Book Excerpts
Excerpt 1
How to Use This Book
Well, maybe as a doorstop or way to prop up a wobbly table.
But if you do get around to reading it might we suggest you don’t read it as you would other business books. We just didn’t write it that way. We want you to have fun and scream, maybe giggle, and maybe roll your eyes a little, even shout at us occasionally for being so not in our minds.
In short we want you to have as much of a good time as we had writing the damn thing.
We’re not being solicitous. We mean it.
Don’t read the chapters in sequence unless you really feel you want to. Each is written as a stand-alone piece that doesn’t live or die on arguments put forward in previous chapters. Dip into one. Pick something at random and see where it leads. We’ve included navigational tools in each to help guide you to other chapters or side-thoughts that are, perhaps in some Kunderaesque way, connected.
There is no single idea in this book on which all else hinges. Books with one idea read like magazine articles and run out of steam by the third chapter and then repeat themselves so much you end up tossing the damn thing into a fireplace.
But here instead we proffer one theme to tie everything together. Namely that power has been transferred from corporation to consumers and so marketing must be both brave and intelligent to succeed.
The information within is not timeless – technology changes daily and with it often comes new ways of marketing – but we think the deeper principles hold true. Principles that have existed forever but should now be followed with urgency to win back the consumer.
So tear it apart, write notes within the pages – not just on the margins. Doodle on our faces on the back page. Rip the pages you like out – rip the pages you hate out! Put your coffee cup on it and leave rings on the pages. We’re so sick of people saying “Respect the book” as if it is some kind of religious artifact. Use this as you would a user manual for your car, not as a literary tome. Because it ain’t that.