A book of lively and relatable marketing advice.
A plan to transform newsletter emails from annoying to alluring.
For his nonfiction debut, lawyer and entrepreneur Klinck sets himself a seemingly impossible task: to change marketing and business-related mass emails from an unpleasant part of a person’s workday to something that will actually generate results—and maybe even prompt a smile. The author, an entrepreneur and Harvard Law School graduate, wants to remodel his readers’ email marketing habits in order to teach them “how to find and cultivate raving fans, the kind of fans who will buy anything you have to sell.” The key understanding, according to Klinck, is that email marketing is just like any other kind of marketing, which explains the author’s decision to spend time on explaining the basics of that field before applying those basics to a new medium. One problem with the conventional wisdom surrounding email marketing, the author claims, is that the people offering it don’t understand the difference between marketing and selling. He describes marketing as “offering the right product to the right person at the right time, with the right message.” Selling isn’t about the customer’s needs, he asserts, whereas marketing is “relentlessly interested in the needs of the buyer.” After clarifying this key difference, Klinck dispenses practical tips; for instance, although he grants that an email marketer’s goal is to generate responses, he advises that one shouldn’t track reply statistics, so as to avoid becoming obsessed with such numbers. In short chapters, enlivened by occasional black-and-white personal photos to make specific points, he presents many insights into the new world of marketing.
The author’s main point is that email marketing practices can only be effectively improved by infusing routine business emails with genuine personality, even if it means expressing opinions that part of your audience may not share. Klinck presents positive feedback for his approach that he’s received from others, but the best possible illustrations of his main point are the readability and approachability of this book. The author is a funny, vigorous writer, always ready with a cultural reference (with the movie The Princess Bride an apparent favorite), a joke, or a self-deprecating aside drawn from his own past. His core message is one of clear communication, and several of his sharpest points involve finding a personal voice for all kinds of marketing emails. “If you talk like Hemingway, write like Hemingway,” he writes. “If you talk like James Joyce…there’s something wrong with you. Knock it off.” (“Don’t write like the Queen of England,” he adds. “Unless you are the Queen of England.”) His advice on this score is often invaluable, as when he invites readers to record some of their own conversation, transcribe it, and look at “the cadence of how you actually talk when you’re talking to a friend. Try to adopt that in your writing.” Readers involved in any kind of marketing will also appreciate Klinck’s breezy optimism and insistence on viewing email recipients as real human beings: “They’re your friends, the people you serve.”
A book of lively and relatable marketing advice.Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5445-2737-6
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
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
IN THE NEWS
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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