A thorough albeit somewhat repetitive look at sensory techniques for sales professionals.
Avanessian offers an overview of sensory marketing with an evangelical twist.
In this business book, the author looks at successful approaches to sensory marketing—appeals to touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight—while also exploring the spiritual dimensions of selling. The book opens with an overview of sales theory before going into detail about sensory selling, with chapters addressing each of the major senses. Avanessian discusses Apple’s minimalist packaging, the jingles of Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, Sony’s use of haptic feedback, Westin’s signature hotel scent, and Blue Apron’s use of flavor profiles as examples of companies that have seen sales increases, spurred by their catering to the senses. After covering the five conventional human senses, the author explores a sixth: intuition, also characterized as inner wisdom, spiritual intelligence, or faith. Avanessian also encourages readers to incorporate Christian spirituality into their selling practices. (“Research has shown that engaging in regular spiritual practices can have a positive effect on an individual’s productivity and overall well-being.”) Throughout the book, the author intersperses discussions of sensory selling techniques with questions and activities designed to guide readers in applying the concepts to their own work. Avanessian takes a clear interest in his subject, and readers will appreciate his enthusiasm throughout the text, as well as the many citations that demonstrate his arguments’ grounding in research. However, the book is frequently repetitive, repeatedly returning to the same examples, including Apple, Lush, and Coca-Cola. The author sometimes reiterates specific examples of sales and marketing techniques within a single chapter, often in near-identical wording (like “soothing music”), so the work’s scope is less extensive than it initially appears. Still, some specific cases, such as Avanessian’s account of using his own techniques to allow him to schedule a meeting with a high-level potential customer, will prove valuable to readers. The author’s evangelical outreach is somewhat unexpected, and readers may be divided as to whether assessing biblical miracles through a sensory marketing lens is an effective explication of the concept.
A thorough albeit somewhat repetitive look at sensory techniques for sales professionals.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2026
ISBN: 9798385054060
Page Count: 300
Publisher: WestBowPress
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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