andreweverett360 Book Review, Marketing

Hillstrom’s Pricing


Hillstrom’s Pricing: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Optimizing Customer Behavior via Prices
by Kevin Hillstrom

This fascinating booklet is about how the mix of price levels a retailer offers in its selection of merchandise affects customer behavior. In his 30-year career in retail, Kevin Hillstrom worked for Nordstrom, Eddie Bauer, and Land’s End as well as 225 clients in his consulting practice.

The author examines sales data by price range, merchandise category, channel, and customer life cycle (new customers vs. repeat customers) over a span of five years. Most pages include a spreadsheet or graph showing data from a hypothetical company with declining sales, along with commentary on how the author analyzes the numbers to figure out what’s going on. The target audience for the booklet appears to be catalog and ecommerce retailers.

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andreweverett360 Book Review, Marketing

2021 Castlin Manifesto: Strategy in Polemy


2021 Castlin Manifesto: Strategy in Polemy
by JP Castlin

JP Castlin is a strategic thinker and consultant based in Sweden. Major themes in his Manifesto are complexity and emergent strategy. In the chapter on marketing, he is not shy about challenging prominent figures. The paper is 71 pages including an impressive 9-page bibliography with academic papers, articles, and books cited throughout the text.

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andreweverett360 Book Review, Management

How to Build a Better Business Plan


How to Build a Better Business Plan: A Hands-On Action Guide for Business Owners
by Alastair Thomson

One of the primary benefits of a business plan is “finding a business model that works.” Alastair Thomson, an accountant and experienced C-level executive, guides you to think from a lender’s or investor’s perspective, whether or not you are seeking outside financing. From their side of the table, would you find your business compelling?

The completed plan becomes your “roadmap” for execution. “With the right business plan, you do your thinking up-front. You know how to take advantage when new opportunities come your way and you know exactly what problem needs solving if performance veers off-course.” Thomson encourages planning for three scenarios: best-case, worst-case, and likely outcome. “The biggest danger for a pessimist is under-resourcing their business.”

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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 interview, Marketing, Uncategorized

An interview with Peter McGraw author of Shtick to Business

An interview with Peter McGraw
author of Shtick to Business: What the masters of comedy can teach you
about breaking rules, being fearless, and building a serious career.

October 15, 2020 — 38 minutes — Book Review — Amazon

  • [00:58] “that guy”
  • [03:53] behavioral economics
  • [06:59] group genius
  • [12:09] liminal spaces
  • [15:45] warm team and feature creep
  • [23:26] two paths to a creative solution
  • [26:18] writing is a cheat code for life
  • [34:19] where you find a lot of growth

Transcript Continue reading “An interview with Peter McGraw author of Shtick to Business” →

andreweverett360 Book Review, Marketing

Marketing and the Bottom Line


Marketing and the Bottom Line
by Tim Ambler

Tim Ambler (now retired) was a professor at the London Business School. He was unique in that he was a marketing professor who was also a Chartered Accountant. Ambler contends that boards of directors should devote more attention to marketing. He puts a particular emphasis on brand equity and innovation.

“The point is simple: if you want to know what your future cash flow will look like, investigate where it comes from—the market… Survival depends on basic wealth creation. And wealth creation depends on how healthy the marketing is… Securing customer preference opens up the main cash flow for every business.”

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andreweverett360 Finance, interview

An interview with Alastair Thomson author of Cash Flow Surge

After posting more than 250 book reviews, I decided to try something new: an author interview on YouTube. I am grateful to Alastair Thomson for graciously sharing his wisdom on managing small and medium-sized businesses. Alastair has an accounting background, but this conversation is not about debits and credits. It’s about improving your business from the perspective of an experienced CEO and CFO. We cover cash flow, profit, customer experience, metrics, business ethics, marketing, quality, continuous improvement, front-line employees, growth, margins, inventory, and receivables.

An interview with Alastair Thomson, author of Cash Flow Surge
July 16, 2020 – 1 hour – Book Review – Amazon

Transcript

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andreweverett360 Book Review, Marketing

How Not to Plan: 66 Ways to Screw it Up


How Not to Plan: 66 Ways to Screw it Up
by Les Binet and Sarah Carter

Packed with insights, this book is a compendium of 66 articles originally published in Admap, “all loosely based on a myth-busting theme.” The word “not” in the book title and each article title is in strikethrough type. The articles are grouped into 9 chapters: Setting Objectives; Product, Price, and Place; Brand and Communication; Research and Analysis; Talking and Thinking Strategy; Who Are You Talking To?; Media and Budgets; Creative Work; and Effectiveness and Evaluation. 

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andreweverett360 Book Review, Marketing, Writing

Copywriting Made Simple


Copywriting Made Simple: How to Write Powerful and Persuasive Copy that Sells
by Tom Albrighton

This is an excellent introduction to copywriting, offering general advice on the process as well as specific tips for print advertisements, audio and video scripts, sales letters, emails, brochures, and social media posts. The book is divided into three parts: plan your copy, write your copy, and improve your copy.

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andreweverett360 Book Review, Marketing

Eat Your Greens: Fact-Based Thinking to Improve Your Brand’s Health


Eat Your Greens: Fact-Based Thinking to Improve Your Brand’s Health
Edited by Wiemer Snijders

This book is a compilation of 42 chapters written by 37 practitioners and scholars of branding, advertising, and marketing. “The brief to all of the contributors was simple: tell us how you apply or find inspiration from marketing science in a short, easy-to-digest paper… I did not ask them to write about a particular topic; this was intended as a bag of nutritious ‘mixed greens.’” There is no chapter on spinach or basil, but somehow cauliflower scored a cameo role in chapter 26.

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