What is it with marketing?

What is it with business and marketing books? Most sound like they were written by stuffy professor types who rarely get out into the world. I mean, have they ever tried to take three kids to the grocery store? Or to McDonalds during the lunch rush with an infant dangling from under an armpit? Or to a children's clothing store while pushing a stroller, dragging racks of clothes behind in the wheels?

Something must be done about what they experience and how they articulate it. Two of my favorite books are Marketing to Women, by Marti Barletta and Marketing to Moms by Maria Bailey. These women get it...and they use interesting language--not that stuff that makes me feel like I'm in a college classroom learning because my grade depends on it. Seth Godin's Purple Cow is good, but even he slips into the stale-cracker-talk occasionally.

Sure, heads of corporations care about metrics and all that blah, blah, blah tech talk. What about the real people, the media account executives dealing with local retailers, the small retailers ... and anyone who is competing against Walmart? These people want straight-from-the-streets, actionable ideas. They don't care about what it took to make Campbell's Soup or Betty Crocker big names. They want to know how to sell NOW, which is why people love Roy Williams' Wizard of Ads books and the Jay Conrad Levinson's Guerilla series.

More later!