Books on Marketing for Every Need
Written by Shirley Lichti for The Record, August 26, 1999

Check the business section in almost any bookstore today and you will be bombarded by a huge number of books on how to market yourself, your products or your services. The selection grows even more bewildering if you search an online bookstore such as Amazon.com.

Choosing the best book for your purposes is difficult. To make it a little easier, I thought it would be interesting to ask some local experts in a variety of fields to name the marketing book that they have found most valuable in their own work.

Below are their recommendations, with a brief synopsis of each book.

Boom Bust and Echo 2000: Profiting from the Demographic Shift in the New Millennium by David K. Foot (with Daniel Stoffman) - recommended by Dr. Auleen Carson, Associate Professor of Marketing, School of Business and Economics, Wilfrid Laurier University

Marketing relies on detecting opportunities in the market. This book provides excellent ideas on identifying future market opportunities and assessing the future viability of existing businesses.

Canadian baby boomers represent the world’s largest baby boom population and have an unusually large amount of spending power. The baby bust generation, the baby boom echo, and the millenium busters are other major demographic groups described and analyzed by Foot.

The book is a great source of ideas for medium term marketing planning.

Also, there is a very useful appendix in the book that provides a methodology for product and sales forecasting based on demographic data, which is an area many small business people struggle with.

Guerrilla Marketing : Secrets for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business by Jay Conrad Levinson - recommended by Maureen Shepherd, Business Librarian, Kitchener Public Library

Levinson, a marketing guru, has written more than 10 books in his "Guerrilla" series during the last decade. First published in 1983, Guerrilla Marketing has always been popular with KPL borrowers.

The latest updated edition provides a wealth of information for micro to medium sized businesses, emphasizing smart tactics rather than big budgets. There is a fascinating discussion on the psychology of marketing and what makes people buy.

Guerrilla Marketing provides a variety of marketing options and offers practical advice in jargon-free language for small business people. New technologies are covered, particularly the use of the Internet.

Overall the book is well organized with short chapters, an index, a good table of contents, and useful headings in the margins to focus busy readers.

Power Base Selling - Secrets of an Ivy League Street Fighter by Jim Holden - recommended by Greg Barratt, Director of Sales & Marketing, Kitchener, Ernst & Young

Holden deals with selling and large account sales. The focus is on understanding that within a company, political strength equals influence and that power is wielded through a combination of influence and authority.

Holden outlines the process of defining the political structure within an organization and mapping out the distribution of political strength. One gem he offers is to call higher than you think you should and sooner than you think you should.

He also suggests ways to view competitive strategy and the actions you can take based on your competitors' moves. The book is helpful for anyone trying to sell to a large company.

The Guerrilla Marketing Handbook by Jay Levinson & Seth Godin - recommended by Cindy Pearson, Director, Marketing and Communications, Communitech Technology Association

This handbook offers a common sense approach to marketing by removing the mystery from the entire marketing process. Levinson and Godin provide unconventional, non-traditional, and extremely flexible tactics, especially necessary for those operating on a small budget.

The book reinforces the importance of cooperation and relationship building, two elements that are essential for business success. It teaches readers that the marketing process is an investment of time, energy, and imagination, not just dollars.

In addition to the various other “Guerrilla” books, the Guerrilla web site - www.gmarketing.com - is a valuable source of information and inspiration.

What Were they Thinking - Marketing Lessons that you can learn from Products that Flopped by Robert M. McMath and Thom Forbes - recommended by Kathi Smith, Manager, Business Enterprise Centre

The odds for successful marketing increase if you are aware of what products have succeeded and failed in the past.

Some notable failures include Ben-Gay Aspirin – you probably think of soothing sore muscles but can’t imagine swallowing it.

Other failures? Aerosol toothpaste (what parent would buy it?), microwaveable ice cream, toaster eggs, cucumber antiperspirant spray, and rabbit jerky.

Although the lessons focus mainly on large companies, there are lessons for small businesses too. It’s re-assuring to learn that even the biggest companies sometimes have flops.

This is an entertaining and easy to read book about marketing.

Relationship Marketing by Regis McKenna - recommended by Alan Quarry, President, Quarry Integrated Communications

Marketing is not a function of business....it is the business according to Silicon Valley guru Regis McKenna. He points out that marketing is the job of everyone in the company and believes that the next stage of business will be known as “The Age of the Customer”.

Businesses that focus on responding to customers needs and wants - and continue to build ongoing, loyal relationships with those customers based on trust and quality - will succeed. Firms that focus inwardly on their own processes, product specmanship and the old marketing models will be left behind.

"We actually re-organized our firm in 1995 to enable us to be more client focussed as a result of some of McKenna’s thinking and theories," Quarry told me.

Some other marketing books that Quarry highly recommends are:

• Hitting The Sweet Spot by Lisa Fortini Campbell
• Integrated Marketing by Don Schultz
• The Copy Workshop by Bruce Bendinger
• Raving Fans by Ken Blanchard
• Positioning by Ries and Trout
• and anything written by Guy Kawasaki and Peter Drucker

And lastly, here is my own pick. Like Quarry, I had trouble narrowing it down to just one book but since I work primarily with services based companies I would choose:

Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith

This is a great book written for companies whose revenue comes from services, not products.

Beckwith points out that we live in a service economy, with more than 75 per cent of people working in service companies. Yet too many companies are still trying to use a product marketing model.

Services can't be sold like products because they are intangible. The trouble with selling services is you can’t see, hear, or touch them. So how do you sell, develop and make them grow? Beckwith offers many useful pointers.

I especially like his chapter titled Marketing is not a Department, which shares my view that marketing is everyone's job.

Other books I would highly recommend are:

• The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout
• Focus by Al Ries
• Fabled Service by Betsy Sanders
• Kotler on Marketing by Philip Kotler
• Designing Direct Mail that Sells by Sandra Blum
  

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