A good primer for the New Marketing

I borrowed Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing from my boss. Now I want to buy a copy for myself so I can digest it more fully.

This is a great introduction to basing your customer experience on personas. If you can analyze your customers to the level where you can write specific stories about them, you can base a better experience by analyzing their needs. You end up creating 3-7 “personas,” stories about specific people that frequent your customer experiences.

The authors have created a system called “Persuasion Architecture.” It’s a Six Sigma process where you uncover your customers’ personas, design an entire experience that caters to these personas’ needs, and then optimize the experience.

The book does a great job of teaching high level concepts and the “why’s” of adopting such an involved process. But they never really get to the “how” of the process. I’m kind of glad that they didn’t cover this because the book would have been much longer. I’d like to innovate on my own instead of adopting their exact process anyway.

All of the newest topics about marketing are about being remarkable, innovative, accountable, and transparent. This book fits right in. Highly recommended.