This is the most unconventional marketing book I have ever read. Judd Labarthe is a critical thinker who questions and refutes the typical marketing concepts and buzzwords. Instead, his book is a celebration of logical thinking and common sense: marketing isn’t about following theories and models taught in business schools and marketing classes, but about understanding the brand’s real situation, identifying plausible growth opportunities, and then finding a logical way to develop these into real-world business success. Swimming Downstream is both refreshing and – thanks to Labarthe’s honest writing style – entertaining. I will recommend it to my students!

With Swimming Downstream, Judd Labarthe invites marketers and brand builders to liberate themselves from outmoded thinking and conventional assumptions. His intelligence, pragmatism and enthusiasm for subject and craft jump alive and vivid from every page. The book is a significant commentary on a discipline that too often lacks discipline, and an infectious treatise on a subject we are all complicit in. Swimming Downstream delivers a cognitive jumpstart – this is Jedi-level stuff.

Swimming Downstream crushes the conventional wisdom dished out by marketing veterans and self-styled “experts”, and it does so with a deft combination of rigor, creativity and a fun, conversational style I really loved. Better still, Labarthe doesn’t simply poke holes in traditional marketing tropes; he provides solid, practical solutions illustrated with insightful case histories based on his experience as a marketing consultant.  So if you’re convinced that the key to becoming a big brand is selling more to your most loyal customers, that your advertising has to be persuasive, that brand distinctiveness hinges on what people think of your brand – or if you’ve been seduced by any of the other popular but misguided ideas of how marketing works – then you need this book. 

As a nonfiction book editor who has co-written four books on marketing and sales, it's safe to say I’ve read dozens of marketing books. Judd Labarthe's Swimming Downstream offers two things I rarely see together: a clear, practical, and actionable guidance for growing brands and businesses, and also a ripping great read! If you're looking for a serious (and seriously witty) book that will change the way you think about marketing and how you do it, this book is for you.

Labarthe starts with the notion that marketing is in trouble – and he's right. In fact, it's been desperately broken for years, focused on short-term results and guided by feel and intuition rather than rigor and analysis. Swimming Downstream takes a thoughtful, analytical, and well researched approach to helping business leaders re-think their marketing with a focus on long-term success. Its message isn’t just for marketers: Labarthe also reminds us, rightly in my view, that marketing and brand are the responsibility of the top of the house, not a department. His anecdotes are at once familiar and instructive, and the chapter end summaries provide a shorthand "to-do list" for the attention-challenged. Swimming Downstream is a useful, understandable, and practical guide to fixing marketing, so it can again do what David Ogilvy noted that it must do – make the cash register ring.