I KNOW THE ANSWER, BUT WHAT’S THE QUESTION?
Some Thoughtful – If Abbreviated -- Answers To Some Tough Marketing Questions
GREAT ANSWERS TO TOUGH MARKETING QUESTIONS, by P.R. Smith. Kogan, Page, Sterling, VA, 2nd ed., 2003. Paper, 298 pp. $27.50. To order click here.
A client once responded to my description of a difficult and complex plan by saying, “Sounds simple to me.” To which I responded, “If by simple you mean I walk to the edge of the water, strike the water with my cloak, and when the water parts, I walk across. Simple.”
This story – true, by the way – illustrates what Smith, an award-winning, British based marketing consultant, has done in this otherwise charming book. He has glibly reduced some of the most complex marketing concepts and problems to simplistic answers.
The second problem is that this is a marketing book, but not a professional services marketing book. For example, his discussion on pricing is so grossly irrelevant to pricing for professionals as to be completely alien. His discussions on psychological factors that affect buyers is useless to professionals (maybe great for products, but we’re not in that business), until such time as somebody can find a way, for example, to persuade a happily married individual to get a divorce through superior advertising.
Is there any value for professional service marketers here? Well, in an ancillary way. It defines some basic marketing principles more succinctly, and with less smug pretension, than most marketing texts. It’s not academic claptrap written by someone who has never had responsibility for the consequences of theory, and that’s worth a lot.
At the same time, this is not a primer on marketing, which is in no way as simple as might be inferred from the brevity of each concept in the book. Nor does Smith pretend that it is. What he has done is to take each topic, discuss and define it briefly, and move on to the next. A lot of topics, all important, but only a page or page and a half to each one. Would that marketing were that simple.
For example, What Exactly Is Segmentation? (A page and a half) How Do You Manage A Research project? (A page and a half) What should be in the perfect marketing plan? (A page and a half). And so on. All obviously a brief definition, well put, but not a blueprint to how to do it. That’s ok, because the author doesn’t suggest otherwise. And for the professional services marketer, it’s a quick way to learn the basic principles of marketing. The book is what it is, and doesn’t pretend to be more than that.
I must say I do have a problem with some of the concepts, particularly those that are based on conventional wisdom, which rarely turns out to be wisdom at all. For example, the discussion on positioning starts in the middle, and not at the beginning, which should say, positioning begins by fathoming the root of client or customer needs or desires, and then demonstrating how your product or service meets those needs. The section on marketing planning has the same problem. Why do so many discussions of marketing plans fail to begin with the needs or desires of the customer (or client)? They all go through the rote that begins with analyzing your firm’s or product’s strengths. This leads to what I call the Melancholy Baby Syndrome – the piano player who’ll play anything you want, so long as it’s Melancholy Baby. This is what I have to sell – take it or leave it.
One more note. The author is a marketer in Europe, which, I suspect has some different marketing practices than we have in United States. Nothing serious, but worth considering.
Is this book worth reading? Sure. Mostly, it’s information is accurate and useful, if you understand what the book is really about, and don’t try to use it to build a marketing program. It’s readable and understandable, and relatively free from jargon. Rare in a marketing book.