Selling the Invisible: a field Guide to Modern Marketing \(Biz Books to Go\) pdfdrive com

Recommended Reading for Service Marketers
Because many of marketing’s greatest battles are not waged in the market, but in
the minds of prospects, understanding how people think helps you understand
how to market and sell.
You see that emphasis throughout this book.
My interest in thinking was inspired by watching people in two different
companies stumble through marketing planning. The thinking I saw proved that
synergy is a myth: Two heads may be better than one, but twelve heads are
worse.
I then read Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline to help me understand systems
thinking. I recommend the book, even though it is tough wading. I also
recommend Ichak Adizes’s Corporate Life Cycles. It can help you understand
how people tend to think at different stages of a company’s life.
There are thousands of books on the human mind and memory, but even my

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strong performance in Psychology 101 does not qualify me to choose among
them. I benefited from Decision Traps by J. Edward Russo and Paul J. H.
Schoemaker, Influence by Robert Cialdini, and How We Know What Isn’t So by
Thomas Gilovich. None of these books require an advanced degree in
psychology, and all three remind me that in so many things in life, “logic has
nuthin’ to do with it.”
For years, I worked with art directors on ads, trusting our intuitions. We
thought our intuitions about people were enough; they weren’t. And we all
misuse the word “intuition.” We imply that intuitions are instinctive, perhaps
even extrasensory. But my intuitions about O.J. Simpson’s guilt or innocence,
for example, reflect my previous experiences with alleged wife-batterers, the
reliability of legal evidence, and with the man himself—with a large volume of
information. My intuitions, like everyone else’s, are based on information and
experience: They are based on data. The more and better information we have
about people, including about how people think and make decisions, the better
our intuitions will be.
Away from the psychology section you can find several books about the
distinctive requirements for marketing a service. Jan Carlzon introduces
Moments of Tr u t h, a notion that is similar to my discussion of points of
contact. Ronald Zemke’s The Service Edge lists hundreds of examples of
excellent service and strongly recommends listening and surveying. Tom
Peters’s books are filled with examples and have influenced most people’s
thoughts about service. Whenever someone thinks of getting “close to the
customer,” for example, those are Peters’s four words vibrating in their head.
Regis McKenna’s The Regis Touch and Paul Hawken’s Growing a Business
include very good discussions about the importance of relationships in
marketing.
In the service marketing section, however, the shelves are almost empty. You
will find books with titles like Marketing Your Services. Most of them are books
for consultants and sole proprietors, however, with advice like “Get published in
magazines, give speeches, join the local Chamber of Commerce.” This is good
advice, to be sure, but people to whom it is new and valuable information
probably should not enter business.
Perhaps the most widely distributed book on service marketing is Marketing
Services, by Leonard Berry and A. Parasuraman. The book’s strength is in the
first half, which puts the emphasis in service marketing where the emphasis
belongs: getting the service right.
On communicating, I recommend Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style
and William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. I also recommend David Ogilvy’s

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