I’ve been following Guy Kawasaki for a while, and have been a fan of his work ever since I met him at a startup conference in Israel about 10 years or so ago, so when I got an offer to read a pre-release version of his book, “Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions” and write a review about it I was very glad to do so.

Enchantment is a very easy to read book. I read a lot of business and marketing books both for work and for my personal education and this book was one of the best written and well… “flowing” books. The chapters are right to the point, with no extra fluff to distract you from the main point. You can easily tell this guy worked for Apple for many years. This book was just extremely polished!

As for the content, I found it to be very refreshing and reminded me a bit of Seth Godin’s earlier books.

The book is really about how to get people to fall in love with your product, idea, cause or whatever you want to get out into the world (yes, I said fall in love, no just buy). Reading this book will help you learn what others who were successful at “enchanting” people did and still do to keep their message out there.

Obviously, Apple is high on the list of “enchanting” companies and whether you like their policies or not, they do know how to get the mass market to fall in love with their products and make people feel good about buying them.

Another example Guy shared in his book was his meeting with Richard Branson from Virgin Airlines (spoiler alert – skip to the next paragraph if you want to wait until you read this in the book).
They met at some event and Richard asked Guy if he travels on Virgin Airlines. Guy said no for various reasons and then Richard got down on his knees, and shined Guy’s shoes while “begging” him to fly Virgin. Guy travels on Virgin ever since…

My key takeaway from this book is that people and companies who are enchanters are not afraid. Not of what people might think (imagine a CEO of any other large airline doing something like this in public, ridiculous, right?), and not afraid to get their story out into the market. And most of all it’s about not being afraid to try and risk failure.

Just think about Apple in the past few years. They didn’t invent the mp3 player. In fact, it was out in the market for a while before Apple even got involved in the music business. But they did such a good job building a good product and ecosystem and communicating their message to the world, that they are now synonymous with the music business.

Same thing with the iPhone. Some of you might not know this, but Apple already had a music player/phone in the market in 2003. It was a joint venture with Sony Ericson, and it didn’t do very well. If they were to stop, saying that “they already tried and failed”, and not follow their vision, we would never have had the iPhone.

This fearless behavior of corporations and individuals is the key to becoming an “enchanter”.

Guy also spends a lot of time talking about using technology such as twitter and Facebook to enchant, and how to enchant in a workplace. I found his advice on both of these to be invaluable, and I’ve already started implementing it in my own life.

In any case, if you are a marketer of products, ideas or causes, Enchantment is a must read and should be the next step in your marketing strategy.

Stay tuned for an interview I conducted with Guy Kawasaki about this book.