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Usually ships in 1 business days | | Only 3 left in stock, order soon! | | | | | | How can you be immensely successful for many years, and yet not be imitated by competitors? Impossible, you say. Not so. Virgin Atlantic, the Body Shop, Apple Computers, and Birkenstock they all achieved this status, and there are ample additional examples. They cracked the secret of successful differentiation that is not imitated and are adored by customers who think that they are incomparable. Dr. Dan Herman calls it an Unfair Competitive Advantage. It's not at all unethical. Everyone has a fair chance of attaining such an advantage including, every reader of this book.
There is a secret to successful differentiation that is not imitated. It is a psychological secret that has to do with the way your competitors think. Most marketers today are MBA graduates who tend to think and operate in typical and predictable ways - you might call them MBA Clones. You can take advantage of their biases and outsmart them. In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Dan Herman not only reveals the secret of successful differentiation that is not imitated but also supplies you with a comprehensive set of practical rules and tools that will enable you to make an unfair advantage your reality.
Dr. Herman, a competitive strategy consultant with vast global experience, a seasoned CMO in a large corporation, a branding professional and a businessman, does not tell you to 'think out of the box' as so many do he provides you with a new and comprehensive toolbox for success.
You'll learn:
-- The secret of successful differentiation that is not imitated
-- How to scan methodically for both strategic and tactical opportunities for success
-- How to integrate a business model, a competitive strategy and a brand concept to create a unitary 'unique success formula' for your company
-- How to create marketing hits short meteoric successes
-- How to use electrifying marketing, just-on-desire branding and the brand drama approach to build emotionally powerful brands, and many other useful additions to your profit-generating arsenal of concepts and methods.
Using a plethora of examples from top businesses around the world, Dr. Herman offers a business oriented-point of view that is fresh and different, and even humorous at times. Even though this book will turn your thinking inside out, everything in it is practical and easily applicable in any kind of business. | | | |
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| | Product Details | | Author: | Dan Herman | | Hardcover: | 200 pages | | Publisher: | Paramount Market Publishing, Inc. | | Publication Date: | January 07, 2008 | | Language: | English | | ISBN: | 0978660285 | | Product Length: | 0.0 inches | | Product Width: | 0.01 inches | | Product Height: | 0.01 inches | | Product Weight: | 0.01 pounds | | Package Length: | 9.1 inches | | Package Width: | 6.2 inches | | Package Height: | 0.9 inches | | Package Weight: | 1.2 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 9 reviews |
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| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review: ( 9 customer reviews )
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20 of 20 found the following review helpful:
 Turn your MBA toolkit into a weapons system Feb 07, 2008
By Craig Matteson
Masters degrees in Business Administration (MBA) are not only being taught in elite schools, but in nearly every university, college, and diploma mill that can find some way to get accreditation. Most of the programs teach their students similar concepts in the core subjects of Financial and Management Accounting, Finance, Economics, Statistics, Operations, Organizational Behavior, Information Systems, Marketing and Corporate Strategy. If everyone has the same tools and book of tactics, including how to differentiate your company and create a competitive advantage, how can you actually compete and win in the real world? Worse, these kinds of programs train these managers to work, think, and fit in to the large companies that hire MBAs by the campusfull. That is why this book refers to MBA Clones and provides an approach that takes a different tack than standard MBA thinking would see.
It isn't that what you learn as an MBA isn't valuable, it's that learning the core of a business program provides you with only a basic toolset. You still need to learn to apply them. However, if you apply them like everyone else (the problem with `best practices') you aren't creating a compelling advantage. The best business folks are artists and use their toolsets in powerfully creative ways to win in the marketplace.
Dan Herman is a Ph.D. and CEO (and co-owner) of Competitive Advantages Ltd. Through which he and his team serve companies all around the world. Their goal is to help their clients identify growth opportunities and creating `unfair' competitive advantages. Along with this Advantagizing they help create powerful and compelling brands and profitable business models.
In part 1 of this book provides a look at what Herman's views on some common myths of Competitive Advantage (that you have to be better than your competitors, that you have to endear yourself to as many customers as possible, and that your competitive edge is to be found on a parameter that is important in your business category. He then provides a secret to Differentiation and uses examples from Virgin, Google, Starbucks and others to show you what he is after.
Part 2 explains their O-Scan (opportunity scan) method. It is about identifying insights about customers and what they are GOING to want (rather than what they are demanding today). You also learn to use a customers 15 stage consumption process to find points of pain and opportunity, to provide more consumer benefits, and seeing the hidden rules your competitors are using to win.
Part 3 is provides Herman's views of Branding. First you have to understand the consumer's mind. I found this discussion of how the consumer experiences things, what they are trying to do, and how they for their beliefs to be quite interesting. Herman also rejects the idea that Branding creates brands. He says that it is the real success factors that you have identified previously that will provide substance and power to your brand. He provides the ABCDE of Brand Success: Attribution of benefit, Believability, Craving, Differentiation, and Ease of acting upon their desire.
For Herman, brands are more about expectations, anticipations, and dreams that take them out of their hum-drum reality. It is about adventure, temptations, testing limits, nostalgia, and much more. The goal is to make your marketing electrifying to your customers. He also provides interesting chapters on developing marketing hits and how you can drive your consumers crazy about your brand.
Is all this absolutely original and unique? Look, I have an MBA from the University of Michigan Business School and what he says here is consistent with what I learned there. The expectation I had upon graduation was to use what I learned creatively. What Herman does is help those interested in turning the toolkit you were given into a weapons system. And I think that is very worthwhile.
Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI
9 of 10 found the following review helpful:
The real deal Jan 23, 2008
By Byron D. Metrikin Gold
"Byron"
This book, which I was privileged to read as a review copy of the publisher, contains a totally new approach to marketing, one that is not taught in business schools, one that is geared to today's changed consumer environment. For example, to read the author's description of the Joe Boxer phenomenon is for old fogies like me to have a lightbulb on the culture suddenly turn on.
The book is full of extraordinary insights. A true page-turner, I highly recommend it.
7 of 8 found the following review helpful:
A Fresh Look at Short-Term Thinking Feb 10, 2008
By Craig L. Howe
"The Pointed Pundit"
Long-term strategies have been replaced by ones that adapt and change as opportunities are identified.
"Launch and forget" brands today, such as Marboro, are rare. They have been replaced by visual identities and advertising styles that change rapidly. To succeed over the long-term managements must succeed in the short-term time after time.
Dan Herman, citing observations from Copernicus Marketing Consulting, argues brands are becoming like commodities. Consumers can no longer differentiate them from sugar, corn or cement. They are created by marketers who employ the same data, the same focus groups and data analysis. The marketers have become indistinguishable.
In this new environment, Herman observes:
1. Porter, Kotler, Aaker and Ries and their rules are obsolete.
2. Marketers need to understand nature's rules. They need to be able to devise alternatives paths to the same goals.
3. Theoretical concepts are tools for thinking about reality. They are not reality itself.
If you are a seasoned marketer, this book is different from another you have read. Herman's fresh thinking about competitive advantage, marketing, customer segmentation, differentiation and branding will challenge your thinking. It is worth every penny of its cover price.
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
Should Be A Textbook Feb 10, 2008
By K. Johnson
"Outsmart the MBA Clones" by Dan Herman should definitely be considered as a textbook for business programs. This book uses real-life recent examples of companies, products, and services we know, explains how their creative innovations worked, and how some were imitated. Many companies and their products provide examples throughout this book. Starbucks, Google, Tower Records, Virgin, RIM's BlackBerry, etc. The days of Marlboro Man ads that go on year after year without adapting, are over.
Most businesses are more similar than different. I'll go as far to say, they're basically the same.
Not to be negative towards MBA programs, but many programs produce sheep. They are educational *institutions.* Mills. Fair enough. The knowledge and skills attained in these programs are needed and these courses often focus on graduates entering positions in established companies. Outsmart the Clones can enable you to be more innovative, adaptable, and think outside of the box. It's about tomorrow, not just today.
Successful concepts and products can often, but not always, be mimicked. Today, there are often multiple brands competing for consumers in the same market niche. Herman notes the "Commoditization of Brands," where products are so similar consumers have trouble telling them apart. Obviously, once an idea or item that's copyable is produced, many others will duplicate and follow.
There are sixteen chapters and three parts in Clones: 1) The debunking of Competitive Advantage. Today the focus should be on *Renewable* Competitive Advantage 2) O-scan, which focus on what customer will consume in the future 3) Branding.
The benefit of this book is that you don't have to be in marketing, advertising, or management to benefit from it. There are also good quality illustrations, throughout.
One concept noted by Herman is about the consumer (us humans), stated on page 243: "consumers live their lives, and in the frame of everything they do and go through they are constantly on the lookout for new opportunities to improve their existence. They search for solution to their problems, ways to prevent unwanted situations and experiences, opportunities to develop, improve, and advance themselves and their circumstances, and chances to have fun and enjoy live with their loved ones."
Great point. And, a great book.
6 of 7 found the following review helpful:
 Gold Standard for Marketing a Brand Jan 22, 2008
By Robert D. Steele
This is a five-star book. Amazon won't let us change the stars. I realized I was imposing my ethics in taking away one star. For what it seeks to do, this is a five-star book.
This is a well-written book, ably illustrated, that is easy to read and appreciate. A few flyleaf notes:
+ Real-time branding, leveraging opportunities instead of plans
+ Accelerated world, focus on customer psyche
+ Price is NOT a strategic obstacle or advantage
+ Differentiation is everything (at the 5% level)
+ Promotional campaigns of dubious value
+ Good management is not strategy
+ Market research flawed for its focus on aggregate (group) statistics instead of psychology of the individual consumer
+ Vision plus values can make a difference
+ Identify, Invent, Implement
+ Stellar use of examples through-out the book
+ Opportunity scan: content, consumers, market, competitors, us (from outer circle to inner sweet spot)
+ Very useful and thoughtful lists, easy to understand and reflect upon
+ 15 stages of consumption within which differentiation can occur
+ Loyalty bankruptcy a challenge
+ Hypnotic branding and Fear of Missing Out both can be leveraged
Although I am a long-term strategist and focused on saving the Earth for my three boys and future generations, there is no question but that this book is the gold standard in short-term branding and market exploitation for short-term profit. It was worth my while.
Other books of possible interest:
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage
The Philosophy of Sustainable Design
Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons (Bk Currents)
The Ecology of Commerce
Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
See all 9 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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