Marketing Without Advertising: Easy Ways to Build a Business Your Customers Will Love & Recommend

by Michael Phillips and Salli Rasberry

Book Overview

"Marketing Without Advertising" shows business owners how to concentrate on turning their business into a high-quality organization that customers, employees and other businesspeople will trust,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1413306322
• ISBN13: 9781413306323
• Release Date: June 2008
• Publisher: NOLO
• Length: 398 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Practical - Priceless

What a great book - Practical advice that really makes sense. I'm putting these fundamentals into action already, and feel great about it. Awesome info.

Good resource

I think that this is a complete guideline of non-traditional approaches to moving any company or product into more of a felt part of the community, rather than an ideal merely thrust into the memory. Good POV.

Great Book, A Small Business Probably Should Not Advertise

Having been involved with many small businesses for many years I picked up this book with some skepticism. Then I turned to the first chapter. It's called Advertising: The Last Choice in Marketing. And it was dead on right -- To be sure there is a place for advertising, Pepsi up against Coke has no choice (which isn't to say that they do it well). They have no choice because they can't do the kinds of things this book talks about. They can't produce a new product -- Remember New Coke? In any case, this book isn't about Coke, it's about marketing a small business or service. That means you need to market locally. Effectively you can't advertise. I was recently involved in promoting a play for a local community theater. We had posters all over town, both supermarkets, half the business windows on main street, three articles in our local paper plus announcements every issue in their Community Calendar, there was a twenty minute interview program on the local radio station -- all the kinds of things this book talks about. The play was a great success, both performances sold out, standing ovations for the performers. Afterwards a great number of people came up and said, "I heard you put on a play, I didn't know anything about it, tell me about it when you do another." What possible good would advertising do? If I had run a few thousand dollars of advertising do you think any of these people would have noticed? If they didn't read the articles, see the calendar or tune in the radio. What else could I have done? Marketing now is a different matter. We marketed, it worked. We paid very little money out. Did we do everything the book said? No. We didn't do internet for instance. This was a local play to a local audience in the back room of a local restaurant. The book talks about the internet. And yes, I have to agree the internet is excellent for some kinds of marketing, not for every situation. A small business with a specialty product for which you couldn't possibly find enough customers in a local community couldn't do better than the net. Example -- crystal radio kit. You might could sell one in our little town. You could make a business of selling them world wide. Great book. If you're just starting out or need to improve marketing the ideas expressed here can be agreat help.

A "Must-Own" for the small business owner

The authors of this book cut right to the chase. This isn't just a book about marketing. They tell you what common mistakes people make when running a small business and how to fix them.I attended a presentation by Terry Matthews, the CEO of March Networks and one of the wealthiest men in Canada. It was interesting to hear him describe many of the same techniques outlined in this book and how he used them in the 70's to make his fortune manufacturing telephone equipment.The book is written in such a way that it only takes a few hours to read, but the concepts stay with you for a long time.

Excellent business advice

This book is ostensibly about marketing, but much of the information is of general relevance to running your own business. I received my MBA from an Ivy school, and I have to admit that a substantial portion of the material in the book was stuff that we never covered in marketing classes. Overall, a very useful book about starting and operating your own small business. I highly recommend it.