It is as much a thesis for life as it is for the way you run your marketing and sales worlds. Having read the book twice, once for practical and once for pleasure the book is an excellent combination of examples, ripe for metaphor and theory.
As a head of strategy for a leading e services company this book was well worth my time and the time of all our senior managers. The four "R's" are the best way to simplify a horribly complicated world.
If I could give six stars I would
Finally, marketing professionals who will intelligently embrace and (with ease) outline "repackaging" and "replenishing" strategies. These sections made the book worth the price for me.
The only drawback(s) with the book (though I gave it a full 5 stars), are the case studies. Too many of the online grocers are performing poorly in the marketplace to rely on them as standards, whether or not their marketing strategies are exciting and workable.
Writing especially for product or brand managers who are struggling to simplify their portfolios, Cristol and Sealey have created a breakthrough framework that is itself a lesson in simplicity. After presenting two essential guideposts for managers to assess where their brand sits on the stress spectrum, the authors turn to the heart of Simplicity Marketing -- the 4 R's of simplification: Replace, Repackage, Reposition, and Replenish. Using scores of real-world company examples, Cristol and Sealey show how each of the 4 R's interacts with the others in powerful ways to relieve customer stress and how these strategies may be executed individually or in combination to build brand loyalty. Here for the first time are ten specific strategies to relieve customer stress through consolidating, aggregating, or integrating products and services, repositioning brands for more relevance to stress reduction, and decluttering customers' decision-making requirements. The final pages of this brilliant manifesto for a simplicity revolution provide a guide to managing simplicity strategies, leveraging information technology to simplify rather than complicate customers' lives, and integrating all the tools in the book into an executional blueprint.