Swimming Downstream
How business owners can rescue their marketing and get their brands growing again
Think marketing is all about catchy slogans and flashy campaigns? Think again.
'Swimming Downstream' challenges the status quo of marketing, shredding through the superficial gloss that many associate with the field.
This isn't a book about getting by on pretty logos and social media buzz—it's about understanding marketing as the fundamental battleground where real business competitions are won or lost.
WHY THIS BOOK
Fundamentally, marketing is how, and how well, your business competes. Understanding marketing better means you’ll be preparing yourself to call BS when you see and hear it.
“Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.”
— David Packard
This book will help you make your business more competitive. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
A brand really has just one job to do: help the business that owns it to grow. Marketing also really only has one main job: make the brand easier to buy. And the most promising way to do that, is to build the brand’s fame and distinctiveness. I’ll come back to these themes, a lot, later on in this book.
Brand and business owners and the marketers who serve them spend a lot of time, maybe too much, worrying about what people think of the brand. Yet arguably just as important as what people think of the brand is when they think of it. And most brand owners don’t think about this enough.
Marketing is much more than just advertising. Yet because advertising soaks up so much time and attention and budget, it’s essential for brand and business owners to understand how it really works. Many overestimate its powers. (Spoiler alert: advertising does work, though probably not in the ways you think.)
Who am I to be telling you this?
Since the mid-1990s, I've been at the forefront of solving growth challenges for brands and businesses, holding leadership roles across major global markets before founding my own consultancy in 2012. My journey includes collaborations with iconic brands like Volkswagen, Mastercard, and Budweiser, culminating in nearly 80 marketing effectiveness awards. This experience has not only shown me the heights of success but also the pitfalls that well-intentioned businesspeople can encounter. These insights have profoundly shaped my approach to marketing—what you'll read next are not just my biases but hard-earned perspectives from decades in the field.
