All Marketers Tell Stories & 1984 - Book Reviews

I generally don't like such self-assured books that are meant to provide you with one silver bullet for all problems in your work domain. So it is no surprise that I didn't like All Marketers Are Liars Tell Stories by Seth Godin too much. This one had come highly recommended, so picked it up for reading despite my apprehensions about this genre of books. Let me assure you that I am actually aligned with the core concept, the author talks about in this book and fully agree with his theory - That a brand story has to be good and authentic and also in line with the world view of the target group. Then only your brand story will spread and create a want for your products. 

At the same time, I felt that this subject didn't require a book, but a blog-post which can be read in 10 minutes would have been enough. I found it highly repetitive. The case studies / brand stories - both successes and failures - that author has used in this book as an evidence to prove / disprove his hypothesis, at times felt force-fitted. Some of these cases have been used by other Management Gurus in their books, to explain their respective frameworks. As they say, hindsight is a perfect science. 

As a practicing marketer though, it made me think about certain issues that plague the industries where products/services have become commodities, and differentiation is the key to success. That helped me crystallize my thoughts on a particular plan I was working on. All was not lost!

---

1984 by George Orwell is as sharp and incisive as a political commentary today, as it would have been, when it was first published in 1949. So much has been written about this book, that I am not even sure what new I can say about it. As the book is also about freedom to express one's views, I think I will go ahead and write my views on this book anyway. 

It is a dystopian novel, written in 1948, set in the future year of 1984. It deals with the issues of political overreach and propaganda. It is a political satire on totalitarian governments and the havoc they wreck in an individual's life through their surveillance. The chapters in the novel that talk about the power structures and purpose of power itself, are so well written that they hit the readers hard. 

As a reader, I constantly hoped (like the lead protagonist Smith) for the revolutionaries and brotherhood to exist. I wanted an underground revolution to happen by the end of the book. But by the end, the thought of revolution itself is killed. It was gut wrenching. For me the book turned out to be a manual on "How to kill Human Spirit?". I kept thinking about the book days after I had finished reading it. It is fascinating, how so many things described in the book, find parallel in today's world - politics and more so in the corporate world. Not only present day governments, but how big corporate companies are constantly monitoring us. How politicians, coin words and phrases, which make us think in one direction, rather than let us evaluate! There is an appendix at the end of the novel that explains a language (NewSpeak) used by the government described in this book. It is fascinating to understand, how language or lack of it can be used as a tool of oppression.

---

You now know which book to pick among the two reviewed in this post!