A passionate and convincing case for a long-term marketing strategy.
Marketing professionals Laudi and Suellentrop provide an intensely customer-centered approach to marketing.
In their nonfiction debut, the authors draw on their extensive experience in the marketing world, particularly in the field of software as a service, in which users subscribe to tools that are hosted online. In this book, Laudi and Suellentrop aim to provide a concerted marketing plan that, they contend, many operations lack: “Many marketing teams operate in a haphazard way, flinging ideas around like spaghetti, trying to see what sticks,” they write. “But scrambling like this is no way to generate long-term growth.” In fact, they stress, such a strategy results in a lack of growth over the long term. The title of their book refers to the traditional notion of the “marketing funnel,” in which a potential customer, searching for a new solution, becomes aware of what a company is offering and, persuaded by marketing, decides to buy it. Laudi and Suellentrop argue that this concept is fundamentally shortsighted, especially for the SaaS field: “If your business runs on recurring revenue,” they warn, “it’s a serious mistake to think about marketing as something that stops when someone signs up.” Instead, they propose an approach that’s more like a curated experience—offering new features as a customer needs them rather than all at once—resulting in an ongoing relationship with the people buying a product. The authors go on to offer several pieces of advice on how a company can improve its customer research to the point where it’s possible to predict a customer’s needs and be ready to address them as they arise. The authors employ numerous real-life examples, and their chapters benefit from clear design with numerous graphics and bullet-pointed insets. However, the book’s main strength lies in the frankness with which Laudi and Suellentrop relay their insights, especially regarding the fluid nature of the SaaS world. They insightfully point out how customers’ needs shift as old problems are solved and new ones emerge. Their resulting emphasis on customer service has a winning tone.
A passionate and convincing case for a long-term marketing strategy.Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 978-1544542232
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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