I liked the back and forth between you and Danny. The review was long enough to really give one a good sense of the book’s content and assess if it should be added to ones’ personal to-read list.

Very well done!

Lots of food for thought…

Keep up the great work — looking forward to more of these!

A good list and a brave post — hope you don’t catch too much backlash for it.

If I may add a couple more items to the list. These are based on my own experiences as well as my own mistakes.

Peer Validation v. Customer Validation: A funny thing that I often see with Ottawa firms is a fixation on media outlets that their peers read. Talking about our products and companies on peer forums, blogs, and social media makes us, as developer feel good, but doesn’t translate into customers. Without any data, I am willing to bet many of the companies featured on the Profit 100 list have little coverage on TechCrunch and similar blogs, but huge presence on sites their customers read.

VC VC VC: Ah the quest for the VC funds. I have sat on, been subject too, and participated in countless forums, panels, and committees that are priming and grooming our young companies for VC financing. With our town’s infatuation with VCs it is no wonder to me that few companies would make the Profit 100 list. For one, VC Financing does not equal profitability (for the techies $VC != profit). Again, without any data, I would assert that most of the companies on the list focused on customers before VCs and that they built their product be attractive to their customer rather than attractive to VCs.

I think one issue facing most marketing departments these days is increased pressure for results while decreased resources to meet those needs and for these reasons, marketing tends to become something that is done by only looking into the near future and only by doing what has been done before. So I think every marketer needs to do what you are suggesting and be sure to force the discussion on the big strategic questions.

What I like about marketing is that it is a really dynamic and changing field to be involved in and as long as you can keep your head on swivel, something great might be right around you that could really move the needle.

One thing though I would say is that you have to be careful about hanging onto marketing tactics that aren’t working. Sure, many things take time, like SEO, but if something isn’t working you gotta cut and run fast. I worked at a software company and we experimented with radio ad campaign through Google. Ran them on the entire northwest US… from what we could tell, they might have resulted in 4, yes 4, visits to our website. Although not purely a marketing decision, I was impressed with how quickly MSFT killed the Kin this month. So think there is something to be said for not being afraid to make tough decisions early on.

I think the problem comes down to the fact that numbers often mean nothing without some kind of perspective to them and this is one of the best things that an author I know you read, Avinash Kaushik, preaches.

I find that when you get into situations where you don’t have something concrete to give you audience perspective is when you get into these situations.

I also agree with that you’re saying here… people who aren’t in marketing often have a hard time understand that response rates for most tactics are in the single digits…