Marketing book review

Book review of

Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy
By: Dev Patnaik

In brief, the book says empathy and then care for fellow business-related human beings (customers and staff), will create a better company. In the first 2/3 of the book, there are highly-condensed marketing analysis of several Fortune 500 revivals because the company empathesized and cared about potential customers. In the second 1/3, the author describes how applying empathy and care as the Golden Rule (do unto others…) is useful also in the organization.

There isn’t anything wrong with these themes, but frankly, one’s better off reading either ethics commentaries of the Bible for the Golden Rule or reading serious business marketing and organization books. Both will teach far more than this book’s advocacy of care and empathy.

The type of customers the author is accustomed is consulting for are major very large corporations—somewhere it’s easier to be out-of-touch with buyers. So, if you’re one of these lost Fortune 500 companies and are yourself lost, this book to teach again Marketing 101 might help.

Apparently, the author uses the material here for students at Stanford, (which the author continually reminds the reader of), and the book belongs as simply a treatise toward a very young audience—. Good for students.

Even though this is a small book, I really don't like to read marketing books that are too wordy. The "case studies" used here are brief but still can be further condensed by 1/3 to 1/2, and the business principles the author is teach are obvious, said better in thousands of other books. Good inspiration book, bad analysis book.