A well-written, cogent, and concise argument that demonstrates ways to cope with the changing marketing landscape.
A longtime marketing practitioner challenges his colleagues to adjust to a new economy in this nonfiction book.
In this manifesto directed at chief marketing officers, Raj (Brand Rituals, 2012) suggests that marketing has evolved from the “Attention Economy” to the “Information Economy” to what he calls the “Insight Economy.” This, he writes, “requires us to translate and transform the huge amount of information…in order to find new avenues for growth by leveraging powerful and compelling insights that help us serve our customers’ real needs.” According to Raj, the CMO can no longer be a specialist in one area; rather, he or she must embrace the notion of becoming a “Marketing Decathlete” who’s proficient in 10 specific marketing fields, such as “strategic ability,” “innovative mindset,” “engagement focus,” and “deliver[ing] on equity.” As Raj explains these, he compellingly debunks some common modern marketing perceptions; for example, despite the current excitement about big data and microsegmentation, Raj cautions that “you can’t let yourself get so caught up in rhetoric that you forget what problem you’re really trying to solve.” Similarly, he says that chief executive officers and boards enamored with new technologies are just “becoming enablers of fragmentation”; as a result, he says, CMOs often chase “numerous experiments going nowhere.” Social media isn’t safe from the author’s detailed critique, either; he offers several examples of how consumer reactions on social media have contributed to negative perceptions of brands that “lower the bottom line.” Interestingly, Raj writes that he believes in returning to an age-old concept: focusing on the needs of one’s best customers. The optimum model for successful marketing, he writes, is “the TRL model…Trust, Respect and Loyalty.” Although the book poses no detailed solutions, CMOs who heed the book’s advice will, at the very least, take solace that the upheaval they’re witnessing is widespread.
A well-written, cogent, and concise argument that demonstrates ways to cope with the changing marketing landscape.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9967268-0-1
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Spyglass Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Analyzing his craft, a careful craftsman urges with Thoreauvian conviction that writers should simplify, simplify, simplify.
A New York Times columnist and editorial board member delivers a slim book for aspiring writers, offering saws and sense, wisdom and waggery, biases and biting sarcasm.
Klinkenborg (Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, 2006), who’s taught for decades, endeavors to keep things simple in his prose, and he urges other writers to do the same. (Note: He despises abuses of the word as, as he continually reminds readers.) In the early sections, the author ignores traditional paragraphing so that the text resembles a long free-verse poem. He urges readers to use short, clear sentences and to make sure each one is healthy before moving on; notes that it’s acceptable to start sentences with and and but; sees benefits in diagramming sentences; stresses that all writing is revision; periodically blasts the formulaic writing that many (most?) students learn in school; argues that knowing where you’re headed before you begin might be good for a vacation, but not for a piece of writing; and believes that writers must trust readers more, and trust themselves. Most of Klinkenborg’s advice is neither radical nor especially profound (“Turn to the poets. / Learn from them”), and the text suffers from a corrosive fallacy: that if his strategies work for him they will work for all. The final fifth of the text includes some passages from writers he admires (McPhee, Oates, Cheever) and some of his students’ awkward sentences, which he treats analytically but sometimes with a surprising sarcasm that veers near meanness. He includes examples of students’ dangling modifiers, malapropisms, errors of pronoun agreement, wordiness and other mistakes.
Analyzing his craft, a careful craftsman urges with Thoreauvian conviction that writers should simplify, simplify, simplify.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-26634-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Making movies may be ``hard work,'' as the veteran director continually reminds us throughout this slight volume, but Lumet's simple-minded writing doesn't make much of a case for that or for anything else. Casual to a fault and full of movie-reviewer clichÇs, Lumet's breezy how-to will be of little interest to serious film students, who will find his observations obvious and silly (``Acting is active, it's doing. Acting is a verb''). Lumet purports to take readers through the process of making a movie, from concept to theatrical release—and then proceeds to share such trade secrets as his predilection for bagels and coffee before heading out to a set and his obsessive dislike for teamsters. Lumet's vigorously anti-auteurist aesthetic suits his spotty career, though his handful of good movies (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City, and Q&A) seem to have quite a lot in common visually and thematically as gutsy urban melodramas. Lumet's roots in the theater are obvious in many of his script choices, from Long Day's Journey into Night to Child's Play, Equus, and Deathtrap. ``I love actors,'' he declares, but don't expect any gossip, just sloppy kisses to Paul Newman, Al Pacino, and ``Betty'' Bacall. Lumet venerates his colleague from the so-called Golden Age of TV, Paddy Chayevsky, who scripted Lumet's message-heavy Network. Style, Lumet avers, is ``the way you tell a particular story''; and the secret to critical and commercial success? ``No one really knows.'' The ending of this book, full of empty praise for his fellow artists, reads like a dry run for an Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, the standard way of honoring a multi-Oscar loser. There's a pugnacious Lumet lurking between the lines of this otherwise smarmy book, and that Lumet just might write a good one someday.
Pub Date: March 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43709-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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