Andrew

Read Joseph Campbell Instead

Revisado: 08-14-12

What disappointed you about Winning the Story Wars?

This book posits that there is a war in marketing--the war between inadequacy marketing and empowerment marketing. Not every company is, to quote South Park, trying to have a rock concert to change the world. And ultimately, Sachs fails to grasp that delivering the promise of empowerment to consumers is not necessarily the other side of the coin from inadequacy marketing--both seek to exploit consumers' insecurities and desires and products/services/goods/ideas, no matter how they are marketed, rarely deliver the transformative power the producer ascribes to them. So to say one is prima facie better than the other is to create a false dichotomy and another example of marketing sizzle with no steak--Sachs' greatest sin with this book. Apart from this false dichotomy, Sachs' other great sin is to attempt to map Joseph Campbell's hero's journey onto creating brand stories. A good idea, but not a new one, and any moderately intelligent person should be able to learn more from (the far superior) source material and apply it to marketing than they will from listening to Sachs go on ad infinitum mapping his take on Campbell onto dozens of modern brand stories. If you purchase this book, you may end up viewing it the way I did--as a punishment you will have to sit through to justify the expense of the purchase rather than as an enlightening pleasure.

What was most disappointing about Jonah Sachs’s story?

The most disappointing aspect of this book was that you could listen to the first chapter and be done with it. These are fairly simple ideas that I would guess began as a PowerPoint/Keynote deck to be presented at marketing/social media/tech conferences that someone encouraged Sachs to develop into a book-length narrative. Big mistake. These ideas would best be conveyed in 40 slides or less in under an hour. Sachs also spends too much time gloating and patting himself/his firm on the back over and over throughout the book for embodying the new paradigm of empowerment marketing. He/they have had some big successes, but is there really anything new here? (pretty sure Nike was doing this more than a decade before your firm mapped the idea onto social causes, bro). Save your money, go to the library and get the Bill Moyers/Joseph Campbell interviews instead. You'll learn more, have a more pleasant listening experience, and won't choke in a smug cloud.

What three words best describe Jonah Sachs’s performance?

smug self-aggrandizing breathless

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

lame

Any additional comments?

Weak, not recommended

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