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
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
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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