Book Review: Tom Peters’ Trends

Tom has released a series of mini-booklets on Leadership, Talent, Design, and Trends. They’re called the Essentials Series. Naturally, I thought we’d take a look at the one called Trends which has been co-authored by Martha Barletta author of Marketing To Women.

The two trends that this book describes is (a) women and (b) seniors/boomers, or not-so-seniors as the book suggests. Tom’s books have always been inspiring, and this has been funked up with zany graphics and stock images to ram home the point. 

I think that the subjects of the book are important but what I came away thinking though, was about the senior market not women’s role in the market. There was a single clear message coming through with the seniors and yet I felt overwhelmed by the to-do lists for including women in my business planning.

My take from the book is that when people hit 55 or so, they start to live again. They live life – they don’t just give up and get old.  In terms of women, the book told me something about remembering that women have a super important role in every purchase decision there is – open your eyes stupid.

As I said, I got the seniors bit. I finished the book, got off my plane and waited for a bus to the rental car depot at SeaTac and I looked at all the older folk around me. They were travel ling, having fun, visiting people. The thing is, they may have the money but they don’t want to waste it – they were getting the bus to the off-site car rental so they got a good price (I was going to an off-site rental to get a premium car for the price of a budget car). As I waited I watched as these aging boomers tried, with difficulty, to climb the steps on the buses to get on board. Of course, I thought, a car rental company with a bus that you don’t need to climb steps to get on board – one with easy grip features. How well would this simple (and soft) innovation get received?

I haven’t yet found a moment where I looked at something and thought, if ‘only they considered women’ when they planned that. Martha and Tom have obviously done their homework and provide lists and lists about why women are crucial to your future success – but the more I pulled myself through each section the more I thought about how readers would respond to this. I imagined a CEO turning yet another page of top ten lists thinking, "Enough already! – How am I supposed to implement all this?" then I thought of an overenthusiastic marketing manager who’d swallowed the book and had handwritten lists on sheets on his walls but was still unable to convince his colleagues about the importance of women.

Maybe it’s just me. But this brought it home to me: I thought about asking a female contributor to review the book to check my reaction. And then I thought – well, if I want to ask a woman to review a book that’s supposed to help men understand the importance of women in the market place, then the book hasn’t had the impact on me that it should have.

Still – go out and buy the little book and decide for yourself.