Swimming Downstream: How to Stop Struggling and Start Winning with Marketing that Actually Works
ISBN 9789815319927
Reviews:2 Review
In Swimming Downstream, author Judd Labarthe synthesizes the sharpest points from marketing science, illustrates them with real-life cases drawn from the marketplace and his own practice, and organizes them into a pragmatic, actionable growth framework you can read about today and start implementing tomorrow.
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“Juxtaposing cutting-edge research with time-tested methods ...
the author’s insights really come to life.”
–BENJAMIN CLEMENS NUEBEL, Partner, CRU Brand Consulting GmbH
Successful marketing is more attainable than most businesspeople realize!
Most companies waste time and money doing stuff that doesn’t actually help them compete. They chase trends, deliver “deliverables,” optimize furiously, and call it all strategy. They simply follow the herd, because “everybody knows what works in marketing.”
Yet the evidence shows that what really drives growth is surprising, even counterintuitive. It’s unconventional wisdom, and it can help any brand get moving faster – if you know how to apply it.
In Swimming Downstream, author Judd Labarthe synthesizes the sharpest points from marketing science, illustrates them with real-life cases drawn from the marketplace and his own practice, and organizes them into a pragmatic, actionable growth framework you can read about today and start implementing tomorrow.
- Brand and business owners will learn to recognize and harness marketing’s real success drivers, and to avoid making the very intuitive, very common, and often very costly mistakes that limit competitiveness and growth.
- Marketing professionals will develop a management-convincing arsenal of arguments for doing more of what will help their brand and business grow, and against doing what won’t (but is often sold as “best practice”).
- Students of marketing and others new to the field will gain a valuable and holistic set of evidence- and experience-based alternatives to the conventional wisdom, including what’s commonly taught in school.
Tired of struggling against the current? Let Swimming Downstream show you how to get your business flowing toward lasting success instead.
Reviews(2)
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.
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.
