Entrepreneurs, start-ups and CEOs might want to take notice of Truth. Growth. Repeat. – a new business book that turns advertising on its head.
Author Mike Edmunds, who has spent four decades in the industry, is revealing the secrets of how truth is the best way to find commercial success.
He’s sick of companies asking for an image to sell and all for designing campaigns around the true purpose of a company.
Edmonds says the book – which he will discuss at the CCI-Boffins Business Book breakfast on March 2 – is jargon free.
“For a start I don’t have an MBA and I’m not an academic. I’m a copywriter by background so my skill set is to put things into wording that ordinary people will understand,” he says.
“It’s not full of blurbs and techno babble and its message is about telling the truth and not having any image that stands between you and consumer that is inauthentic.”
“I tell a lot of stories and give a lot of metaphors. It is very story based. When I designed it with the publisher I wanted it to look like a novel rather than a starchy white papered type of textbook because it is very readable in that way.”
Truth. Growth. Repeat is a simple system for marketing that any business can apply. It requires reflecting on the core reason a business was created and whether that has been sidelined by marketers trying to outdo competitors in various ways – including giving the client what they want.
“Once you embrace that true purpose, you attract people to it, you innovate more authentically, you grow more authentically and it is a virtual circle that keeps feeding itself. It becomes self-fulfilling circle. The title reflects the way that system works.
“When it comes to tough decisions, businesses are really throwing a dart and don’t have any way of deciding what the right answer is. And this simple approach gives them a way to have the correct answer every time.”
Edmonds says his 40 years in the industry – including 15 as co-founder at Meerkats – has been spent at the ‘very point where the problem with capitalism becomes most evident and that is the point where company say can you create an image for us, can you make us seem better and that’s the point it all starts to go wrong because consumers start to distrust companies’.
“I feel like I’ve been at the fulcrum of this critical point my whole career and now I’m at the point where I’m rebelling against it and saying I’m not going to do that and, in fact, we’re not going to talk about advertising until we get what you do to be better.
“At Meerkats we say there is nothing wrong with advertising but it’s an accelerant for the truth not a replacement for it. If your product is no good, advertising can’t help you.”
