A ‘power salad’ of ideas: No to stale strategy

“The Invisible Touch”
Harry Beckwith
Warner Books 2000


If you are in the service industry, selling something intangible – the author calls it “invisible” – you sometimes wish you were in an industry that markets something concrete, palpable to the touch, and systematically reproduced in an assembly line. Why? Because such industry of “visibles” has color, scent, taste as is, therefore, an exciting and rewarding enterprise.

And those of us in the industry with invisible products – in securities market, insurance, investment banking, public relations, management consultancy, software design, etc. – should therefore be prepared to be in the gray world of being businesslike, bland, intellectual, and coolly professional.

Before you resign yourself to your colorless gray world, read this vibrant book by Harry Beckwith, “The Invisible Touch,” sub-titled The Four Keys to Modern Marketing.

That is because in this slim book of 232 pages, you will look at your business in a revolutionary way – alternately charmed, inspired and entertained by a marketing expert who gives you gems of insights and wisdom in clear, intelligent and engaging style.

You would hate glossing over any part of this book. There are no commercial pauses, in the first place, and you might miss an important point. Well, like an excellent marketing man that he is, he has made sure you get your hours worth. The sections are short, sweet, crisp and with just the right spice of wit and surprise – especially his one-liners at the end of the discussion of the four keys to modern marketing – price, brand, packaging and relationships.

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On pricing specifically, time charges by consultants – he concludes: “Charge by your worth, not by the hour.” Hear ye, lawyers and accountants!

On branding, particularly on corporate names, listen to this: “Look for a name that people can see, smell, taste, feel or hear – or better yet, all four. Be a Red Pepper.”

He gives this conclusion after ringing rebuke to people who use pompous, kilometric, polysyllabic names – which, he says, are forgettable. His spiel on Apple as a corporate name is instructive to people enamored with high sounding names.

On packaging, especially for great firms who have succeeded in being unexciting and colorless, he dishes this advice: “Look as great as you are.” This is a concluding one-liner after only three pages of anecdotes about oranges sprayed with chemicals to look better and golf courses maintained by a million-dollar pool of horticulturists to keep them perpetually green.

The author is a believer in a beauty like poet John Keats – he who wrote this classic line: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” However, this 21st century writer says it differently: “Beauty has muscle. It seizes us; we cannot get away.”

Finally, on relationships, he advises companies to make the customer feel important. This is nothing new, except that Beckwith says it better and with an astonishing insight that gives a new dimension to a firm’s customer-driven philosophy.

Listen: “We feel most in the din. As the world grows bigger every day, our desire to feel important grows into a need.” And then he gives this refreshing conclusion: “Create an oasis.” That should ignite your imagination to explore ways to make you firm a refreshing corporate station. Sounds like Coke, or Pepsi – but, see, the author is talking about the service industry.

The “four keys” actually comprise the core of the book. But, the author has intended to give “warm up” exercises to the readers with three main preceding sections: “Research and Its Limits,” “Fallacies of marketing,” and “What is Satisfaction?”

By design of by accident, the author succeeds in getting one heated up in a running agreement or argument. When he dares say, “research supports mediocre ideas and kills great ones,” we could hear ourselves fiercely disagreeing. Bu then, when he counsels, “stop measuring client satisfaction and start increasing it,” we find ourselves nodding vigorously.

This book is not your ordinary management or marketing nook. It is not even written in the mold of Peter Drucker (of many books), Philip Kotler (marketing guru), and Theodore Levitt (renowned for they theory on “marketing myopia”).

It is an easy read, because it males you feel the author is speaking in a lively seminar, spicing up his ideas with anecdotes, wit, humor and surprises. That is his intention. Let’s hear him:

“The wise marketer looks for buffets filled with food for thought: the isolated events, curious behaviors, odd trends, and tiny bits of data, all of whose relevance is unclear. The marketer who can assemble a shrewd blend of this information can create a power salad: an idea, strategy, or tactic that changes the business.”

In this book, the author offers a “power salad” – with a justifiable assurance that it will lead us to a refreshing oasis of new strategies if not a brand new business frontier.