Marketing is always the primary force -- the catalyst, the driver, the tsunami -- for propelling the growth of a business. The problem is, the art and science of marketing is often poorly designed and terribly executed to the point that it just plain sucks. It fails to achieve the only legitimate goal for marketing: to drive a company's growth. In this Tenth Anniversary edition of Your Marketing Sucks, renowned CEO Mark Stevens guides the reader through the principles of successful, business-building marketing, expanding on and updating his global Best Seller with fresh new content focused on state of the art guidance for building a wired brand designed to thrive in the viral era. In this invaluable, time-tested book, the bedrock principles of extreme marketing are fused with the power of the Internet/social media to deliver exponential results. It is, in its totality, an idea whose time has come!

Stevens shows how to conceive an innovative, effective marketing campaign strategy and then monitor the results. The idea is to spend one's marketing budget only in ways that will give a measurable return on marketing dollars.

It's every businessperson's nightmare: his or her company is failing, dysfunctional, stuck in neutral, and is disappointing overall, from the finances to the customer feedback. Put bluntly—but candidly—the company sucks. That's the bad news. The good news is that it doesn't have to be that way. Every business can rebound from its lows, regain its momentum, thrill its customers, and be the source of pride and profits its owners and shareholders seek. This U-turn must begin with you, the owner or senior manager, declaring war on yourself. By facing the fact that the malaise is the business suffers from ultimately is your responsibility and your doing, and even more important, will not be rectified unless you take the lead. Face the hard truth. Take the difficult actions. Demonstrate determination, creativity and resolve. Your Company Sucks pulls back the curtain on business performance. To reveal the four real-world reasons businesses decline, to identify them as red flags, and to provide a powerful and innovative methodology to transition from failure to flourish. Mark Stevens reveals that there are not thousands of reasons businesses fail. The reasons fall under four major categories: 1. rudderless leadership 2. the lust-to-lax syndrome 3. incompetence 4. conventional thinking Identifying and addressing the reasons for your company's failure is the focus of the war. This insightful book shows that the key to long-term business success is for the leader to declare war on him/herself so that the company never rests on its laurels. It also demonstrates how customer satisfaction is a curse in disguise. You don't want to satisfy your customers—you want to thrill them.

If you’ve ever felt like you suck at marketing, you’re not alone. Survive and thrive in today’s digital world. Let’s face it, marketing today is really, really hard. From the explosion of digital advertising options to the thousands of martech tools out there on the market, it’s virtually impossible to stay on top of it all. Even more challenging is the deluge of analytics available, leaving marketers swimming in data but thirsting for knowledge. But you don’t have to feel like you suck at marketing. Join award-winning marketing leader Jeff Perkins as he examines how to avoid the pitfalls and survive in today’s ever-changing marketing landscape. Focusing on essential skills for modern marketers, How Not to Suck at Marketing prepares you to: - Create a focused marketing program that drives results - Collaborate effectively with the key stakeholders - Assemble a high-performing marketing team - Define and nurture your company (and personal) brand - Build a focused career and find the right job for you Digital tools allow us to track immediate results, but marketing has always been about the long game. Tackle your marketing strategy and build a focused career with this practical guide.

Go beyond PR spin! Master better ways to communicate honestly and regain the trust of your customers and stakeholders with this book.

Stop throwing thousand-dollar bills out the window and camouflaging spending as marketing! Your Marketing Sucks cuts through the myths that claim marketing is about advertising, public relations, or direct mail. You should stop all marketing until you know how each component of your program justifies itself in dollars and cents and fire your advertising agency if it even thinks about applying for a Clio or other creative award. Learn how marketing it is about growing the revenue, profit, and valuation of the business with this bestseller. After reading Your Marketing Sucks, you'll demand that the money spent on marketing bring in more money in return.

Drive more value from all your marketing and communications channels--together! Demolish your silos and sync all your messaging, strategies, and tactics (really!). Optimize every medium and platform, from iPad and Facebook to TV and direct. This book is a must-read for every senior marketing, communications, and PR decision-maker. It’s not about social media. Or new (or old) media. It’s about results—and there’s only one way to get results. You must finally bite the bullet, tear down your silos, and integrate all your marketing and communications. That’s how you choose the best platforms and messages for each customer. That’s how you make research and metrics work. That’s how you overcome today’s insane levels of complexity and clutter. You’re thinking: Oh, that’s all I need to do? “Just” integrate my whole organization? Are you nuts? No. We’re not. It can be done. This book’s authors have done it. They’ve shown others how to do it. And now they’re going to show you. Step by step. Strategy. Tactics. Research. Metrics. Culture. Social. Mobile. Direct. Broadcast. Print. All of it. With you, the marketing/communications decision-maker, right at the center...right where you belong! Even now, organizational silos prevent most companies from conversing coherently with customers, delivering the right targeted messages, and building real synergies across all their marketing and communications programs. Now, Gini Dietrich and Geoff Livingston show how to finally break down those silos, bridging traditional and newer disciplines to drive more value from all of them. You’ll learn how to create a flexible marketing hub with integrated spokes including sales, PR, advertising, customer service, HR, social media, and the executive team. Then, you’ll learn how to use your hub to speak cohesively with each customer through the tools and platforms that deliver the best results at the lowest cost. Dietrich and Livingston guide you through hands-on strategic planning, illustrating key points with real case studies and offering practical exercises for applying their principles. You’ll learn how to perform baseline analyses of media from iPad apps to radio, optimize resource allocation, change culture to overcome siloed behavior, use measurement to clear away obstacles, and gain more value from every marketing investment you make. Pull it all together--finally! How to successfully integrate your tactics, tools, messages, and teams Better goals, better results: beyond “SMART” to “SMARTER” Specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound, evaluate, and reevaluate Better listening: stakeholders, customers, and research that works How to make sure you hear what really matters Four powerful ways to market in the round When to go direct, come from above, use the groundswell, or execute flanking maneuvers