Relevance: Making Stuff That Matters - Hardcover

Manners, Tim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1591842204 ISBN 13: 9781591842200

Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover, 2008

Synopsis

After years studying remarkable companies and speaking to some of the most influential leaders around, Tim Manners has discovered a solution to the marketing woes of many brands. Stop worrying about demographics, fads, and cutting-edge advertising. Instead, focus on relevance.

Manners shares how the best of the best create solutions to their customers’ problems and help them live happier lives. You’ll learn how:

• Levi’s reasserted relevance when it created wardrobe solutions for men.
• Dunkin’ Donuts stopped trying to mimic the look and feel of Starbucks and found success by delivering a simple, quick cup of joe.
• Hasbro reinvented board games for today’s time-pressed consumers.
• Kleenex’s new germ-fighting tissues helped keep the company relevant by turning a useful product into a necessary one.
• Staples stopped wasting its shoppers’ time with extraneous products.
• Nintendo’s simple design for the Wii appealed to consumers of all ages and game designers alike, allowing it to outsell its competitors.

The path to sustainable growth for your brand begins with designing meaningful solutions and providing them when and where people need them most. Relevance will teach you how to become—and remain—indispensable.

About this title

About the Author

Tim Manners is the editor and publisher of The Hub magazine and the editor of Cool News of the Day, a daily Web digest of marketing insights. As president of David X. Manners Company, a consulting firm, he has spent more than twenty years working with leading marketing services companies, including WPP, Omnicom, Interpublic, and Publicis.

Reviews

Manners, a branding consultant and editor, takes the reader through the various aspects of building a successful brand, using the title of his book as a one word manifesto; all of his ideas loop back to it sooner or later. Branding is no longer a numbers game, according to the experts that he quotes, but about making your sure your customer is happy; not just with the service, or the product, but in their lives. How can this be achieved? The author's answer: through relevant insights, innovation, investment and design. Combine these with careful attention to value and experience, and you'll get growth. What distinguishes this book is the author's scope: he's clearly well connected and has plenty of quotes from branding and marketing experts across several industries to prove it. British range manufacturer Aga and niche coffee retailer Intelligentsia are just two of the "relevant" brands that Manners explores, and this range of knowledge adds authority to an otherwise thin argument, which at times seems like the same old ideas, rehashed and rebranded.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In the hyped-up culture of the digital age, the buzz about a new product can rapidly vault it into must-have status, and at the same time, once-dominant brands can become irrelevant overnight. Branding expert Manners says that the rules of marketing that may have worked in the past no longer apply and that brands can no longer survive based on targeting demographics and traditional advertising. One of the solutions that has worked for companies such as Dell is to allow customers a forum to vent their frustrations and to respond with changes that satisfy their most pressing concerns. Through examples and interviews, Manners profiles dozens of companies, from Kleenex to Apple, that have rediscovered their relevance through insight, innovation, investment, and other revealing techniques. Manners, who has been a marketing consultant for more than 20 years, is the editor and publisher of Hub magazine and the editor of Cool News of the Day, a Web forum for marketing insights. --David Siegfried

Edition details

• Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1591842204
• ISBN 13: 9781591842200
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224