Want to learn how to increase sales by marketing your product to the people who are most likely to buy it? You could take a semester class in college—like I did. Or you could just read this book. And the only final exam is how well its Brand Hacks work for your business.

Brand Hacks is filled with college-level concepts written in easy-to-understand language. It has a millennial feel of focusing on how your product fulfills its customers’ emotional, not just functional, needs. 4 stars!

Thanks to Powerhouse Books and NetGalley for a copy in exchange for my honest review.

Interesting and knowledgeable experiences about brand marketing. This book has plenty of case studies to support emotional brand away for consumers. Be ready to take notes because the key leanings points can be straight away applied in real business.

Bog-standard business book with random anecdotes and a real survivor bias, focusing on tactics that were successful for particular businesses without discussing whether they are often successful (though in fairness the book occasionally mentions that the specific tactics discussed won’t work for everyone, e.g. you have to be authentic, but “authenticity is not for everyone,” which is not very helpful). Does suggest that the power of social media is overblown since marketers are of the class most likely to be on social media. Advice includes having your brand “help make people feel less lonely” by giving it a face and enabling customers to “take Instagram-worthy pictures in your store.” Or you could “[b]uy an old brand and revive its heritage,” though “nostalgia is not for every brand. In some cases, nostalgia can marginalize your brand by emphasizing that it is out of touch and is no longer relevant to consumers.” Long-form content is apparently 90 seconds long (“ ‘Really good content entices people to watch through the end,’ says Abraham, quoting the example of a 90-second video that performed better than a 30-second video.”). Denigrates giving product specifics as “pointless,” because marketing is all about emotion—Always pads shouldn’t compete on absorption but rather build its brand around “confidence.” This may indeed be a useful tool, but it’s depressing. Best quote, most representative of how helpful this book would actually be: “Marketing columnist and former marketing professor Mark Ritson sums it all up: ‘Do customers want purpose-filled brands? Sometimes. In some categories. Depending on how it is done. A lot of time they don’t give a fuck. And usually most segments will not pay more.’”