Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Book Reports Selling the invisible Selling the invisible Title: Selling The Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing Publisher: New York, NY/ A Warner Time Company, hardback 1997 Harry Beckwith is the founder of Beckwith Advertising and Marketing. He has worked with four of America’s best 100 service companies, nine Fortune 500 companies, and many smaller business and venture-capitalized start-ups. Beckwith divides the book into eleven main topics and ends it with a “summing up”. The book mainly talks about what the marketers need to know to sell their services. This book begins with the main problem of service marketing. It then suggests how to learn what you must improve, with examples of techniques that work. Later it talks about the service marketing fundamentals: defining what business you really are in and what people really are buying, positioning your service, understanding prospects and buying behavior, and communicating. Chapters are made in short format, they are intended to convey one point and free of jargon. The author summarizes the point in one sentence in boldface italics. Hints and tips cover the conventional four P’s of marketing, which are product, place, price and promotion, in an irreverent and iconoclastic manner, nothing is sacrosanct. The first part of the book is about how to get started. Here Beckwith emphasizes that the core of service marketing is the service itself. A company needs to make sure that they offer the best service quality before they spend more money on promoting the company. Beckwith says that a company needs to let their customers set the quality standard. Moreover, to stay in the competitive market, it is not enough for a company to just think how to do better in the future. They also have to think different. The services that they offer have to be different from their competitors. Beckwith says: “Create the possible service; don’t just create what the market needs or wants. Create what it would love.” A company needs to differentiate itself clearly from the other companies. Thus, since more company try to offer a service that meet the customer needs, we need to offer a service that can catch customer’s attention and a service that a customer would love. Part Two is about survey and research. For a company to be able to improve its services is by asking everyone about it, by doing a survey. However, to have a significant result from a survey, have a third party to do it for your company. There are some advantages for conducting a survey: it gives a company an opportunity to sell or to make an offer, it keeps contact with the clients, it can tell what business that you are in, and what people are buying. Try to avoid written survey. Beckwith says that people are more convenient to talk than to write, so it is better to have a survey by phone or a personal interview. This way, a company can reveal more information from the clients. In the next part, Beckwith is trying to say that marketing is not just a department everybody in the company is responsible for marketing the company. A company needs to make its employee a marketing person, so that everything that he/she does is a marketing act that can attract and keep more customers. Before companies planned their marketing strategy, they need to know what are they good at, and also to find out what customers are really buying from them. Companies also have to adopt technology as part of their marketing plan, since it can be used for competitive advantage of the company. Nevertheless, he said that if we sell services that means we sell relationship, so to be personable is as important as be professional. Beckwith also talks about the eighteen fallacies that companies used to believe during their planning stage. In this stage, everybody that involved in planning should start with three ideas: accept the limitations of planning, do not value planning for its result, and do not try to plan your future, because one can never tell what will happen in the future. It would be better if companies always prepare with some contingencies plan. It is also crucial for companies to prepare their employees and utilize their skills. Since the market keeps moving so companies also need to keep moving, do not stay dormant. The chapter titled: “Anchors, Warts, and American Express: How Prospects Think” discusses about: what should companies do to attract clients and make them loyal to the services. Companies need to make the clients familiar with their services. They need to go out in the market and spread out the word about their services. In addition, rather than hide the companies’ weaknesses, they can just admit them. This will make your company look honest and trustworthy, and those are the key to selling a service. Again, Beckwith emphasizes on the importance of differences. The fact that many other companies offer similar services makes differences important. Clients look for differences upon which to base their decision. About positioning and focusing, Beckwith says that a company needs to stand for one distinctive thing that will give them a competitive advantage. No companies offer the same services, so identifying and communicating those differences and creating new ones are the central to successful service marketing. However, the client positions the company according to what he knows about the company. Therefore, company needs to focus on the effort on selling the services and on the message that they want the clients to perceive about the company, because sometimes they can influence the company position. A positioning statement states how the company wishes to be perceived by their clients. Company can establish their positioning statement by answering the following questions: who are you, what business are you in, what people do you serve, what are the special needs of the people you serve, with whom are you competing, what makes you different from those competitors, what unique benefit does a client derive from your service. Even though just a small company, it is not necessary to hide its smallness. In fact, they need to work on it by stressing on its advantages, such as responsiveness and individual attention. The next important thing that a company needs to do is focusing. Companies need to know what kind of services that they offer and who is their target market and focus in that area. The next issue that Beckwith discusses is about pricing, he writes that sometimes we need to set prices that are seem illogical. Maybe by giving higher price for our services can attract clients, because it will make our service has more value to offer compare to others. On the other hand, maybe we can also be the low-cost provider, because then most people will assume that we offer an acceptable product or service at the lowest cost. However, do not price our service or product in the middle, clients will perceive that our price and service are not the best but just pretty good. In addition, many companies priced their services in the middle, so we are competing with almost all the service providers in that industry, while the premium service and the low-cost provider has their own market niche. Another important point that Beckwith talks about in his book is naming and branding the services. He says that companies should carefully choose the name for their services. The name had better not be funny name and not generic name. We want our clients to remember, impressed and able to distinguish the services that we offer from those of our competitors, so we had better come out with a distinctive, unique, and creative name. Beckwith mentions that a brand is more than just a symbol. For the public, a brand is a warranty. It is a promise that the service carrying that brand will live up to its name and perform. Communicating and selling are also important in services industry. If a company knows that they can offer a high quality service, show it; let the other know about it, by advertising. In their advertisement, a company also needs to use visualization. Visualization will help their clients to remember the company. Additionally, Beckwith says good marketing must focus on the “buy”. A company must be able to convince the clients that they need the services that this company offers, and make it simple for clients to buy the services. The next issue that a company must also pay attention to is having a clear and specific mission statement. A mission statement needs to be followed with a concrete statement of measurable objectives. By giving clear target, the employees will know how to achieve the objectives so that the company’s mission can also be achieved. A mission statement needs to be reviewed periodically. If a mission statement use by the company does not make any changes in the employees’ behavior then the mission statement needs to be revised. Finally, after doing all the marketing activities needed to attract clients, the next step is how to nurture and keep the clients. It is essential to keep in touch with clients, always keep the clients inform about the services that you offer, if you promise something, make sure that you keep that promise, never let your clients disappointed. The last things that a company needs to do are thanking the clients and stay present. Beckwith says that: “Advertising and publicity reminds clients and former clients of the satisfying service that you once provided, and assures them that you still are around, viable, and successful.” In “summing up”, Beckwith provides a brief but precise discussion of various sources which he commends to his reader. There is a value added benefit, his sense of humor, which indicated by some of the section titles such as “ Anchors, Warts, and American Express”, “Ugly Cats, Boat Shoes, and Overpriced Jewelry: Pricing” and “Monogram Your Shirts, Not Your Company.” Beckwith argues that what consumers are primarily interested in today are not features, but relationships. Even companies who think that they sell only tangible products should rethink their approach to product development and marketing and sales. Beckwith provides an excellent forum for thinking differently about nature of services and how they can be effectively marketed. Marketing a service is not as easy as a product. Because we cannot get the physical and visual reinforcement for what it is that that you are buying. There is nothing to test, nothing tangible to assess what it is we might be getting, so that is why Beckwith called it invisible. That makes marketing a service is much different proposition because we have to supply a lot of missing things to reassure people. More and more products are starting to look more and more alike, and so are services. When people start perceiving things as relatively equal, they become commodities and the battle then turns into a pricing war. The objective on both the product and services sides is to remove that image of a commodity in a way that gets people to pay a good or sometimes even a premium price. This book is not merely about selling, it is more about establishing and nourishing relationships, not only with clients and prospective clients but also with almost everyone else within a given market place, for example, vendors, service providers and strategic allies. Beckwith shares an abundance of information and advice, duly acknowledging various sources from which he has obtained some of the material. What he suggests can be of substantial value to any organization in which business relationships are less then desirable. Everything he suggests combines common sense with a sensitivity to others’ needs and interests. Indeed, almost everyone in almost any organization must constantly be “selling” various services to others within and beyond that organization. First, they must establish credibility, then trust, and finally obtain agreement to cooperate. Beckwith examines them with in business context however, in process suggest wide and deep implication relevant to all other areas of human experience. What I like about this book is the fact of how this book is being structured. It contains short anecdotes about how other services have effectively marketed themselves. This type of structure makes it easy and interesting to read. The book gave concrete examples of how others succeeded in marketing something that was not a product. The downside of this book is that it does not go into details. Aside from showing how other did it, the author rarely tells how to specifically apply it to your situation. However, in overall, I can say that it was an inspirational read. It gave me a whole new perspective about marketing. Bibliography: Word Count: 2116
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