Duct Tape Marketing

Pick up any phone directory. Flip to plumbers, dentists, accountants, lawyers — your choice. Cover the phone numbers and company names with your thumb. Try to tell the ads apart. You can't. The owners of those businesses can't either, and that, John Jantsch insists, is the diagnosis behind almost every struggling small business in America. He calls it copycat marketing — the act of imitating whatever everyone else in your industry does and then wondering why the phone refuses to ring. The owners aren't lazy. They aren't stupid. They've just confused doing what looks like marketing with actually marketing anything.

The other ditch beside this road is what he calls ostrich marketing — owners who have no idea what to do, so they do nothing and hope. Hope is a feeling, not a system. Duct Tape Marketing is Jantsch's argument that the cure for both is the same: a simple, layered, deeply unglamorous discipline that any small business can run without an MBA, a media buyer, or a Manhattan agency. The metaphor is the point. Duct tape is cheap. It's always within arm's reach. A child can use it. And the more layers you apply, the stronger the hold.

Michael Gerber, who wrote the foreword, calls this a book about marketing integrity, and that framing earns its keep across every chapter. Jantsch isn't teaching tricks. He's teaching a way of doing business that makes the marketing almost incidental — a by-product of being clear about who you serve, what you sell, and why anyone should care. His working definition of marketing tightens as he goes. It starts as getting people who have a specific need or problem to know, like, and trust you. By the end it has stretched to its full form: know, like, trust, do business with, and refer you to others who have the same problem. Five verbs. Know, like, trust, contact, refer. The whole book is built around them.