Mickey Brazeal on Business Week Exchange

Author Mickey Brazeal, whose book RFID: Improving the Customer Experience, gives many examples of how to use RFID technology to better serve customers as well as to cut costs in retail, health care, utilities, transportation, agriculture and many other industries recently appeared on Business Week's Exchange. You can see the mention here.

Why you don't find our books in most bookstores

Customers often call to ask if they can find our books in a local bookstore. Unfortunately, the answer is usually "no," but your bookstore can special order from us.

There's are good reasons why we are not in most bookstores.

First, our books are designed for marketing professionals and we find that most marketers are not cruising their local bookstores looking for marketing information.

Second, to stock books in bookstores, we have to prints thousands of copies, many of which will eventually be returned to us. We prefer to print about 6 months worth of books at a time. If a book is selling well, we can easily go back to print. If it is not, we have saved many trees and a lot of warehouse space.

Third, our books are readily available through our own website, and stocked at Amazon, and BN.com. If we receive an order before 3 p.m. eastern time Monday through Friday, we ship the same day. We can ship overnight, if need be. We also have most of our books in a downloadable version, which makes it available almost immediately. (Because we process credit cards manually, downloads will be delayed if they come in during non-business hours.)

In short, if you need a book quickly, call us toll free at 888-787-8100 and we will do our best to accommodate you on whatever schedule works for you.

FallLineup for PMP Books

We at Paramount Books are very excited about our fall lineup of books. In addition to a new book by Tom Asacker, which we mentioned in our last post, we are also tackling some new topics and bringing new insights to some older topics.

Erin O. Patton, founder of The MasterMind Group is working on a book on the effect of the hip-hop Generation X on pop culture. If you've ever wondered why urban trends among minorities have such a powerful impact on the rest of American, and indeed, global, culture, Erin explains it and gives many examples of how and why hip-hop culture has made it into the mainstream.

Mickey Brazeal is bringing us a book on RFID and the Customer Experience. (Radio Frequency Identification). RFID is widely in use at the present time to track shipments of goods, but Brazeal explains how it will be used in the future to improve the customer experience. Its uses could include greater safety in our food supply by tracking which farms (and in some cases, fields and animals) exactly the jalapeno peppers, lettuce, tomatoes, beef, etc. have come from. RFID can also be used to cut down on health care costs. By using RFID to track hospital equipment and drugs, for example, hospitals would not have to have twice as many wheelchairs and respirators as they really need, and they would know when drugs are walking out the pharmacy door.

Miriam Muley will bring us a new book on women and diversity which will help businesses understand why catering to and employing women of all colors improves bottom line results. Miriam will be a featured speak at the PME M2Moms conference in Chicago October 22 and 23 and her book will be available for all attendees.

These books are not yet posted on the Paramount Books site, but they will be shortly. If you want to be among the first to know when they are available and receive a pre-publication (discounted) offer, visit www.paramountbooks.com and sign up for our email newsletter, What's New in Marketing.

Are marketers talking too much?

Many of you have enjoyed Tom Asacker's little book, A Clear Eye for Branding, in which he and a seat companion on a flight have an extended conversation about what branding is and how marketers need to rethink their approaches to branding.

Asacker has been working on a new book called A Little Less Conversation. It will serve as a great companion to A Clear Eye. In it, he commiserates with an executive he meets in an airport after both their flights have been cancelled. Almost any business traveler can relate to that.

But over lunch they have an engaging conversation about why the hard-sell approach to marketing no longer works and why marketers need to forget about their products and establish an emotional connection with their customers, talking to them less and listening to them more.

Several PMP titles have expanded on this theme recently. Dan Herman's book Outsmart the MBA Clones isn't really a slam against MBAs. It is simply a challenge to think outside the box, to consider fresh approaches to bringing the consumer inside the marketing circle instead of leaving him out in the cold and assuming that if you sell features and benefits hard enough your product or service will flourish.

Outsmart the MBA Clones is already available and you'll be hearing more about Tom Asacker's book in the near future as we prepare it for the printer. If you want to make sure you are among the first to have it, sign up on www.paramountbooks.com for the bi-weekly email announcements of new books and special offers called What's New in Marketing?

Black Americans and the Internet

Author Pepper Miller recently presented the results of a Radio One/Yankelovich survey to Target Market News' ninth annual African-American Research and Advertising Summit.

Among the findings of the study were that Black Americans have caught up with white Americans when it comes to using the Internet. Pepper commented that one reason studies have shown Black Americans lagging so far behind their white peers is that surveyors have asked about computer use vs. online use. "Access tells a bigger story about who does what, when, and where online. Radio One and Yankelovich asked the better question and got it right."

Pepper is one of the outstanding Black American researchers today who knows what the right questions are and how to ask them to gain insight into the market.

You can access more from the study and her comments about it in this Ad Age article, by clicking here.

Listen to this man's advice

One of our favorite trendspotters (and former boss) is Peter Francese, the founder of American Demographics magazine. Although the magazine has now been incorporated into Advertising Age, Francese still occasionally writes articles about demographic trends.


His latest, which you can find by clicking here, talks about the changing face of the American consumer and the difficulty that many businesses are having responding to these changes.

One of the principal trends is that the average U.S. head of household is just six months shy of age 50. This means that households are entering the age of maintaining the status quo, as one of our other favorite trendspotters, the editor-in-chief of New Strategist publications, Cheryl Russell, has pointed out many times. When consumers enter that phase in their lives, they are less likely to take risks to try new products or spend money that they don't have, and they are concerned about things that seem to them to be changing the status quo--such as immigration.

With the aging of the population is coming renewed interest in baby boomers, since they are the group driving the aging trend. We've seen an increase in the number of people ordering books on this topic, and it's not just established business people. A significant number of baby boomers are interested in entrepreneurship and they are doing more research to find out what kinds of businesses and services might appeal to their fellow boomers.

Paramount Books helps them out with titles like Marketing to Leading Edge Baby Boomers, Advertising to Baby Boomers, and Baby Boomers and Their Parents.

Making messages more authentic for non-white Americans

Yankelovich Monitor Multicultural Marketing Study reports that only 25 percent of all African-Americans and Hispanic consumers find marketing and advertising personally and culturally relevant.

Yankelovich has it right, but it doesn't have to be that way. Black Americans and U.S. Hispanics are looking for authenticity, not just cultural artifacts that appear to speak to them.

The weekly Yankelovich Monitor blog reports "Like all consumers, African Americans and Hispanics crave marketing communications and product offerings that reflect a deep understanding of their emotional and cultural desires. For example, among African-American and Hispanic consumers who read African-American and Spanish-language newspapers, the vast majority say they do so because they find the content more personally relevant than mass-market newspapers."

Incidently you can sign up for the weekly blog here. It's a great way to get informed commentary about a variety of marketing issues.

And, you can have your whole team learn more about how African-Americans and both U.S. born and foreign-born Hispanics view the world and what "authenticy" means to them by reading some of Paramount Market Publishing's excellent titles, including What's Black About It? by Pepper Miller and Herb Kemp and a just-released book on Hispanics, Hispanic Customers for Life, by bestselling PMP author, M. Isabel Valdes. Isabel delves deeper into the Hispanic culture by looking at Hispanics by generation and how long they have lived in the United States. You can find more information about each of these books and many more multicultural titles by clicking here.