Free Gift Inside!!: Forget the Customer. Develop Marketease - Softcover

Brown, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841125466 ISBN 13: 9781841125466

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, 2003

Synopsis

Free Gift Inside! offers an alternative solution to the difficulty of selling to an already sated and sophisticated consumer.
* Based on the article "Torment Your Customers (They'll Love It" which Harvard Busines Review chose as one of 2002's Six Breakthrough Ideas
* A new concept that turns marketing on its head and offers a more effective answer to customer relationship management and permission marketing

About this title

About the Author

Although his name is unfamiliar to most managers, Stephen Brown is the Antichrist of marketing academia. He is disdainful of customer-centric approaches to marketing and, as a consequence, has clashed publicly with numerous luminaries. Professor of Marketing Research at the University of Ulster, Stephen has held visiting positions at Northwestern University, the University of California and the University of Utah, among others. He has written or co-edited 13 books, including Marketing Apocalypse, Postmodern Marketing and Romancing the Market. His papers have been published in Harvard Business Review, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Advertising, Business Horizons and many more, winning various awards along the way. Additional information is available on his website, www.sfxbrown.com

From the Back Cover

Heretical" – Harvard Business Review

"The finest writer in our field today" – Journal of Marketing

"Amusing and brilliant" – Philip Kotler in HBR

Found it yet? Still looking, flicking, shaking? Wondering whether someone snaffled the free gift before you got here? Annoying, isn’t it? Unsettling almost. Irritating to the point of infuriation, when you come to think about it.

You know, just because a book’s called Free Gift Inside!! doesn’t mean that it contains one. Whatever gave you that idea? What are you expecting to find, in any event? In addition to the free gift, that is. Another book about customer centricity? Yawn. A hymn to corporate social responsibility? Ho-hum. Lots of flow charts, bullet points, no-nonsense chapter summaries, and you-must-do-this-right-now-or-else recommendations? B-o-r-i-n-g. If that’s what you want, then the copy-cat publications of the customer-led crew are right down the aisle. You’re welcome to them.

However, if you really want to know the secret of marketing success. If you’re sick and tired of management by boxes and arrows. If you’re happy to grapple with polysyllables, can live without one word sentences, and have had it up to here with excess exclamation points, then this is the book for you. Really!!!

Free Gift Inside!! won’t transform your company or make you rich. But then none of the others will either, despite their extravagant claims to the contrary. With Free Gift Inside!!, however, you’re absolutely, categorically, unconditionally guaranteed one thing for certain. An absolute, categorical, unconditional guarantee.

From the Inside Flap

Customers? Customers?? Customers??? Don’t talk to me about customers! I’ve had it up to here with customers. Haven’t you?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against customers. Some of my best friends are customers. Customers are a good thing, by and large, provided they’re kept well downwind. But there is a limit. They’re starting to get uppity. They’re beginning to think that they know best. I ask you. Who are these people?

Of course, we only have ourselves to blame, since marketers have been chanting the mantra of customer orientation for forty-odd years. It’s time for a change. It’s time to stop kow-towing. It’s time to forget about customer focus. It’s time to tantalize, tease and torment them, to play hard to get. It’s time, in short, for Stephen Brown’s Free Gift Inside!!

Marketing, he demonstrates, is not about customer-orientation. It is about selling stuff. It is about selling stuff to today's sated, sophisticated, super-skeptical consumers, who have an infinite number of near-identical offerings to choose from.

The aim is to make choosy consumers choose yours.

Edition details

• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1841125466
• ISBN 13: 9781841125466
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304