It is always a good thing when public relations and marketing professionals can take away lessons from success stories that are not directly aimed at public relations or marketing for that matter. One example is a book called Guitar Lessons by Bob Taylor (John Wiley & Sons, 2011, ISBN: 978-0-470-9387-7).
Taylor is the co-founder of the well-known and highly respected Taylor Guitar company. His book is a historical perspective of what he and his business partners and his family members endured trying to establish a successful guitar making company. He tells us that he fell in love with making guitars at a very young age (while in taking a shop class in high school) and never looked back and never looked at any other career path for himself.
He relates how he and his partners tried to make the business a success through selling guitars in mass through a mass-marketing type reseller. That did not work out so well. Taylor also shares his many mistakes in production, market assumptions, human resource revelations and a myriad of other business lessons he learned while on the job.
A few of his success factors throughout the early days in business was his seeking out advice and mentoring from others in the same business. In the end, Taylor really wanted to spend his career making really good guitars (he admits that he can barely play one himself) and all of the other stuff related to business was more of a distraction, although he knew he and his partners needed the business side to find success.
His strongest message in the book is that you need to make each product or service with quality, passion and be singular in delivery. He wanted each of his guitars to be appreciated by its owner and as such looked at making each guitar one at a time.
Taylor and his partners worked more towards creating a memorable guitar than generating millions of dollars in sales. Quality, true passion, initiative and high energy are the best public relations concepts one can have in the tool shed.
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