“If the moolah you spend on marketing isn’t growing your business and bringing in more moolah in return then you have marketing that…sucks”

Now, as reader of this blog and presumably a practitioner of direct response marketing, your marketing should definitely NOT suck.  Nonetheless, Your Marketing Sucks: 10th Anniversary Edition by Mark Stevens is a worthwhile read.

I came across the first edition many years ago with my interest piqued by the title!  I wasn’t disappointed as Mark Stevens set out his take on direct response marketing…what he calls “Extreme Marketing”…and why it’s needed perhaps more than ever.  That’s because for most companies, large and small, their marketing does indeed…suck (big time).

Mark Stevens is the president of his own company, MSCO, and bills himself as an expert in ROI-based marketing and the creator of the Extreme Marketing process.  He is the author of a number of other books including “The Big Eight” and “Extreme Management”.  In other words, he is very much from the corporate world.

BUT…the problem as he sees it “…what passed as marketing was increasingly a show of aesthetic grandstanding designed to win awards for creativity. Far more than to deliver marketing’s only legitimate prize: the sale of products and services.”

You can almost sense that this makes Stevens seethe with rage at what he sees as the widespread incompetence in the corporate world.  I particularly loved his story of how he was so infuriated at the poor marketing of his investment firm that he rang them, told them their marketing sucked…and ended up being asked to make a presentation!

But…none of this will be new to you.  So what’s in the book that will be of interest? [Read more…]