Why smart marketing is about help not hype

Youtility – Chapters 7, 8, & 9 Youtility The two main ideas that play out in the entire book are being amazing or being useful in order for a business to break through in terms of competitiveness and cacophony. The second idea in particular becomes the premise on which the book is anchored: be useful to the customers before they become your customers. It emphasizes the need to change the way goods are marketed to customers based on the fact that the way customers decide on what to purchase has also changed. Averagely, customers will nowadays preview information from numerous sources about a product before buying it.
The three chapters (7, 8, & 9) focus on the need to consider the three prongs of Youtility in marketing: real-time relevancy, self-serve information, and radical transparency. In chapter seven, the author talks of the need to identify customer needs and the ways through which that can be achieved smartly. The entrepreneur has to understand what the prospects need to come up with better decisions and how he can improve their lives by providing these needs. This can be done using data from search engines, web analytics and social chatter. Google is particularly identified as a useful tool in handling this task. In a nutshell, the chapter basically points out asking real customers as the best way to understand customer needs.
In the next chapter, the writers goes ahead to pinpoint how one can translate the needs identified to be useful marketing. Various examples and case studies are illustrated to support the author’s statements. The arguments are structured on the basis that a level of research beyond understanding customer needs is necessary in determining the optimal conveyance for Youtility. One has to go beyond just understanding what a customer needs but also their preference of how and where to access the information. The entrepreneur’s marketing research should therefore be planned in such a way as to reach a large audience for it to be effective.
In the next chapter, the writer talks about how to market one’s marketing by going beyond just asking people to like ‘ your Facebook page’ (Baer, 2013). The line of thought in this idea is that people will not just bump into your Youtility but you have to promote it well. In fact, the writer identifies content as the fire while social media is the gasoline. An entrepreneur should first of all use social media to promote useful information before promoting their company.
The book is an important tool in understanding the marketing dynamics especially in an era where businesses are technologically aligned. The beauty of the book is in its practicality as it shows one how to cultivate a culture of Youtility and even win over the executive arm of one’s company. Moreover, the book provides a way in which one can find success in areas that had otherwise being deemed as failed as is in the case of social media. The best part of it all is that it provides real life examples and case studies to back up each claim.
References
Baer, J. (2013). Youtility: Why smart marketing is about help not hype. Penguin Publishing Group