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
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
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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