Your Marketing Sucks [Paperback]

I own a small start-up company that I founded after many years in the marketing industry so I have some background on this sort of material and while I am always open to new ideas, I didn't really get any. Yes, the general platitudes are correct but they are the same that you would get from any college course in marketing. As we all know, it's one thing to absorb information and knowledge in a classroom or through a book and it's quite another to put it into practice. I didn't feel like this book helped implement anything.

Moreover, the writing was so incredibly poor I felt like writing a letter to the editor or the publisher or whoever to tell them to go back and have another pass at it. It was also repetitive to the point where it felt like Mr. Stevens was padding - did he get paid by the word?

Lastly, although the book is clearly a direct plug for Mr. Stevens's firm, I gave the benefit of the doubt and thought I would visit his web site and contact them with the potential for hiring them to help me. In that regard, I have to echo some of the other reviewers who posted that dollars appear to be more of a concern to Mr. Stevens than actual best practices. It would seem to me that Your Marketing Sucks is more in tune with the small business owner's needs than with the IBMs and Coca-Colas of the world to whom $20,000 (my marketing budget) is bubble-gum money, but Mr. Stevens does not appear interested in working with anyone who can't generate big bucks. That's his right but it strikes me as disingenuous.

In addition, at a local business networking event in Connecticut I met someone who had actually had some contact with Mr. Stevens and his firm and came away very unimpressed. His take was that they toss around big concepts and ideas, take your money, and ultimately fall back on the same old thing you find in almost any other agency. I don't know whether that assessment is true or not but reading this book seems to reinforce it.

I helped line his pockets by purchasing the book but that's the limit for me.

Okay, that being said, I found a lot of problems with the book, mostly in terms of how it was written and the tone some of the chapters take, but I was still interested enough to contact Mr. Stevens's firm and see if perhaps I could benefit from a direct consultation. That's where my experience went down the tubes and although I am sure it colored my perception of the book, I think it's only fair to mention it here because, after all, the book is really just one large marketing gimmick for his firm's services and his business practices, I guess not surprisingly, don't completely mirror the things he stresses in the book. He doesn't necessarily practice what he preaches. That's red flag number one.

During the initial conversation I had with his representative, I was told that there was a fee involved (somewhat exhorbitant for a small business owner, I felt) for me to come in, tell Mr. Stevens about my business, and have him tell me what was wrong with it. I may be wrong, but it seems to me I shouldn't have to pay for the privilege of deciding whether or not I want the firm to represent me (or whether or not they want to represent me). Then I was told that I could have a private one-on-one session with Mr. Stevens to "pick his brain" in whatever way I chose. Again, I am not well-versed in what a nominal fee for such a service is but it still seemed somewhat high. Red flag number two.

Second, in researching his firm through his web site, it seems that the site goes against some of the basic tenets of what he indicates a web site should do for a business. I found the site not very user-friendly and more prone to promote the book than the firm. Red flag number three.

Lastly, I just got a bad vibe that, although the book appears to have been written for businesses like mine, unless you are a multi-million dollar corporation Mr. Stevens doesn't want to talk to you. In that regard, I have to agree with one of the previous reviewers who stated that Mr. Stevens cares more about the dollars than the marketing principles he espouses in this book.

Check it out of the library if you feel you should read it for yourself but I wouldn't purchase it.