Harry Beckwith - The Invisible Touch: The Four Keys to Modern Marketing

T he lures of partial-celebrity are tempting. For both your sake and mine, however, I hope to resist them.

I wrote Selling the Invisible from obscurity. A few hundred clients, friends, and acquaintances knew me. On the morning the book first appeared on the shelves, March 5, 1997, our clients reached from Greensboro to San Francisco, but 80 percent worked within view of the IDS building in mid-town Minneapolis.

As I look back on how much has changed since then, I realize my first book offers this lesson to service providers: Write one. If a book sells nicely, an authors life changes.

Letters arrived postmarked from towns wed never heard of (Valley, Nebraska? Kosciusko, Mississippi?). Callers spoke in dialects wed never heard of (Singapore has a dialect? Pakistan?). Both often overflowed with compliments. Those incredible compliments actually poured in, unsolicited. None was written by an old friend, by someone whose back Id scratched first, or by Jimmy Franco, Warner Books fine publicist.

This welcome response brought with it a temptation.

The temptation is to think I know everything now, and to write a book from that narrower perspective. Like fatigue narrows a distance runners peripheral vision, the label expert can limit an authors. The author starts looking inside, confident of finding wisdom there, drawing on what he already knows. Thus diverted, he misses the critical insights outside his tunnel vision.

This book does look closer to home. Its emphasis on my experienceas a service provider, a client, and an adviser to servicesreflects how the months spent on the first book changed my perspective.

Selling the Invisible drew heavily on larger businesses such as McDonalds. As the book evolved, however, my perspective evolved, too. It was ready to change completely; the slightest nudge would do that.

Then the nudge came.

In the summer of 1997, I called Alan Webber, the editor of the magazine Fast Company. In the course of a nice phone conversation, we agreed to a swap: two signed copies of Selling the Invisible in exchange for a Fast Company denim hat.

The following Monday, my receptionist carried a small box into my office. The conspicuous return address said Fast Company. I tore open the box, knowing what was inside.

I reached in, pulled out the hat, and noticed an enigmatic slogan on the back of it: Work Is Personal. I viewed those three words, perplexed. What did they mean? What could they mean?

The force of those words soon imploded in my head: Work is personal.

Work is not about business; its about us. The human dimension of businessthe messy, emotional, utterly human dimensionis not merely important; it is all-encompassing. As a result, we must plunge into the world of feelingstruly frightening territory.

In our search for critical insights into business, particularly marketing, we can learn from Peter Drucker, Philip Kotler, and Theodore Levitt. But we can learn just as much from Shakespeare, and perhaps even more from Daniel Golemans bus driver (see ). Business provides one stage on which we act out the human drama. We understand the stage; we know far less about the drama. Fortunately, we can find the texts that can teach about that script in front of us every day: a cabby rushing us through downtown Chicago; your four-year-old son reacting to some colors but not others; Hamlet battling his demons.

The first good lesson of marketing, then, may be this. Look. Just look around. And look carefully. See what is thererather than what you expected to find.

It is not a perfect method. Nothing is. Among other things, you can conclude far too much from the little you see. You see an exception, for example, but declare it the rule. You see something, write a book, and then notice yourself being quoted. You feel terrified. You realize that much of what you have regarded as wisdom all these years was just other people quoting other people like youpeople making their best educated guesses.

The shock is enough to make you stop reading.

I am not expressing false modesty, or modesty at all. I wrote this book with conviction. The evidence makes every conclusion seem almost irrefutable. But like most people, I often assemble the evidence after my conclusions, not before them. I usually stick by my guns, even after my bullets are gone. Like all people, I am puzzling even to myself but deeply engaged in trying to solve this puzzle. It helps me to recognize patterns that help build businesses. Like everyone, I yield to emotions and idiosyncrasies; reason badly; succumb to impulse, influence, and other false prophets; and regularly act against my own self-interest.

With those disclaimers, I begin this book.

I do not intend this as some final word, but as some first ones. Many who have followed this advice have enjoyed either sudden luck or well-earned success. Most of this advice reflects the experience of the twentieth centurys smartest and most successful service marketers: Ray Kroc and Walt Disney. These pages offer fuel for growth and food for thought, and this final reminder: Those two are not mutually exclusive.

The wise marketer looks for buffets filled with food for thought: the isolated events, curious behaviors, odd trends, and tiny bits of data, all of whose relevance is unclear. The marketer who can assemble a shrewd blend of this information can create a power salad: an idea, strategy, or tactic that changes a business. Sometimes, the answer we need is not the answer, but another perspective on the problem. You see a slogan on a hat, for exampleWork is personal. Suddenly, the fog lifts.