Dear Marketer,
If you're anything like
me you appreciate good books.
Because for all the money spent on seminars and workshops, which
I'm a big proponent of, dollar for dollar it's hard to beat the
value of a good book. A good book can, literally, be worth its
weight (and more) in gold.
Over the years I've been
fortunate to have had a number of good books recommended to me by
mentors, colleagues, friends and acquaintances. Those
recommendations and my own searches have led me to others. So in this
section I'll list a few of these books and tell you a little
bit about them.
I'm just getting started
on this section, so please check back as, time permitting, I
plan to update it
regularly. And if
you have a book recommendation for me please email that to me at
enicastro@positiveresponse.com with a
subject line of Books, along with a line or two about why you're
recommending it.
And now, the books.
Sincerely,
Ernest Nicastro
Recommended Reading
Method Marketing: How to Make a Fortune by
Getting Inside the Heads of Your Customers, by Denny
Hatch - Method acting, formulated by Konstantin
Stanislavsky, is a style of acting. Adherents of method
acting (Dustin Hoffman, Robert DeNiro, the late Marlon Brando) subscribe
to the premise that only by thoroughly understanding how the
human mind works - for example, what causes emotions such as
fear, greed, guilt and anger - can an actor get inside the head
of a character and convincingly become that person.
To quote Hatch from page seven of his book: "Same
thing in marketing. You cannot write copy or make a live sales
pitch without getting inside the head of the person to whom you
are communicating and becoming that person." Thus the term
coined by Hatch (Hatch's wife, actually): method marketing.
In this book Hatch profiles eight accomplished marketers who
owe much of their success to their method marketing skills.
Included in this group are such well known names as David Oreck
and J. Peterman along with several you've probably never heard
of. In addition, the text features word-for-word reproductions of
many of the sales letters these eight marketers used to launch
and grow their businesses. These letters alone are worth the
price of the book.
Why business people speak like idiots,
by Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway & Jon Warshawsky - A
brief (176 pages), highly readable book in which the authors take
to task people and companies that, well, speak like idiots.
Better yet, they show you how to avoid falling into that same
trap yourself.
You're familiar with idiotspeak. You read
and hear it a lot. An example of idiotspeak is the really smart
guy who came up with the term, Human Capital Management
because he wanted to sound really smart and
important...and the straightforward Human Resource Management or
Workforce Management didn't sound smart and
important enough for him. Instead, he originated a phrase with
overtones of slavery and chattel to it.
Other examples of idiotspeak given by the authors
are: leading edge, bleeding edge, change agent, best of breed,
paradigm shift, results-driven and frictionless.
Here's another idiotspeak example cited in the book. It's from
the Annual Report of a former high-flying company that was all
about leading edge and paradigm shift:
"We have robust networks of strategic assets that
we own or have contractual access to, which gives us greater
flexibility and speed to reliably deliver widespread logistical
solutions."
Well I don't know about paradigm shifts but the
honchos who approved this messaging have come to be known as
shifty people who gave thousands of loyal employees the
shaft. Yep, that's right. I'm talking about the good
ol' boys at Enron.
All of the authors work or worked at Deloitte
Consulting and were instrumental in the development of that
company's
Bullfighter software (available for free), a program that can
help you eliminate idiotspeak and jargon from your
documents and presentations. Lots of valuable tips for you in
this book. My only complaint is they didn't include an index.
More coming soon!
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