Your Attention Please: How to Appeal to Today's Distracted, Disinterested, Disengaged, Disenchanted, and Busy Consumer
Maybe you're in sales...or marketing...or communications? Maybe you're a writer. Maybe you're even a CEO. Whatever your title, you're one of the hundreds of thousands of professionals who communicate for a living-and you're struggling to get your message heard in a noisy and crowded marketplace.\ Yes, you know what you want to say and who you want to reach. No, you don't have writer's block and you certainly know how to construct a sentence. So what's the problem?\ The audience you're writing...
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Maybe you're in sales...or marketing...or communications? Maybe you're a writer. Maybe you're even a CEO. Whatever your title, you're one of the hundreds of thousands of professionals who communicate for a living-and you're struggling to get your message heard in a noisy and crowded marketplace. Yes, you know what you want to say and who you want to reach. No, you don't have writer's block and you certainly know how to construct a sentence. So what's the problem? The audience you're writing for is going, going, gone... Today's consumer doesn't want to read anymore-they're already overwhelmed by overflowing e-mail, millions of Web pages, and 24/7 news proliferation. Your Attention, Please. is the new strategy guide for communicating to the reluctant consumer. It shows you who the new audience is, how to reach them, and how you must communicate differently-or risk losing mindshare and marketshare. Author Biography: Paul B. Brown writes the "Off-The-Shelf" column for The New York Times Sunday business section. A former writer and editor for Business Week, Financial World, Forbes, and Inc., Mr. Brown is the coauthor of numerous bestsellers including Customers for Life, written with Carl Sewell, which has been translated into sixteen languages and has sold more than 1 million copies worldwide to date. Paul Brown resides in Boston, MA. Author Biography: Alison Davis is the cofounder and CEO of Davis & Company, a leader in employee communication consulting. Her clients include Aetna, Dow Corning, Georgia-Pacific, Honeywell, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Wells Fargo, and Wyeth. Alison Davis resides in Glen Rock, NJ. Publishers Weekly Keep it "Short. Simple. Sweet," Brown (Customers for Life) and Davis, an employee communication consultant, advise business professionals in this cheery but disheartening primer on reaching an American public suffering from "brain overload" and "attention deficit trait." The authors' recommendation: treat every potential reader or viewer like a restless teenager. There's plenty of commonsense advice-keep information easy to digest, break up communications into bite-size bits, directly address consumers' desires and understand your audience. But it's hard not to recoil at the implication that all of today's consumers are scatterbrained or at the authors' impossible suggestion to "love your audience members unreservedly." And no, business professionals can't fake it: their "love has to be real-not manufactured or manipulative-and unconditional." While keeping prose at the recommended seventh-grade level, business people must communicate in an "authentic voice... it should be the real you." Laid out in bullets, sidebars and extra-wide margins, this basic volume is for professionals with as little patience with prose as their target audience. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
\ Publishers WeeklyKeep it "Short. Simple. Sweet," Brown (Customers for Life) and Davis, an employee communication consultant, advise business professionals in this cheery but disheartening primer on reaching an American public suffering from "brain overload" and "attention deficit trait." The authors' recommendation: treat every potential reader or viewer like a restless teenager. There's plenty of commonsense advice-keep information easy to digest, break up communications into bite-size bits, directly address consumers' desires and understand your audience. But it's hard not to recoil at the implication that all of today's consumers are scatterbrained or at the authors' impossible suggestion to "love your audience members unreservedly." And no, business professionals can't fake it: their "love has to be real-not manufactured or manipulative-and unconditional." While keeping prose at the recommended seventh-grade level, business people must communicate in an "authentic voice... it should be the real you." Laid out in bullets, sidebars and extra-wide margins, this basic volume is for professionals with as little patience with prose as their target audience. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.\ \ \ \ \ Library JournalBrown (former editor, BusinessWeek; coauthor, Customers for Life) and communications consultant Davis argue that the world is overloaded with information and that anyone who wants to get through to people needs to develop a clear and concise story. In addition, they spell out ways to make each story more compelling. Their advice covers graphic design and navigation, how to pitch a movie, and the varieties of storytelling to use. The book does a fine job of practicing what it preaches, with lots of bulleted lists, callouts, and summaries. Numerous business communication books are already available including Stephen Denning's The Leader's Guide to Storytelling, Laurence Vincent's Legendary Brands, and Brian Fugere and others' Why Business People Speak Like Idiots in part because businesses can get caught up in the details of their product or service and lose sight of what their audience needs to know. This book is as good as any other on the subject but is particularly concise because it does not present very many formal case studies. Everything is in sound bites. A good primer for general circulation libraries and business schools and a good reminder for practicing professionals. Stephen Turner, Turner & Assocs., San Francisco Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.\ \
