andreweverett360 Book Review, Marketing

B2B Institute’s B2B Trends

2030 B2B Trends: Contrarian Ideas for The Next Decade

by Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo, The B2B Institute

The B2B Institute published a 43-page PDF on what they foresee as the three major trends in business-to-business marketing: (1) a greater emphasis on building long-term brand equity; (2) greater consistency in creative execution; and (3) a shift from hyper-targeting to broader reach within categories. Some of the ideas presented in this paper will sound familiar to anyone who has read the work of Ehrenberg-Bass Institute or the work of Les Binet and Peter Field.

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andreweverett360 Book Review, Marketing

How Brands Grow

How Brands Grow

by Byron Sharp

This excellent, clearly-written book is based on empirical research covering market share, brand equity, price promotions, and advertising. It includes some counter-intuitive conclusions regarding customer retention, loyalty programs, segmentation, and competitor differentiation. Byron Sharp is the director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science at the University of South Australia.

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andreweverett360 Book Review, Career

Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future

Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future

by Dorie Clark

This book is about making a career change. It starts with understanding your transferable skills, identifying how you are different as a competitive advantage, then establishing a narrative to make sense of your transition.

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andreweverett360 Book Review, Marketing

Outside In

outside-in

Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business

by Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine

“Customer experience is how your customers perceive their interactions with your company. Once you understand that, you can manage your business from the outside in… To achieve the full potential of customer experience as a business strategy… you must manage from the perspective of your customers, and you must do it in a systemic, repeatable, and disciplined way.”

The benefits of providing exceptional customer experience are “higher revenues resulting from better customer retention, greater share of wallet, and positive word of mouth, plus lower expenses due to happier customers who don’t run up your service costs.” One example from the book is a $1.7 billion per year savings in customer service costs and bill credits as a result of Sprint simplifying its confusing plan options.

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andreweverett360 Book Review, Career

Disrupt Yourself

disrupt-yourself

Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovative to Work

by Whitney Johnson

Clayton Christensen introduced the concept of disruptive innovation in The Innovator’s Dilemma, his seminal book which focused on the computer industry. His successive books applied the concept to health care and education. Now, Whitney Johnson writes about disrupting your own career.

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andreweverett360 Book Review, Marketing

The Brand Challenge

the-brand-challenge

The Brand Challenge: Adapting Branding to Sectorial Imperatives

Edited by Kartikeya Kompella

The Brand Challenge consists of four general branding topics followed 11 sector-specific chapters, namely: luxury, retail, business-to-business (B2B), media, financial services, non-profits, fashion, hotels, cities, technology, and football (soccer). Each chapter is written by a different author.

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andreweverett360 Book Review, Marketing

Repositioning: Marketing in an Era of Competition, Change, and Crisis

repositioning

Repositioning: Marketing in an Era of Competition, Change, and Crisis

by Jack Trout with Steve Rivkin

Repositioning by Jack Trout (1935-2017) is a follow-up to a book called Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, which Trout co-wrote with Al Ries 30 years prior.

Positioning is a competitive strategy, which Trout defines as “how you differentiate yourself in the mind of your prospect.”  Repositioning is about adjusting perceptions about you or about your competition.  Trout stresses simplicity–you need one powerful differentiating idea, the more obvious the better.

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andreweverett360 Book Review, Marketing

In Search of the Obvious

in-search-of-the-obvious

In Search of the Obvious: The Antidote for Today’s Marketing Mess

by Jack Trout

Jack Trout (1935-2017) had been a marketing professional for over 40 years.  This book is about how the marketing profession has gotten off course, and the importance of timeless fundamentals, simplicity, and common sense.

Trout is critical of Madison Avenue. “To me it’s creativity run amok…The fact is that creativity was always a misnomer. An agency isn’t creating something. The company or product or service already exists. What they are doing is figuring out what is the best way to sell it. That, simply stated, means to take that logical, differentiating argument and dramatize it.”

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andreweverett360 Book Review, Marketing

Break From the Pack: How to Compete in a Copycat Economy

break-from-the-pack

Break From the Pack: How to Compete in a Copycat Economy

by Oren Harari

Break-from-the-pack companies are analogous to the small cluster of runners at the front of a marathon. The Copycat Economy is analogous to the majority of runners who lag behind. In the words of former IBM CEO Sam Palmisano, “Either you innovate or you’re in commodity hell. If you do what everybody else does, you have a low-margin business.”

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