An earnest but uneven book that energetically offers a new angle on what it means to succeed as a brand.
Lewis, the CEO and founder of international research agency Vision One, presents a look at corporate success through the lens of branding.
In this business book, the author takes readers through a metric called the Brand Velocity Score, arguing that it’s a key indicator that should be of interest to all growth-minded executives. Lewis applies Newtonian physics to the realm of marketing, defining the momentum of a brand as its velocity multiplied by its mass, or size. His book opens with an overview of what brand momentum is, and explains that, to a consumer, a brand is fundamentally a mental model that synthesizes imagery, emotions, and experiences. It then moves to addressing growth as a driver of business health, highlighting metrics that the author asserts should be part of any assessment of a brand’s success. In the book’s third section, Lewis gets into the details of how the Brand Velocity Score is calculated—by asking consumers whether they think a brand is growing, shrinking, or staying the same—and how marketers should understand public perception of their brands. The final section guides readers through establishing a growth strategy that relies on brand momentum to ensure corporate longevity and success.
Lewis offers a combination of cheerleading and persuasion as he advocates for his primary concept while patiently explaining it to readers. The book presents an enthusiastic argument in favor of a metric that’s simultaneously concrete and nebulous—a dichotomy that Lewis explains is deliberate. Respondents bring their perceptions of the brand and their own definitions of “growing,” so the answer to whether a brand is growing is completely subjective. However, Lewis contends that by surveying a large enough population—due to the "wisdom of crowds" effect—responses will cluster around an objectively correct assessment of the brand’s health. The book makes a strong case for the validity of the Brand Velocity Score, citing examples of how the metric has paralleled and even predicted the success of some companies. Still, it doesn’t grapple enough with the concept of success as a self-fulfilling prophecy: “If we believe a brand is successful, popular or growing, we will eventually succumb to these beliefs... perception of momentum can be enough to fuel our behaviours,” Lewis writes, contending that a belief in success creates actual success without interrogating the concept further. Although the book trumpets the value of Brand Velocity Score data, it can be vague when it comes to other sources of quantitative information. (“One stat I saw estimated that 25 percent of businesses have yet to experience growth in the past decade.”) Lewis is an enthusiastic writer who shows that he’s fully convinced of the value of brand momentum as an indication of corporate health, and he does an excellent job of explaining the concept and how one may apply as a tool. However, his emphasis on perception-as-reality may leave skeptical readers wondering about its real-world validity.
An earnest but uneven book that energetically offers a new angle on what it means to succeed as a brand.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781068740510
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Vision-X
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2024
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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