A punchy and stimulating look at building brands.
A business book offers a methodology for companies to build trust in their potential customers.
“People don’t trust brands like they used to,” Bloomstein notes at the beginning of her work. “Failures of leadership, inconsistent messaging, and deceptive practices” in all areas of public life, from retail to “the halls of governments,” have combined to erode trust in marketed brands of all kinds. “Cynicism takes root,” the author writes, “when people don’t know who to trust and decide not to believe anything.” This is both a threat and a challenge for businesses wishing to build trust in their products and services, and Bloomstein seeks to provide clear and sharp advice for what customers want and what they respond to in the present age. “Users don’t shop for features, or fables,” she asserts. “They shop for benefits first,” for “What’s in it for me?” basics. “Focus on users’ needs,” she advises, “then you can help them focus on the features and details that will make a difference in their decisions.” In the course of her book, the author uses a variety of companies as examples of what to do and how to do it. Brand names like America’s Test Kitchen, GOV.UK, Airbnb, Banana Republic, MailChimp, and others are discussed, sometimes in the context of both Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the well-known business truism about “good, fast, or cheap”—everybody has to pick two out of the three. At the heart of Bloomstein’s outlook is the importance of simplicity in the flow of information. “Abstraction is different from generalizing,” she shrewdly points out, and “If information is power, it’s because confidence in our own knowledge fuels trust.” The author uses a very clear, lean prose line; marketing directors at all levels will find her insights intriguing, although her discussions of her various example companies can sometimes go too far into the weeds for effective generalizing. In this instance, readers may think of Bloomstein’s own comment that “ ‘More’ isn’t better. It’s exhausting.”
A punchy and stimulating look at building brands.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-989603-92-5
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Page Two Books
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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