Rating: 
Summary: A rehash of something outstanding
Review: Harry's second book falls prey to his own advice: the first one was so outstanding, that I expected something excellent and was disappointed with merely "good". Like many movie sequels, this book simply repeated themes that were great in the original, but have now grown stale. Of all authors, I was really disappointed in the blatant reuse of specific examples: the orangest orange example, the Peanuts back-of-the-shoes example. Others. I did read it cover-to-cover in one night. I did chuckle. I did enjoy the examples. But there was no blinding new insight. Having loved his original, I'm disappointed with the sequel. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I was expecting it to be outstanding. This didn't have it. If you haven't read Selling the Invisible, buy that instead. If you have already read it, don't bother with Part II.
Rating:
Summary: A rehash of something outstanding
Review: Harry's second book falls prey to his own advice: the first one was so outstanding, that I expected something excellent and was disappointed with merely "good". Like many movie sequels, this book simply repeated themes that were great in the original, but have now grown stale. Of all authors, I was really disappointed in the blatant reuse of specific examples: the orangest orange example, the Peanuts back-of-the-shoes example. Others. I did read it cover-to-cover in one night. I did chuckle. I did enjoy the examples. But there was no blinding new insight. Having loved his original, I'm disappointed with the sequel. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I was expecting it to be outstanding. This didn't have it. If you haven't read Selling the Invisible, buy that instead. If you have already read it, don't bother with Part II.
Rating: 
Summary: Exposes Assumptions
Review: He's off completely though when he gushes over his European hiking pal. What if this hiking pal was a Subway sandwich guy, instead of a 2nd year law student...? Placebo effect in full force again. It depends on "who" is saying your name. How many Moms wish they could change their names? What's the deal with the Carter-Reagan comparison? That wasn't even intelligent?!?!?! The greatest insight, I thought, was the discovery that people first make decisions and then seek to justify them. I can see how understanding that concept can be useful. Find out what they've decided first, and then support it or try to change it... Absolutely Brilliant!!!!! I'm soooo guilty of that one. Thanks Harry for another great treasure of insights. Didn't care for the repeat stuff from "What Clients Love", but you knocked a few out of the park. I'll pay to see that any time!
Rating:
Summary: Exposes Assumptions
Review: He's off completely though when he gushes over his European hiking pal. What if this hiking pal was a Subway sandwich guy, instead of a 2nd year law student...? Placebo effect in full force again. It depends on "who" is saying your name. How many Moms wish they could change their names? What's the deal with the Carter-Reagan comparison? That wasn't even intelligent?!?!?! The greatest insight, I thought, was the discovery that people first make decisions and then seek to justify them. I can see how understanding that concept can be useful. Find out what they've decided first, and then support it or try to change it... Absolutely Brilliant!!!!! I'm soooo guilty of that one. Thanks Harry for another great treasure of insights. Didn't care for the repeat stuff from "What Clients Love", but you knocked a few out of the park. I'll pay to see that any time!
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: 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: Focus on Customer Satisification and not Price Discounting
Review: Market Research has limits. The end result of any market research project can be engineered to give a predictable outcome. For example, in a sampling of 18 people - questions were ask about a specific product likes and dislikes and a conclusion drawn about the product. Next, the pool size was increased to 500 people with the similar characteristics found in the first 18 person sample and surprising the same marketing research results were achieved. So, marketing decisions driven by market research can be hazardous, if absolute faith in the conclusions of the Research are followed. Also, too further break down reliance on market research, Beckwith states that people exhibit the Heisenburg principle meaning people change their behavior when they are being studied. Beckwith concludes, soft research is better than hard research and the bottom line is to listen to the customer.
The Marketing has fallacies. Best practices make an invitation to ordinariness. Instead of following Best practices, innovate and create best practices.
Focus on satisification and equate quality too price believing that customer who have perspection of receiving quality will pay a higher price. Price discounting works in special cases. Price discounting is designed too acquire new customers and destroy competitor profit margins causing them to collaspe. For most companies discounting only attracts the wrong type of customer.
Focus on achieving customer satisification rather than cutting price. Customers, who are bargin hunters will flee to businesses that offer lower price. These type of customers are always looking for cheaper product and customer loyalty is a function of price. For every one large discount store, it destorys 100 smaller businesses while attract high volume of customers at low prices and profit margins. These companies expect people to buy more product because of the lower price and profit off the higher volume of sales. So, the lower profit margin per product is offset by higher volume of products sold. The only way to combat the discount business model is to offer better service, more specialized products, and a stronger focus on meeting customer expectations. Rather than seeking larger numbers of people, emphasis a business model with a selective group of customers with more disposable money, and selective tastes for products and services; stay on the upper pyramid of product and service differentiation. For example, Boston Market thought, if they offer discount coupons, they would increase foot traffic into their stores and the clientele would love their food. So they offer coupons and increased traffic, slowed down service time per customer, fustrated the clientele that should have become their loyal customers and attracted the wrong type of customer. Boston Market stock valued at $41 share price plummetted to 33 cents, as the company cut its coupons and the clientele seeking discount priced food fled. The prime customer was also fed up with delayed service and the company entered Chapter 11.
Build Brand as a mental expection that the customer believes he will get. Branding has become the most effective when customers nolonger are willing to do comparative pricing and analysis and instead select a product because of its brand. Brand is the symbol that people associate with a specific expectation which is often better than reality. Brand can create an expectation so strong that the customer ignores diminished quality and value in the product or service. Brand represents the symbol companies seeks to position in the minds of the customer.
Packaging adds beauty to the product and reinforces the brand.
Focus on the customer relationship. Seek customers like yourself. This does two things: 1) Increases understanding of the customer and predictablity of his responses 2) Reduces complaints and nonsolvable conflicts with unsatisified customers.
Rating: 
Summary: Fun and Easy Read on Marketing
Review: Since I enjoyed the author's first book, I have decided to read the Invisible Touch as well. I started reading it and could not put it down until I finished the whole book. The book does not intend to cover all of marketing. The coverage is more towards brand management. The book is made up of many small sections and is very easy to read. At each section, he sites a real life observation and based on that observation generalizes and sets forth a marketing rule. Since it deals with human traits, it is a touching book at times and makes you fall in love with marketing. I recommend it even to professional marketeers.
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 (donmitch@2000percentsolution.com)
Rating:
Summary: "Let's get right to the essence...."
Review: This book was written by a marketing/sales expert who has his finger on the pulse of 21st century marketing. "The Invisible Touch" is also a quick-read that does not waste a busy marketing executive's time. I especially liked the sprinkling of real-world case studies and "lessons learned" throughout the book, along with the street-smart confidence behind Harry Beckwith's "keys to marketing success." Finally, this was a fun read!
| 
