Bought this primarily on the strength of the cover which is perhaps not the best way to choose a book! (the cover is the back end of a Zebra). The Zebra principle is that when you see a herd of Zebra running its the one at the front you see and all the rest merge into each other. However expected this book to be full of good advice for small businesses as well as practical ideas to go with the theory, sadly I was disappointed. This volume is about (a) theory and (b) assessing what you are doing is working however if you are looking for a volume which says "have you tried XYZ?" then this is not the book for you. Robert Craven states that 20% of your customers provide 80% of your revenue as a rough guide so look at your high spending customers how can you get more like this? however this is where it is left some advice on where to look and what to do would not come amiss. The most useful part of this book in my opinion was the link to the www.bright-marketing.com which I found up to date and quite useful - the password for the free articles and some free books is in this volume so could be worth buying to get the password. The second area which I found useful was page 158 (so took a bit of getting to) is the Bright Marketing Manifesto - this is 23 points about how to focus your marketing (these are not in order)
(1)Marketing is not a battle of the product; marketing is a battle for the mind of the consumer - ie to a certain extent what you are actually selling is irrelevant but you have to make the customer believe they want or need it.
(2) Don't compete on price! - I personally hear this everywhere and it is tempting to be the cheapest however there are two problems with this (a) you'll go broke (b) there is always a bigger company with deeper pockets willing to go lower - find something else to compete on.
ISBN-9781 85458 562 2
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