Review of Relationship Marketing: Successful Strategies For The Age Of The Customer (Paperback)

This 1991 book focuses on technology marketing, but it is relevant to general marketing today. In some respects, McKenna was a marketing prophet, since he was an early proponent of experience-based marketing, interactivity, connectivity and creativity.He sees marketing as a means of building relationships and credibility through a four-part process:

1. Use word of mouth, primarily through face-to-face meetings.
2. Develop the infrastructure (rank influencers in your industry and cultivate relationships)
3. Form strategic relationships with the 10% who influence the other 90%..
4. Sell to the right customers.

Here are some of my other take-aways from Relationship Marketing:

* Shift from monologue to dialogue.
* Concentrate on substance before image.
* Be wary of secondary marketing research reports.
* In the information age, image advertising won’t work.
* Know that the line between products and services is blurring
* Personality and image are always changing.
* Perpetual adaptation makes a product successful.
* Marketing is a process, not a set of tactics.
* Marketing is qualitative, not quantitative.
* Marketing is everyone’s job.

McKenna also has a distinctive approach to positioning. Unlike Trout and Ries, he sees positioning as a blend of technology, price, applications, quality, service, distribution channels, target audience, specific customers, and alliances. In other words, positioning is who you are, not what you want people to believe you are. He also sees positioning as changing and dynamic.

When you look at the world of blogs and social media, this counsel makes more sense than ever. I also think McKenna was on the mark with his expanded understanding of positioning and focus on relationships as the focal point of marketing.

I’m very glad I read this book in the late 90s.It has helped me become a better marketer. Her are other books to consider:

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, 20th Anniversary Edition
The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage
Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets (Collins Business Essentials)
The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual

Product Description
The bestselling author of The Regis Touch expands on his previous work to focus on building crucial relationships that help a company dominate–and own–the market in this age of the customer. Includes stories, insights, and advice to give readers an edge in today’s fiercely competitive climate.

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Review of Loud And Clear: How To Prepare And Deliver Effective Business And Technical Presentations, Fourth Edition (Paperback)

Loud and Clear is an outstanding resource for producing an effective presentation.The emphasis on audience analysis, which is so often overlooked, is excellent and will lead you to focus on the things that matter for your presentation.I especially liked the exercises suggested by the authors.Do them; you will learn more about your style of communication and your ability to connect with audiences than you had ever imagined.This book is probably most effective for newer presenters who need a foundation in the building blocks of assembling an effective presentation.But, it will also be instructional and valuable to check the effectiveness of more experienced presenters.Overall Loud and Clear is a concise, well-written recipe for effective presentations

Product Description
Full step-by-step advice and practical answers, Loud and Clearis just what today’s managers and technical experts need to make suretheir messages come across clearly and confidently.Available fordecades only at a college discount , this presentations handbook hasbeen completely revised and updated for trade publications.

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Review of Go To: The Story of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Maverick Scientists and Iconoclasts–The Programmers Who Created the Software Revolution (Paperback)

I enjoyed this book very much. It was certainly true that nobody could predict who would be a good programmers. I must confess that I picked those who were intelligent and enthusiastic. It sounds like a jungle out there.

Now for my hot buttons. Why am I not surprised that the history is wrong? It’s because the author suffers from the writers’ “Curse,” assumingthingswritten down are the truth. Johnny von Neumann never even saw the ENIAC until its design was fixed and the system almost built. He did consult with Dick Clippinger and his programming group from 1947/48 when they turned the ENIAC into a stored program computer. At that time, people were presenting various instruction sets for computers and von Neumann suggested a one-address code with a central accumulator architecture for the ENIAC, which we used. My group at the Moore School was under contract to do the ENIAC programming. Actually, Dick Clippinger, Adele Goldstine and I, with some help from DRs. Giese and Galbraith from Aberdeen did the actual programming.

When von Neumann saw the ENIAC, he was excited by it and, learning Pres Eckert and John Mauchly and their design team were already at work on EDVAC, the ENIAC successor, he asked if he could sit in on the meetings. The EDVAC design already included the stored-program concept. See Eckert’s interview with Peter Vogt for the Smithsonian Computer History Project. After a number of meetings, von Newmann skipped some meetings to go to Las Alamos, but he sent back the article, which Pres and John took as an internal document, summarizing the content of the meetings. Other members of the team were not allowed to write or talk about it. Goldstine, who was the Security Officer distributed von Neumann’s article widely. Some Security Officer. Both Goldstine and von Neumann came from the University World where publishing is used to stake out claims.Both knew exactly what they were doing. They betrayed their colleagues and continued to do so. When Pres and John applied for an EDVAC patent, they discovered that this enterprising duo had already applied. Not too many people took von Newmann seriously when he said he did it to ensure that it remained in the public domain and not used for commercial purposes. Apparently, Goldstine felt von Newmann was a better meal ticket than one from Pres and John. He was wrong. Pres and John went on to develop BINAC, the first stored program computer. Yes, it ran for 48 hours without an error in March 1949. Reported in the Franklin Institute newsletter. Then, they went on to build the first electronic commercial computer. As far as I know, nobody, other than the organizations von Newmann consulted with, ever built the Johnniac while the computer industry switched with UNIVAC to the commercial world.

I could continue on, but I know I am unfair to expect you to buck the tide. However, I am now 77 years old and I feel that someoneshould tell the truth, and if not me, who?

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