Brand Busters by Chris Wirthwein

Available for Amazon Kindle readers (see below)

by Chris Wirthwein

In Brand Busters, marketing veteran Chris Wirthwein draws on his 20-plus years of experience of helping clients to market scientific and technical products to explain how to avoid these marketing pitfalls:

1. Talking "needs" instead of "wants."

2. Falling in love with your product instead of your customer.

3. Believing that marketing is all science or all art.

4. Trying to please everyone.

5. Forgetting that people forget.

6. Believing your price is too high—without proof.

7. Believing you must sell your product on an economic basis.

Wirthwein says adding value to a product is usually a better option than cutting price and that many businesses may not be charging enough for their products. He uses the example of bottled water. People complain about the cost of gas, but at the same time buy a bottle of water without much thought. He notes that if gas cost as much as bottled water, we would pay $150 to fill our tank. Yet we pay the equivalent of about $7 a gallon for water—a commodity that we are accustomed to thinking of as free.

Brand Busters initially was intended for marketers of scientific and technical products—companies with customers Wirthwein characterizes as hypercritical and hypersophisticated. But Wirthwein quickly realized the principles in his book are "fundamental to marketing no matter what the product is."

Books about marketing highly technical products are a rarity. "This is brain surgery stuff; rocket science stuff, tales from the trenches," says Wirthwein, who provides examples of products ranging from ball bearings to peanut shell pests. This kind of stuff isn't often written about, so it may bring in a whole new set of ideas from a whole different world than what most marketing people are exposed to."

"Marketing is capturing people's imagination, attention, and emotion. It's rewarding when you can get somebody to pay attention and love your client's product all because of a bit of marketing that was created out of an idea. That's the kind of inspiration you'll take away from this book," says Wirthwein.

(152 pages, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-9801745-0-2; 2008)