Posts Tagged ‘book review’

The picture above depicts how vehicular traffic is regulated on the road heading into China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region: plastic “dummy” cops standing sentinel adorning the soft-shoulder, meant to resemble the genuine article to deter traffic violators, wanton drunken driving, and reckless acts behind the wheel across the wide, flat expanses of the barren steppes of the wind-battered Mongolian plain.

Well, yesterday afternoon I finished off native-Missourian Peter Hessler’s third installment in his “angels abroad” China series, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, and I’m giving the book a very tall two thumbs up. This is 424pp of lean and mean non-fiction prosaic gold which you’re going to regret not reading. Did I mention you should go out and snag a copy today?

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I’m happy I listen to people when they strongly suggest titles to read. In the case of Lawrence L. Allen’s Chocolate Fortunes: The Battle for the Hearts, Minds, and Wallets of China’s Consumers, this was a particularly sweet suggestion and many thanks to Dan Harris of Harris & Moure Law, the perennial award-winning blogmeister and commentator at China Law Blog, or as we Generation Xers like to call it, CLB.

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I’m almost done reading Scott Kirsner’s Fans, Friends & Followers: Building An Audience and A Creative Career in the Digital Age based on a majorly strong thumbs-up from Jon Reiss, author of Think Outside the Box Office. Both books complement each other well, even despite their mild overlap, and I’ve been particularly enjoying how Scott’s book is structured along Po Bronson lines, essentially a series of comprehensive vignettes showing a representative sampling of people who embody the DIY/social media/take no prisoners message Kirsner is conveying to his loyal audience.

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…well, you can go ahead and fill in the blanks.

But that would seem to be the prognosis of an excellent new book called The Cleanest Race, penned by B.R. Myers, a title I’d written about extensively yesterday which garnered a considerable amount of feedback from my readers (thanks to all who emailed in, especially on Facebook)

Myers’ premise in a nutshell is thus: we here in cushy West are astonishingly  ignorant of the North Korean menace, and our present political engagements and strategies vis-a-vis the hermit kingdom — whereby the US and its allies demand unfettered access to the DPRK’s nuclear facilities and the immediate, unconditional dismantling of its overall WMD program — runs counter to the ruling philosophy of North Korea’s “Dear Leader,” Mr. Kim Jong Il (ain’t he cute? Some South Koreans certainly think so).

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It’s hard to articulate what overcame me for the better part of yesterday, but I just couldn’t put down LA Times Beijing bureau chief Barbara Demick’s latest North Korea (DPRK) tell-all, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.

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I just completed Max Lenderman’s Brand New World: How Paupers, Pirates and Oligarchs are Reshaping Business, which somehow strikingly reminded me of Vijay Mahajan’s Africa Rising: How 900 Million Consumers Offer More Than You Think, a title I’d polished off earlier during 2009.

The parallelisms between these two longitudinal studies especially dawned on me during Lenderman’s final chapters where he delves fulsomely into the novel ways multinational (MNC) marketers have begun appealing to rural poor market segments. He describes how these strategies can then be applied in marketing to more affluent sections of the consumer public, suggesting ways to enhance the overall purchasing experience for tired Western customers and for companies to boost their brand loyalty.

Lenderman kicks his book off with a bit of a scholarly build-up, and you’ve got to first run this challenging gauntlet in order to grasp the crux of his overall argument. But the basic angle is that brands are losing mega market share to their aspiring competitors who seem to be honing the art of “experience marketing,” one of Lenderman’s pet pasions which he previous penned an entire book about.

“Experience marketing” is the act of creating sales experiences which are truly “win-win,” where marketers can be lauded for doing something good for society and the collective, not merely lambasted for self-interestedly flogging product. It’s an area where marketers can demonstrate their corporate social responsibility by taking active interests in the difficulties their customers might be facing. A good examples is the 2008 pilot project initiated by carmaker Hyundai to extend full money-back guarantees to their owners who were unable to meet their monthly payments on cars purchased under financing plans. Rather than being deluged by a raft of returns and a gargantuan loss of market share, Lenderman writes how the Koren automaker’s gesture landed the company an immediate 2009  Q1 2009 15% upsurge in sales for the brand, far exceeding the manufacturer’s gloomy conservative expectations.

Rural India, to wit, has become the battleground for many of these unusual “experiential” campaigns.

For instance, there exists the rural Indian fascination with all things Bollywood. Indian product marketers have thusly taken to the road in what are called “brand vans,” complete with hired actors who re-enact famous Bollywood scenes or newly scripted encouters which are staged in front of expectant village throngs, actively making use of the product being marketed by demonstrating how the product comes come to the aid of the “hero” or “heroine” during the skit. Since rural Indians prefer to be shown how a product works, standard product appeals to its features or benefits are too abstract for this segment.

While this might seem gimmicky or inauthentic to a Western audience,  in India this unconventional marketing technique has netted nothing short of windfalls for Indian consumer product companies, with examples listed in the book.

Lenderman understands that this marketing technique need not be taken verbatim from the Subcontinent’s context applied directly to the West, but he hughlights the kernel of consumerist wisdom in what’s going on down in India. If marketing interactions in the West can be tailored more personally and inclusively, disaffected consumers in developed economies might feel less put-upon. This new way of thinking about Western marketing, he explains, might be just the needed boost of genuineness to these otherwise contrived approaches. If marketers can somehow plant the seed of an idea that “this is how this helps us, but, moreover, this is how this helps you” it could convincingly shatter today’s marketing and branding ennui. Shipwrecked as we are during these current economic crisis conditions, there is little doubt that brand-induced rigor mortis has firmly set in.

The author offers up a few prescriptions for how marketers can diversify their current approaches to break through the logjam:

• marketing departments (along with their ad agency cohorts) need to brainstorm ways of selling stuff more personally to their target customers. Anything smacking of falsehood or inauthenticity will be immediately dismissed by a savvy 21st-century marketplace.
• brands who do embrace the sales-marketing “win-win” will benefit in multiples, given the viral nature of social networks.
• financial constraints which contrain the purchasing habits of poor market segments (egs. in India, across Africa, and in other parts of the developing world) from buying their way into more affluent lifestyles represent an opportunity, rather than a threat, to product manufactuters. Resource limitations can sometimes represent an advantage, as it forces brand leaders to do much more with significantly less.
• marketers must appeal to the 2B-plus poor, underdeveloped, members of the planet, who shall quickly constitute the lion’s share of their future sales. With the latter’s rising affluence and aspirational lifestyles, class upgrades will be demanded, and product floggers who understand this will be there when the bell tolls. In observing the poor, their buying habits, and by understanding their unqiue situation, it will inspire creative new branding approaches.
• marketers who opt to ignore this message will likely not survive the coming decade’s market reshuffling.

Both of these books are quick, though deep, reads, and I highly recommend them.

If your marketing strategy is currently dry and lifeless, you might want to generate some radical new thinking with these two provocative titles.

Ever since I picked up Stella Dong’s Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, I’ve become increasingly curious about that city straddling the Huangpu River, and about its existence during what is more commonly referred to as the Interwar Period — between the two World Wars. I’ve been on a ceaseless lookout for evidence of foreign (“colonial”) people who once lived in the city, and their reflections of what it was like to dwell in pre-PRC China, something which has been regrettably obscured by the natural passage of time and the deliberate propaganda efforts on the part of the current Chinese authority to erase the blight of the humiliating recent past.

When I was in Shanghai last during the previous month, Derek Sandhaus of Earnshaw Books was kind enough to pass me a copy of Liliane Willens‘ Stateless in Shanghai, Willens first-hand coming-of-age story about her life beginning in the late 1920s as a young girl of Russian-Jewish parentage in the ethnically-divided city.

I’m not quite done with the read, but — as expected — I’m enjoying all the colourful historical tidbits about the various skirmishes that took place in the city when the Empire of Japan invaded China in December 1937, and how the battle was ongoing around the International Settlement and the French Concession, while the privileged existence of the expat set carried on without as much as a hiccup; well, that’s not necessarily true. People were dying all around as stray bombs would somehow land in the middle of busy pedestrian areas chock-a-block with rickshaw drivers and businesspeople, but the parties, the dances, and festivals, and — moreover — the silver spoon lifestyle was rarely interrupted for long during this phase of the Japanese invasion.

As for my reading styles, I have different moods when reading historical tomes. How I feel very much depends on what I know about a given subject. For instance, if I’m in the early days of getting to know a historical period — in particular, I’ve noticed this to be so for Asia — then I avoid works which are too detailed to seek out more “bold brush stroke canvas” accounts of the period in question. As I become more familiarized with what went down, I begin digging deeper. I want to read about anecdotes, read the diaries and the possible transcripts of conversations which transpired from the time, as I slowly attempt to weed out the wheat from the chaff and untangle the knotted obscurity of the time, separating the bluster and maniupulation and the purely self-serving attempts to hoodwink those who follow from the naked truth.

Willens’ book is my attempt to take my familiarity about Shanghai to what I’ll refer to as “Level 3″ — the stage which follows my actual visiting of a place, so that I can now imagine where everything is situated — a kind of internal “Google Maps,” if you will, because now I’ve seen much of it myself and can visualize the geography and topography as I flip my way through the pages.

In the leadup to WWII, Willens describes a city wound tighter than a coiled spring, living under a sort of denial. Rather than acknowledge the obvious clear danger which the Japanese gunboat and naval presence in the Huangpu River presented to the denizens of the Shanghai’s extraterritorial concessions — not to mention to the Chinese then living under Nationalist (Guomindang/Kuomintang/KMT) rule in the Chinese-administered (now Japanese-occupied) areas — the foreign (some stateless) residents of Shanghai were plainly content to believe the murmurings of their colonial leadersship who didn’t have the vision to accept what was truly happening. Interesting observations all.

One can readily imagine what Willens might have captured through the lens of a digital camera — much like the young diciples of Zana Briski’s Kids With Cameras did — had the technology been already invented at the time.

A funny little Willens remark would suffice as well: “I never thought twice about learning languages as a young girl. At home we spoke a mixture of Russian, Pidgin English, French, and English. At my French school, we spoke French, while on the street I spoke Pidgin English again and English. For a long time as a girl, I always believed that each and every adult seemed to possess their own language so I never thought twice about chatting with each adult in their own tongue.” Cool! This reinforced my convictions that children must be inculcated in as many languages as possible when their unsullied minds are willing receptacles for novelty…

I’ll return with more feedback once I’m done with my coverage, but a better advertisement for the Earnshaw Books imprint I cannot possibly imagine…