With personal stories and a dry wit, Collins bridges the gap between cultural theory and marketing practice.
An award-winning marketer explains brand strategy, consumer behavior, and the new generation of marketing.
Collins has been involved in some of the most successful advertising campaigns of the past two decades (he has worked with Beyoncé, Apple, Google, the Brooklyn Nets, and others), and he also has solid academic credentials, holding a key position at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. This experience in both spheres informs this book, as the author examines why certain campaigns have been astonishingly successful while others have fallen painfully flat. The key, he argues, is not about a product itself; it’s about connecting to a particular segment of society through shared values and experiences. Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, for example, was not noticeably different from other brews, but the brand was marketed as representing autonomy and self-expression, which spoke to the ideology of the burgeoning hipster community. With interesting case studies, Collins unpacks how cultural communities come into being and how marketing firms can track their development, with increasingly precise targeting to tribes and clans. Demographic information is crucial, although some marketers can miss crucial nuances in the data. The author notes that these sorts of marketing campaigns can be commercially successful while being socially damaging, such as the Marlboro Man campaign, which made smoking attractive. Collins could have delved further into the long-term impact of this cultural segmentation of society. When does targeted marketing become a contributor to social fragmentation? At what point does the idea of “my people” turn into us-vs.-them conflict? Collins veers away from this line of thinking, but he believes that marketers should think more carefully about the campaigns they design and the stories they tell. The author offers plenty of food for thought about how the social landscape is evolving.
With personal stories and a dry wit, Collins bridges the gap between cultural theory and marketing practice.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781541700963
Page Count: 304
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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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