Prove It by Melanie Deziel with Phil M Jones: Exactly How Modern Marketers Earn Trust, is the follow-up to Ms. Deziel excellent The Content Fuel Framework which I reviewed last year.

Like its predecessor, Prove It is a how to guide that many marketers will find familiar for the ideas and concepts are not really new and are the fodder that modern marketing is based on. However, like her previous book, what Ms. Deziel and Mr. Jones do in Prove It is to create an overarching framework and concept that put these ideas into context and provides a guide to future ideas and processes.

The main thrust of Prove Its is that today’s customers don’t want to be told why they should buy a product or service but to be shown why they should with concrete and provable examples. This process then becomes the underpinning for a brand as a whole. Where Prove It really works its magic is by showing rather than telling. It uses the slogans and catchphrases that the reader will be all too familiar with to make its points crystal clear.  “Fifteen minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance” for example is Geico’s way of proving that they are easy and convenient to deal with while also potentially being able to save the customer money – ‘give us a little of your time and we’ll lower your car insurance rate.’

Prove it is full of these examples for every type of business or service and how these claims can be discovered about your business, and how that discovery process in turn leads into a marketing / branding strategy. The book also encourages the reader to back up these claims with documentation and to use this a method of re-enforcing the brand’s identity by doing so. Where Prove It really scores on this front is by pointing out that businesses often already have access this documentation in other forms. Reviews on sites such as Yelp, customer service surveys, or just by talking to customers themselves can yield not only great content but can also provide witness to the claims that a brand is making and therefore backup the branding process itself.

What I personally found very interesting was a dissection of how Apple ‘coached’ its client base to not necessarily believe the claims of its competitors when it came to the differences between using a Mac or another computer brand with its “I’m a Mac and I’m a PC” series of TV ads. The idea that an ad can be coaching a customer to ask the difficult questions that the competition may not want to answer is fascinating and subtly brilliant.

Prove It is a short and engaging book for both marketing professionals and beginners alike. It demystifies how modern advertising and content marketing work. This is not a nuts and bolts “place this type of ad at this type of time” kind of book; but more about mindset. This is a book to understand how to sell a product or service so that a customer can easily identity the ‘why’ they are prepared to buy.

To sum up it so very worth your time and its place on your bookshelf.