Forget about learning marketing the conventional way. All you really need to know about marketing well is in Truth: The New Rules for Marketing in a Skeptical World, Lynn Upshaw’s new book.

I found something to believe in on almost every page of this book. I usually like to flip through a book first, then go back and skim it. Very rarely do I start at the beginning and read word for word of a business book, but I found myself doing this with Truth — I didn’t want to miss anything. Upshaw has written a very compelling marketing course for anyone interested in marketing with integrity. Compelling because it’s filled with real life examples of companies that have built brand loyalty with authenticity, as well as companies that haven’t. A marketing course because if you follow his blueprint, you can’t help but succeed in building authentic relationships with your customers, relationships with integrity that will last — and you’ll learn a lot along the way.

This type of marketing advice is so necessary today. There’s no hype, no trickery, no gimmicks. Upshaw’s common sense Truth comes in three parts — Practical Integrity, True Strategies, and Making it Happen.

Practical Integrity
The author’s model for Practical Integrity is pure simplicity:

Customer strategy: Be the one customers can count on.
Product strategy: Market products that embody your personal integrity
Competitive strategy: Win the credibility race
Value strategy: Use trust to drive value
Promotion strategy: Promote honestly and non-invasively

Then stick with all of this, regardless of market changes or competitive circumstances, to create sustainable integrity, recommends the author, who also quotes a 2004 study:

80% of U.S. consumers believe that American businesses are too concerned about making a profit and not concerned enough about their workers, consumers, and the environment.

Upshaw’s profiles of several companies that let their beliefs about the world around them influence how they market to that world, including Trader Joe’s, Herman Miller, Infosys, Patagonia, and Kiehl’s Since 1851, are fascinating. As the author says, “Name any company in any business, and it probably can learn a thing or two from these companies. If nothing else, they teach us that scale is not as important as commitment, differentiation can be created by integrity, and marketing is most persuasive when the marketer lets the customer do the marketing.”

True Strategies
In the True Strategies section, Upshaw details the customer, product, competitive, value, and promotion strategies listed above that make up the Practical Integrity proposition. These strategies read like checklists that lead to surefire authenticity in marketing, and should be required reading for every marketing professional and student. The author’s collection of true stories and the lengths to which some companies will go to preserve product and company integrity shown beside the carelessness with which other companies guard their own credibility is insightful and illuminating.

Making it Happen
And in Making it Happen, Upshaw gives all of us the plan for doing just that — by making sure integrity starts at the top, fostering a place for integrity and building high-integrity teams, measuring return on market integrity, and building an integrity-based marketing plan.

This book is no lightweight read, but it’s one I’ll return to again and again. It’s meaty. It’s got some great stories and some great lessons. And I think it’s really meaningful marketing.

[tags]marketing with integrity, Lynn Upshaw, truth in marketing, marketing authenticity, marketing strategy, Trader Joe’s, Herman Miller, Infosys, Patagonia, Kiehl’s Since 1851[/tags]

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