Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First

Marketing consultant Horowitz (Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World) offers the latest addition to the deluge of morally-centered business tomes. In one way, it's an overturning of traditional corporate wisdom--see your competitors as your allies, not your adversaries, Horowitz suggests--but it's also something we've been hearing an awful lot of lately: build meaningful relationships with your customers, view your employees as your partners and so on. Nevertheless, the arguments are all sound and illustrated with the customer-obsessed success stories of ventures like Saturn and Nordstrom. Horowitz is at his best when displaying his canny understanding of the media world, advising how to fit your business's message with the media's need to produce timely, relevant stories. But it also feels like the author is trying to riff on too many ideas, as he skips from thoughts on bartering to copywriting to investing. If readers don't mind following the occasionally meandering structure, they'll find this to be a bountiful source of marketing tips.