Cool Marketing Thoughts

As mentioned in the previous post, I’m about to dig myself a way through a pile of structurally ordered letters that make marketing sense when read in the right direction. I’ll be combining the joyful read of AnnaMaria Turano & John Rosen’s Stopwatch Marketing with Jospeh Jaffe’s Join The Conversation. Jospeh’s book is all about conversation, because there lies the true power of brand marketing. Other than offering a decent product in a perfect fashion, the talking about it and the reviews that satisfied customers have afterwards with their friends and relatives build up a brand image that is more stronger and powerful than any PR activity could achieve on its own. Third party recommendations are stronger and more dedicated and stand tall. Combine that with a decent strategy and well adjusted ideas from a book as Stopwatch Marketing and I’m pretty sure your brand/product/idea will be a hit with the right dose of both approaches.

Joseph’s book is a fistful of well aimed thoughts about how brands and marketing can profit from the power of conversation. If you look at the line-up of the chapters, you’ll get the drift.

1. Talking “at” versus talking “with”
2. The many-to-many model
3. Can marketing be a conversation?
4. The birth of Generation I
5. The rise of the prosumer
6. The new consumerism
7. The six Cs: Three phases of conversation
8. The consent-conversation relationship
9. What conversations are in your future?
10. Why are you so afraid of conversation?
11. The 10 tenets of good conversation
12. The 5 ways you can join the conversation
13. When conversation isn’t a conversation at all
14. Where does conversation fit in?
15. Conversation through community
16. Conversation through dialog
17. Conversation through partnership
18. Getting started: The manifesto for experimentation
19. Does conversation work?
20. Do you speak conversation? Take the test

Again, just as I wrote a few hours ago: I look forward to reading this and write down my thoughts. Check back soon for a decent review.

January/February will be a month of reviews in between advertising rants and campaigns, because yesterday I offered to review a book from Jaffe Juice, and today I got contacted by John Rosen who was kind enough to put me on his list to review the Stopwatch Marketing book. I am delighted to have some new books to put on my bedside table or to read on the train rides back and forth from Amsterdam, and I’m looking forward to write down my findings for the readers of this blog. Stay tuned for that. Below is a short overview of Stopwatch Marketing. More information can be found on the dedicated blog.

Sometimes shopping takes minutes, but is still too long; sometimes shopping takes months, and the shopper is sad to see it end. In Stopwatch Marketing, you will learn that time isn’t money; it’s much more important than that. Understanding how much time and energy consumers are willing to spend shopping for a particular purchase – their shopping strategies – is the single most important (and overlooked) thing you need to know in order to succeed in selling your product or service to them.

In Stopwatch Marketing, we identify four basic shopping strategies – impatient, reluctant, painstaking, and recreational – and show how to analyze, evaluate, and exploit the time that represents every shopper’s most important resource; how to understand and measure the length of time your customer will spend searching for your product or service; and how to make absolutely certain that your product or service is close to the front of your customer’s queue.

Many of America’s best-known and most successful companies are using the principles of Stopwatch Marketing™ every day to achieve spectacular growth in both margin and market share. The book includes fresh company examples such as Tempur-pedic, Microsoft, Goodyear and MasterLock as well as completely original interpretations of popular case studies like Lexus, Charles Schwab, Apple, Commerce Bank and Whole Foods. Our book not only shares their stories, but offers step-by-step guidelines for building an entire marketing strategy around stopwatch principles. Our success in applying these principles to our clients’ businesses gives us confidence that we are on to something quite new and interesting in the marketing world: the criticality of the customer’s time demands in reaching a purchase decision.

This certainly seems to be an interesting read, and to be honest, seeing Microsoft in their list of examples made me quite curious to know which of the techniques or tactics are being applied. (I work for Microsoft, in case you missed my switch). Other than that, I really look forward to dig deeper in the strategies to get consumers to spend as much as they can in the shortest amount of time possible, without blasting them over with an overload of teasers or bombing them with spam. To be continued…