Page 144 - Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing - PDFDrive.com

Confessions of an Advertising Man, a book so interesting that my mother read it
thirty-five years ago just for fun.

But nothing I can recommend will help you create names as ingenious as
NameLab, themes as effective as “We’re Number Two, we try harder,” or
concepts as clever as negotiable certificates of deposit. I believe imagination is
the greatest possible asset in marketing, in part because imagination is rare and,
in all likelihood, unteachable.

On positioning, Ries and Trout’s Positioning is a classic. A bearable flaw of
the book—no book can cover everything—is that the authors stress how the
human mind works, yet ignore volumes of research on the influence of recency
and vividness on the mind. Ries and Trout suggest that positioning is not heavily
dependent on the words and images used. They seem to suggest that good
positioning statements make strong headlines and theme lines. Cynics might
suggest that Ries and Trout deemphasized words and images and downsized the
importance of creativity because their ad agency’s creative product was weak.
Maybe so. It is wise to read their book—a very good book—with that in mind.

On presenting, I recommend Bob Boylan’s What’s Your Point? and anything
by Ron Hoff. Most of all, however, I recommend watching a presentation by my
former boss, Dick Wilson. Some things cannot be explained; they must be seen.
A Dick Wilson presentation is one of them.

On marketing generally, and service marketing particularly, I save my
strongest recommendation for last: Theodore Levitt’s The Marketing
Imagination, particularly chapters 5 and 6. Levitt strongly influenced my
sections on relationship deficits and the importance of visibles.

Nothing beats experience, of course, but reading books about others’
experiences comes in a competent second. The risk in learning only from
personal experience is that too often, we draw conclusions from too little data—
we learn too much from too little. We also tend to credit our company’s
successes to everything that went into them—the classic fallacy Post hoc ergo
prompter hoc (It happened after the fact; therefore it happened because of that
fact). And so we keep repeating things that hurt our business.

In Decision Traps, Russo and Schoemaker tell the amusing story of the man
who explains how he won the huge Spanish lottery. The man chose a number
ending in 48. He said he knew the winning number would end in 48 because for
seven days before he picked the number, he woke up thinking of the number
seven. “And seven times seven is forty-eight,” he said. “So of course, I picked
48!”

All people act like the Spanish lottery winner at times. We mislead ourselves.
We link our successes and failures to things that barely influenced the outcome.