Ignorer la navigation
Beyond the Brand
Book

Beyond the Brand

Why Engaging the Right Customers is Essential to Winning in Business

Kaplan Publishing, 2004 plus...


Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative

Recommendation

Most marketing books discuss how marketers should relate to their customers. Some use a formal, objective approach to penetrate the wall that separates the service or product provider from the consumer. This book promotes a very different, softer "anthro-journalistic" tactic: learning consumers' desires by hearing their stories and reflecting those wishes in the product's design. This leads to giving the product its own stories to "tell" potential customers, in a mutual social network based on shared meaning. The idea borrows the power of the oral tradition from anthropology and applies it to word-of-mouth product promotion. Author John Winsor stresses listening and storytelling as ways for trained marketers to understand customers and sell to them. Although his treatise dips occasionally into slightly airy New Age sensibilities, Winsor's information on the flaws of focus groups and the importance of heartfelt, meaningful customer feedback tells a story of its own. Of course, applying a cultural anthropologist's perspective to marketing will work better for some businesses than others. getAbstract.com thinks this book will intrigue and possibly challenge marketers who want to break out of branding buzz and explore new ideas.

Take-Aways

  • Telling stories is a powerful way to connect with customers and gain insights.
  • Focus group research is often flawed because it is too rigid and uses the same people repeatedly.
  • Instead, talk to your customers. This will give you the foundation for a "bottom up approach," which can provide your firm with powerful insights and product concepts.

About the Author

In 1998 John Winsor started Radar Communications, a marketing consultancy using organic, bottom-up anthro-journalistic tools. In 1986, he founded Sports & Fitness Publishing, which he sold to Condé Nast and Emap in 1998.


More on this topic

By the same author

6
Book
8
Book

    Learners who read this summary also read

    Related Channels