Summer reading. Grass Beyond The Mountains. Discovering the last great cattle frontier on the North American continent. Richmond P. Hobson. 1951. ISBN 0771041705.  I first read this book while at University after spending  a summer of helicopter mining exploration in the regions that Hobson talks about,  the Batanuni  Range and the Blackwater River . If you take the Anaheim trail from Quesnel through to  Bella Coola you will see this incredible and huge country. I was lucky to meet some of the characters in the book, Panhandle Philips and his wife Adelia at their ranch.  This book details the finding of the 5 million acre ranch and the toughness shown by these pioneers in just getting there.  Hobson’s second book , Nothing Too Good For  A Cowboy, details the building of the ranch and the trials and tribulations they went through. (It became a TV drama)  This is real horses and men stuff, unvarnished and simple – but a great read at anytime, especially since its all about opening up BC in the 30s.

Related articles by Zemanta

• More than cowboys and cowgirls

Stopwatch Marketing.Take charge of the time when your customer decides to buy. John Rosen, Annamaria Turano. 2008. ISBN 9781591841944.  This is likely one of the best consumer marketing books I have read in along time.  Through detailed examples (Goodyear. Roto-Rooter,  Whole Foods, Walmart, Microsoft, Lexus and a terrific matrix (See below)  they really bring this concepts home.

You folks  in B2C markets  will have lots of aha! moments. Check out Chapter one here .  My lesson learned is that all marketers need to remember and remind their CEOs that buyers are rarely if ever as fascinated by the product as the creator.  This book reinforces the work of TunedIn (The correct value statement at the correct time) and Christensen (People buy products to do work) by adding the time element to our previously static vision of demographics. The people can and do purchase the same product at different times for vastly different reasons.

Related articles by Zemanta

• A Longer (and cheaper!) Tail
• Wal-Mart Switches To Local Fruit, Veggies
• ‘the little know-it-all’ book report
• Whole Truth