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| Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs | 
 enlarge | Authors: Craig Stull, Phil Myers, David Meerman Scott
Publisher: Wiley
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 5465
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 047026036X
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.409
EAN: 9780470260364
ASIN: 047026036X
Publication Date: June 30, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
If you market a product, service, or idea in any business, industry or organization, you must read Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs, a guide to understanding and meeting the needs of consumers, whether or not they make those needs clear. An easy-to-follow six-step process developed over the past 15 years can help you address unsolved problems, recognize buyer personas, quantify impact and create breakthrough experiences. Stop wasting time by guessing what your market needs and start understanding consumer desire.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
The power of paying attention June 26, 2008
34 out of 35 found this review helpful
What a thoughtful and helpful book! It explores the concept of creating a product or service that resonates with buyers; that, in essence, sells itself. By getting closer to your customers you'll be able to know what they want, and then offer it to them. By paying attention, you'll be successful.
The authors use real-life examples throughout the book to explain the six-step Tuning In process. This helps turn vague-sounding theory into something you can actually use. For example, Step 2 in the Tuning In process is "Understand Buyer Personas." This involves breaking buyers into distinct groups, and finding out, in detail, the things that are important for each group. The authors used the 2004 presidential election as an example. Operatives for the two candidates divided voters into groups such as NASCAR Dads and Security Moms, and targeted their individual campaign messages directly to each group. This was much more effective than using a scatter-shop approach to broadcast a generic message to anyone and everyone.
One idea that makes sense to me is the idea of creating an "elevator speech" for your product or service. It's the short answer you'd give if someone asked what your product is in an elevator, and you had to answer before the ride is over. Since you only have time to say about 25 words, they should be the distillation of your product from the buyer's point of view. There is no time for, as the book puts it, "egocentric corporate gobbledygook."
I found quite a few ideas of this caliber I'll put into use. For any businessperson, the book is well worth buying.
Here's the chapter list:
1. Why Didn't We Think of That?
2. Tuned Out... and Just Guessing
3. Get Tuned In
4. Step 1: Find Unresolved Problems
5. Step 2: Understand Buyer Personas
6. Step 3: Quantify the Impact
7. Step 4: Create Breakthrough Experiences
8. Step 5: Articulate Powerful Ideas
9. Step 6: Establish Authentic Connections
10. Cultivate a Tuned In Culture
11. Unleash Your Resonator
The return of common sense marketing June 20, 2008
17 out of 21 found this review helpful
Why did the Apple Newton flop and the iPod rock? How did a struggling magician transform himself into a success with a three-word tagline? How did a car rental startup grab an entire market segment that was just sitting there for the big guys to gobble up? Answer: it was all a matter of tuning in.
It stands to reason if an organization wants to develop products and services that resonate with people, the first step is to ask people what they want. Simple as it sounds, authors Stull, Myers, and Scott, each of whom has extensive experience working with large firms and non-profits, observe that many of them simply don't do it. Those that do often lack the right processes to gather and act upon the information they receive. As a result, they roll out products and services that fall absolutely flat, squandering their resources and completely missing golden opportunities.
The authors contend the solution is to tune in. Instead of selecting new product initiatives in ivory tower executive suites and developing them in the lab, get to the grass roots. Talk to actual people, uncover their most urgent needs, and craft solutions. This strikes me as an incredibly sensible approach; perhaps that is why big companies are apt to overlook it.
The book focuses on the why and how of tuning in, with emphasis on the how. The authors lay out a 6-step process for tuning in, very detailed yet written in plain English every reader will understand -
1. Find unresolved problems
2. Understand buyer personas
3. Quantify the impact
4. Create breakthrough experiences
5. Articulate powerful ideas
6. Establish authentic connections
Even though it is simple and straightforward, the tuning in process, like any other, has its share of pitfalls, problems, and subtleties. Here's where the authors' impressive consulting and training experience really distinguishes this book from others I've read on similar topics. These men are able to identify the hazards organizations will encounter in the trenches, and explain - largely through the use of real life case studies and their own war stories - how to handle (and not handle) them.
I like the emphasis on real life stories. They give the whole book the flavor of authenticity books like this need. The procession of examples is what makes tuning in seem implementable, rather than being just another cool-sounding new marketing theory.
Any organizational leader, marketing specialist, or sales executive will profit from, and probably be challenged by, "Tuned In", since tuning in involves jettisoning conventional wisdom (for instance, making new product decisions based strictly on what current customers say), and engaging in new forms of communication such as blogs and social networking communities. Still, this is one of those books you're better off reading sooner rather than later. As more and more companies start tuning in, those that don't are going to start looking worse and worse in the marketplace.
Learn to Create a Product that Sells Itself June 21, 2008
10 out of 15 found this review helpful
** If you want to learn how to build a great product your customers will love, this is a book you should read. **
More and more, marketing and product management professionals are realizing that you cannot use advertising to sell mediocre products. This used to be the case - you could build something relatively average, and just buy lots of TV ads to convince people to buy your product. Well, today outbound, interruption-based marketing like TV ads and cold calls don't work. People just ignore them. To effectively grow your business today, you need to leverage inbound marketing, which means building a truly remarkable product, and then helping your customers to spread the ideas related to your product by word of mouth and online in blogs and social media. So... How do you build a really great product that customers want to talk about? Well, if you follow the process in this book you have a really good chance of doing just that.
Tuned In does a really good job of covering product management and product development best practices - especially the critical parts about really understanding your target market and uncovering those unmet needs that lie under the surface of what people are telling you. This is really critical to developing breakthrough or remarkable products, which is essential to being a successful business today.
One of the things I like best about this book is that the presentation of the concepts in done heavily through examples. Some business / marketing books are very theoretical and don't include any practical examples to illustrate the concepts, but this book uses lots of interesting examples throughout which makes it a lot easier to really understand the message.
 3 stars for the content, 5 stars for the examples; 3.5 stars altogether July 16, 2008
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
Remove the examples from the book, and you have for the most part a collection of already known high level concepts without much depth. Granted, marketing does not have to be complicated and it should not be, but creating innovative products requires more than concepts. For example, the first step in the authors' Tuned-in "process" is "Find unresolved problems". OK, good point, but I knew that and you probably did know that too! How do I do it? The authors's advice: "ask the customers"! But I knew that too. Tell me more. "Ask your non-customers". Wow,I would never have thought of that. Tell me more. "Go to trade shows" say the authors. I knew that too. Tell me more. "Ask open questions", "Keep an open mind", etc. say the authors. At the end of this chapter and of most chapters, I fell frustrated of not learning approaches or tips I have not heard about before and of not learning more how to do it.
At the end of Chapter 4, I was going to drop the book, but the examples kept me going. There are at least 50 examples of Tuned-in companies from Disneyland to the Maganavox remote control that locates itself to the ubiquitous iPod. These examples are interesting by themselves. They are spread through the book to illustrate each step and to validate the entire tuned-in "process".
I keep putting process in between quotes because what the authors present is not really a process. It is more a framework. In addition, it seems that not one of the examples was actually the result of applying the authors' framework under their guidance. So the whole edifice is an after-the-fact analysis of successful innovations that serves to justify the author's framework. I would have liked to see at least one example of a product that the authors actually helped develop.
The book itself is an example of the framework the authors propose, and in particular of "Step 5: Articulate Powerful Ideas". This chapter develops the idea of establishing "memorable concepts that speak to the problems the customers have". The authors here eat their own dog food, and it is clear that they spent time thinking about how they should name that book and what memorable concepts they should articulate it in. "Tuned-in" is a sgood and simple concept that is repeated over and over throughout the book so that it sticks in your mind. There is an other one that is used over and over; it is "resonators" to designate successful products that resonate with customers.
In summary, the value of this book is probably in this Chapter 5. At least it is for me. We typically underestimate that the least number of words a concept can be described in, the more powerful it is. "Tuned in" is a useful concept to keep in mind to designate that idea that we need to be "tuned in" to the market and the customer. But you will need many other books and workshops to know how to do it. But, that's what the authors' core business is: delivering seminars! No doubt that they will have demand.
Are you June 20, 2008
8 out of 12 found this review helpful
[...]
David Meerman Scott, author of the extremely popular book The New Rules of Marketing and PR, has just released yet another book Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs which describes how business opportunities come about by listening to the spoken/unspoken audience and market needs. This book was written with two of his colleagues over at Pragmatic Marketing, Phil Myers and Craig Stull.
The book reinforces an extremely good rule of thumb for all businesses, and that's listening. But listening takes many forms and your audience won't always talk directly to you by filling out a questionnaire or attending a focus group. You have to dig deeper and "Tuned In" walks you through the process of discovering new opportunities, understanding the persona of the buyer, creating a unique experience and quantifying the ROI to fill the need. The book delivers a series of real world examples to show you how the "Tuned In" theory has been filled in the past.
I finished "Tuned In" a while ago, (David was nice enough to give me an advanced copy. We met for dinner a couple months ago. Check out my video interview with him.) but decided to write about it tonight because of an interesting conversation I had last night with someone pitching me their new business idea.
A really bad business pitch
It's always a bad sign when someone begins pitching their new business idea, proudly announces they've done no research, and then in the same breath says, "I don't know of any other company that's doing what I'm doing."
Ouch. If I was a potential investor I'd show him the door.
As he described the idea, I began to question it and also list more than seven alternatives of what he's trying to do. Some directly competitive and others indirectly competitive.
We were at a party, talking casually, but I was offering up some free industry advice. One of my many hats is as an industry consultant, sometimes for the Gerson Lehrman Group, where I offer consultations for investors and entrepreneurs looking to get into a new market.
He admitted to not having heard of any of the competitors I mentioned. I was really shocked given that they were all major players in the industry he hoped to join. Instead of asking me more about these companies, his competitors, he cut me off further trying to explain his business. I reasserted that there were alternative solutions. He never implored further and I never had the opportunity to explain how his competitors worked.
Usually when I talk to entrepreneurs and investors and I tell them about competing products, they immediately pull out a pen and start writing. This guy didn't. It's like he didn't care to know. I don't know if he even heard what I said. Heck, if I was in this guy's shoes and someone told me about a direct competitor to my business, Spark Media Solutions, I'd write it down, look it up, and call them. You never know, they could become partners. :)
I haven't seen this man's product, and he admittedly was not giving me a full explanation. It's very possible that it could offer something new, unusual, and solve a given need in a unique way. But given the way he was interacting with me, I think it's highly unlikely. The main reason:
He didn't listen.
You learn so much more when you listen to your market.
I was retelling this story last night to Mary Hodder of Dabble hours after the conversation and we agreed there's nothing more depressing than watching an entrepreneur proud of their ignorance of their own market. Here's a warning to any entrepreneur that is pitching their business:
NEVER say you don't have any competition.
There's nothing that sets off my BS detector faster than hearing that. I am not alone. I've discussed this with other journalists and industry analysts and we're sick of smug business people that think they've created something in an alternative space and there's no way they could possibly have competition. I immediately pounce when I hear it. In fact, I will start listing competitors for them to which they concede by saying, "Well, if you put it that way, yes, I guess we have competitors." You mean when I put it the way in which they approach the same audience and deliver exactly the same services you do?
You can be unique, and you should. But unless you're creating time travel you're probably not creating something that's completely new. Listen to your market and create something unique. Read "Tuned In" to learn how to do it.
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