A helpful, hands-on guide to creating memorable brand narratives.
A marketing consultant shares her approach to crafting compelling business storytelling content in this business primer.
“A story is about capturing that moment when your product or service intersects with humanity and changes a life for the better,” writes Brammer, who’s created award-winning business story content for such Fortune100 companies as Microsoft and Schneider Electric. She notes that business content is either informational or inspirational; although both have roles in marketing strategy, one type can’t be transformed into the other. Case studies, she notes, are useful to influence purchase decisions, but they’re linear narratives of facts and figures, not full-fledged stories. Stories, she explains, follow an arc structure that includes a setup, a climax, and a conclusion—all of which aim to engage the emotions of the broadest possible audience. Brammer details how to do exploratory research, “digging for leads and qualifying potential winners” to “identify a human conflict,” your story’s “cast of characters,” and “key points” for the story to make. She provides tools including an “Impact Quadrant” to measure a narrative’s effectiveness, and templates to map out a story video and to manage development and approval processes. Brammer also stresses the importance of such things as word-choice specificity, and she provides concise end-of-section summaries called “Fingertip reminders.” Overall, Brammer’s book is chock-full of practical advice for any business marketer, particularly those who may be new to the responsibility of generating effective stories. She takes readers through several specific examples of narrative development and offers insights into the nitty-gritty of the process that only an experienced practitioner could provide. Her suggested phrasings to avoid endless feedback from stakeholders, for example, are particularly masterful, and among many tips worth adopting. Although Brammer’s discussion of working with agencies to create story videos may be out of reach for some, it valuably delineates what’s involved in the process.
A helpful, hands-on guide to creating memorable brand narratives.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781662940422
Page Count: 227
Publisher: Great Stories
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2023
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
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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