Swimming Downstream
How To Stop Struggling & Start Winning
With Marketing That Actually Works
Introducing the new book from Judd Labarthe, founder of Planner At Large.
Here’s what readers are saying:
Swimming Downstream takes a thoughtful, analytical, and well researched approach to helping business leaders re-think their marketing with a focus on long-term success. Labarthe reminds us, rightly in my view, that marketing and brand are the responsibility of the top of the house, not a department. His anecdotes are instructive, and the chapter end summaries provide a shorthand "to-do list" for the attention-challenged. Swimming Downstream is a useful, understandable, and practical guide to fixing marketing.
Stephen Ban, former Fortune 500 CMO
As a nonfiction book editor who has co-written four books on marketing and sales, it's safe to say I’ve read dozens of marketing books. Swimming Downstream offers two things I rarely see together: clear, practical, and actionable guidance for growing brands and businesses, and also a ripping great read! If you're looking for a serious (and seriously witty) book that will change the way you think about marketing and how you do it, this book is for you.
Helena Bouchez, Principal, Executive Words
Swimming Downstream crushes the conventional wisdom dished out by marketing veterans and self-styled “experts”, and it does so with a deft combination of rigor, creativity and a fun, conversational style I really loved. Better still, Labarthe doesn’t simply poke holes in traditional marketing tropes; he provides solid, practical solutions illustrated with insightful case histories based on his experience as a marketing consultant.
Marty Horn, former SVP, DDB Worldwide, and author of the forthcoming The Marketing Researcher’s Edge
The most unconventional marketing book I have ever read. Labarthe is a critical thinker who questions and refutes the typical marketing concepts and buzzwords, the models taught in business schools and marketing classes. Instead, his book is a celebration of logical thinking and common sense. It’s both refreshing and entertaining. Will recommend it to my students!
Prof. Dr. Michael Bahles, BSP Business & Law School Berlin
Swimming Downstream invites marketers and brand builders to liberate themselves from outmoded thinking and conventional assumptions. Labarthe’s intelligence, pragmatism and enthusiasm for subject and craft jump alive and vivid from every page. This book is a significant commentary on a discipline that too often lacks discipline, an infectious treatise that delivers a cognitive jumpstart.
Simon Pont, founder & author, The Better Mousetrap and Digital State
Marketing is much more than logos, social posts and clever campaigns: fundamentally, marketing is about how, and how well, a business competes.
So the better you understand marketing, the more able you are to recognize and align with the forces that really drive growth, and to put your business in a stronger position to succeed.
You’re also better prepared to call BS when you see and hear it - and whether you’re a business owner, a marketer yourself, or just a student of the discipline, that’ll happen a lot. Sadly.
But there’s good news: successful marketing is more attainable than most businesspeople realize.
Marketing as practiced today leads most companies to swim against the current, wasting resources doing stuff that doesn’t actually help them compete. They chase trends, deliver “deliverables”, optimize furiously, and call it all strategy. They simply follow the herd, because “everybody knows what works in marketing.”
Yet the evidence shows that what really drives growth is surprising, even counterintuitive. It’s unconventional wisdom, and it can help any brand get moving faster.
If you know how to apply it.
In Swimming Downstream, I synthesize the sharpest points from marketing science. Illustrate them with real-life cases drawn from the marketplace and my own practice. And organize them into a pragmatic, actionable growth framework you can read about today and start implementing tomorrow.
Brand and business owners will learn to recognize and harness marketing’s real success drivers, and to avoid making the very intuitive, very common, and often very costly mistakes that limit competitiveness and growth.
Marketing professionals will develop a management-convincing arsenal of arguments for doing more of what will help their brand and business grow, and against doing what won’t (but is often sold as “best practice”).
Students of marketing and others new to the field will gain a valuable and holistic set of evidence- and experience-based alternatives to the conventional wisdom, including what’s commonly taught in school.
(And as a bonus for any reader considering working with Planner At Large for the first time, the book will also give you a great preview of what that’s like.)
Who am I to be talking about all this?
I've been helping brands and businesses compete and grow since the mid-90s, in regional and global strategy leadership roles on major brands at renowned brand and communications agencies, and, later, with Planner At Large. So I’ve seen up close what successful marketing can look like. I’ve also seen a lot of smart businesspeople with good intentions fall short. I’ve studied what works (and why) and what doesn’t (and why not). And I’ve packed what I’ve learned, warts and all, into a book like the one I wish someone had handed me when I was first starting out.
