An involving and thought-provoking series of challenges to the old-fashioned idea of brand building.
A comprehensive guide to elevating your branding game.
Truly effective branding is not merely taking a costume out of a closet and wearing it when needed, marketing expert Chidley contends; rather, it should be imagined as a field, “a space people can step into and feel changed by…that helps them see themselves more clearly, act more confidently, or belong more deeply.” This field is a force surrounding the planet—the “brand gravity” at the heart of his book. The author writes that he’s spent years watching brands become “untethered,” reduced to a mere logo, color palette, or slogan, when, in his view, there’s so much more to the concept. He urges readers to enter what he refers to as the Gravity Era, in which the traditional idea of branding is reframed: Instead of adorning a product with the bells and whistles of a branding campaign, “gravitational” brands establish their presence first, becoming visible, repeatable, and shared in order to win hearts. Too many brands, Chidley writes, invest in being seen before deciding what they should be seen for, failing to build a strong anchor. A well-designed product, he maintains, doesn’t need explanation; through his “gravitational” approach, they appeal directly to intuition. The author’s long experience shows on every page of his book, which is full of challenging reconceptions of the nature and psychology of branding. He clearly and accessibly breaks down what he refers to as the Brand Gravity Matrix, which is the intersection of the nature of the customer’s choice (does the customer make the choice, or does the brand take the lead?) and the nature of the product or service being chosen (is it functional or emotional?). Despite his contention to the contrary, some of his statements do seem to prioritize the manipulation of the brand over the quality of the product, but for the most part, this is a fascinating study of the kind of branding that’s never been more ubiquitous than it is right now.
An involving and thought-provoking series of challenges to the old-fashioned idea of brand building.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2025
ISBN: 9798993695013
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 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
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