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About The Book

For more than half a century, marketers have bombarded customers with more and more choices in products and services. What is the result? Unprecedented anxiety. Our mental circuit breakers are on overload. In fact, pioneering brand strategists Steven M. Cristol and Peter Sealey assert that we have reached our manageable threshold for making decisions -- and a watershed in product proliferation. In this pathbreaking book, the authors argue with compelling evidence that the next generation of marketing successes will belong to those brands that simplify customers' lives or businesses in ways that are inextricably tied to brand and product positioning. They contend that if a brand is not reducing customer stress, it is creating it -- and it is vulnerable to losing market share to more customer-empathetic competitors.
Writing especially for product or brand managers who are struggling to simplify their portfolios, Cristol and Sealey have created a breakthrough framework that is itself a lesson in simplicity. After presenting two essential guideposts for managers to assess where their brand sits on the stress spectrum, the authors turn to the heart of Simplicity Marketing -- the 4 R's of simplification: Replace, Repackage, Reposition, and Replenish. Using scores of real-world company examples, Cristol and Sealey show how each of the 4 R's interacts with the others in powerful ways to relieve customer stress and how these strategies may be executed individually or in combination to build brand loyalty. Here for the first time are ten specific strategies to relieve customer stress through consolidating, aggregating, or integrating products and services, repositioning brands for more relevance to stress reduction, and decluttering customers' decision-making requirements. The final pages of this brilliant manifesto for a simplicity revolution provide a guide to managing simplicity strategies, leveraging information technology to simplify rather than complicate customers' lives, and integrating all the tools in the book into an executional blueprint.

About The Authors

Product Details

  • Publisher: Free Press (March 11, 2001)
  • Length: 288 pages
  • ISBN13: 9780743215688

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Raves and Reviews

"Demonstrates keen insight into the growing complexity of people's lives and the need for brand marketers to understand the importance of stress reduction and simplicity in their approach. The book lays out a clear, focused strategy that will be a key ingredient for building successful relationships between people and brands in the 21st century." -- Doug Daft, Chairman and CEO, The Coca-Cola Company

"A breakthrough book that introduces one of the big ideas of the next decade. The 4 R's will become a key conceptual management tool in today's complex, cluttered, fast-changing environments. And rarely is so important a book so fun and inspiring." -- David A. Aaker, Vice Chairman, Prophet Brand Strategy, and co-author of Brand Leadership

"The 4 R's will be especially helpful to marketers in our rapidly changing marketplace." -- R. L. Wehling, Global Marketing Officer, Procter & Gamble

"In a world of dizzying technological change and ever-expanding choice, simplicity becomes the ultimate customer benefit. The 4 R's are the blueprint for delivering it. Must reading for all marketers and CEOs." --Stephen Graham, former VP Marketing Communications Worldwide, AT&T

"A clear new way of thinking about marketing in a fragmented digital age. We're using the four R's to build sales, brand equity, and competitive advantage for Fortune." --Jack Haire, President, The Fortune Group

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