Marketing Articles & Book Reviews

It is very tempting when you are starting a business to cast your net too widely and to try to appeal to many types of customer.

The problem is that by being so general, you finish up talking to no one.

I think it’s easier to see how crazy this is by stepping out of the business world.

Who To Date?

Imagine that you are a lonely man looking for a date.

The problem is, you don’t seem to meet many women in your everyday life so you decide to do what many others do and write a personal advertisement in your local newspaper. (Or go through one of the dating websites/apps.)

You could take the easy way out because you’re not sure what you want.

“Woman wanted – any age”

That’s pretty clear and you’ve not ruled out anyone because they are just outside any artificial criteria you set.

Not many words either so it won’t cost much.

You advertise.

Nothing happens.

Why?

Because the advert is from a desperate man.

You may as well have said

“I am a desperate man. Any woman will do.”

And that’s not a very attractive proposition.

So you stop to think what you want and narrow it down a bit.

If Cheryl Cole is your ideal woman, you identify the following characteristics:

Beautiful

Slim

Wealthy

Successful singer and personality

Geordie

Aged 37 (she was born 30 June 1983)

That’s given you something to work with.

Now Cheryl Cole probably doesn’t read the personal ads in your local paper so your ad has to say more than “Cheryl Cole call me” but someone like her may.

Which characteristics are most important to you?

Does a woman have to be beautiful, or the less exclusive “nice looking” or perhaps looks aren’t important to you.

Does she have to be a Geordie or just support Newcastle United?

The more you refine what you are looking for, the more you can write a personal ad which will attract the type of woman you do want to meet. Of course, you need to tell the truth but you’ll want to emphasise certain things your ideal woman finds attractive.

The alternative is, you are so desperate any woman will do.

It’s the same in business.

Holding your arms out and shouting “Any customer will do” won’t attract anyone.

You want to attract those customers who are right for you.

Those who give you an opportunity to do your best work. You need to define your marketing bullseye.

In this article, I will look at the issues involved with finding and selecting a niche market that will help your business to attract, convert and keep customers.

What Is A Niche Market?

A niche market is a small segment of a bigger, more general market that you can specifically target in your marketing and sales efforts. Done right, niche marketing goes even further because it completely affects the way you design and operate your business.

Defining a niche market needs me to define a market.

A market is a group of customers with specific wants and needs who decide to buy particular products and services for what those items can do for them.

By definition, the car market is the big group of people who buy cars.

That’s self evident.

But you need to go further.

The car market is the group of people who buy cars because they want or need flexible, personal transport that puts them in control of where they go and when they go.

That definition helps you to understand why people buy cars rather than use public transport as a viable substitute product or service.

Two seater sports cars is a niche within the car market for people who only need to worry about transporting themselves and possibly a passenger and want to do it in a certain style. Buying a sports car says a lot about the person and what he or she values. Even this niche can be to big which is why there is a one seater sports car (the Briggs Mono).

Why You Need A Niche Market

In some ways it makes sense to think that you want to target a big market rather than a small one. It gives you more customers who could buy your product.

There are two flaws in this thinking.

1. You should be more interested in the balance between demand and supply in a market. A huge market where there is already more supply than demand is going to be extremely competitive and it’s going to be difficult to make a profit. If demand is much bigger than supply, then prices and profits can be high and customers have little choice than to buy (although this may change over the long term as new competitors enter the market).
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2. A smaller, more focused market means that your product can match the wants and needs of the customers while a bigger, more general market has more diverse needs and you can struggle to convince possible customers to make the buying decision, which means you miss the marketing bullseye.

Effective marketing is all about getting the right marketing message or offer in front of the right customers in the right way at the right time or as often as necessary (the 4 Ms Of Marketing).

Having a niche makes it much easier to:

• get the message right
• get the choices about marketing media right
• keep putting the message and offer in front of the eyes and ears of possible customers.

I can’t emphasise enough how important it is to see marketing as a process where through a series of contacts you turn someone who has a general problem, want or need into someone who trusts you enough to give you money for the product or services you can provide. It rarely happens in one contact or touch unless the problem is urgent.

The Three Big Issues To Confront When Choosing Your Niche Market

In my article, Will Your New Business Succeed? I talked about the three big risks:

• Demand risk
• Competitive risk
• Capability risk

All three need to be considered when you are looking to choose your niche market.

Thinking about the demand risk for your niche market:

• is the demand real? Will customers pay enough money to solve the problem or to meet their wants and needs? You only need to watch a TV programme like Dragons Den to see would be entrepreneurs trying to solve a problem that few other people care about.
• is demand big enough to support your business? This is a particular problem for businesses who find that demand is restricted by location issues. Conversely the Internet has made many more niche markets viable because it can bring customers from all over the world to a business.

Competitive risk means facing up to issues like:

• Will the business be able to sustain a competitive advantage in terms of cusstomer alue that encourages people to buy based on a low price or superior value?
• Will new suppliers enter the market or are there effective barriers to entry to stop or delay competitors?

Capability risk looks at the issue of whether the business has the capabilities and competences needed to deliver on the promises made in marketing to attract and convert customers.

Niche Marketing And Differentiation

Are niche marketing and differentiation the same concept?

No I don’t think they are but the ideas are related.

When you select a niche market, you cut down the number of competitors and customers who will be attracted to that niche.

Perhaps there are 50 competitors in the general market but only 5 in the niche. Think about moving from looking at small hotels to 5 star luxury hotels in a small city for example. The differences between the two groups is much bigger than teh difference within the groups.

When you’re differentiated, you create a market of one. If the customer wants the value proposition you offer, he or she has to buy from you.

Some times, selecting a niche automatically differentiate you from your competitors because no other business has chosen to target that particular niche. Going back to the hotel example, perhaps there is only one 5 star luxury hotel in a small city.

How To Find Your Niche Market

At its core, your niche market defines:

• Who your customers are:
• What they want and need to buy

Occasionally it can also involve some of the other big questions that can be used to differentiate your business – where, why, how, how many and how much.

I think it’s useful to draw a customer value map of the market you are working within or thinking about entering. This will encourage you to think about the different price points that customers buy at and the different customer value alternatives.

Many people find it difficult to think abstractly about a market and what customers want and need and persuades them to buy. It’s easier to compare two offerings at a similar price point and to see how they are similar and different. This lets you focus on the factors of differentiation.

You can do the same exercise at a different price point (it can be useful to look at economy, mid-market and premium prices) to get a better idea of the dimensions of differentiation.

Let’s think about cars again as the brands are meaningful worldwide.

A Rolls Royce and a Lamborghini may have very similar prices and they both meet the need to combine personalised transport with status but the attributes of the customer value proposition are very different and aren’t in the same niche market.

The customer value attributes of these cars are very different in some ways but similar in others. Both are expensive, offer massive prestige and status (who says “he only has a Lamborghini or Rolls Royce”?) and have big powerful engines that make the cars much faster than the average car.

The Rolls Royce emphasises comfort, space, ride quality. The Lamborghini has head-turning looks, incredible performance and astonishing road-holding and handling.

It can be worth looking at where customers have to make compromises and how readily the customers accept the problems. Anyone who can afford a Lamborghini or Rolls Royce probably doesn’t need to care about fuel consumption but perhaps the person has green views and would prefer lower emissions and more miles to the gallon. Depreciation may also be an issue if the person wants to replace the car every twelve months. These issues can help to explain how products can be differentiated within a niche market.

Once you’re clear on the main dimensions of differentiation, you can look at the different combinations that already exist in the market.

It can be useful to map two dimensions on an x-y graph so you can see how the competitors fit together. A 2×2 or 3×3 matrix can give you enough detail or you can increase the number of categories along each axis.

Think about the car market and the number of seats and price for example. To my knowledge, there is only the Briggs Mono that has one seat, so whatever price point it occupies, there is a potential niche to either side in price. In the mass market sectors, there will be a lot of cars with four and five seats around the main price points. These niches already have competition.

However, if you take one of those differentiation dimensions (e.g. number of seats) and then combine it with another (fuel economy) you may find that what looked like a busy niche has an opportunity gap.

Remember, if you’re looking at a niche market without any existing competitors, you need to consider demand risk very carefully. Perhaps there’s a good reason why this niche market is empty. If there are already competitors and the niche doesn’t subdivide nicely on another factor of differentiation, you need to think about whether you can survive competition by having low costs by producing at the minimum efficient scale.

By this stage, you should have a few ideas for the niche market you want to target in terms of the who and want (and possibly the other big questions).

At this stage your niche can have competitors because you’ll be looking at how to differentiate it within the niche later on.

The concern is whether the niche provides the opportunity for profit over the longer term. You don’t want to target a niche and find that it disappears after a couple of years.

The two main strategy models to think about are:

• PEST Analysis
• The Five Forces Of Industry Profitability

Many people are familiar with these two techniques but they are often done badly and therefore provide little of the long term insight that may be available about how the niche market can develop.

The SKEPTIC Model combines them together which can be useful if you’re jaded about the two individual strategy techniques.

As you look forward, you may find yourself looking at different potential trends and perhaps a few either/or situations. If these look to offer significant strategic risk, you may need to use scenario planning to develop a clearer view of the future.

Once you’re satisfied that your proposed niche has a good future, you can start looking in more detail at your strategic options. This will usually involve summarising the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in a SWOT chart.

If you’ve got an established business, you need to look at how well it can serve the chosen niche market. The value chain is a useful technique for looking at internal capabilities and resources and how everything you do ties together to form your competitive advantages.

If you’re starting a new business in a niche, you have the luxury of designing your business model from scratch.

Either way, you need to try to avoid the mistakes made in differentiation and not let your mind fall into any of the niche marketing myths.

Summary Of How To Choose Your Niche Market

Choosing a niche market can be easy for some people. The answer is obvious based on their past knowledge and experience or a huge gap in the market that is crying out to be filled.

Other people find it much harder. It is scary to choose a niche market or to differentiate a business within a niche.

Selecting a niche means saying Yes to some combination of customers and products/services.

More importantly it involves saying No to many more alternative combinations.

The strength and big advantage of niche marketing is that it gives the business focus, hopefully laser focus on a particular set of customers, products and services and the underlying capabilities needed to deliver customer value at a fair price. It gives the business a strong vision and makes it easier to ignore opportunities that arise outside of the vision.

How Did You Select Your Niche Market?

I’d like to collect a series of stories about how businesses decided on particular niches so if you’ve got a niche, please leave a comment.

Do marketing and business strategy fit together neatly like two complicated jigsaw puzzle pieces in the picture of “successful business management”?

Or do marketing and strategy overlap in a topic called “marketing strategy”?

It’s an interesting question and one that I picked up from the Harvard Business Review on an article called The Best Companies Combine Marketing and Strategy.

The Debate – Marketing or Strategy or Marketing Strategy?

It seems that the writer, Roger Martin has co-written a book called Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works and one of the reviewers on Amazon agrees that it’s a good book but feels that the authors talk much more about marketing than they do about strategy. Roger argues that the distinction between strategy and marketing has dissolved.

Marketing grew out of sales and how a business could sell more products and services to more customers. Certainly the old copywriters used to talk about advertising as salesmanship in print or salesmanship multiplied.

Strategy developed out of military strategy and theory and how opponents could be beaten for the wanted territory, in this case the contents of the customers’ wallets and bank accounts.

This view of customers as something to win from competitors feels wrong. Unlike land that can be occupied, customers have decisions made by people who think and feel.

Yes some people can be manipulated by unethical marketers but as the saying goes “you can’t fool all the people, all the time.”

Roger says “Good marketing and good strategy are both about making choices that build and maintain a particular set of capabilities that enables the company to outperform its competitors with a particular set of customers. ”

I agree.

In my article, What Is Strategy, I define strategy as

“Strategy is how you achieve your own objectives by winning the hearts, minds and business of customers by out-thinking and outmanoeuvring competitors.”

In today’s world where supply exceeds demand, you must have the customer at the very centre of your strategy, your marketing strategy and marketing.

To ignore the customer is to commit financial suicide except for monopolistic situations or where an industry has been built up where virtually all suppliers ignore the wants and needs of customers and the customers, through ignorance and inertia, acquiesce to this terrible treatment e.g. financial services like banking, investments and insurance.

Personally I think it’s useful to think about how the customer impacts on the business as marketing strategy. There are certainly strategic issues that don’t directly impact on the customer (e.g. conglomerate diversification to reduce product/market risk) and marketing that is much more tactical than strategic in nature.

But if strategy steps too far away from thoughts about meeting current and future customer needs and wants, the business has a problem.

And marketing where tactics diverge from strategy to chase a quick buck also risk diluting the implementation of an effective strategy.

I wrote the Six Steps Profit Formula because I believe that strategy and marketing are often not joined up. Too often strategy issues are ignored in the rush to “do marketing” but marketing issues and how you can create and capture customer value are ignored in strategy work based around PEST Analysis and the Five Forces Analysis that can be too abstract.

Who Owns The Responsibility For Strategy, Marketing and Marketing Strategy

In my view:

• Strategy belongs to the board of directors and the senior executive management team. Those roles are often split in large companies but in smaller businesses, they are combined. Where split, I’d argue that the executive management develop the strategy and the board review and challenge it.

• Marketing tactics belong to the marketing managers and staff working with the sales management and staff if responsibilities are split.

• Marketing strategy belongs more to the senior executive management team than it does to the marketing department. In strategy workshops it’s essential that the voice of the customer comes through load and clear and that needs to be captured directly from customer and market research and from those people who spend most time listening to and dealing with customers.

It gets messy. If the marketing department’s responsibility is to use effective marketing tactics to implement the marketing strategy developed by senior managers and if things don’t work out as expected, then who’s to blame?

Is it the strategy that is wrong and needs to be changed?

Or is the strategy right but the implementation of it has been badly done, in which case there needs to be an improvement in tactics but the strategy itself remains valid?

This is where the role of the marketing director is important. He’s been the person who was involved in the development of the marketing strategy and has direct responsibility for implementing it through tactics.

How Do You Think Marketing, Strategy And Marketing Strategy Fit Together?

I’m interested to know what you think. Do you see a clear divide between marketing and strategy or do you see some overlap?

I suspect some business schools have modules where there is quite a clear divide. Others may well have significant overlap between their strategy and marketing modules.

What about in real life?

Marketing Bingo is my game for checking that your marketing hasn’t fallen into the trap of being too similar to your competitors.

This is a practical example of applying Yellow Pages Bingo to the Accountants market.

When I wrote this article (originally posted on my Differentiate Your Business blog in February 2011) I looked at the Yellow Pages for accountants in Central Birmingham.

I find accountants are a good example to use because it’s a service used by nearly all small businesses and many struggle to select the right accountant for their needs.

I’ve split it into three sections – description of the accountancy firm, services and offer – of phrases that are regularly repeated.

Description of firm

• For the self employed
• For business and individuals
• Specialists in local businesses
• Small business specialist
• Friendly
• Professional service

Services

• Accounts preparation
• Tax returns /  self assessment tax returns
• VAT
• PAYE
• Corporation tax
• Construction industry scheme
• Payroll
• Book-keeping
• Management accounts
• Business start-ups
• Company formations

Offers

• Free initial consultation
• Sensible fees

I have to admit that in the latest edition of the Yellow Pages, there weren’t as many advertisements from accountants as there have been in the past. Perhaps the recession has forced some to cut back and others believe that the Internet is a more natural place to look for an accountant.

What happens in any market when every supplier looks the same?

The choice comes to either the cheapest or the most convenient.

Neither is a very good way for selecting a service which could have a very big effect on your business success.

This damages the accountancy firms who do a great job of supporting small businesses because their differentiation factors are not being communicated (see How To Differentiate An Accountancy Practice) and even worse, it damages the small businesses which don’t get the essential finance advice they need to grow successfully.

It’s Your Turn To Play Marketing Bingo For Accountants

Take your pick, yellow pages or websites because both bring local accountants together which emphasises the importance of being differentiated.

Then have a look to see if you can see any examples of accountants who do stand out, who have differentiated themselves.

Or can you just see the clichés – “we are a friendly and professional accountancy practice which specialises in small businesses…

Then Take A Look At Your Own Market & Play Marketing Bingo

My purpose of this blog is not to make fun of accountants but to make a serious point about marketing which in many ways is “anti-marketing” (doing the opposite of what you want) in a service you can relate to. Indeed, you may well have struggled with the choice “which accountant should I go to?”

Be brave and take a look at your own website, your own website, yellow pages advertisement, your own brochure and compare it with your competitors.

If you are saying the same things – blah, blah, blah – then you have a problem and you need to fix it by:

• Identifying what makes you special and different; and then
• Communicating it to the market

Management-speak bingo is a fun game employees can play while listening to senior executives give a rallying call to the troops.

They pick ten popular management buzzwords or phrases along with their fellow players and wait for the esteemed leader to call them out.

If one gets a full house – every phrases they’ve selected has been mentioned – then they win.

That may seem silly to you as a small business owner – although I’m sure you’re hoping that your staff don’t play management speak bingo on you – bit what if you’re doing it to yourself in your marketing.

I have a variation on the management-speak bingo game called Marketing Bingo, Yellow Pages bingo or Website bingo, depending on which is your main source of leads who are looking for what you sell.

This time you select the five or ten words or phrases which best describe your business – they will be on your website home page and Yellow Pages advertisement won’t they?

And then you play Bingo by seeing how often they appear on your competitors yellow pages and websites.

In my Marketing bingo game, you’re not looking for the words to be repeated. Just the opposite.

You win if half or more of your keywords are not used by competitors.

That means that your message is different and has a chance of standing out and attracting attention.

But if more than half your keywords are also used by competitors, then your marketing messages merge into one and your customers get confused.

And a confused customer is a reluctant buyer.

Here is an example of Marketing Bingo – Marketing Bingo For Accountants

If your marketing dazzles like a zebra, then potentially you’ve got a big problem.

Let me explain.

On its own, a zebra is a beautiful creature unlike anything else. You can think of it as a stripy horse but smaller.

I took this photo on a safari holiday in Botswana many years ago and I think it makes the point well.

Just like your marketing, a zebra looks good on its own.

But zebras normally hang around in groups or small herds. In fact the collective name for a zebra is a “dazzle” for one very good reason.

When in a group, it’s difficult to see where one zebra ends and another begins.

In fact, it is a challenge to even count up how many zebras are in the photo because of the angles and the way the stripes confuse the eyes.

This trick works very well for the zebras because it helps to protect them from predators like lions. Apart from a powerful kick, the zebra doesn’t have any defence but if a lion can’t single out one animal from the dazzle, it won’t attack.

Not standing out from the crowd is good for zebras but it’s a killer for your business.

Just like zebras tend to congregate together, your customers are looking at your business along with your competitors.

It’s the way old Yellow Pages always worked by bring you and your competitors together and forcing a difficult selection decision. It’s the same with the Internet.

There’s another problem too.

The on-tap power of the Internet to give your customers access to the information they want, when they want it, means traditional outreach marketing – which lets your business be the equivalent of the single zebra standing on its own – is less effective. Potential customers see little value wasting time on things that interrupt them when they are not relevant and when they can go to Google and find everything when they want it.

This puts the emphasis on your business to be different, to look different, and to feel different in some way that matters to the customer.

Or your customer will decide that you and your competitors are much the same.

Which gives you a problem.

Because your customer will decide that the only difference that matters is price and the lowest price wins the customer’s preference.

That’s bad for you, bad for your profit margins and bad for the customer who may actually have special needs which aren’t being catered for – see Is Your Marketing Hitting The Bullseye?

How Your Marketing Becomes Zebra Marketing

It is very easy to fall into the zebra marketing trap.

You look at how your more successful competitors are marketing and you borrow phrases and ideas which you think will appeal to your customers.

In fact, you’re probably right to do so.

There will be some things that really matter and you should cover them in your marketing – see key success factors.

But you don’t want to find yourself playing marketing bingo where a customer will look at five competitors and see the same “you must buy from me” reasons from each of them.

Stop Being A Normal Zebra

You need to find a way to make your marketing stand out. If Seth Godin can have a Purple Cow, I can have  Pink Zebra.

Your marketing needs to emphasise your unique selling point or your key factors of difference if you have more than one. It’s much better that these differences are genuine and not a case of “jazzing up your marketing to look different” when the underlying product or service is the same – see You Want Deep Not Shallow Differentiation. This isn’t a case where you want to “razzle dazzle them” as Billy Flynn in the musical, Chicago would try.

You need to give your business a chance to attract attention and to create preference with buyers. It’s true that not everyone wants a pink zebra but some will if you make sure your differences are important to your target group of customers – see How Important Is Your Difference?

What If You’re Guilty Of Giraffe Marketing?

Did you notice the giraffe in the photograph of the zebras?

You don’t have any difficulty telling a giraffe and a zebra apart – a zebra is like a horse with black and white stripes, a giraffe is a creamy yellow with brown spots… oh yes and it has a very long neck and very long legs.

A giraffe shouldn’t have any trouble standing out from the crowd of zebras.

But this one does.

Take another look. It seems to be hiding, putting itself in the background and making itself look small.

That can happen with a business and its marketing too.

You can have genuine differences that existing customers recognise and value. They can be the reasons why repeat customers keep coming back to buy again and again (what I call order winners).

But what if your marketing doesn’t recognise these vital factors and explain them to the other people you want as customers?

What if you don’t recognise what it is that does make your business unique and special?

“It can’t happen” you might be thinking.

But it does.

We grow used to things and accept them as normal.

It’s just the way things are.

So you hide rather than shout about the things that will make your business stand out from the crowd.

It’s an important reason why it is so useful to work with someone from the outside who looks at things with fresh eyes and can be amazed by what you really do for your customers and how they benefit.

Just like you want your customers to be.

Bullseye marketing is a powerful analogy for niche marketing and differentiating your business.

Imagine You Are A Buyer

I’d like you to put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer looking for what you sell.

You have some idea of what you want or need so you go out looking.

You see something but it doesn’t measure up – it’s in the outer ring of our buying bullseye target. You’d have to have a desperate and urgent need to make do with that product.

Then you see another offer.

It’s a bit better but it’s still not close enough to the centre to make you reach for your credit card.

And then you see another offer which has some things you want but not others or it has a deal-breaker – something you want to avoid so again you don’t buy.

As you look at options, you clarify your thoughts on what you really want – what represents a bullseye – because you learn about what’s available (including features, advantages and benefits you’d never thought of previously) and what you need and like.

Have You Found The Bullseye When Buying?

Sometimes you find what you’re looking for.

Sometimes you find something that’s good enough and you buy that because the extra value you get from a bullseye purchase isn’t enough to compensate you for the extra time and effort you need to hit the bullseye.

Other times you find a collection of products and services which are all stuck in the outer-rings. None are what you are looking for so you have to decide to:

• Seriously compromise what you want and buy the best of a bad bunch (often a short-cut to dissatisfaction and frustration);
  .
• Delay your purchase while you either keep looking or hope that the ideal product appears; or
  .
• Find another way to solve the underlying problem.

Me-too, generic products are often in the outer-rings of the buyers’ bullseye and that’s why they are vulnerable to a business who focuses on a particular niche.

Sure, the product will miss the target for many people but for some it will either hit the bullseye or the inner-ring and be a convincing “good enough” to persuade you that it makes sense to buy rather than delay.

Are You Using Bullseye Marketing In Your Business?

How is your marketing doing?

Is it attracting customers who are a natural fit for your business and what you offer? Does your product or service match their bullseye?

And are your identifying and emphasising what makes you a bullseye fit in your marketing in a way that is compelling? Does your marketing promote the few factors that make your product uniquely meet their needs?

Your marketing can fail if:

• You have the perfect product and in theory it hits the bullseye but your marketing doesn’t show that it’s perfect for your target customers.

• Your product doesn’t hit the bullseye of (m)any potential customers.

Solving the first is a marketing problem, solving the second is a product or process innovation problem. To use an analogy, you can put lipstick on a pig but it’s still a pig.

Bullseye Marketing Is A Powerful Analogy

The bullseye marketing target is a powerful analogy that helps to explain why some people buy and why some don’t.

Your task is to make sure that your offer reaches those who it will appeal to. You do that by targeting a niche and using bullseye marketing.

In my business coaching, I often talk to my clients about the importance of each of the 5 M’s of Marketing.

This is all about getting your ducks all lined up in a row and it’s very difficult to succeed, even if one of them is out of kilter.

What Are The 5 M’s Of Marketing?

The 5 M’s of Marketing are:

1. The Market chosen to target.
2. The Marketing Message used to explain the offer
3. The Marketing Media used to carry the message to potential customers in the target market.
4. The Measurement of marketing activities which allows you to test your ideas and to continually improve what you do.
5. Your Marketing Mindset is the way you approach the activities including how consistent you are in what you say and do.

Let’s take a closer look at these Five M’s. [continue reading…]

The full title of this book by Hugh Davidson is

Offensive Marketing: Or How to Make Your Competitors Followers

In my review posted on Amazon.co.uk, I gave it 5 Stars. This means it is Excellent.

Here is my review.

The first great marketing book I read

Back in the mid 1980s, this was the first great marketing book I ever read and I must have read it half a dozen times in total. I’ve also bought the two updates of the book.

This is the book that taught me the POISE acronym for marketing: [continue reading…]