Oisin Browne’s ‘The Binman’s Guide to Marketing’ reviewed

By  @SimonCocking. Review of Oisin Browne‘s ‘The Binman’s Guide to Marketing’, see review of ‘The Binman’s Guide to Selling’ here.

The book takes the areas of sales and marketing, and breaks them down into 100 simple, easy-to-understand, bite-size pieces. With interviews, inspirations & ideas from branding, social media, PR and digital marketing to traditional media the book masters the art of making the complex world of marketing simple.

This is a wide ranging book with a good selection of ideas and suggestions for how to increase the impact of your marketing efforts. Idea #31 ‘Be the Steven Spielberg’ for your company  is a good example of Browne’s desire to get under the hood and illustrate the thinking for his suggestions based on his own experiences. It is a smart idea to create your own videos in-house, and to make more than one of them. The production qualities may be slightly less than 100% slick, but they will be genuine and on-message. He also advocates, again smartly, to not just make one, but a series of them, to keep telling your story and communicating your message. Like Peter Vesterbacka, Chief Eagle for Angry Birds, who is always seen in public wearing his trademark red Angry Birds hoodie, so too Browne advocates the importance of always being on message. At the same time he understands the importance of knowing when to sell, and when simply raising brand awareness is the right approach.

After the book gives you 100 marketing tips it then brings you a series of interviews with marketing executives and leaders. This part of the book is more uneven and feels like it was a quick Q and A sent to a mail list with not as much quality control in terms of their responses. Many of the answers are  glib and even self serving rather than offering useful insights for the reader. It is a great idea to get the opinions of experienced marketers, but without any push back in terms of challenging them to expand on the brief mottoes they are offering up, many of their responses were not particularly in-depth or helpful.

Overall it is a useful book, with a keen willingness to explore different options, embrace new technology, and change if it’s not working. The next book in the series will be on customer service, something that could be invaluable for many Irish businesses.

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