December 4, 2005
Marketing for Dummies
Written by Brian Turner
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The Dummies series has a good reputation for being accessible, useful, and generally helpful in introducing ordinary people to sometimes complex topics.
“Marketing for Dummies” by Alexander Hiam unfortunately doesn’t really live up to the reputation.
Although it starts of well enough - “Designing a Great Marketing Program” touches base on basics, all too soon he’s discussing advertising - and begins a recurring theme of trying to teach marketers to become creative. I can really envisage a lot of groans as middle management reading this book decide to inflict their personal sense of creativity on more talented employees.
Alexander Hiam tries to cover marketing pretty comprehensively, but he never really seems sure who his target audience is - one moment he’s addressing a sole trader, the next, a million-dollar accounts manager.
This becomes a pretty acute issue throughout the book, because he is engaging a coaching style rather than trying to explain core marketing principles - he’s exploring the practice, such as what type of advertising to use, and where to get it from.
And that’s where the two main flaws of this book really come to a head.
Firstly, he’s addressing an American audience, with resources on American consumerism, American companies, and general US market information. He makes recommendations which simply do not read as useful for a company centered on European-markets.
Secondly, and perhaps more heinously, though, is that he doesn’t really know much about the internet. Here’s someone trying to teach people about marketing, and yet he has no real expertise with using the most powerful marketing medium on the planet.
He’s aware that having a website can be important and that PPC exists and can be helpful - but that’s about his limit. And it’s not until nearly halfway through the book you find anything on measuring returns from investment.
What we have here is a classic example of Old Marketing - even worse, it’s a general preamble through Old Marketing for a single market audience.
Although there is useful information in this book, I found it really very limited - the inability to target a specific level of reader, the US targeting, and omitting the overwhelming significance of the internet - all reduce it’s use and accessibility.
Overall, it’s not an entirely bad book - if you have absolutely no inclination of marketing practices then the book is going to be useful to some extent - but if you are already involved in marketing, especially in the UK, then don’t expect it to be a great help.
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