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FOREWORD

{by Sergio Zyman}

Jump Start Your MARKETING Brain is a proven playbook for surviving in the current world and for growing your business in general.

In place of mindless gimmicks and tricks, it delivers rock-solid data, insightful truths, and market-altering ideas that will help you get to your business destination.

This book shows you how to quantitatively tilt the odds of success in your favor. The book also documents practical ideas for making a measurable difference in your sales and marketing results.

In a nutshell, the book teaches what I preach: “How to sell more, to more people, for more money, more efficiently.” It also does something that I like to do over and over again, which is to blow up the black box of marketing and to replace it with proven principles. It proves clearly that marketing can and should be considered a hard science, not an artistic mystery.

Like a business anthropologist, Doug Hall has sifted through mounds of academic research and real-world marketplace data so you don’t have to. He’s dug deep to quantify what really matters—what really works in today’s marketplace.

Jump Start Your MARKETING Brain directly challenges conventional marketing wisdom. It backs up its challenges with hard data. Huge chunks of the book are counterintuitive. And at the end of the day, you might think that this is just a trick to get your attention, but it’s not. The counterintuitive insights are proven principles that you need to understand if you want to make a real difference for your business.

In today’s world, it’s time for a revolution in how we market and sell every branded product and service. It’s time to start fresh. It’s time to lay the policies and principles of failure aside. It’s time to embrace a more scientific, data-driven approach where we “play with the odds” instead of “praying for long shots.”

Jump Start Your MARKETING Brain is a blueprint for how I see marketing in the future and how I’ve been seeing it for the last few years. It’s the marketing that made me successful. It’s a back-to-basics marketing focused on what really matters. It’s about connecting customers and consumers with meaningful brands, products, and services in order to get them to give us their hard-earned dollars, yen, pounds, pesos, and euros in return.

The data mining, statistical analysis and insight that Jump Start Your MARKETING Brain delivers are impressive. But the monumental aspect of the book is how the Scientific Advice has been translated into Practical Ideas, the kind of actionable, practical ideas that have made the Eureka! Ranch legendary in the corporate world.

Never in business history has there been a greater need for revolution in how we approach sales and marketing. I’ve been talking about it now for years and practiced it for many more years when I worked for the Coca-Cola Company. Now is the time for a more disciplined, factual, and measured approach. The discipline starts with a fundamental focus on meaningfully serving the real needs of our customers and our consumers. The time for creative geniuses comes after that. You have to have a strategy and a destination before you can start applying creativity to that strategy and destination.

Jump Start Your MARKETING Brain is a book that, beyond any doubts, confirms what I have long believed: Marketing-centered thinking is and should be the engine of growth for your entire company, not just for your brands. Marketing thinking is too important to keep hidden in the sales and marketing department. Marketing is the fundamental promise of your organization. It is the glue that guides the direction and inter-relationships between all departments from finance to manufacturing to every other silo that you have on your organizational chart.

When I wrote The End of Marketing as We Know It, people wrote me and said, “Oh, wow! Now I get it. I understand what marketing is, and now I want to start practicing it in a more scientific way.” The two-page format of Jump Start Your MARKETING Brain screams at you to take action—to get up, get out, and do something to make a clear difference for your company; a measurable difference for your company. The time for excuses is over. The time for action is now, and I’m sure that after reading Jump Start Your MARKETING Brain, many people will write to Hall as they wrote to me, and they’ll say, “Now I get it, and I’m going to get it done.”

Sergio Zyman CEO, Zyman Marketing Former Chief Marketing Officer The Coca-Cola Company

Sergio Zyman’s books include: The End of Marketing as We Know It The End of Advertising as We Know It Renovate Before You Innovate: Why Doing the New Thing Might Not Be the Right Thing