REVIEW: Studying Marketing

Another cold, snowy day... Zooey's huddled up in her house, and so am I.

So book reviews!

Actually, the book's called A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Studying Marketing. The cover design's quite nice, all handwritten as though on graph paper. It's clearly aimed at college students-- which I am not-- but as Jim Blythe writes in the Introduction:

my two marketing lecturers ensured that I had no formal knowledge of marketing, so like a road sweeper I have picked it up as I went along, and consequently I learned it for fun. I recommend you to do the same.

I'm trying!

Now, understand what I didn't. This is not a how-to book, but a book talking about the roots of marketing and how it's studied (oh no!) in school. On that note, you may wish to skip to "How This Book Realigned my Chakras" below. It fits well in the first weeks of an Intro to Marketing course, or for someone studying political & economic history.

But it is interesting, if you have a head for names and ideas. It opens with Adam Smith and Malthus and takes us through psychology & sociology to end up with this weird mongrel subject, marketing. Personally, I always wondered at people who studied marketing in school. It's not terribly interesting as a book subject and I have since watched a couple of friends without the degree achieve success in the field. It is not, after all, mechanical engineering or Russian. You can fake it. Or just learn by doing.

Blythe's version of events puts marketing's birth with the idea that "the route to success is to consider the customer's needs." Then he traces the discipline, as it borrowed ideas from other more stable subjects, on its shambling march to respectability. Now that it has its own journals & theorists, he claims, marketers don't need to know much of anything. Ouch.

Then he gives a whirlwind tour of everything you need to know in marketing. He summarizes the gurus-- Levitt, Drucker, Brown, D'Aveni, Kotler. He gives some hints to the jargon and even a nice little primer on postmodernism (Hyperreality! Fragmentation! Acceptance of Disorder and C H A O S!). Finally, he covers why marketing is-- and isn't-- a real subject to study. Mainly that it's young. And that people hate marketers.

Now, I kind of feel a day behind in my efforts to Brand, Monetize, Capitalize, and Value-Add my cat. But I'm not so sure time was wasted. This is, after all, an agreeable book, with tons of places to look for more info. Most marketing texts don't even touch on Andy Warhol and peanuts, and I am now in much better shape when it comes to reading marketing books. They rely so heavily on jargon-- in books that are supposed to be pragmatic!-- that I'm thankful to have had a pleasant guide to the ideas behind them.

How This Book Realigned My Chakras for Better and Worse

• I learned something while being entertained
  
• I stopped feeling inadequate next to not only Madison Avenue, but Madison, Dane's little girl next door, who always sits out on her porch and puffs up obnoxious Mr. MacMuffin's fluffy, noxious coat
• I did no actual marketing
• (it's actually cheap only only for a textbook)
  
• I'm still not entirely sure how to do it
• Hmmm.
• Oh, we're out of milk, too.

How to Improve Blogger

As a good CATpitalist, I have selected Blogger as a free hosting platform, but I haven't taken what it's given me. It's an extremely limited system, with only a few basically identical templates (ugly) and just as few widgets. Wordpress seems much better, BUT their hosting service won't allow ads. So it was Blogger. But--

You have to stand out from the herd (of cats).

So I've started some improvements, having poked around the internet. First, I got a new template from Pam Blackstone's site "Random Bytes." It supports three-column layouts, which makes much better use of the screen space. Thanks, Pam!

Second, I simply and easily built a new logo in Photoshop Elements. That program came free with my digital camera-- that's Zooey in the header, on the hunt for money-- but you could just as easily use freeware or shareware editing programs like GIMPShop, Paint.NET (Windows), or ImageWell (Mac).

Installing the HTML for the new template-- I'm not a code head-- deleted all my custom widgets like text, Blogflux button, and GPS. So I've got a little work to do to put that stuff together, and you should be forewarned if you go to make similar changes.

This layout should allow for better integration of ads-- I didn't like the between-post style, and Blogger will make sidebar ads disappear in favor of the tweeners. Also, I can now put more stuff-- tag clouds, links, etc etc-- on the same screen. So, good stuff.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to do some restoration to my sidebars...

REVIEW: eMarketing eXcellence

I picked up eMarketing eXcellence, an "e-marketing essentials" book, at the library when all the For Dummies books had been checked out. It's thick and dense and seems a lot more impressive to carry around than a For Dummies book. Do the Singles Bar test: read a For Dummies book at the bar with a Bud Lite and see how much "play" you get. Then go to a different bar and whip out eMarketing eXcellence while drinking a cola. Not a Cuervo Black and cola, just a cola. You may find its sleek, impressive, six-figure-looking cover makes your "pLay" go up "eXponentially."

Just don't actually read it. It is written, not for human beings, but middle managers, who speak in the arcane language of Six Sigma and Dilbertese. A sample from the section on web site design:

Web site design presents a challenge few have mastered. We all have used web sites that provide us with what we are looking for, and many more that don't, but what makes some sites more appealing than others? This section looks at the purpose or objectives of web sites and then the key variables required to achieve web objectives. Clarifying the key objectives and purpose of the site helps to determine the functions and content of the site. [emphasis mine]

Satan writes like this in the Netherworld. Aren't "objectives" and "purpose" the same thing? Why write it twice? To bludgeon? Does word design too present a challenge few have mastered? Seriously, you could cut this paragraph down to about five words and still get the job done.

The authors try to jazz it up with lots of section headers and graphs and charts, but this cements its fall into the land of sad textbooks who spend Prom on the shelf, neither bought nor even checked out.

Who writes books like this? Who reads them? Actually, the question is, who buys them. The book's primary audience is not human beings who read something to learn. It's managers and workshop leaders who put the thing on a syllabus and force large groups of people to buy it, or even whole company departments. It's one of those awful college-level textbooks that not only feels like nobody's ever read it, but nobody actually wrote it either.

So if you are a middle manager or have to teach a workshop, I recommend it highly. You can skim the bullet lists and section headers and pretty quickly get the lingo down. Think of it as a phrasebook for marketing-speak.

IN SUM:

What did I learn from this book? How not to write a book. To learn about e-marketing ideas I can use, I guess I'll have to wait for those For Dummies books. Sorry, ladies.

Our Freezing Poor Winter

Well, it's really dang cold right now. Zooey has abandoned her palatial digs up on the hill and come down to her timeshare where she can enjoy a more frequent bowl of delicious niblets and see me more than once a day. I'm glad, because it gets lonely down here, especially when we have about three hours of daylight and a constant howling wind.


Figure 2. Timeshare Warmth.

I had some marketing ideas-- a Zooey parade for charity, a CATpitalism car wash, but I think they'll wait until it thaws. Until then, look for more book reviews! I hit up the library yesterday for some marketing books. We are gonna build this brand, and at the core of CATpitalism is thinking about capitalism by reading and reviewing books.

(P.S. You will note that Zooey ate all of her positive thinking vittles. Yes!)

MARKETING: Craigslist SEO

SEO is "Search Engine Optimization," and Craigslist is the quirky, uniquely Netty classifieds service. It reaches gazillions of people every 0.5 seconds and has a Google PageRank of like 1 or 2 so all the marketing gurus are freaking out about how to use it all the time. I've run across a number of blog posts claiming sneaky ways to get on it so your PageRank will explode and you'll become rich and sexy. Some guys even sell eBooks about how to do it.

But it doesn't want to be used for marketing. It's a free-for-all, but the people there have an idea of what it should be. They hate spammers, hate it when people try to screw with the system, and like it when it's just real people connecting with other real people to give away a musty couch or a lava lamp. It's not like getting 20 seconds free on ESPN.

Don't believe me? Browse the Best of Craigslist for ads selected by the users. My favorite? The one that summed it all up.

So, even though the SEO gurus say Craigslist is where it's at, think twice before diving in there. It's too much like showing up at a circus in admiralwear.

As a bonus, check this out, from the New York Times:

Craigslist Meets the Capitalists

If Craig has a cat, I bet it's not monetized at all!

MARKETING: Early Tips

I had a grand total of one (1) clicks over the weekend. Yikes! Time for:

MARKETING.

Since I am building this from the ground up out nekkid in the open, I want to tell you about my three-part plan.

BUILDING A BRAND!
When people think "monetize my cat," I want them to think "CATpitalism!" and come here. So I am redirecting all my typical Internet energies entirely through these channels. No longer will I be whoever I was before, now every site I visit, every comment I post, is "Cat-Daddy." I deleted my old email accounts! The name on my driver's license no longer exists! I am dead to me! I am reborn!

Part of this too-- a part I haven't gotten to yet-- will be design consciousness. I will make images and designs that reflect this site and everything it's about. I have some ideas, and will post them soon. Go from the ground up, right?

JOINING IN!
Hanging out with people, in other words. Get to know them and they get to know you. You'll get hits, but even better, you'll learn something. Sound unbusinesslike? Call it "market research" if it makes you feel better.

I think a lot of advertisers and marketers want to treat their potential customers like sheep. Certainly a lot of the marketing textbooks I've skimmed have that approach-- "tell them what to think, and repeat it until they do think it." I don't like that so much, and I think with a business like this one, where my market capitalization is less than USD$17 billion, I have to use my disadvantages as advantages. My dis-/ad- vantage point is smallness. BUT that lets me know people on a small level, rather than think of them as jumbled masses.

PERSISTENCE!
Entering my second week, I have had a goal of posting every weekday. I thought I had last week, but there's nothing up for Friday. Oops! Seven posts, though. It's a start.

I've learned from my own net habits that people visit sites for CONTENT. So writing great content, all the time, is how to market this site the best. Because if people find out it's here and then find it thin like crummy, week-old soup watered down by gutterspill coming through a hole in the roof, they won't come back!

No! CATpitalism is thick and full of meat and veggies! Eat! EAT!

(What about OFFLINE marketing? I have a totally different approach for offline marketing-- but that will come in a later post!)

IMPOSTOR SYNDROME

I mentioned this a post yesterday, but I want to say some more. I think this is the single worst culprit in the business world. Heck, in any world.

I certainly know what it feels like, just like my cat. You don't belong. You don't have organically-grown catnip and an ionized air filter by your litterbox. Your cat litter's not imported Indonesian diatomaceous earth. You don't even have a litterbox! You have to do your business behind trees and shrubs. You don't get high-quality, mercury-free tunafish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You dumpster dive. You eat scraps and carrion and if you're lucky a squirrel.

And it affects you. You think differently, about the world around you, and even about yourself. You avoid those preening cats with shampooed coats and aromatic flea collars. When opportunity knocks, you're the only one home, but you figure she's not looking for you. You tell yourself that your kind of cat isn't invited. Rich cats, fat cats, sure. They get all the breaks! If you only had a break. Well, the break just walked away weeping because you convinced yourself not to open up to it!

You run up the tree and wait for a fireman who never comes. And the little old lady cries and cries below, but you can't tell her you love her. YOUR KIND OF PEOPLE DON'T DO THAT! No love, no hope. Only sorrow, fleas, and coccidiosis.
See what happens? You convince yourself you're not good enough. You look at people you envy-- rich people, successful people, people who got all the breaks-- and you resent them. You tell yourself they're scumbags for having what you want. And you say life is unfair, and then decide you can't get what they have. Why not? Because you don't want to resent yourself? What IS that?

Well, life is unfair sometimes. But other times it is fair. Don't let the unfair rob you of the fair.

How do you do this? Maybe tomorrow...