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
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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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
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