A helpful, practical, and approachable playbook for improving client and marketing agency relationships.
A guide offers a multifaceted plan for helping executives and firms work more effectively with their marketing agencies.
Belsky, the CEO of a digital marketing agency, opens his compact book by observing that there are plenty of people employed in managing the relationships between companies and the consulting agencies they hire. Unfortunately, he points out, there’s comparatively little emphasis on improving the relationships between clients and their agencies. The author cites three reasons for this: Executives seldom feel compelled to be better clients; they rarely understand why they should try; and they have little or no available coaching on how to improve along those lines. In these pages, Belsky offers a lean, systematic outline of how to be a better client, drawing on his experience interviewing over 100 CEOs, chief marketing officers, and other business leaders. Too many clients seem to believe that it’s their agencies’ job to solve any problems in relationships, but the author argues that executives working from their end to improve things will maximize efficiency and profits. What are the key ingredients, for instance, of the great “brief” that will help align what the client wants with what the agency is offering? Every brand or marketing campaign has its own tone, for example. Belsky suggests asking what that tone is (“Is it lively? Is it tranquil? Is it playful? Is it serious or informative?”). It’s through this basic, ground-up approach (how to work conference calls, how to break down presentations, even how to decide whether or not hiring an agency is necessary in the first place), combined with plenty of short sections and numbered points, that the author demystifies the process by which executives can better work with the agencies they hire. He smoothly and expertly lays out simple, useful lessons that are too often overlooked in the business world.
A helpful, practical, and approachable playbook for improving client and marketing agency relationships.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2023
ISBN: 9798988270614
Page Count: 126
Publisher: Ripples Media
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
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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