.

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.

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.

"Waiting For Your Cat To Bark" wins this year's "The book I couldn't wait to put down" award.

Honestly, the only reason I bought the book was because I absolutely adore the writing of Roy Williams, and he recommend it for about six-months pre-publish -- the Eisenberg boys are his prize students. (Turns out, Roy's brilliance as a writer is equaled by the rose of his glasses.)

My experience with "Cat," however, did confirm several things:

1. Robert B. Cialdini's theory that people generally remain consistent with previous choices despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. (I can't imagine any other reason so many people are giving this book 5 stars.) In truth, I was so pre-sold by Williams that even as I found myself falling asleep reading Cat, I was telling others how great it was. (Then somewhere around page 50 I realized what an idiot I was being and shut up about it.)

2. Great marketing can get people to buy anything, and Roy Williams is one of the best there is. The fact that Cat hit the bestseller list is more a testimony to his marketing genius than to Cat authors' writing ability.

3. My theory that it's the quality of one's sales pitch that gets a book professionally published, not the quality of one's writing. (Anyone else noticed how many crappy books are getting published these days? When are publishers going to go back to reading a full manuscript before committing to putting a book on the shelves?)

4. That the Eisenberg brothers over-learned and over-applied William's advice to invent your own words and jargon. Thank God other reviewers quoted all their superfluff terms -- it saved me from having to retrieve them from the depths of my purposeful forgetfulness.

This book is a marketing brochure for two guys who, seemingly, do understand internet marketing. It's just a shame they don't know how to, or didn't want to, write about it so others could actually learn from their experiences.

This truly is the blueprint to match your selling process to your customers buying process... and measure its effectiveness!

Applying the concepts in this book helped boost one of our client's bank account to an all time high. Read the book and take action on the book and you'll pad your cushion.

The Eisenbergs and Lisa Davis share a powerful way to create a left-brain selling process while greasing the gears for your emotional buying, right-brained consumer; all while giving you the means to measure your persuasive and selling systems effectiveness! I'm not sure what business would not want to create a system that speaks to their customers and allows them to measure its effectiveness?!

The methodology in this book, which is written in plain and simple English, can be used on your website, in your marketing material, in your store, with your staff, and across the board. If you use them, you will have stronger and better relationships with your current customers and with your future customers. To put it another way, your customers will thank you with their money. They will thank you because you will no longer be speaking to them but with them... to them vs. with them.

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.

It turns out one size doesn't fit all. The customer revolution produced a new breed of consumer - one that is savvy and particular and expects to be sold according to his or her individual personality. Enter "Persuasion Architecture" - a method for "speaking to your customer in the language of the customer." The Eisenbrothers, with Lisa T. Davis, have written a book as clever as its title, about what could be a complicated subject - persona-based selling - and made it accessible to anyone in business.

Simplistic brilliance? I believe that true brilliance is simplistic. Anybody can be confusing. The brilliance of this information is its ease to follow, understand and if you have vision, execute. The true measure of how well one knows their "stuff" is how easily they can explain it to others. The Eisenbergs definately know their stuff. Don't waste another second before getting your hands on this book.

I found the book another rehash of the same theme: customers aren't all the same, so you can't just push advertising at them anymore. Okay, okay, we know that already.

The authors seem enamored with complex and unnecessary terminology, which I found tedious. the book is full of terms like "persuasion architecture," "business topology," "modalities," and "personas," to name a few. I guess the more jargon you can use, the more you can charge. If that is what you are looking for, then it's a great book.

Remember geometry class and all those tedious proofs you had to go through, step by step. I could intuit the answers so had little patience for proofs. That's what this book reminded me of. In all it seemed to me to be an overly complex paint-by-numbers approach. Even so, it just *approaches* the subject but never really gets there. You can identify all the modalities and develop all the personas you want, but without the creavity to turn that information into compelling marketing, it doesn't help anything except the consultants' bottom lines.

I kept expecting the "real meat" of the book to come, but it never did for me. Perhaps it's because I'm already knowledgeable on the subject. With such a clever title, I hoped there might be some nuggets, but I found none. Some good ways to explain some issues to clients, but that's about it.