Marketing Outrageously Redux: How to Increase Your Revenue by Staggering Amounts

Until last year I didn't know Jon Spoelstra from Johnny Appleseed. And I certainly didn't know that he's been wandering across America sprinkling the seeds of business growth.In fact, I first ran into Jon when I ordered a copy of his thriller Red Chaser: A noir thriller of the 1950s, the Cold War and the Brooklyn Dodgers A heckuva deal on a great book. Amazingly, he offered it FREE, such an irresistible price that I felt guilty taking him up on it. So guilty in fact, that I shipped off to him a copy of my own book Postcards. Little Letters From Life as a thank you.When I saw Marketing Outrageously Redux touted on the website of Roy Williams, who bills himself as the Wizard of Ads, and clearly deserves that title, I looked into this man Spoelstra and discovered that he is a legend in his own right. I am far from being a sports fan, but I have been on the creative side of the marketing and advertising business all my life and I know talent when I see it. This is it.I rushed to buy his book.Spoelstra has taken upside-down professional teams and put them on their feet and standing in the black. And he's turned good organizations to solid gold, all with ideas that would make the collective hair of typically "sensible" marketers stand on end.I once walked into the office of the marketing director of a large bank whose name I won't mention. Behind him on the wall was a plaque that read, "What business needs is more General Pattons and fewer marketing chickens." Fred was well schooled, looked the part, but lived by the Law of Conventional Wisdom. He and his like-minded big bank were on the edge of going out of business. And this was when the economy was GOOD. Fred, as they say in Texas, was all hat and no cattle.This bank didn't need unheeded mottoes, it badly needed Jon Spoelstra, who actually is one of those General Pattons. And his pearl handled revolvers are the "scary" ideas you'll read about in this wonderful book. Even the cover is a provocative hoot that will make you think about the stunning effect that unconventional, interruptive communications, promotions, policies, personnel practices, leadership, and unexpected organizational management style can evoke among the masses who are out there just waiting for somebody to surprise them.Buy this book. Read it. Test your courage by answering some of the questions it asks -- and answers.It's 271 pages of sheer fun and terrific wisdom, particularly for business people longing for breakthroughs. If you've been wondering, "Is anybody out there listening?" you should probably be asking, "If I were them, why should they?"Marketing Outrageously Redux will unscrew your thinking.

Fooled into actually learning something? Inspired?Then pick up Marketing Outrageously now.I had the good fortune of being assigned Jon Spoelstra's Ice to the Eskimos three years ago in college and have been waiting for the following up ever since. As a student being bombarded with assignments, I plowed through Ice in a day, actually disappointed when it ended. Outrageously is even better.The best part of the book is the insider stories. (Elvis, Area 51 and Pat Riley are all subjects.) There is at least one anecdote related to each chapter. Besides being highly entertaining, they are a way to remember an idea Spoelstra is looking to hit home.Spoelstra is not only a marketing genius, but also a wonderful author. He knows his books don't just need to be informational, but engaging as well. Above all, he prompts you to act. If you read this book, you'll laugh, you'll think in a new way and oh yeah, make some extra money for your company along the way.

Like a lot of books on marketing, this one is rooted in the author's own experiences. This is both its strength and its weakness.The strength is that firsthand Spoelstra developed some sports marketing methods that really worked well. If you do event marketing you may get some good ideas from this. Spoelstra's job was to fill stadium seats so fans could be sold weanies and beer, which is where the real money is.To fill those seats he became adept at engineering promotions in tandem with fast-food chains. As I recall, McDonald's and other big dogs wouldn't work with him, so he had to work with smaller chains, but did manage to boost attendance to games.A lot of what he did has to do with coupons - which is to say, incentivizing people by leading them to believe they could have a fun night out for less money if they go to the game. Coupon incentives can work to fill seats, and filled seats allow sports organizations to sell TV comercial time and rent stadium billboards for more money.Most businesses are in the game of trying to get more money from the direct customer. Spoelstra's real customers were the advertisers looking to promote their deodorant or whatever. Even though the goal is filling seats with bodies, he could cut the price of selling the tickets and make money on volume because the ad space becomes more valuable as attendance goes up.YOU cannot usually get ahead in business by cutting your prices in general. The math is explained in "How To Sell At Prices Higher Than Your Competitors" by Steinmetz and numerous non-mathematical reasons are explained elsewhere, as in the whole body of marketing literature pertaining to positioning. Cutting prices and doing coupon promos to bring more people in is a problematical marketing strategy in so many ways yet price-cutting is really the core of seat-filling promotions.If you're in a business like Spoelstra's this book is really cool... but the slant of the thinking here is so rooted in his own experiences you'll need to be really discerning about following his methods. He doesn't adequately expose the weaknesses of his methods if applied to other, dare I say, more commonplace marketing situations.Good book with good ideas, but not essential. If you are a marketing specialist as I am, or are in sports or event marketing you probably should be familiar with it

Le livre contient pleins (mais vraiment pleins !!!) d'idées que l'auteur à mis en place lorsqu'il s'occupait d'équipe de basket ou de base-ball avec pour but de faire accroitre la notoriété des équipes et de vendre des tickets. Pour ce faire remarquer, il laissait plein de "coup de communication" assez extravagants, parfois drôles, mais toujours inspirants.Contrairement aux livres qui vont prendre des exemples d'entreprises qui sont tellement grosse (Apple, Microsoft, McDonald's, etc.) que jamais vous pourrez vous permettre des campagnes marketing à ce niveau-là, "Marketing Outrageously" montre comment, quand on est un outsider, même avec un budget marketing limité, ce qui peut faire exploser votre marque c'est l'audace et la créativité.Et même si le but n'est pas de copier ce qu'il a fait, lire ce livre pourra vraiment vous aider dans votre petit commerce à attirer davantage l'attention (des clients, des prospects, du public) sur votre marque ou boutique et donc de devancer la concurrence.Un des livres de marketing les plus inspirants que j'ai lu... A condition de ne pas avoir peur d'être "outrageous"!

Good book