In Search of the Obvious

This audio book could upset a lot of people

It is the first to state the obvious: Marketing is a mess. Jack Trout intends to make a lot of people, who made the mess, very uncomfortable. Only then will they begin to look for the obvious solutions that will separate their products from their competitors-in a way that is equally obvious to customers. All this comes with no jargon, no numbers, no complexity, and a great deal of common sense.

The search for any marketing strategy is the search for the obvious.

We are in an era of killer competition. Category after category is perceived as a commodity. This fact is the central reason the critically important function of marketing is such a mess. It's also why the average chief marketing officer barely lasts beyond two years in the job.

In this audio book, marketing guru, Jack Trout clears up the confusion that surrounds the marketing profession. Instead of focusing on segmentation or customer retention or search engine optimization or data mining, marketers should be searching for that simple, obvious differentiating idea. Marketers not looking for the obvious had better have a very low price.

This search should begin with what Trout considers the best book ever written on marketing-even though it was published in 1916 and isn't about marketing. Entitled Obvious Adams: The Story of a Successful Business Man, it lays out the five tests of an obvious idea that will lead you to the right marketing strategy for any product. Trout goes beyond the obvious by laying out what gets in the way of this search, like the Internet, advertising people, marketing people, Wall Street, research, even the future. These are all huge distractions that keep marketers from their most important task: differentiating their products.

To bring these principles for finding the obvious to life, Trout finds obvious solutions to today's troubles for the likes of GM, Coke, Wal-Mart, newspapers, and the bewildering beer business. The fundamental problem is that professional marketers overlook the most obvious and effective ideas entirely, in an attempt to be clever or creative. But if an idea is obvious to you, it will be obvious to your consumer-which is why it will work.