Irregular Books

I borrowed Marketing for Dummies from a friend who operates a struggling small business. She keeps it, along with Business Plans for Dummies, up on a shelf above her computer for easy reference. After reading these two books, I understand why her business is struggling.

The publishers of the Dummies series would have you believe that their books serve as complete guides to whatever subject a reader might want to know about. Marketing for Dummies undermines this assertion. Although the quote on the front cover reads “This is the one book to have…”, the truth is exactly the opposite: if you read this book alone, you’ll ensure that your marketing efforts will be unremarkable failures. Marketing for Dummies contains a great deal of information about marketing, but nothing that will enable a business to make itself heard above the din of competing messages.

Business schools are hardly known for their high academic standards. They’re ranked along with colleges of education and institutes for TV and VCR repair as among the schools to which it is easiest to gain admittance. Only a dummy would claim that a business school education is sufficient for learning anything but mediocre marketing. Well, guess who wrote this book for dummies: Alexander Hiam, a man who teaches business school courses.

If the choice you want to make is between Marketing for Dummies and going to business school, by all means read Marketing for Dummies. If the choice you want to make is between the same old fill-in-the blank marketing techniques that everybody else is using and an innovative strategy that will leave your competition in the dust, leave this book on the shelf.

Marketing for Dummies is filled with business school baloney that, while not untrue, is certainly unoriginal and uninspired. Examples:

- Page 93 reveals astounding “Secret #3: You Can Research ANYTHING!”. This is a secret? The author might as well say “You can name your child ANYTHING!” or “You can paint your house ANY COLOR!” The key to good research is not the idea that anything can be researched, but the insight that different kinds of research are best applied to answer different sorts of questions.

- Page 42 consists of a haggard old business school chart about the life cycle of products, missing the point that the best marketers sell experiences, not products. Experiences persist. All products go in the trash, eventually.

- Page 177 provides a figure showing the different shapes of outside advertising banners. Pardon, but is the shape of an ad banner what’s really important? What’s important in marketing is not whether marketers use a flag or a triangular pendant, but what message is conveyed within the border of the banner. Besides, any print shop catalog will provide information about the different shapes of banners available. Pointless graphics like this one appear to be filler used to make the book feel thicker without investing any effort.

Marketing for Dummies is full of this sort of junk. If readers skim through the book they may come upon a few worthwhile ideas, but they’re not anything most people couldn’t come up with on their own.

Marketing for Dummies won’t teach you anything about marketing except what tens of thousands of other people are taught in business schools every year. It teaches mediocrity. It teaches you to be predictable. It teaches you how not to create something interesting and exciting.

In order to engage in successful marketing, you need to do just a few things: understand the audience you want to reach, craft a message that is uniquely motivating to that audience, and find an effective way to deliver that message. Seem simple? Of course it isn’t, but the path to success is travelled through personal experience and creativity, not with a bunch of charts and graphs from a book written for people who admit that they’re too stupid to understand anything else.

A better title for Marketing for Dummies would have been Marketing for Unimaginative Suckers.