New Book Review: "Selling the Invisible"
New book review for Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing, by Harry Beckwith, Business Plus, 1997:
Almost 150 reviews at this point for this text, spanning consistently over a period of the 10 years it has been written. This reviewer recalls the recent "The Wall Street Journal" article which questioned whether such a high number of reviews for a single product is ever warranted. In the case at hand, this reviewer believes that so many reviews, with such positive feedback, is testament to the quality of the original content as well as to the ongoing (and arguably increasing) relevancy of the material.
Services marketing is the subject of this masterwork, and while subtitles for other books can be misleading at times, "Selling the Invisible" is truly a field guide to modern marketing – in the words of Beckwith a "how-to-think-about book", not necessarily a "how-to" book, "because if you think like these new marketers – if you think more broadly and deeply about services and their prospects – you will figure out dozens of better ways to grow your business".
The author explains that "this book is for all those service marketers: the 80 percent of us who do not manufacture products – and the other 20 percent who do", and that "the new marketing is more than a way of doing; it is a way of thinking. It begins with an understanding of the distinctive characteristics of services – their invisibility and intangibility – and of the unique nature of service prospects and users – their fear, their limited time, their sometimes illogical ways of making decisions, and their most important drives and needs."