AUSTIN MCGHIE ran a CPG marketing and sales team and a leading
advertising agency before turning thirty-five. Since then, he has
successfully gotten older, run two more agencies, and built a
nationally recognized marketing-strategy business from the ground
up before selling it to a global communications company. Today, he
and his business partner, Alpa Pandya, happily run a small but
mighty marketing-strategy consulting business. Along the way,
Austin has advised clients such as Kellogg’s, Disney, Boeing, Nike,
ESPN, NBC, YouTube, Levi Strauss, Westin, Amazon, Facebook, Visa
and Unilever.
In addition to participating in a host of writing and speaking
engagements, Austin is the "almost bestselling" author of "Brand is
a Four Letter Word: Marketing and the Art of Positioning." Visit
him at FindDifference.com.
“I’ll tell you what I like about Austin’s work, and why it’s worth
reading. He’s written an angry book about what’s not happening in
the marketing world. To me, it’s time to get angry and restate what
many overlook or just don’t get about building a differentiated
brand.”
—Jack Trout, global marketing expert and author
“The same people who think you can ‘brand’ something are the ones
who ask us to produce ‘viral’ videos. What’s with these people
hijacking adjectives and verbs for dubious marketing purposes? Just
as viral videos are outcomes of smart, insightful thinking, so are
brands. I just hope the marketing pundits don’t brand Austin McGhie
a heretic for his spot-on ideas. Wait, did I say that?”
—Tom Yorton, CEO, Second City Communications
Brand Is a Four Letter Word: Positioning and the Real Art of
Marketing
If Sloan Wilson's classic The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
personifies the top-down business culture of the 1950s,
individuality rules today. And businesses must embrace this
evolution, McGhie suggests in this perceptive exploration of
evolving marketing doctrine. With the Internet impelling
unprecedented cultural change, cookie-cutter conformity ensures
mediocrity; the most differentiated, strongest products come from
"oddball entrepreneurs." Contrary to conventional thinking, McGhie
argues that a brand is not imposed on the market but is awarded by
the market; it is "a consequence, not an action." This shift in
perception manifests the need for a dialectic between producer and
customer, with sincerity at the core. McGhie draws on his extensive
marketing background to show how brands engage customers in company
culture and persuade them to participate in the corporate "sense of
mission." Whether the reader accepts or condemns McGhie's
contention that the model of one-way persuasion is obsolete, the
heightened significance of customer word-of-mouth reaction, or its
electronic counterpart, seems unassailable. The customer, not the
marketer, controls the brand in the brave new world of viral
marketing. And McGhie's argument that traditional marketing
theories, though still adapting to new media, are not necessarily
obsolete should intrigue both industry professionals and marketing
neophytes.
—Publishers Weekly
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