Every once in a while I find a book I can't put down. I don't know if I have gotten lucky with the last two books I've read, but after reading The Brand Gap, I picked up Meaningful Marketing by Doug Hall, and realized that I'd just gone two-for-two! The author is the founder of Eureka! Ranch, a well-known business idea thinktank. Hall, with his co-author Jeffrey Stamp, looked at over 2,000 business studies and distilled the results into 100+ "Data Proven Truths" set out in the book. Each "Truth" is accompanied by two to four practical ways to apply the truth to your business.

When I read books, I fold down the corner of the pages that contain pasages I want to review later. Looking at my copy of the book, I am certain that more pages have folded-down corners than pages that don't! To be sure, many of the studies upon which the book is based relate to the retail industry, but I gleaned dozens of great ideas. For example:

Do one thing right. Meaningful Marketing is about building a trust between customers and your brand. Trust is built on the belief that you and your company have a higher-than-normal level of expertise in a specific area. This trust results in greater customer loyalty and less price sensitivity. A customer's trust in yor expertise is dramatically enhanced when you focus on doing one thing better than anyone else. Analysis of over 901 new products found that when the marketing message was highly focused on one benefit, the brand was 60 percent more likely to succeed in the marketplace than when the message was unfocused. . . . Think hard aobut your offering. What is the one element that, above all others, defines why someone should become your customer? What is the one Meaningful difference that is most Meaningful to your customers?

Doug Hall has this to say about naming your business:

Your brand name defines who and what you are. The more your sales and marketing message offers a Meaningful difference that aligns with the suggestive nature of your brand name, the more likely customers will recall and remember it. . . . Your brand name is a clear and overt declaration of what you offer. The more related and synergistic your name is whith your message, the more effective your marketing will be. A[n] analysis of some 901 new products found that the odds of long-term marketplace survival were 34 percent greater when the new product's brand name evoked the benefit instead of being an absract or unrelated name.

My favorite idea comes from the section titled, "Keep it Simple, Stupid," where the authors cite a study that found that brands with messages written at or below a fifth-grade reading level were 25% more likely to survive than those with more complex messages. The authors suggest explaining your sales and marketing story to a fifth-grader, and asking him to repeat what he just heard -- and correcting the difference between what you said and what he said.

The book comes with an audio CD that I haven't yet listened to, but it is going in my car's changer tomorrow.