Invisible Touch: Four Keys to Modern Abridged Marketing

Rating:
Summary: Helpful, Light but Unstructured
Review: I bought this book at the Newark Airport to take with me on a flight to a conference in Florida. I finished the entire book on the way there.

For anyone who deals in the fields of marketing, sales, advertising, or customer service, I feel this is a fun and useful read. In order to instruct readers on the value or good, cohesive, customer-centered marketing, the author uses a long list of anecdotes from his own vast personal experience. Each chapter is centered around a single, often clever, marketing lesson delivered succinctly. This being the case, the book is ideally suited to readers who can only commit to short bursts of reading.

Overall, I found the tone of the book light and fun. This made for easy reading about the sometimes dull subject of modern marketing. The author's creative take encouraged me to open my mind and get my creative juices flowing!

I think this will make a good addition to a business person's library. However, it is definitely not a "Marketing Bible."

Rating:
Summary: Lessons from the Front Lines of Marketing
Review: There are a lot of important lessons about marketing that many people never master. Even with a marketing course, you will miss many of these basic points. Work in marketing long enough and you will, and these essential perspectives will become ingrained. Although there is no substitute for experience, The Invisible Touch is a good compendium of many of those important lessons.

The first chapter is on the limits of research. Most people in marketing know almost nothing about research, and as a result assign it a value that is inappropriate. For example, when you measure something you change it. The author describes having been part of a Nielsen panel while young, and how the family's television viewing habits changed as a result. Essentially, he wants you to understand that most of what you want to learn to make great marketing strides cannot easily be obtained from standard research methods. He proposes some useful alternatives, such as depth interviews (where a longer conversation is held and the interviewee determine most of the direction).

I also greatly enjoyed his section on the fallacies of marketing. These should be posted on the wall of most offices. His perspective on services is quite good. Most business is lost by poor service, not pricing or product defects. Yet improving service is often the lowest priority in an organization.

His four key points relate to pricing (higher prices add to the perception of quality), branding (the clarity of your message and identity is of more value than your actual quality), packaging (people prefer what is beautiful and value it more highly -- they uniformly are subject to the Ugly Duckling stall), and relationships (making clients and customers feel important is job one, with lots of advice for how to do that).

I especially enjoyed his use of continuing examples. One was of attending a Laura Nyro concert, and being disappointed because she did not connect emotionally with the audience. Services are experienced and personal. "We give concerts . . . how much better can we give them?"

The other one was the famous Folger's crystals advertisement for instant coffee served in the Blue Fox restaurant in San Francisco. People said the coffee was the best they ever tasted. Clearly, the ambience, reputation, and circumstances of being at the Blue Fox all had a lot to do with that perception of the coffee.

The limitations of the book are several. First, it is not a general theory of how people decide to buy. For that, I suggest you read Robert Cialdini's book, Influence. Second, the conclusions you will want to draw for your own business may not always follow this advice. There is no clear pathway to decide what is best for you. For example, if you are exceptionally efficient and value is part of your brand, your prices had better reflect that and may be lower than the competition's (such as Wal-Mart, which is cited in the book, and Southwest Airlines). If everyone followed the literal advice in this book, it wouldn't work as well. Naturally, since few come close, that's not an immediate issue. Third, the book doesn't connect the pieces together to show you how to use each element to build on each other element. Communications is talked about quite well in the relationships section, but gets much less attention in branding (which it is equally important). How can better communications also help you be sure you are following the book's precepts?

As a result of these limitations, I suggest you use the book to stimulate imagination. A good follow-up would be to discuss it with your colleagues to identify places where you may have opportunities to improve. In doing this, I suggest you have someone facilitate the conversation. If you can afford to pay for this, a local business school professor would be a good choice.

Good luck in overcoming your stalled thinking that comes from a lack of experience in successful marketing! You don't have to make all of the mistakes that are possible to learn how to be more successful!

Donald Mitchell ([e-mail])

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book
Review: This was one of many books I have purchased during 2001. It was the most enjoyable book. It was to the point and at the end of each section it summarised in a few words what to do or what or how to avoid. It is a very practical book and have already recommend my other marketing colleagues read it.

It was in particular the four keys to modern marketing which I found extremely positive. This is often what is missing from practical books. It does not discuss what other authors have written but simply assume, which is right, that you know marketing and this will give you the necesary direction to be a practical marketing person.

Very practical, the hints are extremely good.

Rating:
Summary: My Favorite Marketing Book
Review: You'll probably read it in a day. It's that good. In typical Beckwith style, concepts are broken down into *short* easy-to-read segments that do a great job of teaching and illustrating. His main concepts are: Price, Brand, Packaging, and Relationships (although it's the last half of the book before he attacks these titles). If you're considering starting a new business, buy this book. Many, many thought provoking ideas. I could never sell my book because it's too marked up!