Substance, not content, is king. It’s really difficult to envision a world where everything you encounter in social media, print media and any other medium that exists or will exist in the future actually adds value in some meaningful way. What is adding value? Adding value is indeed subjective. What is meant by adding value in this blog? Information that informs, teaches or otherwise helps everyone become more aware, more successful and more attentive to the people and perhaps things that matter most in their lives. It’s that simple and it’s that complicated. This blog will share books, articles, essays, and anything else that will help elucidate the myriad, nuanced complexities of human and business interaction. Knowledge is power, perhaps, but knowledge without passion, belief, conviction and execution is useless. Much of my life has been spent as a graduate of the college of useless knowledge. That ends today. It is critical at this point to make it clear that any recommendations made here are not paid for by anyone at any time. There will be no publicist’s copy duplicated here and proclaimed as news. Paid promotion poisons the food for thought. This blog will retain its intellectual freedom by refusing to post any paid content.
The first recommendation of this blog is Chris Malone and Susan Fiske’s The Human Brand. It quantifies what great ad and brand professionals know – that is, the emotional connection that must exist between consumers and successful brands. They argue quite successfully that just like with human interaction there needs to be a combination of warmth and competence projected by companies and brands that will lead to trust and and on to repeat business. Both competence and warmth must be there because a lack of either or both of these sends the wrong signals to the consumer and can lead to disastrous results. The Human Brand was selected Marketing Book of the Year for 2013. BSPLLC2015 happily declares it essential reading.
For more information, here’s a link to The Human Brand via Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/The-Human-Brand-Products-Companies/dp/1118611314
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