Customer Reviews

Rubies in the Orchard: How to Uncover the Hidden Gems in Your Business

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(25)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I decided to request, "Rubies in the Orchard" as one of my Amazon Vine offerings last month as I have recently started my own business venture and feel that I have something really great to offer. Other than knowing that the author was successful in marketing POM Wonderful juice, I had no idea what 'gems' she also found along the way.

It started out as a normal, easy to read business autobiography. I literally had NO idea who this woman was - although I had HEARD her name before but couldn't reference her name or face. It was when she mentions her group of friends being Rita Wilson, Ariana Huffington and Laurie David (producer of Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth') did I start to think that this woman, being in this sort of 'circle', that perhaps I should pay closer attention to her book.

It turns out that Lynda Resnick is an ABSOLUTE marketing GENIUS. I mean, who at 19-23 years old has their own STAFFED marketing company?!?! Although hard working, extremely driven and dedicated, she seems to have "it"...that vision - that golden touch if you will. She and her husband have turned around declining businesses such as The Franklin Mint, Fiji Water and Teleflora.

What I appreciated about the book was to read the history if you will behind POM Wonderful pomegranate juice, Fiji Water...these things that my family have been drinking and enjoying over the past few years. It was interesting to read what it took and how these items got to where they are to my kitchen table.

All in all, she has COMMON SENSE and doesn't cave into pressure of the suits just because she is not. I feel that if you have a great product, you have a market for it, then if you manufacturer it with quality ingredients, deliver on your word, stay the course, keep your eyes open for the need to change if need be, then you are ahead of a lot of moderately and even successful businesses out there and you have a shot.

Being that she did not have an opportunity to attend a formal college to receive a formal college degree, I appreciated her tenacity and drive to dedicate herself and her company to making a product they believed in succeed.

What I DID NOT appreciate was the droning on about me, me, I, I, I in her book. I'm SORRY but I understand she's a marketing genius. I understand that she worked hard. I understand that she's incredibly successful. And YES, I would LOVE for the products that I sell and believe in to be just as successful but 3/4 of my way through the book, I just really got tired of me, me, me, I, I, I. She DOES acknoweldge some of the people that were responsible for pivotal points in her career or the the person responsible for a specific aspect of her company's accomplishments (like the person who designed the shape of the POM juice bottles for instance) but I just got tired to reading the words, "ME" and "I" just way too much. I would have liked to read more "WE" along the way instead of it being sprinkled out sparingly through the book. After a while, the words "ME" and "I" eventually starting glaring out at me like they were typed in bold when they were not. SURELY it takes more than 1 or 2 people to run successful businesses...I'm thinking some of those hard working individuals felt overlooked and neglected by not being acknowledged in her book.

I am reviewing an uncorrected proof so it's my hope that the editors revise some of these "MEs" and "Is" along the way so every time it pops up, it's not grinding on someone else's nerves and they get to enjoy the book a bit more than I did.

Overall, what I was hoping to find wasn't here but I found something else...I was hoping to find some suggestions - inspirational or practical, 'functional' advise on how to start, manage and grow your business but instead what I read was a personal business autobiography; which in the end was fine because if she did it, then so can I and so can you. :-)

However, if you are looking for a practical manual or reference in how to start, manage, grow and market your business, then this is not it. If you want to read the story about a successful business woman and marketing genius and can find entertainment or inspiration by someone who speaks a tad bit too much about themselves, then this book may be right up your alley.

UPDATE 5/09

Someone responded to my review and mentioned that she did in fact give credit in her list of acknowledgments...here is my response:

As I had mentioned, I received a copy of an 'uncorrected proof'...the version that I received did not have any acknowledgements listed. Even still, instead of an afterthought added to the end, I would have rather enjoyed reading others mentioned in the stories and scenarios that she describes in the book. It would NOT have not been THAT hard to do...to reference others as she told her stories.

I just recall midway through the book, I started to cringe when I'd read about another accomplishment with her name all over the positive outcome...instead of being lost in the book for a moment, I remember mentally being pulled from the book cringing at the thought and wondering what those people who were overlooked felt as they were reading about a specific incident or scenario. Instead of being impressed with her accomplishment, I felt bad for the person who she neglected to mention and wondered what THEIR side of the story was. With that said, I'm glad that you felt that she was generous with giving credit to those who helped her along her path...I didn't get that feeling at all when I read the book.

Seemingly much of Rubies in the Orchard is a self-pat on the back to the author, successful though she may be from a business perspective. The give away is in the preface: Resnick discusses a "scrumptious" lunch with name-dropping friends as being the kick-off point for her writing this book "with Francis Wilkinson," as the cover notes.

As for content, this book does contain some solid marketing points. However, the gems offered did not need to take so many self-glorification pages to highlight. In keeping with her environmental diatribe, many trees could have been spared in the process.

Though a book about marketing, Resnick covers environmental issues and policy at length in one chapter - from a one-sided perspective - but she takes environmentalists to task when it comes to FIJI Water, the bottled water company she and her husband own. Suddenly, the environmentalists are wrong about all those plastic bottles being a problem and, by gosh, hauling water out of Fiji is environmentally OK because of all the enviro-measures the company takes and causes they support. This appears at once self-serving and mindful of the buying / selling of indulgences.

However, how does one who is so environmentally conscious, who laments the "consumer culture," find it so noble to produce imitations of the (yes) fake pearls worn by Jackie Kennedy? How is it that such an activity contributes to the world's betterment, but all other businesses contribute to global warming (or climate change)?

In sum, buy the book used. Speed read through the vanity-press writing, which is easy enough given the simplistic level at which the book is written. Slow down to savor the principles. Once done, get another, better book about marketing.

Resnick may be a marketing genius, but in this book she comes across as self-centered, egotistical, and dismissive of most nearly everyone who crosses her path. I'd heard that the whole pomegranate craze was manufactured by someone who acquired pomegranate orchards in a business deal and wasn't quite sure what to do with them, funded research to show the health benefits of the fruit, and basically created demand where none existed before. The book shares that story, but the story is buried in page after page after page of the author's incessant boasting, accented by frequent snarky put-downs of everyone she had to outsmart to achieve her great successes. The book is much more about Ms. Resnick than it is about marketing.

Early on, Resnick talks about how, at age four, she took command of the stage and became a TV star -- people "liked her" and she liked the feeling of power. And so the story begins.

In the preface alone, we learn how amazing Resnick is -- she is oh so very busy ("with so many business responsibilities to attend to"), has "stunningly accomplished" friends, has "accomplished many goals" in her life," knows "marketing and branding" better than anyone else and has developed a "formula for success" that she's willing to share with us -- (not that it will teach us anything -- because as Resnick says later in the book -- she has never taken a marketing course and you certainly can't learn how to be a good marketer from a textbook.)

In the first paragraph of chapter one, we learn that Resnick was very wealthy but bored -- and that prompted her to figure out how to squeeze a fortune out of her family pomegranate farm. In typical I'm better-than-you fashion, Resnick talks about sitting at a table with "a collection of cheerless marketing consultants and somber executives" listening to their "marketing gospel and commandments" -- she tuned out while listening to them "drone on". She, of course, knows best -- and claims that she doesn't want to insult them, but "given their supreme confidence," she couldn't have insulted them even if she had wanted to.

Resnick is full of unexplained conclusions -- such as: "there are many points in business when you need to compromise" but "there are also a few areas that are so critically important that compromise is fatal." Translation: My way or the high way. Another conclusory statement -- its become fashionable in recent years to "think outside the box, but it's just about always wrong. The answers are not outside the box -- they're inside." Huh?? These unsupported, pithy conclusions are coupled with unabashed boasting (once she stirred up demand for her product, it exceeded supply by 300%, which she assures us, without explanation, is not good news -- then why is it important? why bother to share that statistic?)

She gives very little credit to others in her life. She turned Teleflora into a successful business, apparently single-handedly,as marketing flowers in keepsake containes was her idea -- and apparently hers alone. "I" thought of the keepsake containers, "My concept . . ." Seems like every success is the result of her single-handedly overcoming a sea of objectors. She dislikes, distrusts, and berates most everyone she encounters in the business world. The first president of Teleflora was on the road to retirement, interested only in his golf game. A partner in an advertising game had no work ethic and took two hour lunch breaks -- whilw she was working seven days a week and raising two kids. When she does give some tidbit of credit to others, she invariably manages to weave a dig or two into the praise. The field force she had to win over to make Teleflora successful -- those are the "willfull bunch of hard-drinking guys who would have resented every order," her "insolent staff." Another key staff member was talented, though with his wife "not exactly the dream team of corporate etiquette", not to mention he had a "touch of larceny" and looked for "every conceivable way to cut corners." This is someone she's speaking favorably about!!

She presents herself as a hard working (yep, seven days a week) self-made wonderwoman, who had to fend for herself because her movie-distributor daddy with two Rolls Royces in the driveway wouldn't pay for art school -- oh, did I mention that she was accepted to the best art school in LA? She did. She mentions as well that she did everything in "typical A-student fashion, . . . with no detail overlooked."

I find the author's narcissism exhausting. OK, Lynda -- You're smart. You're smarter than everyone else in the business world. You're talented. You were a star at four. An ace high school student. Ran your own business. What does that have to do with finding rubies in the orchard? When Resnick does talk about marketing, the stories are really about her ability to create demand where none existed before -- about how she can sell ice to Eskimos. Honestly, it makes me wonder just how much of the pomegranate hype is real and how much is the marketing genius of Lynda Resnick.

Overall, there is some marketing insight in this book, but it's more psychology than business -- it's a behind-the-scenes look at the mind of a narcissist who will do whatever it takes to be "successful" in business and cling to that sense of power she felt on the stage as a four year old.

This book reminds me of a book I once read whilst researching the oyster business. The oyster book's title and synopsis led one to believe that it was all about the oyster business in the Pacific NW. Alas, it was actually a self-published little nostrum of a series of reminiscences of one of the fellows who helped to commercialize the modern PNW oyster business. In the end it was neither very elucidating nor entertaining and I put it down feeling deep disappointment.

Rubies in the Orchard at least has the attribute of being easily readable if not downright entertaining. Ms. Resnick's ghost writer is obviously a professional and although some of her plays on words are wince inducing (fruitless search for unavailable fruit juice, for instance) she enables Ms. Resnick to relate her story in, as I said, an easily readable manner, and one puts down the book fully convinced that she is an unusually talented and accomplished marketer, however self-involved. What is more, she is able to make some helpful and excellent common sense points about the task of building and developing a brand.

I did, however, have a problem with her proselytizing about the products of her and her husband's companies because they actually seem to go directly against her own professed rules of business.

For instance, Ms. Resnick repeatedly makes a point about the necessity of not misleading one's customers (domino's pizza, countrytime lemonade) at the same time neglecting to mention that one of her huge successes, The Franklin Mint, relied upon at least the inference of an collectible-investment angle to sell many of its products. It got to the point where sellers of collectibles would (and still) sneeringly refer to Franklin Mint products when speaking of monies not well spent on collectible-investments. I do not know if Ms. Resnick was involved with the company when the limited edition investment era of the Franklin Mint was in full swing but I believe that she had a duty to at least mention this aspect of the company's history.

Also, I took offense at her attempts to paint Fiji Water as the ecological wunderkind of a purveyor that not only sells a superior product but somehow makes the earth a better place by placing water into plastic jugs and shipping it tens of thousands of miles across the globe to be marketed to gullible consumers. The fact is that the bottled water business is, on the whole, a huge creator of plastic waste (huge rafts of which threaten the ecology of the Pacific Ocean ironically threatening harm to the very place from which this water is mined). It also burns a sinful amount of hydrocarbon fuel to ship a virtually worthless product, water, from distant Fiji to various points of sale.

The counter argument to this is, of course, that being able to do this at a profit is marketing genius. This book is, after all about marketing and not ethics; although, she was the first to raise the ethics issue.

Finally, Ms. Resnick spends a lot of time extolling the health benefits of her sacred pomegranate juice and explains that her company has spent millions of dollars to prove these benefits through peer-reviewed scientific studies. While this is all well and good, her companies package both their water and at least some of their pom-based drinks in plastic containers which a growing literature, scientific literature, has demonstrated leaches chemicals into the products it contains. This problem has so alarmed some medical professionals that an entire class of plastics used for baby bottles and such is under a proposed ban.

These complaints of mine are not meant to detract from Ms. Resnick's obvious talents so much as to reinforce her message that she has killer marketing skills that at times don't let facts get in the way of a good story, in my opinion.

I have read many management, marketing, and strive-to-achieve books over the years. I have also read many biographies which were engaging and inspirational. It seems that Rubies in the Orchard, by Lynda Resnick, is a self-promotional biography which is mistakenly being promoted as a management book of some type. I really feel this book would do much better if it was honestly promoted as a biography that is intended to help promote Lynda's businesses, rather than being a marketing book aimed to help others improve their businesses.

The key problem here is that Lynda loves self promotion. Almost every other chapter is intended to get people to buy her products. Her pomegranates juice is made from "the tastiest, sweetest pomegranates in the world." It is, in fact, like "a fine Burgundy." Her Marilyn Monroe doll for the Franklin Mint was apparently the most perfect representation of Marilyn Monroe that ever existed. Her over-one-hundred-thousand-dollar purchase of Jacqueline Kennedy's pearls is spectacular because "everyone" knows and loves those pearls. PETA is evil. Bottled water is perfect. Her praise for herself is never-ending. Her disdain for her opponents is thick and excessive.

I don't mean to say that Lynda has not achieved great things. She has. She has taken the much-neglected pomegranate and taken it to new, stellar heights. She took a poorly performing bottled water company and elevated them. She convinced millions of people to buy "collector plates" and "collector dolls" rather than investing in actual savings accounts. She achieved everything she aimed for.

But along the way, she takes pot-shots at anyone who dared to impede her progress. Her father was nasty for not funding her college dreams. She laughs at people who think outside the box or who try multiple lanes of income. She claims only her "inside the box" research and discipline can work. This from a person who grew up with a very wealthy family and with a savings account to fall back on. Even as she says he only does things she feels will succeed, she admits to her failures. Surely that means that people SHOULD try multiple paths to find the one that is right for them?

She says not to sell an awful product, to focus on what is true, simply, and a real need. But in the same book she talks about pushing people to spend multiple hundreds of dollars on a die-cast car. Is that a real need? When those people hit a credit crunch, did they value having a "tin car" on their desk, rather than money earning interest in a portfolio? I have in fact bought "collectors plates" from the Franklin Mint. Twenty years later, they are not "collectors items". They are boxes in a closet that nobody will buy.

Lynda's claims of the average newspaper reader's age being 60 is proven false by a number of studies. Her avid promotion of bottled water despite the mountain of evidence against it definitely gives me reason to pause. There seem to be many "facts" in this book which which five minutes of Google investigation are proven to be quite untrue. She picks on other bottled water competitors as being wrong for trying to create thinner bottles, to save on plastic and weight?

There are definitely some gems in here. Figure out your intrinsic value. Don't sell an awful product. Focus on creating a quality feeling in your customers - that they are "collectors", not "buyers". Make your message concise and meaningful. Go for NPR coverage rather than Super Bowl ads.

That all being said, Lynda's self promotion exceeded even my normally tolerant acceptance of such activities. The fact that Lynda is going around the Amazon reviews and commenting on negative reviews, pushing people to go to her blogs, gives me an even more uncomfortable feeling. This is not a book about learning to market in your own space. This is a book about promoting Lynda and her products. If it was sold as such a book, i wouldn't have minded as much. Since the book is promoted as a marketing guide, I find it very deceptive that her actual message was to drink lots of pomegranate juice while drinking her bottled water and buying her collectible items.

I may not be the best business person. It's taking me a long time just to write a simple "business plan" and I haven't even started on the marketing aspect. I'm a wonderful candidate for an education! I read a lot of books. I write Amazon reviews also. Kinda simple. That's me.

I had no idea who the author was before getting my hands and eyes into this book. Turns out she's crazy-successful. And she will tell you how great she is at business. Some authors like to write in almost a detached sort of way when writing of themselves and their accomplishments (read: Iacocca) in order to illustrate a greater point. This particular author has no qualms about using her distinguished, highly successful, amazing, super-duper and miraculous rise to business/marketing guru-dom and it just strikes me as self-serving instead of designed for to make the audience better at marketing.

Proof in point: She admits that she came up with the idea because Oprah or Huffington or Pelosi (I forgot the props to her clique) gave her the idea to write a book. They were just buddying around one day during one of their extremely upper class brunches, munching on juniper leaves and Fijian water (I'm embellishing a wee bit here) and bragging about what color Prius is coming out next year when she said something like "You know, I should write a book. But I don't know what to write about." Her partners said "What do you know the best?" (Like they didn't know). She had a eureka moment and said "Golly, I'll write about marketing."

She didn't and shouldn't have written this book. I'm just too uptight on motivations. Maybe it's just me, but when someone begins a book by politically charging the material and polarizing a good portion of the public readership, it irks me. I can't get past it and I apologize for being too sensitive. She talks about herself, her famous contacts, and her success WAY too much. It just isn't necessary or helpful. (OK, I get it, you really are succesful and I'm not. Got it.)

What bothers me the most is my gut reaction to the beginning of the book: I had to put it down for all the charged rhetoric. I did glance through some following chapters and every time I reached a major point or break in the action, without fail, there was a polarizing political point.

Sorry for being so long-winded and negative, but if you just can't stand to be hit over the head when trying to learn something, you might react like I did.

There are some good ideas and valid insights in the book. Unfortunately, they are so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of self-aggrandizing rubbish that they are hard to find, and they are hard to take seriously when the reader does find them.

This book centers on the authors creation of several marketing successes, POM, TelaFlora, the Franklin Mint, and Fiji Water, just to name a few. The author in the latter three cases, took an existing product line and re-engineered the marketing campaign for each. In all cases, her marketing plans were very successful.

She tells the readers about her great successes, but does not delve into the specifics of how she accomplished these changes. She states repeatedly that the `thinks inside the box,' examining the internal nature of the product. How? What qualities is she examining? How does she compare the market to the product? How does she identify the niche for the product?

The author recounts several times when she used non-traditional marketing campaigns successfully. She does not explain how she designed these campaigns. Again, the `how's' of the design of the marketing campaigns are left unanswered.

The author explains the `what's' many times. She spends a great deal of time explaining that she knows more about marketing and product than anyone else. OK, fine. She had made that argument quite well in the first twenty pages or so of the book. To continue to drive the point home for the next few hundred pages seems self-important and a waste of the reader's time.

There are some good observations in the book about the nature of internet marketing, about green markets, and about intrinsic worth. These points have been made before, and they will be made again. The author covers them well. Unfortunately, they are too small, too few, and too buried under the author's hubris. Some writers suffer from writer's block. This book suffers from writer's ego.

"Take a hike with me. Follow your dreams." (Page XX)

Lynda Resnick's Rubies in the Orchard: How to Uncover the Hidden Gems in Your Business is one part marketing strategy, one part personal story, and one part how-to formula. Resnick is a woman of direct experience in the rough-and-tumble world of advertising and marketing, and her chops shine through in this nonfiction book. She and her husband have successfully resurrected Fiji Water, Teleflora, and The Franklin Mint, but one of their best successes---POM--blossomed from a group of pomegranate orchards her husband bought years before.

Rubies in the orchard are the intrinsic value of products, and these are the values that must be communicated to customers, says Resnick. Following each marketing anecdote--from her days as a small business owner amidst scandal to her very profitable empire of companies--Resnick offers sage marketing advice that can be used not only in the boardroom and executive offices, but at home too. For example, she says, "You get a lot further in life by showing what you don't know and asking for help than you do pretending you know it all" (Page 24).

Throughout this delightful book, Resnick boxes out the main points she is trying to hit home with readers, and these little reminders keep her examples fresh in mind. Readers will be particularly astonished about how a set of fake pearls worth $34 at the time of purchase ended up being auctioned off for more than $200,000, and how those pearls became integral to Resnick's success at The Franklin Mint.

Marketing and advertising could be viewed as boring by some readers, but Resnick's wit shines through in this success story.

"He had a habit of making the financials look rosier than they actually were. . . . but the poor chap was so accustomed to manufacturing crooked numbers each quarter. . . If he had exhibited a drinking or substance abuse problem, we could have sent him to rehab, but where do you send a recidivist hooked on funny financials?" (Page 76)

While some aspects of Rubies in the Orchard: How to Uncover the Hidden Gems in Your Business may come off as preachy, particularly for conservatives not sold on the reality of global warming, she does make a viable points about why businesses should go green. Readers who are interested in an autobiography or learning more about the marketing world would be pleased with this fast read.

I expected a book that would give me some practical marketing tools. I feel like what I got was one big advertisement for the products the author is directly tied to.

Yes, it was an interesting read...I learned a lot about why Resnick's products are superior, especially the benefits of eating pomegranate products. This just did not deliver in the category of giving me tips that I could practically apply.

I used to work in marketing on the creative side -- thankfully not for clients with products, but for those with services, often of the social good variety (free clinics, schools, etc.). For some reason I had a hankering to pick up a recent marketing title and see what some of the latest buzz is, and this slim volume looked chatty enough to not be a huge investment. Well, it turns out that any investment made reading this book is a bad one, because unless you're operating at a very high level (ie. working for a company with gross sales in the millions) you're not going to learn much of anything useful. For the most part, the author writes about how she and her financier husband retooled existing companies (Franklin Mint, Teleflora) or assets (pomegranate farms) into cash cows through the genius of her marketing savvy.

The problem is that most of the steps she suggests are integral to her success depend on having a lot of capital behind you. For example, plenty of people have know for decades that pomegranates are quite good for you, but it takes someone (like the author and her husband) with a couple million in the bank to fund scientific research to "prove" this and then tinker with crops, experiment with juice formulas, custom design pomegranate squeezing machines, and undertake the costly gamble of launching a product. Another example comes when she insists that you have to keep as much of your operation in-house (for example, marketing, research, etc.). The problem is that, again, it generally requires a certain scale for it to be financially viable to have all that staff on salary. And just to give you a sense of the scale she's operating at, the holding company she and her husband own their companies through has a finance team of 25 MBAs (this, as she points out, allows them to groom potential execs in house). That's all great, but 25 MBAs represents an investment of at least $2.5 million (at least, if they're any good).

Besides not offering any insights that are useful to 99.9% of the world (intrinsic value proposition, wow, never heard of that! thinking inside the box, whoa!), the book suffers from being possibly the most smug, self-aggrandizing piece of writing I have ever come across. The author leaves no doubt as to her own genius and the shortcomings of almost everyone she's encountered along the way. Time after time in this book, she tells us how she is the only one with the vision to see what the drones in suits can't. The real problem there is that she could just show us how these successes came about and let us mentally praise her, but she's intent on patting herself on the back over and over and over... (Note to author: being "precocious" is something you leave for others to describe you as, to call yourself precocious is the height of vanity.) This need to brag extends to her personal life, where she can't help but explain how she was a stressed-out working single mother before it became commonplace. And let's not even get into the name-dropping and her instrumental role in the release of the Pentagon Papers (actually, she was instrumental, it's just not germane to the topic of the book).

The point is that there is a way to write about one's success without being a braggart, but this book utterly fails that test. Even worse, it fails to provide marketing advice that's useful for the average reader.