The unspoken tradition of book reviewing seems to be to rave about your friend’s books. To pay them back for the white wine you drank at the launch party. In that noble tradition I was asked to review a couple of excellent recent business books:
A review of the second edition of Adam Morgan’s Eating the Big Fish
A brief review of Mark Earls’ Herd
Here’s the unedited texts:
Eating the Big Fish (for October’s Admap)
As Adam said at the launch of this second edition, googling ‘challenger brands’ produces an extraordinary 2,160,000 results. How many of those 2 million know that they are indebted to Adam (the Sir Tim Berners Lee of brand thinking) for gifting the world the concept? Adam and Malcolm Gladwell together kicked off a trend for books about marketing that were also enjoyable to read. Have a look along your bookshelves and remind yourself how dry most business books were a decade ago.If you read it in the late nineties then I’m sure you were blown away. It felt like the category killer, the end of marketing history. I wonder if, like me, you thought; ‘wow this is full of great stuff, I’m going to be dipping into it all the time’. But then perhaps you got distracted by other ‘must read’ marketing books and the digital explosion seemed to have tilted the playing field a bit so that books from the last millennium felt outdated, a bit ‘analogue’. Moreover the concepts became so widely distributed that they seemed to leave the book behind. Marketers cherry picked aspects of it and incorporated them in their own bespoke processes. People said they were aiming for a lighthouse identity or talked about their over commitment to service standards. Brands like innocent and method acknowledge their debt to the book. For several years no branding discussion has felt complete without reference to innocent. Who needed the original text when its teachings were so vividly alive?
So it’s high time to remind ourselves why the book was so damn good and to see what a second edition has to offer.
Irresistible Complicity
An Amazon reviewer of the first edition praised its ‘velvety authority and irresistible complicity’. Both of these qualities are dialed up in the second edition. It has the same backbone but has been updated with new examples, many of which stronger because they have the insider’s perspective. Whereas in the first edition Adam was interviewing challengers, in this edition he and his team are often working with them and the reader is privy to their choices. Adam takes us into one of his workshops in a hotel beside a busy Californian freeway where the New Zealand Tourism global team debate how to build their brand and then astonish his team by singing a Maori song as a thank you.
The irresistible complicity is helped by extensive use of the first person plural and by plenty of endearingly human examples. There are great stories here such as the ‘42 below’ marketer relocating to New York to promote a new premium vodka, finding every door slammed in his face and wondering how to break into the market. The lateral answer was snow shovels. Whereas some business books take an approach of; ‘here’s the evidence, here’s what to do, now get on with it’, Adam’s book always recognizes that difficult choices aren’t easy for us humans and that brand owners will lose sleep over the risks required.
Velvety authority glides across the pages. Adam has a rare gift among Brits. A technique he might christen ‘Tom Peters’. He is able to articulate a principle and summon up interesting, often unexpected examples of transatlantic brands successfully putting it into practice. His anecdotes feel like parables. He is impressively at home in both American and British brandscapes. The eclectic examples of challenger brands range from Las Vegas to Daniel Radcliffe.
Monsters
The original concept of the Big Fish and its visualization in a classic Avis vs Hertz ad led to a perception that brand’s main challenge is to its market leader. But this doesn’t always apply. Adam has usefully redefined the Big Fish as ‘the monster’. It doesn’t have to be another brand, it can often be inertia, social convention, elitism etc. This new distinction pervades the book and the twelve ‘challenger stances’ are a superb distillation of the ways brands can work, the monster they challenge and the reason people are attracted to that stance. Everyone in marketing should be required to locate their brand on this chart. New chapters such as the scope of the lighthouse keeper also move the thinking on for the digital age. Another chart superbly distils how brands can push beyond the brilliant basics (doing something simply better than others) to adopt convenience, product, participative and ethical agendas.
In the spirit of the book I feel called upon to challenge something. I was surprised not to find references to the learnings from behavioural economics or neuroscience. This is a shame because they would support Adam’s second chapter; ‘The Consumer Isn’t’ and a bit more theory could have been used to buttress his observations about what works. But, as the book emphasizes, brands can’t include everything, some sort of sacrifice is key. This is very much a book for practitioners not theorists and all the better for it. If you had to sacrifice all your business books apart from one then this is the one to take to the desert island.
Arise Sir Adam.
Herd in Paperback (for January’s Market Leader)
When the hardback of Herd came out in early 2007 it was dangerously ahead of its time. Mark was delighted to be voted the speaker that delegates to that years Market Research Society conference were least looking forward to hearing!
In 2009 the updated paperback launches into a world in which many of his ideas have become mainstream. (Last year I even heard David Willets on the Today programme referencing it in relation to future conservative policy) and is a perfect fit with behavioural economics books such as Nudge and Predictably Irrational.
Where Mark’s book has the edge over these populist academic writers is that he never loses sight of the fact he is writing a book for marketing practitioners. Along the way (and it is an exciting trip, several Amazon reviewers observe how fast they devoured it,) he even provides a convincing explanation for Andrew Ehrenburg’s neglected body of work on why big brands stay big. We do stuff because we see other people doing it and we are genetically programmed to be brilliant copiers.
But what does it all add up to? In my humble opinion it offers a way through the central problem confronting marketing today. Marketing’s received wisdoms and current best practice from brand architecture through to single minded propositions are trapped in a post-Enlightenment world of rational message transmission to ‘complex’ individuals about whom we need more ‘insights’.
At the same time science is busy rolling back the Enlightenment, demonstrating that we are primarily instinctive super apes and only secondarily sentient individuals. The digital natives we want to sell to have also moved on. They’ve embraced a mashed up digital world which has sidestepped linear rational persuasion and has more in common with ancient oral storytelling around campfires. ‘Herd’ itself with its wonderfully eclectic examples feels like the missing link. Oh and don’t forget to pass it on.
Chris Forrest
