I recently read Bernadette Jiwa’s wonderful book Marketing: A Love Story and was so impressed with her simple yet profound messages that I felt compelled to share the highlights with you.
Anyone who works anywhere should read this book. The information isn’t just valuable for marketers, but for anyone in sales, customer service, management, and so on. You can buy the book here, while also supporting local, independent bookstores! (Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase.) If you work anywhere on the planet, you need to know this stuff. The book is a collection of some of Jiwa's very valuable blog posts in one handy little book that’s an incredibly easy read. So here are my top 4 takeaways.
4. Being okay isn’t okay. When customers just have an average experience with your product or service, they'll forget all about you and have no reason to come back again. We need to strive to provide our customers with an exceptional experience that they’ll remember and want more of. There's actually a good thing about this mediocre attitude: So many companies are just fine being average, and that creates the perfect opportunity for the rest of us to outshine them! 3. We can’t focus on getting people in the door and then ditch them. So often as marketers, we focus on getting people through our doors (physical or virtual), and then we drop the ball. These people, who’ve trusted us enough to express interest in our business, turn into just another transaction. We need to get above this mentality and treat each person who visits us as if they’re the only person in the world who matters. Because they are. 2. We must fully understand what our customers want. The days of marketers telling people what they want are long gone; the tables have turned and now customers are telling us what they want. The problem is that so many marketers don’t listen. Jiwa says, “When you innovate and build your business from a place of empathy…those values bubble up into everything you do.” If we listen and really learn to understand our customers, people will notice. 1. We need to matter to our customers. And care about them. According to Jiwa, “the best marketing happens in the moment" when we “take the time to quietly practice empathy”. The key to mattering to our customers is to actually care about them. So we need to take the time and make an effort to learn what problems our customers are facing and find ways to help them solve those problems. If all of this strikes a chord with you, I highly recommend you read the book. It may change the way you think about your own marketing.
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