New Book Review: "Selling the Invisible"
Recently posted book review for Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing, by Harry Beckwith, Business Plus, 1997, reposted here:
Almost 150 reviews at this point for this text, spanning consistently over a period of the 10 years it has been written. This reviewer recalls the recent "The Wall Street Journal" article which questioned whether such a high number of reviews for a single product is ever warranted. In the case at hand, this reviewer believes that so many reviews, with such positive feedback, is testament to the quality of the original content as well as to the ongoing (and arguably increasing) relevancy of the material.
Services marketing is the subject of this masterwork, and while subtitles for other books can be misleading at times, "Selling the Invisible" is truly a field guide to modern marketing – in the words of Beckwith a "how-to-think-about book", not necessarily a "how-to" book, "because if you think like these new marketers – if you think more broadly and deeply about services and their prospects – you will figure out dozens of better ways to grow your business".
The author explains that "this book is for all those service marketers: the 80 percent of us who do not manufacture products – and the other 20 percent who do", and that "the new marketing is more than a way of doing; it is a way of thinking. It begins with an understanding of the distinctive characteristics of services – their invisibility and intangibility – and of the unique nature of service prospects and users – their fear, their limited time, their sometimes illogical ways of making decisions, and their most important drives and needs."
The format of this book greatly aids the content, as it is divided into chapters by subject matter and further broken down into discussions of 1 to 3 pages that are expected to be easily digestible by even the most book-weary readers. The core problem of service marketing, service quality, is first discussed, followed by a discussion on improving service quality, and later the fundamentals of service marketing: defining one's business and understanding what customers are really purchasing, positioning one's service, understanding prospects and buying behavior, and communicating to prospects.
As a consultant, this reviewer was reminded of Gerald M. Weinberg's "The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully" (see my review) while reading this text, because, like Weinberg, Beckwith brilliantly leads the reader through his thoughts one step at a time through subject matter that is not always intuitive, and is so fluent in his subject material that he is also able to arrive at his own principles and rules to elegantly apply the lessons that he has learned throughout his career.
While this book is a quick read, the content might take time to digest if the reader is not familiar with service marketing. One of the quotes on the back of the hardcover edition of this book especially rings true: "After just forty-eight pages I'd written ten pages of notes and had more ideas than I could implement in a year. Terrific." As a consultant, this reviewer highly recommends this book to everyone in business, especially the chapter that addresses what the author views as the 18 fallacies of planning.