Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?

Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?, a brand new book by Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg (along with Lisa Davis) just went on sale. I plan to get a copy this week - and Michele Miller's Wonderbranding says (and she's always right!) that this is a must read.

Michele writes:

"Plain and simple, it's all about persuading customers to do business with you when they ignore marketing. And this team of authors does a heck of a job. Read an excerpt from the book here.
In the book, you'll learn:

• How the customer's buying process works in a cross-channel, new media-driven marketplace
• Why customers respond differently today than they used to
• How to use the Web to generate persuasive momentum across multiple channels
• How the various touch-points within a business affect each other
• How to guide prospects through the buying process at every customer touch-points
• How personality traits influence customer behavior online and offline
• How to anticipate the different angles from which customers approach your business
• How to identify and provide meaningful answers to your customers' questions at each stage of their buying process
• How to begin implementing Persuasion Architecture™ techniques for your business

...You can also read reviews from folks like Seth Godin, Jeffrey Gitomer and Roy H. Williams..."

So I'm all over it!

straight from Knowledge@Wharton

Companies That Use Combative Advertising May End Up with a Black Eye

John Zhang has a message for Cingular Wireless and Verizon Wireless or, for that matter, any company that uses its ads to attack a competitor. Instead of luring away your competitor's customers, you may just be hurting yourself. Zhang, a Wharton marketing professor, has found that combative ads -- the sort of comparative spots that beer makers, particularly Anheuser-Busch and Miller, are famed for -- may backfire. Instead of pulling consumers to an advertiser, they may just make people indifferent to all offerings in a product category. "Combative advertising, a characteristic of mature markets, is defined as advertising that shifts consumer preferences toward the advertising firm but does not expand the category demand," Zhang says in his research paper titled, "A Theory of Combative Advertising."

Invisibility cloak.

Remember Harry Potter had a cloak that made him invisible? Impossible. Or not? Listen to this NPR story...