Ice to the Eskimos: : How to Market a Product Nobody Wants

Citation

Dupree, J.V. (1999), "Ice to the Eskimos: : How to Market a Product Nobody Wants", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 16 No. 1, pp. 99-101. https://doi.org/10.1108/jcm.1999.16.1.99.3

Buy this book, read it, memorize it, sleep with it. As Adam Smith defined capitalism and Max Weber defined bureaucracy, so Spoelstra defines customer‐focused marketing. If your office ever catches fire, leave your computer and your files, but do not leave this book. I initially read this book on a 15‐minute flight from Pittsburgh to Phoenix. Wait, that is a four‐hour flight! Not when reading this book!

Jon Spoelstra offers 19 steps to marketing success in as many succinct chapters. Beginning with a story that exemplifies the central tenet of each chapter, he humorously offers practical advice and wisdom. Essentially, the book offers two golden rules and two corresponding marketing techniques:

1. 1

   Only try to sell a product that the customer wants to buy, to which market research is the key.

2. 2

   Try to sell the customer just a little bit more than they want to buy, using technology to build a customer database.

The reader might initially have some ethical concerns about Spoelstra’s tactics. The title Ice to the Eskimos, ideas like a “silver bullet” fix, and chapter titles like “Jump starting out of hell” or “Creating your own terrorist group,” might tend to raise concerns for even the most broadminded of marketers. In reality Spoelstra is the epitome of ethical, customer‐focused marketing. His book is not about pushing bad products by any means, but rather understanding the customer and marketing to the customers needs. Even Eskimos need and use ice. If anything, Jon Spoelstra is the example of ethical marketing because he shows how to identify and market to a real need with your existing product, warts and all.

Written in a deceptively light, easy‐to‐read style, this entertaining and often humorous book has more substance and practical value than the weightiest article in a prestigious business journal or erudite, advanced college text with its endless lists of footnotes and hypothetical case studies. Spoelstra walks through the essentials of marketing with creative ideas and anecdotal evidence of the efficacy of these ideas from his own marketing turnaround of the New Jersey Nets and consulting with other organizations.

The first four chapters focus on fixing cash flow through quick, nearly cost‐free solutions. Sounding like a turnaround specialist, in Chapter 1 Spoelstra correctly explains your client/company has to “want to” change the status quo before you can successfully implement the marketing turnaround. Chapter 2 entertainingly explains the need for situation analysis, understanding who you, the company, and the product are, and who your market is. He cautions against being a “Ulysses,” tempted toward the “rocks” of an enticing market that does not fit your capacities or your product. The “silver bullet”, a substantive, sustainable, but quick fix strategy described in Chapter 3, is an analysis‐based solution for generating the revenue necessary to survive and grow. Then, you have the time to build databases, modernize your processes, refine your product, retrain your staff in customer service excellence, and do the things that lead to success. Continuing in Chapter 4, Spoelstra expands the silver bullet into getting customers to buy more by buying sooner, through shortening the buying cycle.

At Chapter 5 Spoelstra shifts focus to the people involved, leaders and employees. First, the president needs to lead the charge for new business. Stop spending time with management and lawyers and get out with the customer; sell, get to know them, do a little one‐on‐one market research. Chapter 6 suggests giving your people incentives to try new ideas. A brief segue into product innovation in Chapter 7 leads us back to people management in Chapter 8, where Spoelstra explains how to build a team of people committed to the changes that lead to success. At the physical and numeric center of the book, Chapter 9 summarizes Spoelstra’s golden rules, the key being identifying what the customer wants and focusing on that.

Chapters 10‐12 offer strategies and tools for identifying and understanding your customer. Chapter 10 advises that you get out of the office into the market and rub shoulders with the customer. Chapter 11 provides very practical and apparently generally ignored advice in the form of a question. Do you know how much each marketing dollar you put into a project generates in terms of revenue and profits? Chapter 12 is a cornucopia of advice on the value of market research and how to conduct it on the cheap. Frankly, I have trouble with Chapter 13. It is of some value for organizations with clients or sponsors, but I had difficulty translating his ideas to other contexts. After this brief diversion, Spoelstra takes us back to the importance of people to your marketing efforts in Chapters 14‐15. He argues in Chapter 14 that if you “feed, care, and protect your superstars,” non‐performing employees will either come along or move on. For the deadweight that does not get the message, he offers a short, quick solution. Chapter 15 is probably worth the price of the book. With one comprehensive story Spoelstra explains how to bundle and price a product to maximize its attractiveness to the customer and its return to your bottom‐line.

The concluding four chapters develop strategies for dealing with the business functions that support or more accurately hinder the success of marketing. In Chapter 16, Spoelstra shows just how smart he really is. Ice to the Eskimos does something almost no other marketing book does; it considers the operations side of the business, what he calls the “backroom”, explaining why they will resist marketing success and how to help them help you succeed. Chapter 17 explains the importance of customer service and the need to differentiate your customers. All businesses lose customers; you need to know who your good customers are so you can cultivate them, or at least not drive them away with ineffective or ignorant customer service practices. Again, going where no marketer has gone before, Jon Spoelstra addresses the need to understand how your finance people think and how to help them think like marketers ‐ to see expenditures as investments to grow the business, not as expenses to be avoided. Ice to the Eskimos closes with Spoelstra reminding us to have fun.

This book is perfect for the marketer who is struggling for ideas to stimulate the sales of a flagging or comatose product. It is an excellent work for the advanced marketing student to see the practical ways to ethically market a product to a public that wants it but doesn’t realize it. It would be great supplemental reading for an initiate to marketing, to see both how fun marketing can be and how marketers can move seemingly unmovable products in creative, customer‐focused, ethical ways.