Tips and Traps for Marketing Your Business

by Scott W. Cooper, Birk P. Cooper, Fritz P. Grutzner, et al.

Win new customers--and keep them coming back

Whether you run a billion-dollar company or a mom-and-pop small business, you have to know your customers and know what they want. Written by three marketing experts, Tips & Traps for Marketing Your Business is filled with marketing best practices that show you how to win over new customers and make existing customers more profitable. You'll also find practical and proven marketing...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0071494898
• ISBN13: 9780071494892
• Release Date: March 2008
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.17 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Incredibly Useful

As head of strategy of a global advertising and communications firm, I would recommend this to anyone who wants to understand how clients think about marketing and how to execute a solid marketing plan in any company, of any size. These guys are all marketing professionals who have done a terrific job of demystifying the complexity of marketing in a very thorough, yet readable manner. John Gerzema Chief Insights Officer Young & Rubicam

Avoid lessons learned the hard way

Competition is too intense to make mistakes and most chief marketing and marketing and sales leaders are too busy to train younger talent. This book addresses both issues by offering its readers lessons learned from the authors' decades of experience creating brand strategies and writing marketing plans for multiple products, markets and types of companies. Even if you have your own marketing planning process down flat, plans are rarely as good as they can be. With the book as a guide, you'll improve your skills and plans, something we all need in today's challenging economy.

Marketing Basics for the Busy

This great book connects the esoteric with the practical. Should be required reading for all sales, marketing and executive management. In today's fast-paced business environment, it is easy to forget the basics, and this book helped get us focused quickly with simple straight talk. I don't have time to be a marketing expert. I ordered this book for our senior executives after reading it over the weekend to get our brand focused and aligned with our business objectives. We now have a clear and exciting brand story and a solid marketing plan to tell it. It provides a logical and reasonable approach with many case references of real best practices. Regardless of your company's size, this is good common sense marketing review.

Required reading for small business owners

Cooper Grutzner and Cooper have come up with a book that is sets out a GREAT framework for smaller business marketing efforts. The approach to the book gives "the masses" a simple and straightforward look into insights that usually cost THOUSANDS of dollars to obtain. Will this book write your business' marketing plan? NO. Will it force you to think constructively about where the "traps" are, and how to learn from other's mistakes? ABSOLUTELY. That's the purpose of it in my view and it delivers on that mission. In short, I think this is required reading for anyone who's got a "great idea" but doesn't have the "next step" to take that idea into the marketplace. You'll definitely be able to save yourself from some of the traps, and the tips will work for you. Well worth the read.

Excellent Roadmap

I have run several small companies, and frankly, we could have used the straightforward guidance I found in this book. One of the most valuable parts of the book was the section on brand definition. "Brand" is a buzzword everyone uses, but I'm not sure the concept is really understood, even by some very bright business people. In my past businesses, our successful brands were created more by luck than by plan. As part of our sales presentations, everyone in the company from owner to sales rep told the same unique story of how our products were developed without realizing how powerful that particular story was and how well it defined our company and brand. This section of the book helped me understand why those brands were successful, and offers a very specific approach to developing and keeping messages on track which is crucial for creating long term brand value.