This is the 4th Edition, published in 2007, so it’s pretty up to date. It’s a treatise on marketing for small businesses and individuals, the breadth of which is kind of astonishing. It’s been around for a long time and Levinson has since built a whole infrastructure of co-authored books on more specialized marketing topics. But this is the one that started it all, the one that forms the basis for all of those other ones, and, I’m betting, the one that mentions his other books the most. It’s clear that he has applied most of what he espouses to a high degree of success.
I needed this book. I’m at a point in my business where I need to have my marketing strategy in the front of my mind at every moment. It needs to roll off my tongue like a downhill putt at Augusta, if you know what I mean. Levinson gets the business owner pretty far down the road on this pursuit, but he doesn’t stop there. He spends a little more time on saving money and doing market research, then launches into a detailed discussion of all of the different types of marketing and advertising know to humankind. He groups them as (1) Minimedia (like business cards), (2) Maximedia (like TV), and (3) New Media (like e-mail and blogs).
It’s pretty comprehensive and he goes into a fair amount of minutia on each. He had an interesting digression on classified advertising and talked fondly about the $500/month he earned for about a dozen years selling his self-published book Secrets of Successful Free-Lancing (pg 137). He sold it only via classified ads and uses it to illustrate how lethal and simple classified advertising can be if you monitor your response rates.
He spends a fair amount of time on direct mail (that’s maximedia), going into detail on the style of the envelope, the color of the paper used, and the content of the mailer. He goes through it all man, I’m telling you.
I got a lot out of these three segments, but I also blew through a lot of it very quickly. Radio and TV advertising are not in the cards for me so I couldn’t stay focused on topics like these.
He finishes up the book with three chapters on the “nature of the guerrilla.” In this section he goes into the attributes and attitudes of the marketing guerrilla. It is motivating and some good stuff, but I think the Gitomer books cover a lot of this stuff and I like reading them a lot better. I’ve slapped together some notes on Guerilla Marketing that I’ll use them a lot as I hammer through my marketing strategy over the next 60 days, but I have a feeling that I’m going to be spending more of my time in the Gitomer books than in Guerilla Marketing.
This was a good read and brought a lot of stuff to mind, it’s going in the stack of books at my office that I’m going to be referring to in the near future.
I'm John Steffen and I write stuff here. I can't help myself. Be thankful I'm not clogging up your Facebook timeline with this junk. Reach me @jstefdotcom.