Youtility

Why Smart Marketing Is About Help Not Hype

By: Jay Baer

Narrated by: Marcus Sheridan, Jay Baer

The difference between helping and selling is just two letters.

If you're wondering how to make your products seem more exciting online, you're asking the wrong question. You're not competing for attention only against other similar products. You're competing against your customers' friends and family and viral videos and cute puppies. To win attention these days you must ask a different question: "How can we help?"

Jay Baer's Youtility offers a new approach that cuts through the clutter: marketing that is truly, inherently useful. If you sell something, you make a customer today, but if you genuinely help someone, you create a customer for life. Drawing from real examples of companies who are practicing Youtility as well as his experience helping more than 700 brands improve their marketing strategy, Baer provides a groundbreaking plan for using information and helpfulness to transform the relationship between companies and customers.

©2013 Jay Baer (P)2013 Gildan Media LLC

Critic reviews

"In today’s always-on, hyper-saturated marketplace, product messages no longer break through like they used to. Providing helpful information to customers does. In this important audiobook, Baer calls the art of being deeply valued by your customers Youtility. I call it smart."(David Meerman Scott, best-selling author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR)

Still very relevant information

Although we are now several years from the original publication (would LOVE to see an updated edition), this information remains both relevant and actionable for today's market.

The right approach to marketing

Jay clearly outlined the principles of effective marketing to today's buyers and give examples from real companies of how they are put into practice.

Incredible!!

This book is an incredible resource on how to make your company useful to the extent that makes customers want more NATURALLY. You aren't selling products.. you're selling your company and its values. Its usefulness. 10/10 recommend, hands down.

Lots of (similar) ideas for making an org useful

A colleague suggested our executive team read this. It wasn't like she thought it would be: She thought there would be more about why "hype" is NOT useful in promoting your organization. There's almost nothing on that angle of the subtitle. But I still got a lot out of the book, even if most of it was hammering one point: answer questions that people have about your industry, no matter how silly/dumb — and make sure you answer them publicly, transparently, and fully, with a dash of humor if you can. Do this, and watch your brand exposure explode. What made the book valuable to me were all of the real-world examples, which inspired lots of ideas that our nonprofit organization could try. Grade: B+

Good inspiration to be helpful to your customers

If you don't like selling, this is a great reference. I'd like to hear an updated version for 2016