A genuinely original contribution to marketing literature.
A new profiling tool promises to change the marketing landscape by focusing on consumers’ values.
Conventional marketing wisdom has long held the principal predictor of consumer behavior is age, which is precisely why so much time and energy has been expended trying to effectively reach millennials (defined here are people born between 1980 and 1995). However, while Allison (The Stackable Boomer, 2015) was researching baby boomers, he discovered that many of their life decisions align with millennials’, undermining the regnant view that the latter are “an entirely new species of human.” He argues that, in general, relying upon age as a profiling tool is misguided and that it should be discarded in favor of a reliance on values—what people “want, need, and expect from life.” He transformed this key insight into a practical instrument, he says, by inventing “Valuegraphics,” which he describes as the “world’s largest purpose-built database of shared values,” comprised of 75,000 surveys that one can algorithmically mine. It classifies respondents according to basic types, determined by core values; the 10 most popular are called “Valuegraphics Archetypes,” such as “The Adventure Club” (“the curious ones, always restless and looking to try new things”) and “The Savers Society” (which includes Allison’s “mother-in-law, who will drive forty-five minutes across town because butter is on sale”). According to the author, members of a particular archetype are overwhelmingly likely to agree with one another, which makes them remarkably predictable as a group. For example, he says, those who consider loyalty to be their chief value tend to agree with others who do so about 83 percent of the time. As one might expect, the book often reads like a long infomercial, as its sales pitch for Valuegraphics is relentless. However, Allison’s prose is lucid, engaging, and convincing, and he makes a powerful argument that our society’s “new agelessness” demands a seismic shift in marketing analysis. Further, he provides a rigorous account of Valuegraphics’ various applications and benefits. Oddly, though, he doesn’t include a full sample survey, stating that it’s too complex to show in book form.
A genuinely original contribution to marketing literature.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0087-4
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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