NEVER OUTMATCHED

Pepper lays out a business game plan using military principles.

“Digital marketing [has] upset the apple cart, so to speak, and the traditional methods [are] no longer as effective as they used to be,” writes the author, a United States Army veteran and successful marketing specialist, in his nonfiction debut. In these pages, Pepper reminds those working in the marketing field that they were not hired to maintain the status quo (disruption is going to find them anyway). He proceeds to map centuries-old successful military strategies onto the world of modern marketing (“When people ask me what’s the latest marketing book I’ve come across, I reply, ‘Caesar’s Commentaries’”), adding lessons he’s learned from his extensive experience in the civilian business world, where change is also the key. “Transformation is at the core of successful relationship marketing,” he writes, reinforcing this and other precepts with quotes from famous military thinkers and icons like General George S. Patton. The author’s own experience, he stresses, underscores the superiority of transformational relationships in marketing over merely transactional ones, and he discusses the various obstacles he’s encountered in managing people and encountering institutional resistance. Often, his main barrier was the Dunning-Kruger effect, “a cognitive bias in which people with less ability and knowledge in an area overestimate their competence.” Pepper does a very engaging job of conveying his corporate experiences, particularly as chief marketing officer for Foundations Recovery Network, but some readers may feel like they’re getting too much autobiography and not enough strategizing. Fortunately, the author effectively invokes famed military experts like von Clausewitz, and his conviction is infectious when noting that CMOs must always feel confident that they will not be outmatched. Pepper’s clear-sighted maxims will doubtlessly motivate and inspire readers who are dealing with the volatile nature of 21st-century marketing.

A readable and forceful breakdown of marketing tactics honed to military sharpness.