Jump Start Your Marketing Brain. Doug Hall

      Like a business anthropologist, Doug Hall has sifted through mounds of academic research and real-world marketplace data so you don’t have to. He’s dug deep to quantify what really matters—what really works in today’s marketplace.

      Jump Start Your MARKETING Brain directly challenges conventional marketing wisdom. It backs up its challenges with hard data. Huge chunks of the book are counterintuitive. And at the end of the day, you might think that this is just a trick to get your attention, but it’s not. The counterintuitive insights are proven principles that you need to understand if you want to make a real difference for your business.

       In today’s world, it’s time for a revolution in how we market and sell every branded product and service. It’s time to start fresh. It’s time to lay the policies and principles of failure aside. It’s time to embrace a more scientific, data-driven approach where we “play with the odds” instead of “praying for long shots.”

      Jump Start Your MARKETING Brain is a blueprint for how I see marketing in the future and how I’ve been seeing it for the last few years. It’s the marketing that made me successful. It’s a back-to-basics marketing focused on what really matters. It’s about connecting customers and consumers with meaningful brands, products, and services in order to get them to give us their hard-earned dollars, yen, pounds, pesos, and euros in return.

      The data mining, statistical analysis and insight that Jump Start Your MARKETING Brain delivers are impressive. But the monumental aspect of the book is how the Scientific Advice has been translated into Practical Ideas, the kind of actionable, practical ideas that have made the Eureka! Ranch legendary in the corporate world.

      Never in business history has there been a greater need for revolution in how we approach sales and marketing. I’ve been talking about it now for years and practiced it for many more years when I worked for the Coca-Cola Company. Now is the time for a more disciplined, factual, and measured approach. The discipline starts with a fundamental focus on meaningfully serving the real needs of our customers and our consumers. The time for creative geniuses comes after that. You have to have a strategy and a destination before you can start applying creativity to that strategy and destination.

      Jump Start Your MARKETING Brain is a book that, beyond any doubts, confirms what I have long believed: Marketing-centered thinking is and should be the engine of growth for your entire company, not just for your brands. Marketing thinking is too important to keep hidden in the sales and marketing department. Marketing is the fundamental promise of your organization. It is the glue that guides the direction and inter-relationships between all departments from finance to manufacturing to every other silo that you have on your organizational chart.

      When I wrote The End of Marketing as We Know It, people wrote me and said, “Oh, wow! Now I get it. I understand what marketing is, and now I want to start practicing it in a more scientific way.” The two-page format of Jump Start Your MARKETING Brain screams at you to take action—to get up, get out, and do something to make a clear difference for your company; a measurable difference for your company. The time for excuses is over. The time for action is now, and I’m sure that after reading Jump Start Your MARKETING Brain, many people will write to Hall as they wrote to me, and they’ll say, “Now I get it, and I’m going to get it done.”

Sergio Zyman CEO, Zyman Marketing Former Chief Marketing Officer The Coca-Cola Company

Sergio Zyman’s books include: The End of Marketing as We Know It The End of Advertising as We Know It Renovate Before You Innovate: Why Doing the New Thing Might Not Be the Right Thing

INTRODUCTION

       Learning is not compulsory … neither is survival.

      

W. Edwards Deming

      Wake up, Marketers!

      It’s time for a revolution.

      Most marketing programs are WORTHLESS!

       AND if something doesn’t change, most marketing people will soon become cost-savings opportunities!

      By most marketing programs, I mean 75 to 95 percent. That’s the numeric estimate of the failure rate of marketing initiatives according to academic researchers, it’s the forecast based on interviews with CEOs, and it’s the conclusion of my own independent research on more than 10,000 ideas.

      It’s time for a revolution in marketing. It’s time for marketing managers and senior managers at companies small and large to change their approach.

      The world of sales and marketing faces a crisis of confidence. Senior management of large corporations, as well as many who finance small and medium-sized businesses, has lost faith in the abilities of sales and marketing to grow top-line sales. Instead, management is turning to the more disciplined purchasing, production, and manufacturing groups as they are reliably delivering lower costs and finding new ways to improve bottom-line profits.

      The only way we are going to change this negative momentum—and yes, I’m a ZEALOT for the HONORABLE CRAFTS of SALES & MARKETING—is by changing our THINKING SYSTEMS. It’s through changing our systems of thinking that we can achieve meaningful, measurable top-line growth and rightfully restore the confidence of senior management and those who finance small and mediumsized enterprises.

      Even the biggest of the big need to change their approach. A study by Emergence in 2003 found that of twenty-two advertisers in the “$100 million advertising spending club,” only six had marketing slogans recognized by more than 10 percent of the adult population! And I thought that “stupid” marketing ended with the thankful death of the “dot-con” marketers at the turn of the century. Apparently not.

      Since this book was first published, thousands of executives from Singapore to New York to London have taken the Marketing Brain IQ Test on the previous pages. The results have been EMBARRASSING!

      When given the multiple-choice test, marketing HOT SHOTS get an average of 30 percent correct. Heck, given that there are only two options for most of the questions, flipping a coin should get them a 50 percent success rate. Marketing Managers laugh when they get basic questions wrong. I cry.

      Tom Peters is a kindred spirit. He was kind enough to write the foreword to the first book in the Jump Start series, Jump Start Your BUSINESS Brain. An e-mail from him, written from his New Delhi hotel room in the fall of 2004, gave me a wake-up call. Here’s an excerpt:

      Tom Peters’s Re-Imagine Manifesto

       They say I’m extreme.

       I say I’m a realist.

       They say “We need an Initiative.”

       I say “We need a Dream, and Dreamers.

       They say “We can’t handle this much change.”

       I say “Your job and career are in jeopardy; what other options do you have?”

       They say “Take a deep breath. Be calm.”

       I say “Tell it to Wal-Mart. Tell it to China. Tell it to India.

       Tell it to Dell. Tell it to Microsoft.”

       They say, “Sure we need ‘Change.’”