Renegade Marketing summary

Introduction

Renegade Marketing by Drew Neisser. Renegade marketing shows B2B marketers how courage, communication, thoughtful execution, and measurement create distinctive, effective brands. Every day we're bombarded by information. From the moment you check your phone in the morning until you fall asleep at night, you're absorbing content.

Every day there are billions of new Google searches, millions of new blog posts published, there are also hundreds of millions of tweets posted. Never has the human brain been so overloaded. As a marketing executive, your job is to break through that wall of noise. You need to create a message so distinct that people are able to absorb it.

Even more importantly, they need to remember it. This is something Drew Neisser knows very well. Over his four decades in the industry, he's worked with huge corporations like IBM. He has also worked with cutting edge startups.

He's witnessed marketing technology change beyond recognition, and he's made it his mission to stay ahead of the curve. The marketing company he founded, Renegade, has a simple slogan, Cut Through. Its campaigns are designed to help companies cut through the information overload. They also help deliver simple, effective messages to their customers.

Neisser has also interviewed more than 425 leading chief marketing officers, or CMOs. From those interviews, as well as his own experience, he has distilled four key characteristics of really successful marketers. They are courageous, artful, thoughtful, and scientific. Together, these characteristics form the acronym CATS.

In these chapters, you'll learn about Drew Neisser's transformative approach to B2B marketing. You'll also learn how you can develop these CATS qualities and apply them in your own company.

courage and distinctiveness

Courage and Distinctiveness. Today, marketing executives are trained to make marketing ever more complex. They have more data to work with than ever before, attend fancy training academies. They are also given huge teams to work with.

They're told to imagine their target audience as a collection of different personas. They're also told to tailor their message to fit everyone. But here's the thing, you absolutely cannot be everything to everyone. If you make your message too all encompassing, you end up confusing the customer and pleasing no one.

To be successful, you need the courage to create a simple pitch that sets you apart from the competition. Let's look at an example from the building industry. The author's apartment board decided it needed to replace the hallway carpeting and invited bids from several companies. The first two companies proudly stated that they worked for big restaurants, corporations, and private apartment buildings.

The third company, GEMPB Enterprise, made a different sort of pitch. It said it worked exclusively on carpeting for private apartment buildings and offered no other services. Its representatives demonstrated their expertise by identifying a specific problem they regularly encountered on the job. The problem was complaints from residents.

Then they explained how they'd solved it by budgeting for nightly cleanups and using special vacuums. By the end of the pitch, the board was sold. GEMPB Enterprise had a unique selling point and it could state that point clearly and simply. In the beginning, the company had to turn down a lot of work.

Its target market was so specific, that was scary. But over time, the narrow focus became its key selling point. GEMPB Enterprise dared to be different and it worked. The first letter in CATS stands for courage.

To be courageous, renegade marketers need to be willing to cut through the noise. They also need to craft a simple, distinctive identity. And if something isn't working, they need the courage to pivot to something that does. Making change takes courage.

But in reality, failing to change can be even riskier. Look at Netflix. The streaming giant was once in the business of mailing DVDs. It invested in streaming well ahead of much of the competition and became a market leader.

Blockbuster, on the other hand, was far too late to the streaming game. The former entertainment giant went bust because it failed to embrace change. So what changes are you willing to make to cut through the noise and make your company unique? In the next chapter, you'll discover how to artfully articulate your company's unique purpose.

You'll also learn how to make sure it's shared by everyone in your organization.