Author, Consultant & Fractional Chief Marketing Officer
About me
When you're trying to build a brand, there are a lot of marketing & advertising choices to make. While most of the cost goes into tactics and media, it's actually strategy and planning that determines whether your marketing is successful (or not).
I've helped leading brands like General Motors, The U.S. Postal Service, FedEx, Verizon, Kraft-Heinz, Unilever, Subway, Advocate Health Care, and many others build and run successful campaigns. Years of working at top traditional and digital agencies taught me there are three keys to marketing success.
The first is insight. You must understand what makes your brand and products unique to your customers and audience. Second, you must have a clear, meaningful and genuine story to tell. And third, the quality of your engagement with consumers matters far more than the number of impressions you create.
My focus today is working with small and midsize companies that will be tomorrow's top brands. Providing the leadership, perspective, process, and practices they need to market and advertise more effectively.
Book Overview
A common problem in marketing is what a brand says in advertising isn't always what customers and employees experience. Authenticity shows you how to align your marketing efforts with the purpose of your brand.
Too many companies depend on marketing tactics that don't match the needs and concerns of their customers, or embrace messaging and causes that don't connect. Authenticity is an anti-gimmick business book. It prescribes clear strategies that enable companies to communicate in a more genuine, emotional way.
Authors Mark Toft, Jay Sunny, and Rich Taylor provide a series of approaches to help embrace and communicate the purpose of your brand with effectiveness. Whether you're a business executive who wants to be more persuasive or an advertising professional looking to grow your brand, this book combines the authors' successful experiences at top agencies into practical advice that can work for anyone in any business.
Readers will learn the importance of purpose and conflict in marketing activities, how to approach advertising with clarity and passion, and how to plan content while avoiding the false allure of aspirational advertising and insincere corporate social responsibility. Inauthentic messaging can often spell failure for a business, but the company that tells a genuine, compelling story to its customers is the one that succeeds.
Features
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Supports reading in small doses through short, provocative chapters
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Offers refreshed principles and strategies to help reveal or recover authenticity in your branding, messaging, advertising, and marketing
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Roots advice in over five decades of combined business and marketing experiences producing award-winning campaigns
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Provides examples and analysis of brands that align marketing with their genuine purposes
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Relates surprising and commonsense wisdom in an engaging style, free of business jargon
What People Are saying
My company has been working with Rich for over a year now. He led us through a series of eye-opening activities to ensure our end result was authentic and impactful. He has a gift of boiling a story down to the most salient pieces and cutting away the "fat"
Senior Director of Marketing,
Heart + Mind Strategies
