The full title of this book by Tom Shapiro is
“Rethink Your Marketing: 7 Strategies to Unleash Revenue Growth”.
In my review at Amazon.co.uk, I gave it a FIVE star rating, meaning that I rate it as excellent.
Here is what I posted.
An excellent and thoughtful book to get your business back on track
The book encourages you to rethink seven different areas:
1-your audience
2-how they think
3-your goals
4-your marketing mix
5-your metrics
6-your revenue model
7-your future
The aim is to get your business growing again. Too often, companies get stuck and the owner-managers don’t know what to do other than more of the same, copying competitors or jumping on the latest fad.
After reading the first chapter, I thought it was going to be insubstantial. Plenty of fluff but not much content as stories and examples dominated. It covers narrowing your market to become more focused or cutting across different age groups or locations but I’d have liked to have seen more structure along the lines of Blue Ocean Strategy.
The second chapter made me think again as it nicely explained some of the revelations coming out of the study of neuromarketing, psychology and behavioural economics.
Goals are a topic that everyone knows about but few do them correctly to align actions within the business. There is plenty of excellent advice in this chapter including writing down goals, using the SMART acronym to sharpen them and getting feedback from metrics.
What about your marketing mix and especially how you reach out to potential and existing customers? If you’re like most businesses, you do pretty much the same as your competitors so the market doesn’t see you as much different from the rest. You have an opportunity to both stand out and make a big impact by rethinking this area of your business.
Chapter 5 is about metrics and this has been a hot topic of mine for getting on for 30 years. A business without effective metrics is like watching a cricket match without a scoreboard. Both interest and motivation depends on knowing the score and what needs to be done to win. Not just any KPIs but the vital few that reflect your unique strategy.
Chapter 6 challenges you to think about the way your business (and industry) generate revenue and whether innovative thinking can add extra value for customers as well as creating a big jump in revenue for you or take away major problems with the way you work.
The final step is to think about how your market and customers will change in the future and to get ahead of the breakthroughs rather than being forced to react to more proactive competitors who had insight AND took action. That dynamic business can be yours.
Overall, I think this is an excellent book which takes a refreshingly different look at how you can improve the results of your marketing. There are many traditional marketing books that tell you what to do to get success from the wide variety of marketing media available – websites, social media, radio and magazine advertising etc and I particularly like Duct Tape Marketing by John Jantsch.
This book won’t tell you how to use Facebook or Twitter better or how you should create a series of follow-up contacts in a direct mail sequence. Instead it will encourage you to question the fundamentals of your marketing and inspire you to improve areas of weakness.
In many ways, it mirrors my own approach to business improvement.
I first read it as part of my Kindle Unlimited subscription but I give few marketing books the full five star status and when I do, I must have it in my business books library so I bought it.
You can buy it from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com
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