42 Rules of Marketing
by Laura Lowell
SuperStar Press, Cupertino, CA; 107 pages

Reviewed by Gwen O’Neill

So you have come up with a great idea for a small business. You’ve found enough money to start your venture, even figured out where to “set up shop.” You finished your business plan and are confident that this is the right time to forge ahead.

Now the tricky part begins. How can you be sure you’ve targeted your market and that you and any partners or advisors have selected the right strategy to implement your plan?

Marketing a small business is usually the hardest part of running that business, and often the reason small business startups fail. An AproTech 2003 study found that only 20 percent of small businesses make it to their fifth year. Given this, it behooves all small business owners to learn more about marketing. So imagine my delight in finding a marketing book that was actually fun to read.
In her book 42 Rules of Marketing, Laura Lowell offers bite-sized chunks of information with short, easy-to-read paragraphs. Her rules start with “Rules are meant to be broken” and go on to include items such as “Know what you’re aiming at” and “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Lowell was the director of worldwide consumer marketing communications for Hewlett-Packard where she was responsible for planning and implementing integrated marketing campaigns across all HP consumer product lines. She also spent several years at Intel Corporation and helped develop the Intel Inside branding program.

Lowell says, “Marketing is the way you create and distribute messages to get people’s attention so you can convince them to buy more of your stuff.” She affirms that marketing is “creative, exciting and dare-I-say fun,” and adds, “Throwing ideas around, watching them get better and bigger by the minute — how cool is that?”

In addition to defining what marketing is — both a science and an art — she talks about identifying objectives, picking the problems you want to solve, and prioritizing the activities. Lowell says that getting to know your customers and targeting your message to various groups in your marketplace is made easier, and at the same time more challenging, by technology. “Technology allows you to target your messages in ways we couldn’t even dream of before we had the Internet.”

Along with more general discussions on how to be compelling and using the right tools, she get into specific discussions about some of these tools, such as blogs and e-mail, and also the relationship between traditional media (such as audio, video and text) and the newer Internet tools.

So after you’ve created your marketing plan, you need to be able to evaluate how effective it was. Did you define what the success would look like as you were in the planning stages? “The measurement could be click through on your Web site, calls to a 1-800 number, or actual sales volume and revenue targets. Gauging effectiveness doesn’t need to be complicated and overly engineered.”

42 Rules also has interesting ideas about launching second-generation products or a new market segment, and how “If planned well, one launch will lead right into the next … It can be a ‘big bang’ or ‘crescendo’ where activities lead up to or are triggered by a specific event.”

Lowell also advises, “Don’t take your company, your product, or yourself too seriously. Humor is one of the most effective ways to connect with individuals … Target customers get nothing but serious messages all day long. A little humor would stand out and maybe prompt a chuckle. Aha, you’re in … now you have established a nice sub-conscious connection with the person.”

Rule 41 is “Don’t follow the pack,” and the concluding Rule 42 is “These are my rules. What are yours?” You’ll have to read the book to find out why there are 42 rules.

This is an engaging book with some compelling food for thought. Visit www.42rules.com for more information.