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Your Marketing Sucks Mark Stevens Crown Business, Random House New York, NY 2003 223 pp. US$24.00 (hardcover)
Keywords Marketing, Extreme Marketing, Lazy Marketing
Review DOI: 10.1108/07363760510576554
Most marketing managers and small business professionals are concerned about the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. Many of us make the mistake of equating effort - budget - with effectiveness. Mark Stevens offers an extreme marketing philosophy as the answer to this dilemma. Your Marketing Sucks, is basically a critique of "lazy marketing" - doing traditional, uncoordinated actions, and using the amount spent as the primary effectiveness metric. In its place, Stevens argues that marketing managers and business professionals responsible for sales and marketing need to adopt an extreme marketing perspective - to be ruthless in questioning assumptions, evaluating options, and then terminating any marketing effort that cannot be specifically and concretely measured to show results in creating wealth and value to the company.
Written to be a quick read, Stevens' book tells the reader where he is going at the beginning of the book and in the introduction of each chapter. Providing very solid principles and practices of integrated marketing, it is written like a sales pitch rather than a book using extreme language and examples to make a point - "You're wasting marketing dollars, stop it!" This small book is formatted into nine pithy chapters plus an example of an extreme marketing plan in his conclusion. Each chapter opens with the specific problem Stevens will address, a suggested solution, and the resulting benefit. He also includes a chapter governing "rules" of extreme marketing. Your Marketing Sucks can be read through in a single seating in about two hours.
The underlying premise that "nothing happens until a sale is made," (p. 50) so permeates the book that it may lead the reader to think he is reading a book about sales. However, the case Stevens is pressing is that marketing must sell or it is of no value. Winning awards for clever advertisements, building a prestigious company or product image, and having a larger and larger "mindshare" of the market are all worthless unless they sell more products. His "ruthless" attitude toward marketing that is ineffective (unmeasured results) is the basis of his claim to extreme marketing. If...