Marketing: Whether you’re an entrepreneurial start-up or a multimillion-dollar conglomerate, it’s the pivotal base of your business success. And while most of us have been exposed to it since we were born, successful marketing remains a major challenge for business. Simply put, marketing is the process of communicating the value of your product or service in order to increase sales for your company. Without marketing, your message will not reach customers.
Marketing is far from simple however. Just the types of marketing can be overwhelming to the uninitiated. Relationship, business, industrial and societal marketing top the long list that has in recent years been dominated by buzzwords like “branding” and “e-marketing.” It might seem like marketing requires large amounts of time and help from experts to work.
“The Marketing Minute: A Year’s Worth of Daily Marketing Ideas Designed to Instigate and Inspire,” by Allen Howie, can help surmount those needed Herculean efforts and make it seem like great creative fun. Whether you are a novice or so experienced you can write marketing plans in your sleep, this is a must-read gem of a book that highlights and clarifies with insight and intelligence.
Howie is president and creative director of Ideology Marketing + Design, which he founded in 1997 in Southern Indiana. With more than 30 years in marketing and advertising, he has led his organization to national award-winning prominence.
As his first book, “The Marketing Minute” hits the bull’s eye in making us consider marketing as a daily function of business. Howie introduces the book as a “sort of ‘devotional’ for the reader looking for some daily marketing inspiration, or as a reference for someone who needs to focus on a specific area.”
The book is divided into 13 four-week sections for a total of 52 weeks of fresh daily marketing ideas. Careful grouping in this way allows them to build upon one another, overflowing into a rich collection of insights that build enthusiasm while educating. In a “noisy marketplace,” Howie’s book sounds a siren’s call that can enable businesses to get their message heard.
The reader is further engaged with “Action” questions and suggestions and space on each page for the reader to make notes about how to apply a particular idea to their situation. Day One, under the heading of Branding, illustrates:
“Would you like to know how well your own people understand your brand? Try this test. Without preparing anyone ahead of time, have all of the key people in your organization (including yourself) write down a single sentence describing what makes you different. Collect them all and compare notes.”
Howie asks readers to determine what three things would strengthen employees’ concept of your brand.
Other section topics include: Execute (get the details right to get your message heard); Innovate (anticipate customer needs); and Change Channels (identify the right media for your message). The ideas are timely, particularly those dealing with changing technology. They range from learning how to place your morning doughnut order on line to determining CPL (cost per lead) advertising on websites.
The author is an adept storyteller as well as an expert on successful marketing history. His examples are appropriately and entertainingly broad brush, ranging from Walt Disney to the HBO series “True Blood.” Whether marketing to a multinational client like Apple or Google or to the local health club down the street, Howie’s ability to help you decipher the marketing code is the focus.
For something that we have been experiencing all of our lives, many of us — and our organizations — handle marketing poorly. “The Marketing Minute” shows how using a small amount of time can have an enormous impact. Howie’s book stands as necessary reading if you want to identify and implement ideas that can make marketing both successful and exciting. Read it today — don’t waste another marketing minute.