Reduced to mush
The book does have a message, but it is not conveyed properly, says Santosh Desai.
Sometimes, the best way to get a sense of what a new book might be like is to note the books that have inspired the author. In the case of About Face: The Secrets of Emotionally Effective Advertising, the references fall more or less in two neat piles. On the one hand, there are accessible books on neuromarketing with titles like Mapping the Mind, How We Decide, The Naked Brain and Neuromarketing: Understanding the Buy Buttons in Your Customer's Brain.
On the other, you have a whole lot of How To books on advertising - very American buy-nowor-repent-for-life sounding titles. About Face falls in the second category. Take an important subject that can be treated with depth and nuance and treat it instead as a tutorial delivered to mentally challenged arthropods.
Create a new buzzword of sorts, position yourself as an expert in something that sounds new and exciting and then say what is utterly familiar and comforting (Be on-emotion, not just onmessage, create engaging sensory experiences, beware of creating cognitive dissonance, do not lead with price and so on).
Cram the book with a lot of pseudo-scientific diagrams and factoids and, before you know it, you are a speaker on the international circuit, inflicting seminars on hapless seekers of the magic mantra. It is not as if the essential point that the book seeks to make is not relevant.
The overwhelming emphasis on messaging in advertising is, indeed, misplaced and consumers do respond to advertising through the primary filter of emotion, as the book argues. But the device of arriving at conclusions about relative effectiveness of different kinds of advertising by relying on eye tracking data is to use a very primitive instrument to measure something very fine and intangible. It is akin to a chef using data on salivation to create magical recipes!
In some ways, because marketing is taught at business schools, which have a strong bias towards quantitative methods of explaining the world, we tend to overplay the role of rationality in decision-making. One could argue that if we were truly rational, we would end up buying a fraction of things we do.
Both emotion and rationality operate within a larger construct of constructed meaning. When we pay Rs 20 lakh for a car that provides no greater functional utility than one that costs Rs 4 lakh, there is a rational part of us that justifies this price because of the additional features and an emotional part that is seduced by what the car says about us.
What is interesting is the construction of the meaning system within which both rationality and emotion operate - the idea of personal mobility in our society, the transformation of a machine into a sign of masculinity and the communication of meaning through each element of the car.
Dan Hill takes a great subject and reduces it to generic mush. If the only thing you read about About Face is this review, you would have got off lightly.
- The author takes an important subject and treats it as a tutorial delivered to mentally challenged arthropods
BOOKMARKS
Small Wonder: The Making of the Nano
By Philip Chacko, Christabelle Noronha and Sujata Agrawal
Westland Ltd | Pages: 149 | Price: Rs 295
A chronicle, when it could have been a thriller. As the official story, it passes.
Predictable Results in Unpredictable Times
By Stephen R. Covey and Bob Whitman with Breck England
FranklinCovey Publishing | Pages: 110 | Price: $14.99, or Rs 675
Of the four hazards of unpredictable times, the authors consider the crisis of trust the most important. The section on trust is the best. Trust us.
On the other, you have a whole lot of How To books on advertising - very American buy-nowor-repent-for-life sounding titles. About Face falls in the second category. Take an important subject that can be treated with depth and nuance and treat it instead as a tutorial delivered to mentally challenged arthropods.
Create a new buzzword of sorts, position yourself as an expert in something that sounds new and exciting and then say what is utterly familiar and comforting (Be on-emotion, not just onmessage, create engaging sensory experiences, beware of creating cognitive dissonance, do not lead with price and so on).
Cram the book with a lot of pseudo-scientific diagrams and factoids and, before you know it, you are a speaker on the international circuit, inflicting seminars on hapless seekers of the magic mantra. It is not as if the essential point that the book seeks to make is not relevant.
The overwhelming emphasis on messaging in advertising is, indeed, misplaced and consumers do respond to advertising through the primary filter of emotion, as the book argues. But the device of arriving at conclusions about relative effectiveness of different kinds of advertising by relying on eye tracking data is to use a very primitive instrument to measure something very fine and intangible. It is akin to a chef using data on salivation to create magical recipes!
In some ways, because marketing is taught at business schools, which have a strong bias towards quantitative methods of explaining the world, we tend to overplay the role of rationality in decision-making. One could argue that if we were truly rational, we would end up buying a fraction of things we do.
Both emotion and rationality operate within a larger construct of constructed meaning. When we pay Rs 20 lakh for a car that provides no greater functional utility than one that costs Rs 4 lakh, there is a rational part of us that justifies this price because of the additional features and an emotional part that is seduced by what the car says about us.
What is interesting is the construction of the meaning system within which both rationality and emotion operate - the idea of personal mobility in our society, the transformation of a machine into a sign of masculinity and the communication of meaning through each element of the car.
Dan Hill takes a great subject and reduces it to generic mush. If the only thing you read about About Face is this review, you would have got off lightly.
- The author takes an important subject and treats it as a tutorial delivered to mentally challenged arthropods
BOOKMARKS
By Philip Chacko, Christabelle Noronha and Sujata Agrawal
Westland Ltd | Pages: 149 | Price: Rs 295
A chronicle, when it could have been a thriller. As the official story, it passes.
By Stephen R. Covey and Bob Whitman with Breck England
FranklinCovey Publishing | Pages: 110 | Price: $14.99, or Rs 675
Of the four hazards of unpredictable times, the authors consider the crisis of trust the most important. The section on trust is the best. Trust us.
