Selling The Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing Essay

Selling The Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing Book Review: Harry Beckwith is the founder of Beckwith Advertising and Marketing. He has worked with four of America’s best 100 service companies, nine Fortune 500 companies, and many smaller business and venture-capitalized start-ups. Beckwith divides the book into eleven main topics and ends it with a â€Å"summing up†. The book mainly talks about what the marketers need to know to sell their services. This book begins with the main problem of service marketing. It then suggests how to learn what you must improve, with examples of techniques that work. Later it talks about the service marketing fundamentals: defining what business you really are in and what people really are buying, positioning your service, understanding prospects and buying behavior, and communicating. Chapters are made in short format, they are intended to convey one point and free of jargon. The author summarizes the point in one sentence in boldface italics. Hints and tips cover the conventional four P’s of marketing, which are product, place, price and promotion, in an irreverent and iconoclastic manner, nothing is sacrosanct. The first part of the book is about how to get started. Here Beckwith emphasizes that the core of service marketing is the service itself. A company needs to make sure that they offer the best service quality before they spend more money on promoting the company. Beckwith says that a company needs to let their customers set the quality standard. Moreover, to stay in the competitive market, it is not enough for a company to just think how to do better in the future. They also have to think different. The services that they offer have to be different from their competitors. Beckwith says: â€Å"Create the possible service; don’t just create what the market needs or wants. Create what it would love.† A company needs to differentiate itself clearly from the other companies. Thus, since more company try to offer a service that meet the customer needs, we need to offer a service that can catch customer’s attention and a service that a customer would love. Part Two is about survey and research. For a company to be able to improve its services is by asking everyone about it, by doing a survey. However, to have a significant result from a survey, ... ...lue to any organization in which business relationships are less then desirable. Everything he suggests combines common sense with a sensitivity to others’ needs and interests. Indeed, almost everyone in almost any organization must constantly be â€Å"selling† various services to others within and beyond that organization. First, they must establish credibility, then trust, and finally obtain agreement to cooperate. Beckwith examines them with in business context however, in process suggest wide and deep implication relevant to all other areas of human experience. What I like about this book is the fact of how this book is being structured. It contains short anecdotes about how other services have effectively marketed themselves. This type of structure makes it easy and interesting to read. The book gave concrete examples of how others succeeded in marketing something that was not a product. The downside of this book is that it does not go into details. Aside from showing how other did it, the author rarely tells how to specifically apply it to your situation. However, in overall, I can say that it was an inspirational read. It gave me a whole new perspective about marketing.