Branded Male: Marketing to Men Review

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Branded Male: Marketing to Men ReviewI have to admit, I'm one of those tough sells Mark Tungate writes about in BRANDED MALE: MARKETING TO MEN. I hate shopping and see it only as an evil necessity. I don't buy trendy, and I hate the whole corporate look because I'll never look like the models that parade around in that attire.
Women have a rougher go of it than men do because our society pushes them into constant upgrades. Men tend to roll along stuck at whatever pinnacle they reached shortly after graduating high school. Generally men buy clothes when they gain weight (of course, the clothes are SHRINKING in the dryer), ruin a favorite shirt, or run out of necessities like tee shirts, socks, and underwear due to attrition. Most men have shirts that have birthdays and anniversaries.
Tungate addresses all these issues in a much more elegant manner than I have here, but I think I've summed up his approach. While shopping for clothing or toiletries is a social experience for most women, giving them the chance to catch up on life stories as well as get a supporting vote for a new and daring purchase, men don't gather like that. I've seen men gather to buy shotguns, and generally they go for a two for one to buy a his and his, bass boats, or golf equipment. Even that doesn't require accompaniment, though. Guys just get together after the initial purchase and ogle each others' goods.
I approached Tungate's BRANDED MALE: MARKETING TO MEN with more curiosity than interest. I like to speculate on what markets are going to open up and how advertisers are going to address them. Being a self-employed novelist, I pay a lot of attention to emerging technology, consumer paradigm shifts, and marketing.
Tungate's tour de force covers clothing, cosmestics, grooming, cars, periodicals and books (which offered me some insights I hadn't considered before and found very interesting), and sex. I thought most of it seemed Euro-centric to a degree, or maybe East Coast here in the United States, but it was intensely readable.
I love history, and Tungate brings a lot of history into the book that I didn't expect. I found the marketing aspect interesting, but I was more taken with the history that he delivers. These manifested as brief snippets laced throughout the text that anchored the points he made and allowed me to better understand what he was saying. I'll bet most readers that pick this book up will experience the same thing.
I actually planned to allow myself time to read a chapter a day, basically covering each of the topics Tungate proposes. Instead, I was sucked in by the writing and compelled to keep turning pages. I hadn't expected to be as captivated by the subject as I was (after all, I am male and we have short attention spans and tend not to over think dress and style).
As a novelist by trade, I found a lot of information in the book that I plan on using in my writing. I know I've read a good book when it finds a place on my shelf (and I've got limited space at this point). BRANDED MALE: MARKETING TO MEN is a great, fun read with plenty of information and marketing tips. The text is broken up into a modified block format (each paragraph has a double-space between it that allows plenty of white space) and that layout actually made the book even easier to read.
If you're interested in marketing, or understanding your husband's reluctance to go shopping even when he needs to, Tungate explains some of what's going on. Anyone that's read Alissa Quart's book BRANDED: THE BUYING AND SELLING OF TEENAGERS will enjoy this one as a follow-up. And if you haven't read Quart's book, you're in for two books that are definite eye-openers.
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Game-Changing Strategies: How to Create New Market Space in Established Industries by Breaking the Rules (J-B US non-Franchise Leadership) Review

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Game-Changing Strategies: How to Create New Market Space in Established Industries by Breaking the Rules (J-B US non-Franchise Leadership) ReviewReaders of business books on innovation have all been victims of the hype of doing new things and doing things differently. Of course we all know that doing new things and finding new ways of doing things can be sources of considerable value, with payoffs that go far beyond increased efficiency and continuous improvement. But simply eulogizing the companies that have made it big with a new business model (the IKEAs, Body Shops, Entreprise Rent-a-Cars and Southwest Airlines of the world) against formidable established competitors, is eye-opening but somehow insufficient.
Business model innovation - how a company changes key parts of the value chain to create new space in an established industry - is the subject of Professor Markides' new book. Remarkably removed from the common hype Markides emphasizes:
1.That implementing the new business model is harder than inventing it.
2.For a start-up, business model innovation is more obvious and easier than for an established company.
3.There are more business model innovators who fail than succeed.
4.An established company that decides to run a new business model, has to simultaneously manage degrees of differentiation and integration, synergy and competition with the existing business model and different ways of managing these can be successful
5.Established firms have various strategic options when responding to disruptive competitors with new business models
6.Established firms should themselves be innovative in their business models
And much more. The book is partly based on the author's own research of a large sample of business model innovators and is full of well-known and not-so-well-known case-examples, all well-written and with business arguments clearly articulated.
Of course the author understands that innovation is impossible without creativity and he counterbalances his "Creativity is not enough" Chapter 3, with his Appendix B - "How to enhance corporate creativity".
All in all a fine business book.
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The Luxury Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands Review

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The Luxury Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands ReviewThis is a unique book and very interesting for people involved in understanding the current and future luxury industry characteristics. It discusses the main issues and principles of luxury management, it is very clear and it mentions many practical cases from this industry. It clarifies the borders of real luxury, it is a perfect guide for entrepreneurs and managers which want to succeed in luxury branding. I suggest to read this book because it is different from the others and it is written by two internationally recognized experts in this field.The Luxury Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands Overview

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The Purpose Driven Church: Every Church Is Big in God's Eyes Review

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The Purpose Driven Church: Every Church Is Big in God's Eyes ReviewI find it hard to rate this book accurately. I have read few books that have been more helpful in the realm of practical church life. Warren skillfully presents a blue-print on how to grow a healthy in church in which the five purposes (which are presented Biblically) of worship, discipleship, fellowship, ministry, and evangelism are held in balance. The steps to take are practical and clear. Add to that a plethora of helpful common-sense tips to improving logistics in working with both the visitors and members of your church. This book is full of helpful ideas.
HOWEVER, the demerit of the book is its rather shallow Biblical basis. I believe that the five purposes Warren presents are biblical. I believe that the concept of moving people from membership to maturity to ministry to missions is biblical and very, very well developed. And I was impressed to see that Warren's church uses a church covenant and practices church discipline. I simply wish he had given a better biblical defense for these things. There are points where it seems like the author is taking Scripture out of context to defend a point - evidenced by his excessive use of paraphrases of Scripture. He should have used a literal translation and stuck to what the text actually says.
I also highly disagree with Warren's approach to music. He probably goes a bit overboard on the seeker-sensitive side of things, although I admit many of the things he says are non-moral, non-biblical, common-sense issues.
I was helped by reading this book. I have the sense to know that I can't apply everything Warren says in my own church culture and tradition, but there are some things any one can apply. I say, buy this book and read with discernment. As long as you don't make a Bible out of it, you will probably benefit greatly.The Purpose Driven Church: Every Church Is Big in God's Eyes Overview

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Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era Review

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Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era ReviewHenry Chesbrough literally "wrote the book" on Open Innovation years ago. Today (2011 timeframe) every firm is trying to understand how to gain more ideas from customers and business partners, and frankly, few have really figured it out. And that's just focused on product innovation and the pipelines and structures that Chesbrough introduced in his first book. Which makes Open Services Innovation interesting and problematic at the same time.
Problematic because so many firms are just really beginning to understand "open" innovation, and taking small steps to understand how to best interact with customers and partners. That means that the graduate level class of open services innovation is valuable, but probably beyond many firms at this point. After all, asking a firm to innovate around services or business models is difficult, and asking them to use open innovation is difficult. Combining the two is a huge leap for many firms. I suspect that this book will become really popular in three to five years, once the frameworks for open innovation have been accepted and become more established.
The book is interesting because it assumes that the reader is familiar with and has implemented some aspects of open innovation, and it spends far much more of its time and focus on service and business model innovation. In fact it does a lot of what White Space Innovation by Mark Johnson did, only without Johnson's framework. The book is valuable because it discusses innovation in areas where many firms are only getting started - innovation in processes, services, business models and customer experiences. So in that regard, a firm or individual new to innovation can pick up the book and ignore the "open" aspects, which are relatively few, and learn a fair amount of innovation in services, business models and experiences, which is equally valuable and in fact is probably best suited for many firms.
The book also points out what I consider to be a real problem with book publishing. Chesbrough has a good idea and conveys it in four or five solid chapters. After that, he is forced to stretch the material to consider Open Services Innovation for Large firms, Open Services Innovation for Smaller Firms, Open Services Innovation for Services Industries, and so forth. I don't think these concepts add a lot to the discussion and they feel like filler in order to stretch the content to legitimate book length. You can get all the value you need from this book by reading the first 130 pages. That's not a critique on the content, but a comment on the format and the expectations of a publisher.
Chesbrough is to open innovation what Christensen is to innovation in general, and his concepts and ideas are spot on. What's possibly unfortunate about this book is that he is covering a subject that is akin to quantum physics for many firms, who are still trying to get the grasp of the Newtonian Physics of simple, open innovation. Many firms will buy this book, but I suspect most of them won't be able to use it effectively until they have a better grasp of "open" innovation, unless they toss out the open focus and think through innovation around services and business models.
One brief complaint - Many open innovation practitioners fail to communicate effectively that Open Innovation is a generic term for a number of different approaches to working with clients and customers to gather and manage ideas. You can see different types of Open Innovation in IdeaStorm, from Dell, IdeaJams, from IBM, Innovation Contests like the X-Prize, technology transfer organizations and solution providers like Innocentive. Be careful when considering Open Innovation, as it is only a catchall phrase for a lot of different tools and techniques, which have different applications and different downstream implications. I wish that authors writing about Open would address this. I've written a short chapter on this in the book A guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing edited by Paul Sloane: [...]Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era Overview

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The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage Review

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The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage ReviewThe book takes a very logical, reasoned approach towards the theoretical next steps of economic expansion. It reasons that margins drive profits and that by constantly searching for higher margin offerings, a company will naturally improve and increase its profitability.
The logic is understandable... Commodity goods have small margins, as they are undifferentiated from each other and relativly easy to reproduce. Manufactured goods take things one step further, providing higher margins due to some level of product differentiation and brand specificity. Above that are Services, where the products don't last long enough to be copied and are customized enough to prevent easy manipulation. The higher margins should lead to higher profitability and better staying power. Fair enough.
Where the book's logic becomes strained, however, is where it strethes out towards the next generation of higher margin offerings, "Experiences."While it is true that experience companies my be able to provide higher margins than can older economy companies, experience companies tend to suffer from a fatal flaw that has infected many of the companies praised in the book. That flaw is the utter lack of repeat business generated by most experience economy companies.
Take two of the companies mentioned in the book as companies to emulate -- Planet Hollywood, the restaurant chain, and Peapod, the online grocery store. Planet Hollywood is under bankruptcy protection, because people are simply unwilling to pay through the nose repeatedly for the same experience over and over again. Peapod ran out of cash and is limping along only after being bought out by a Dutch firm. Hardly two stellar companies to emulate when searching for ever expanding profits.
Throughout the book, by expounding the virtues of ever expanding margins, rather than focusing on goods, services, and 'experiences' that people would be willing to repeatedly pay to have, the authors make the mistake of ignoring the overall forest for the sake of a single tree.
In the real world, experience companies know their limitations and create their pricing scheme to represent that fact. Amusement parks sell season passes for less than the cost of two visits -- acknowledging the fact that people may pay more for experiences, but only once, and repeat business depends heavily on making the repeat worth the cost.
Had the book focused more on successful ways for experience economy companies to thrive, rather than spending its time drolling on about the virtues of failing companies with the right plan, it would have been far more believable and enjoyable.The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage Overview

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Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant Review

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Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant ReviewThe authors have published many articles over the last decade on Value Innovation. This is their first book. It summarizes their extensive knowledge on out-of-the-box strategic thinking.
What is a BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY? The authors explain it by comparing it to a red ocean strategy (traditional strategic thinking):
1. DO NOT compete in existing market space. INSTEAD you should create uncontested market space.
2. DO NOT beat the competition. INSTEAD you should make the competition irrelevant.
3. DO NOT exploit existing demand. INSTEAD you should create and capture new demand.
4. DO NOT make the value/cost trade-off. INSTEAD you should break the value/cost trade-off.
5. DO NOT align the whole system of a company's activities with its strategic choice of differentiation or low cost. INSTEAD you should align the whole system of a company's activities in pursuit of both differentiation and low cost.
A red ocean strategy is based on traditional strategic thinking - e.g. Harvard's strategy guru Michael Porter.
Some cases:
* Airline industry price wars result in bankruptcies and low profit margins. Southwest Airlines creates a new market by offering the speed of air travel with the low cost and flexibility of driving.
* Golf equipment industry competes to win a greater share of existing golf customers. Callaway Golf creates "Big Bertha", a golf club with a large head that attracted new customers to golf that had been frustrated by the difficulty of hitting the ball.
* The cosmetic industry creates a red ocean with models, expensive advertising, and promises of youth and beauty. The Body Shop creates a blue ocean that lasts more than a decade by creating functional cosmetics that defied the industry which sold emotionally appealing cosmetics.
* The wine industry gluts the market with a red ocean of thousands of brands competing on the finest oaks and tannins and legacy winey names. Casella wines creates [yellow tail], a blue ocean wine that succeeded by eliminating complexity, elitism and consumer confusion and creating a fun simple image that non-wine drinkers could enjoy.
A blue ocean is created in the region where a company's actions favourably affect both its cost structure and it value proposition to buyers. Cost savings are made from eliminating and reducing the factors an industry competes on. Buyer value is lifted by raising and creating elements the industry has never offered. Over time, costs are reduced further as scale economies kick in, due to the high sales volumes that superior value generates.
Examples of strategic moves that created blue oceans of new, untapped demand:
- NetJets (fractional Jet ownership)
- Cirque du Soleil (the circus reinvented for the entertainment market)
- Starbucks (coffee as low-cost luxury for high-end consumers)
- Ebay (online auctioning)
- Sony (the Walkman - personal portable stereos)
- Cars: Japanese fuel-efficient autos (mid-70s) and Chrysler minivan (1984)
- Computers: Apple personal computer (1978) and Dell's built-to-order computers (mid-1990s).
The INSEAD professors Kim and Mauborgne have written regularly on the subject of Value Innovation since 1997 in Harvard Business Review. Being a business development manager, their thought leadership on strategic innovation has inspired me tremendously over the years. Their articles have been standard texts for many MBA students for some time (e.g. "Value Innovation", "Creating New Market Space", "Charting your Company's Future"). I expect their first book to be just as dominant in any strategy library as Michael Porter's books (the guru behind the classic red ocean strategies).
Peter Leerskov,
M.Sc. in International Business (Marketing & Management) and Graduate Diploma in E-businessBlue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant Overview

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