Midas Marketing: How Midas Managers Make Markets

Citation

Dupree, J. (2011), "Midas Marketing: How Midas Managers Make Markets", Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 20 No. 2, pp. 166-166. https://doi.org/10.1108/10610421111121161

King Midas was a mythological king who had the “golden touch.” He was an individual cursed with the ability to turn whatever he touched into gold. Midas Marketing is a bit different. While Midas managers make gold by making their own markets, the book is about using social networks and crowdsourcing to change the marketing process. A readable, practical book, it will not give you the Midas touch but it will open doors to marketing information and market making in ways you may never have considered.

This book is written for the decision maker, the business owner, entrepreneur, or senior executive who recognizes that simply working harder at marketing is no longer working. Robert Slee is a published private equity professional who practices what he teaches by creating an online Midas community (www.Midasnation.com) that provides resources and contacts to help readers develop their own markets and apply his principles. Within the book Midas' principles are periodically reviewed and summarized, and there are pages left for personal notes as you consume the ideas.

Written in 20 short chapters, most with a “case study” story, four preview chapters are interspersed throughout the book, it can be read during a medium length flight, or a chapter at a time as you can grab 15 minutes. A non‐academic book, unlike his seminal private finance book, Private Capital Markets, Midas Marketing is replete with reference to a broad range of works in a variety of disciplines. Also, unique in my experience, is that while built upon Slee's extensive experience in marketing and private equity, the content is presented in a rather unassuming manner, with none of the typical self‐aggrandizement one might expect.

Slee argues that business has moved from the information age to the conceptual age and is now entering the aggregation age – the key to Midas marketing. Business has moved from the analysis of information to right‐brain activity, creation and innovation. The aggregation age is building on this activity by leveraging knowledge and intellectual capital through controlling one's “space chain,” crowdsourcing, and acting strategically rather than tactically. Instead of pushing products into the market, one needs to pull markets in by engaging them in the product development and dissemination process. The successful business in the Aggregation Age will pull resources and customers to themselves through a value proposition by creating a value architecture that answers the question “what's in it for me” (WIFM) for each key stakeholder.

Slee provides numerous examples of entrepreneurs who, after attending a Midas marketing seminar, have made the change to crowdsourcing and have seen the dramatic difference it made in building wealth in their businesses. Most dramatic is Ben Harold of Precious Metals, Inc., who broke the cardinal rule of precious metals mining, guard your proprietary geological information at all costs. Initiating a contest with $575,000 in prizes, he published his data on the internet. Within a few weeks he generated information leading to $3 billion worth of resources. He has now grown his company from $100 million to a $9 billion‐dollar firm. Such is the promise of knowledge creation and management through crowdsourcing.

Another powerful example is in a highly competitive business fashion design. Sarah Waters built a community of freelance designers and tapped small family production facilities. She built a system allowing for a rapid response that allowed for changing ordering and shipping from a four‐to‐five month process to under one month. When she expanded into physical retail sites she used her model to change fashion retailing from a six‐to‐nine month lead time for guessing customer desires to a monthly inventory change by tapping constant and immediate feedback from her customers. She integrated their WIFM into her business model using an intranet allowing for immediate input from her salespeople.

One last example takes Midas Marketing principles from the company level to the sales force management level. Don Knight of Automated decided to reshape his sales from based on proven and tracked value added by each sales professional. Having purchased the failing company, Don was hemorrhaging cash. Desperate, he built a new sales compensation system which tracked the direct value each salesperson provided. Slee provides the details of the plan. Bottom line, only one sales person was even covering his expenses. At the same time, he moved the company from a one‐off design company to a branded product company. These changes turned the company around. The details of how he did it are in chapter 14.

Slee is a practical writer, a teacher if you will. He simply provides concepts and ideas, but also application examples and periodic reviews to help the reader stay focused. These “blueprint” sections review the key elements of the preceding chapter and help the reader apply the lessons learned immediately and practically. Midas Marketing is an unassuming book of less than 200 pages, but one which might just bring together those intuitive feelings you have had about how the market has changed and provide some ideas and immediate applications that will build significant wealth in your company.

Good reading.