Marketing Built by Love: A Human-Centered Foundation to Delight Your Customers, Increase Your Revenue, and Grow Your Business
Daniel Bussius
Greenleaf Book Group Press (2023)

“People won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Theodore Roosevelt

Since the markets were established in the ancient world — notably in Egypt, Greece, and Rome — the primary objective of marketing has been to create or increase demand for the given offering, either by purchase or trade.

Long ago, Peter Drucker asserted that business has only one purpose: to create a customer and then keep it.  In a perfect business world, workers “love” WHAT they do and HOW they do it as well as WHERE they do it…and with WHOM. Alas, even in companies that are annually ranked among those most highly admired and best to work for — and are also annually ranked among those most profitable —  there are always some workers who do only what they have to do and do it only as well as necessary to keep their job.

Daniel Bussius provides an abundance of valuable information, insights, and counsel that can help almost any organization — whatever its size and nature may be — to establish “a human-centered foundation” that will delight their customers, increase their revenue, and grow their business. That is this book’s WHAT. Its HOW is best revealed throughout Bussius’ lively and eloquent narrative, in context, within a frame-of-reference. As for the WHY, that should be self-evident.

Bussius cites five “fatal flaws” in today’s marketing:

1. It is too transactional
2. It ignores our reptilian brains
3. Habitual “funnels” no longer facilitate habitual decisions
4. Obsolete technologies
5. Unstructured chaos

Bussius suggests HOW to avoid or overcome each. See Pages 11-20.

Here are other subjects of special interest and value to me:

o The Marketing RAMP
o RAMP “pillars”
o Five (5) stages of obtaining customer commitment
o Additional five (5) stages of strengthening that commitment
o Case studies in RAMP deployment
o Designing and then launching a Marketing RAMP
o “Beyond Marketing: The Revolution at Hand”

Major research studies of both customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction indicate that [begin italics] feeling appreciated [end italics] is ranked by most respondents as being among what is of greatest importance to them. Then chairman and CEO Herb Kelleher was once asked to explain why Southwest Airlines was more profitable and had a greater cap value than all  nine of its major competitors…COMBINED. “We take great care of our people. They take great care of our customers. And our customers take great care of our shareholders.”

The point is, that organizations will never have what Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell characterize as “customer evangelists” unless and until they first have employee evangelists. I think this is what Buszsius has in mind when describing to “lovers” as those who have the highest level of satisfaction.

Here are two concluding suggestions while reading Marketing Built by Love: Highlight key passages, and, record your comments, questions, action steps (preferably with deadlines), and page references as well as your responses to questions posed and to lessons you have learned. Also, be sure to complete the end-of-chapter exercises, and do so with candor. These two simple tactics will facilitate, indeed expedite frequent reviews of key material later.