CEO Bookshelf

Tweet

Once your system is in place, you can finally turn your attention to exploiting it for business. Marketing is likely to be one of your first applications. If you have the smallest doubt about what computers can do in that department, we urge you to check out eMarketing: Reaping Profits on the Information Highway (Perigee Books, 1995, $14). Database marketing, audio-text, multimedia, faxes, bulletin boards, the Internet--you name it, author Seth Godin explains it.

The book bulges at the seams with instructive case studies. Consider Valley Recreation Products, a promoter of regional dart-and-pool leagues that implemented a fax-based system for quickly exchanging scores between participating bars. Or Bissell Inc., which places multimedia displays in warehouse-style stores that carry its Big Green Clean Machine; the units keep track of which features customers ask about and record their comments for later analysis.

People who think they're excused from reading marketing books because they've mastered the seminal The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time obviously bargained without the sequel. Enterprise One to One: Tools for Competing in the Interactive Age (Doubleday Currency, 1997, $24.95), also by Martha Peppers and Don Rogers, provides the how-to that the first book didn't. The thesis is the same: companies must focus on individual relationships, using technology to build a database of customer information and to customize their wares so thoroughly that no one else can match their level of service. But this time around, the emphasis is on what companies need to know to put their ideas into practice.

Peppers and Rogers believe that, ideally, the one-to-one marketing company will sell to a diverse group of customers, allowing it to benefit from customizing products. And the more customers differ in terms of how much they buy, the easier it is to allocate marketing resources to those with the potentially highest return on investment.

But first you need information on customers' buying habits, and that's not always easy to come by. A bookstore, for example, might have buyers with very different tastes, but it has no way to figure out which ones bring in the most sales. One answer is to invite customers to join a readers' club. Members get a discount card that gives them special deals while letting the store record and track their purchases. In this case, the store collects information in categories such as favorite authors and subjects, which is then incorporated into future promotions. A club member who buys a lot of income-tax-preparation books, for example, might receive promotions for new financial-planning releases. This is, of course, the same kind of strategy that cyberbookstore Amazon.com uses, but Peppers and Rogers demonstrate that you don't have to be on the Web to make it work.

Speaking of Amazon.com, the odds are that you've given up pretending the Internet will have no impact on your business and have begun thinking about what that impact could be. CyberPower for Business: How to Profit from the Information Superhighway (Career Press, 1996, $14.99) touches on such technical fundamentals as modem speeds and autoresponders, but Walter H. Bock and Jeff Senne's book is business-centric at heart. In broad, clear strokes, the authors explain how companies can enlist the Web to make money, increase sales, cut costs, improve customer service, and recruit new employees.

CyberPower is appreciative of on-line technology without glorifying it. For example, it explains that even though you can do things on the Web with pictures and sound, you probably won't want to--at least not until you have your strategy in place. The guiding principle is to use the Internet to emphasize up-to-date information that's valued by your target market.

The final selection on our list won't do much for your understanding of infrastructure or strategy, but it will help you get through your next presentation alive. Even better, it will help get your audience through it awake.

Presentations are complex things, as Claudyne Wilder and David Fine make clear in Point, Click & Wow! A Quick Guide to Brilliant Laptop Presentations (Pfeiffer & Co., 1996, $29.95). Apart from having organized and captivating content, you have to worry about things like equipment, location, and audience type and size. For example, if you're presenting to a medium-size audience (10 to 50 people), do the following: bring a laptop with your presentation loaded on it, along with an LCD panel overhead projector with a 4-by-6-inch or larger screen; make sure the room is extra dark if you're using older LCD panels; and begin with the lights raised and the screen blank. For a larger group (say, 50 to 500), bring a three-color projection unit, an 8-by-6-inch or 9-by-12-inch screen, a power strip, and an extension cord. Also with a bigger audience, assume that equipment setup will take at least one hour.

The authors also suggest types of transitions, dissolves, and build considerations to try, depending upon the audience makeup (whether, for example, it's conservative or informal). For senior executives, a dissolve turns out to be the best transition; for informal departmental meetings, you can open with something called a split-vertical-out and close with a split-vertical-in. Hey, if the business thing doesn't work out, there's always Hollywood.

Anne Field is a freelance writer based in Pelham, N.Y.

 PREV  1 | 2