A bit on the wonky side and tailored for a niche audience but containing information useful to all.
Phillips, Barry, Gans, and Schardt present a guide to transforming and expanding market research to help build a company’s brand.
This business guide details the ways in which research can be used to better build and position a brand. Two of the authors are senior managers at PepsiCo, and two work with Zappi, the company PepsiCo partnered with to create Ada, a learning application that, per the book, transformed PepsiCo’s market research. The text outlines how PepsiCo Insights, the company’s research and marketing arm, affects the larger organization, offering nuggets along the way that can apply to any company looking to become more consumer-centric. The authors cover the history of consumer and marketing data, including the early days of surveys and focus groups, to more modern methods of collecting data online. Chapters include information on making market research more agile, finding the right platform (like PepsiCo’s Ada), gathering buy-ins from other people, and using AI in market research. (“AI will disrupt every phase of the research process,” the authors write.) Each of these topics is explored thoroughly, often through case studies from PepsiCo; in fact, the book often reads like an advertisement for the platform that PepsiCo and Zappi developed. (“To date, the platform has generated over 6,000 research products … and over $100 million in savings and improvements,” readers learn.) Still, there is useful information here. Chapters end with key takeaways and even more helpful action points (for example, build bridges across your organization, map out how your business uses market research right now, and work closely with IT). Though the guide reads like a textbook and can stray into the weeds with its diagrams, charts, and footnotes, there are portions that could appeal to anyone—for instance, the extremely useful final chapter (“The Bluffer’s Guide to Tech Terms”) provides a list of definitions for terms such as algorithm, augmented reality, blockchain, and user interface. Any reader can benefit from this information; heavy-duty researchers will appreciate the rest.
A bit on the wonky side and tailored for a niche audience but containing information useful to all.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781781338698
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Rethink Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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