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

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4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (56 customer reviews)
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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

See all Editorial Reviews

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: #336,295 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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More About the Authors

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Bryan Eisenberg
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Lisa T. Davis
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Jeffrey Eisenberg
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Customer Reviews

56 Reviews
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33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Waiting For Your Cat To Bark , June 2, 2006
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.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A great book with limitations., September 18, 2006
By T. Schmitt (Issaquah, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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.
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22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Don't waist your time on ads, May 15, 2007
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.
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