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The must-read summary of John Jantsch's book:'The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself'.This complete summary of the ideas from John Jantsch's book'The Referral Engine'shows that everyone loves getting referrals from happy customers but few businesses have systems in place to facilitate this happening more often. In his book, the author states that it's time to craft a strategy which will compel your customers and partners to voluntarily and actively participate in your marketing by providing referrals. Satisfied customers who offer referrals will provide the elements which will generate positive buzz around your products and services others will pick up on. This summary explains how to design a referral engine in order to create a pool of brand supporters and expand your business.Added-value of this summary:• Save time• Understand key concepts• Expand your knowledgeTo learn more, read'The Referral Engine'and discover the key to generating referrals and prospering.

World of Warcrafters, LARPers, Settlers of Catan? Weird. Beliebers, Swifties, Directioners? Weirder. Paleos, vegans, carb loaders, ovolactovegetarians? Pretty weird. Mets fans, Yankees fans, Bears fans? Definitely weird. Face it. We're all weird. So why are companies still trying to build products for the masses? Why are we still acting like the masses even exist? Weird is the new normal. And only companies that figure that out have any chance of survival. This book shows you how.

In perhaps the most creative and authoritative book on sensory branding ever written, international business legend Martin Lindstrom reveals what the world's most successful branding companies do differently -- integrating touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound -- with startling and measurable results. Based on the largest study ever conducted on how our five senses affect the creation of brands, BRAND sense explains Martin Lindstrom's innovative six-step program for bringing brand building into the twenty-first century. The study, covering over a dozen countries worldwide, was conducted exclusively for this book by Millward Brown, one of the largest business research institutions in the world. Drawing on countless examples of both product creation and retail experience, Lindstrom shows how to establish a marketing approach that appeals to all the senses, not simply the conventional reliance on sight and sound. Research shows that a full 75 percent of our emotions are in fact generated by what we smell, and the author explains how to capitalize on that insight. Included are innovative tools for evaluating a brand's place on the sensory scale, analyzing its future sensory potential, and enhancing its appeal to reach the broadest base of consumers. Lindstrom lists the top twenty brands for the future based on their sensory awareness. (The top three? Singapore Airlines, Apple, and Disney.) Among the book's many fascinating factual highlights are the following: That gratifying new-car smell that accompanies the purchase of a new car is actually a factory-installed aerosol can containing'new-car'aroma. Kellogg's trademarked crunchy sound and feel of eating cornflakes was created in sound labs and patented in the same way that the company owns its recipe and logo. Singapore Airlines has patented a scent that is part of every female flight attendant's perfume, as well as blended into the hot towels served before takeoff, and which generally permeates their entire fleet of airplanes. Starbucks'sensory uniqueness is far less strongly associated with the smell and taste of coffee than with the interior design of its cafés and its green and white logo. Hailed as the'World's Brand Futurist'by the BBC, Martin Lindstrom is one of the world's top entrepreneurial visionaries, who has changed the face of global marketing with twenty years of hands-on experience as an advertising CEO and adviser to Fortune 500 companies. Firmly steeped in scientific evidence and featuring sensory secrets of the most successful brand names, BRAND sense reveals how to transform marketing strategies into positive business results that no brand builder can afford to ignore.

As industries turn increasingly hostile, it is clear that strong brand-building skills are needed to survive and prosper. In David Aaker's pathbreaking book, Managing Brand Equity, managers discovered the value of a brand as a strategic asset and a company's primary source of competitive advantage. Now, in this compelling new work, Aaker uses real brand-building cases from Saturn, General Electric, Kodak, Healthy Choice, McDonald's, and others to demonstrate how strong brands have been created and managed.A common pitfall of brand strategists is to focus on brand attributes. Aaker shows how to break out of the box by considering emotional and self-expressive benefits and by introducing the brand-as-person, brand-as-organization, and brand-as-symbol perspectives. The twin concepts of brand identity (the brand image that brand strategists aspire to create or maintain) and brand position (that part of the brand identity that is to be actively communicated) play a key role in managing the'out-of-the-box'brand.A second pitfall is to ignore the fact that individual brands are part of a larger system consisting of many intertwined and overlapping brands and subbrands. Aaker shows how to manage the'brand system'to achieve clarity and synergy, to adapt to a changing environment, and to leverage brand assets into new markets and products.Aaker also addresses practical management issues, introducing a set of brand equity measures, termed the brand equity ten, to help those who measure and track brand equity across products and markets. He presents and analyzes brand-nurturing organizational forms that are responsive to the challenges of coordinated brands across markets, products, roles, and contexts. Potentially destructive organizational pressures to change a brand's identity and position are also discussed.As executives in a wide range of industries seek to prevent their products and services from becoming commodities, they are recommitting themselves to brands as a foundation of business strategy. This new work will be essential reading for the battle-ready.

What happens when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand in our culture go away and everything becomes available to everyone?'The Long Tail'is a powerful new force in our economy: the rise of the niche. As the cost of reaching consumers drops dramatically, our markets are shifting from a one-size-fits-all model of mass appeal to one of unlimited variety for unique tastes. From supermarket shelves to advertising agencies, the ability to offer vast choice is changing everything, and causing us to rethink where our markets lie and how to get to them. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it, from DVDs at Netflix to songs on iTunes to advertising on Google. However, this is not just a virtue of online marketplaces; it is an example of an entirely new economic model for business, one that is just beginning to show its power. After a century of obsessing over the few products at the head of the demand curve, the new economics of distribution allow us to turn our focus to the many more products in the tail, which collectively can create a new market as big as the one we already know.The Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance. New efficiencies in distribution, manufacturing, and marketing are essentially resetting the definition of what's commercially viable across the board. If the 20th century was about hits, the 21st will be equally about niches.

In this highly informative and entertaining book, the founder of the vibrant new field of evolutionary consumption illuminates the relevance of our biological heritage to our daily lives as consumers. While culture is important, the author shows that innate evolutionary forces deeply influence the foods we eat, the gifts we offer, the cosmetics and clothing styles we choose to make ourselves more attractive to potential mates, and even the cultural products that stimulate our imaginations (such as art, music, and religion). The book demonstrates that most acts of consumption can be mapped onto four key Darwinian drives-namely, survival (we prefer foods high in calories); reproduction (we use products as sexual signals); kin selection (we naturally exchange gifts with family members); and reciprocal altruism (we enjoy offering gifts to close friends). The author further highlights the analogous behaviors that exist between human consumers and a wide range of animals.For anyone interested in the biological basis of human behavior or simply in what makes consumers tick-marketing professionals, advertisers, psychology mavens, and consumers themselves-this is a fascinating read.

A Fresh and Important New Way to Understand Why We BuyWhy did the RAZR ultimately ruin Motorola? Why does Wal-Mart dominate rural and suburban areas but falter in large cities? Why did Starbucks stumble just when it seemed unstoppable?The answer lies in the ever-present tension between fidelity (the quality of a consumer's experience) and convenience (the ease of getting and paying for a product). In Trade-Off, Kevin Maney shows how these conflicting forces determine the success, or failure, of new products and services in the marketplace. He shows that almost every decision we make as consumers involves a trade-off between fidelity and convenience–between the products we love and the products we need. Rock stars sell out concerts because the experience is high in fidelity-–it can't be replicated in any other way, and because of that, we are willing to suffer inconvenience for the experience. In contrast, a downloaded MP3 of a song is low in fidelity, but consumers buy music online because it's superconvenient. Products that are at one extreme or the other–those that are high in fidelity or high in convenience–-tend to be successful. The things that fall into the middle-–products or services that have moderate fidelity and convenience-–fail to win an enthusiastic audience. Using examples from Amazon and Disney to People Express and the invention of the ATM, Maney demonstrates that the most successful companies skew their offerings to either one extreme or the other-–fidelity or convenience-–in shaping products and building brands.

If the consumer economy had a sex, it would be female.If the business world had a sex, it would be male. And therein lies the pickle.Women are the engine of the global economy, driving 80 percent of consumer spending in the United States alone. They hold the purse strings, and when they've got a tight grip on them as they do now, companies must be shrewder than ever to win them over. Just when executives have mastered becoming technology literate, they find there's another skill they need: becoming female literate. This isn't always easy. Gender is the most powerful determinant of how a person views the world and everything in it. It's stronger than age, income, or race. While there are mountains of research done every year segmenting consumers and analyzing why they buy, more often than not it doesn't factor in the one piece of information that trumps them all: the sex of the buyer. It's stunning how many companies overlook the psychology of gender when we all know that men and women look at the world so differently.Bridget Brennan's Why She Buys shows decision makers how to bridge this divide and capture the business of the world's most powerful consumers just when they need it most.• No Matter Where You Live, Women Are a Foreign Country: You'll discover the value in studying women with the same intensity that you would a foreign market. Women grow up within a culture of their own gender, which is often invisible to men. Brennan dissects this female culture and explains the important brain differencesbetween men and women that may cause your female customers to notice things about your products, marketing campaigns, or sales environment that you might have overlooked.• The High Fives: There are five major trends driving the global female population that are key to determining their wants and needs. These global shifts are just beginning to be tapped by businesses, and learning about them can provide you with an invaluable blueprint for long-range planning. • The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Find out how the best and brightest companies have cracked the female code, and hear horror stories about those that haven't. Through instructive case studies and interviews, Why She Buys provides practical, field-proven techniques that you can apply to your business immediately, from giants like Procter & Gamble and Toyota to upstarts like Method home-care products and lululemon athletica apparel. At a time when every company is looking for a competitive advantage, Bridget Brennan offers a new and effective lens for capturing market share.

Why should I do business with you… and not your competitor?Whether you are a retailer, manufacturer, distributor, or service provider – if you cannot answer this question, you are surely losing customers, clients and market share. This eye-opening book reveals how identifying your competitive advantages and trumpeting them to the marketplace is the most surefire way to close deals, retain clients, and stay miles ahead of the competition.The five fatal flaws of most companies:? They don't have a competitive advantage but think they do? They have a competitive advantage but don't know what it is—so they lower prices instead? They know what their competitive advantage is but neglect to tell clients about it? They mistake “strengths” for competitive advantages? They don't concentrate on competitive advantages when making strategic and operational decisionsThe good news is that you can overcome these costly mistakes – by identifying your competitive advantages and creating new ones. Consultant, public speaker, and competitive advantage expert Jaynie Smith will show you how scores of small and large companies substantially increased their sales by focusing on their competitive advantages. When advising a CEO frustrated by his salespeople's inability to close deals, Smith discovered that his company stayed on schedule 95 percent of the time – an achievement no one else in his industry could claim. By touting this and other competitive advantages to customers, closing rates increased by 30 percent—and so did company revenues.Jack Welch has said, “If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete.” This straight-to-the-point book is filled with insightful stories and specific steps on how to pinpoint your competitive advantages, develop new ones, and get the message out about them. “The biggest marketing flaw in most companies is their failure to fully reap the benefits of their competitive advantages. Either they think they have a competitive advantage but don't. Or they have one and don't realize it. Or they know they have a strong competitive advantage but fail to promote it adequately to their customers and prospects.“In my research with middle-market companies, I found only two CEOs out of 1,000 who could clearly name their companies'competitive advantages. The other 99.8 percent could offer only vague, imprecise generalities. These same CEOs often rely on outside consultants to guide strategic-planning sessions. Yet, in my experience, very few consultants – even seasoned ones – give competitive advantage evaluation more than a superficial glance….“Ignoring your competitive advantages can be an expensive and even fatal mistake. Because no matter the size of your company or the kind of business you are in, your competitive advantages should be the foundation of all your strategic and operational decisions. They're the reasons customers choose to buy from you instead of the other guy.” – From Creating Competitive Advantage

This is a powerful new approach to marketing that will multiply the impact of every dollar invested. Comprehensive research by Doug Hall details marketing initiatives that will deliver sustained success. What makes this book's teaching more reliable and reproducible than others is its foundation on hard data reflecting customer, industrial, and business-to-business marketing, not'guru opinions.'After reading Jump Start Your Marketing Brain, readers will know how to more effectively and efficiently market and sell their brand, their services, their products, and even themselves!