It’s 2018. Why read a book?

You can learn just about anything on the internet in 2018.

Want to learn to play guitar? YouTube has thousands of videos. Want to build a smartphone app? Codecademy will teach you for free. Want to build a great brand? Here are 81,800,000 google search results to get you started.

With all this content available on the internet, why should anyone bother reading a book?

Small mountain, big advantage

Lindsay Vonn gives credit for her success to a focus on fundamentals. Unlike many skiers, Vonn trained in the largely flat Midwest on tiny Buck Hill; a mountain so small you might not see it from the highway. At only 309 feet, it’s about 30 times smaller than most of the training grounds out west.

But the mountain’s small size is its biggest advantage. With such a short slope, Vonn could log many more runs than other skiers. And each run is an opportunity to learn and sharpen the fundamentals.

“I got a lot of repetitions in and worked on my muscle memory,” she says. “If I was out West, I would’ve been doing more freeskiing and wouldn’t have built the technical base.”
See, that little mountain was just the influence she needed to perfect the rudiments. Now she’s the leader in women’s World Cup career wins, just a few wins shy of the all-time record.

Small book, big advantage

Perfecting the fundamentals is one of the surest paths to success. That holds true whether you’re an Olympic skier or a healthcare marketer. We’ve seen our healthcare clients prove it, again and again, through decades of brand-building.
And that valuable truth is the reason we’ve distilled more than 30 years of valuable insights into our new book, Under the Influence: The Anthology of Healthcare Marketing Best Practices.

At 127 pages, Under the Influence is designed to be used like Lindsay Vonn used Buck Hill: as a tool to perfect your fundamentals. It’s organized into 5 sections, each representing a foundational discipline of great brands. We laid it out like this to help you jump in and get started anywhere you like. Maybe you want to tackle your brand’s biggest weakness, or maybe you want to leverage your biggest strength. In either case, Under the Influence can help.

Under the Influence is available for free

Under the Influence is free to download, and hardbound copies are for sale on Amazon. We’d also be happy to send you a hardbound copy for free if you think we might be able to help you influence your brand in the right direction. For that kind of help, you can sign up for a conversation with our President (and author of Under the Influence), Mark Shipley here.