After the difficult work of developing a product, entrepreneurs face a stunning truth: Their hardest labor is still ahead of them. Now, they must learn marketing—that perfect mix of product, price, promotion, and place that, when carefully executed, results in success. It’s this challenge that Paul D. Barchitta examines in Market Me.
Barchitta is an awarding-winning seller in the fiercely competitive medical device sector. While he notes that some aspects of marketing haven’t changed in decades, others, such as promotion, are more important than ever, due to an increasingly crowded marketplace. Key to leveraging the marketing mix in today’s environment, he writes, is understanding the power of “raising awareness”—crafting the most persuasive message to capture the attention of a targeted audience.
To this end, Market Me offers a variety of methods, techniques and theories. Chapters are dedicated to topics like branding, message delivery platforms (such as television, Internet, print, radio, etc.), sales techniques, distribution channels and global marketing.
Depending on where entrepreneurs are in their product’s life cycle (growth, maturity, decline), some chapters may be more useful than others. Sections of broad interest will be those devoted to selling, including one about the differences between transaction and relationship selling (the former focuses on the wants of the salesperson; the latter, which is more effective, emphasizes the wants and needs of the potential buyer). Also valuable is his personal recounting of dealing with the gatekeepers who guard access to the people who make the buying decisions.
Throughout, Barchitta effectively uses his personal experiences to illustrate his points. We learn, for example, about the great lengths he went to in order to atone for a corporate mistake that angered his buyer, including incurring personal expense to rectify the situation.
Overall, Market Me is a useful guide to more effecting marketing—one that can ultimately help entrepreneurs reconnect with the passion that drove them to launch their businesses in the first place.
Also available in hardcover and ebook.
