Odds Are It’s Marketing
A Practical Guide to Spotting Trends, Building Strategy, and Driving Growth
Odds Are It’s Marketing is a convincing marketing guide about building connections through storytelling and making ethics and integrity nonnegotiable in one’s marketing practices.
Shanise Ling’s insightful business book Odds Are It’s Marketing suggests means of successfully navigating the challenges of the contemporary digital world.
The book’s brief chapters focus on successful marketing via keen observations, distilling information well, differentiating among these pieces of information, and scaling one’s responses. There’s recurrent focus on themes including maintaining human connections, building trust, and prioritizing ethics and integrity in each marketing campaign. At the end of each chapter, key points are summarized and deepened and practical exercises are introduced as opportunities for further thought as applies to everyday situations..
The prose is lean and impactful, reflecting in-depth analysis that rises from personal experience. Firsthand accounts of Ling overcoming setbacks and stereotypical insults and treatment contribute to the book’s overarching tone of general empowerment. This encouraging, realistic approach proves most compelling when it comes to the pivotal subject of traditional versus digital marketing.
After addressing resistance to the latter with astute insights, the benefits of new tools including artificial intelligence are articulated in convincing ways. Elsewhere, the book also addresses the importance of developing cross-cultural sensitivities, introducing savvy advice about testing reactions in different markets to heighten one’s awareness and better employ respectful best practices. Points about the speed of changing marketing techniques and the importance of staying ahead of the curve reverberate as the book progresses.
The central themes of building connections through storytelling and making ethics and integrity nonnegotiable in marketing are convincing. Reminders arise throughout the book to accentuate the most strategic points, as where the book focuses on the topic of helping customers feel seen and understood versus just selling products and services. Indeed, its emphasis on gathering and implementing conclusions from data findings without taking advantage of customers’ vulnerabilities echoes and fortifies its central message about fair play.
The book’s use of graphics is sparing and often cosmetic. A single table is present to highlight the resonant factors in various industries; elsewhere, a figure illustrates shared beliefs at the intersection of brands and customers. Some simple boxes are used to group key takeaways and the book’s practical exercises as well. Some of the book’s titular promises are not addressed in full until near the end of the book, whose last, upbeat line prompts hesitation, given the challenging scenarios explored earlier. In the end, its in-depth descriptions of practical marketing tools, and its extensive glossary, prove useful, though.
Odds Are It’s Marketing is an illuminating marketing guide about navigating contemporary challenges with skill, respect, purpose, and integrity.
Reviewed by
Andrea Hammer
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
