Companies often waste valuable resources on marketing by not accurately identifying their company’s purpose, getting caught up in marketing trends that don’t address their specific needs, and creating mission and vision statements that work on top of reality instead of reflecting it. In this 115-page, 11-chapter nonfiction business book, Stacey Ruth presents a different way of handling the problem: working from the inside out.
One of the first steps in determining a company’s marketing needs is to answer the question: “What makes your company so different from you [sic] competitors?” According to the author, her clients usually respond with nine typical answers: exceptional customer service or experience, leading edge technology, value, expertise in a niche, employees, company size, effectiveness/results, speed/efficiency/responsiveness, and patented product/solution/process. The problem is that most companies don’t consistently live up to these claims and even if they did, the claims don’t actually differentiate their companies in the marketplace.
Instead, marketers need to realize that the product and the selling of the product is not their purpose. “The product arises from the Purpose,” she writes, and the purpose should always be an “original approach” to whatever products or services the competitors are offering. This original approach allows companies to effectively compete. Once marketers understand their purpose, know their customers, and address the patterns of growth within the company, marketing efforts are bound to be more successful.
Although the author writes with confidence from her years of experience as a founding partner of two multi-million-dollar agencies, numerous spelling errors, punctuation errors, grammatical mistakes, and awkward sentences undermine her authority. For example: “Every flight a customer takes they [sic] receive a survey which [sic] you [sic] can see what the airline is placing value on – the customer experience and interaction – and the results show in how the employees treat the customers.”
Ruth cites company examples from recent business news, including Apple and McDonald’s, and from the works of famous authors, including Ayn Rand and Niccolo Machiavelli. Her suggestions provide ideas for marketers to consider (if they haven’t already), rather than action steps to take, so readers seeking a quick fix to problems probably won’t find what they’re looking for here. She states on the back cover: “This book is not for the masses” but “for the individual who has a tickle in the back of their consciousness that something isn’t quite right here.”
Marketers are encouraged to focus on their company’s purpose before investing time and money in promoting products or services in TRUTH & DARE: INSIDE OUT MARKETING.
~Carol Michaels for IndieReader.