Customer Reviews

Shift: How to Reinvent Your Business, Your Career, and Your Personal Brand

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(20)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I was on the fence about ordering this book. I don't think of myself as a "brand", and while I could use some self-improvement I don't think I needed to "rebrand" myself. Still, I thought I'd give it a shot...the author has had some great successes in marketing, something that interests me, and I was curious to see how he tied the self-help and marketing together.

Two days and two hundred pages later...

I enjoyed the book. Arnell certainly has a lot of stories to tell (many surrounding his prodigious weight loss) and he tells them well. I was engaged from the first page - he begins the book by telling us he eats 50 oranges a day. Something like that will certainly get your attention.

Arnell has a formula he sticks to throughout the book and it makes the book easy to read. The chapters are short and he usually tells one or two stories in each chapter, relating them to the point he's trying to make. His writing is energetic - the passion he has for his subject clearly comes through. He's helped companies revitalize brands, he's changed himself, and if you follow what he writes then you'll be able to change yourself. The sky's not the limit, he writes.

It's good, entertaining material (it's fun to get a behind-the-scenes look at marketing, even if it is a light treatment of it) which makes the book a quick read. However, is there any substance to the book?

If the first half of the book is the appetizer, the second half is the meat. That's where Arnell tells you how to shift your life. He continues his engaging formula of short chapters peppered with stories while he reveals the secrets to bringing out the best in yourself.

You know what? There are no secrets. You probably won't come across anything you didn't know already.

That doesn't make this book worthless. The strength of this book is two-fold: first, the plan, the path to success, the methods to stay on track are all laid out succinctly. Despite the stories, Arnell makes his points quickly and directly. Secondly, Arnell's enthusiasm is contagious...I couldn't help but be motivated to make some changes in my life.

Sure, there are other self-help books that are longer...a lot longer...than this book. This book wouldn't benefit from being any longer. The truths Arnell lays out (e.g. "go tiger", meaning "be yourself") don't need lengthy explanations. Arnell's role here is part coach and part cheerleader. He'll remind you what to do and how to do it, and make you believe you can accomplish what you set out to do.

Does it work? I don't know yet. I'm going to re-read the second half of the book and try some of his strategies. I'm certainly motivated to try and that's half the battle right there.

I wasn't expecting a book about weight loss. Since the author is a prominent brand strategist I expect his book would be about that. It's not, much.

The book goes on for nearly 80 pages talking about the author's weight loss and formative experiences before he starts talking about advertising. If you don't care about his personal battle of the bulge, but are interested in gaining marketing insight you might skip to chapter 12 and read from there.

The central idea of the early chapters seems to be that Arnell was morbidly obese and disciplined himself to lose 256 lbs. so as not to put himself in an early grave.

He goes on about it quite a lot, I suppose because it's a real triumphant victory for him personally. But I was, like, "yeah, I get it," after his accomplishment was mentioned 2 or 3 times.

Arnell is a good writer. The early chapters of the book are arranged more like a collection of short essays and I didn't see much structure underneath it.

As an advertising book it has some valuable insights. I liked that about it. I read a lot on advertising, but I don't pay that much attention to the "branding" stuff, because most of what's out there focuses on "branding" for clients with enormous financial resources and a willingness to burn through millions of dollars a year testing branding ideas for, mostly, mass-market products like soda, clothing, soap and so on.

I'm in direct response advertising for small businesses who would usually be ill-advised to invest in the brand advertising Peter
Arnell creates. We're at different ends of what works in advertising - he does stuff for huge corporations like Pepsi and McDonald's, and guys like me help small businesses get measurable money-making results from marketing.

Around page 160 the author decides he really just wants to talk about his weight loss through the end of the book. Ostensibly he's teaching us about personal transformation and re-branding. That's a laudable goal and I think his intentions are noble.

Since about 67% of American adults are overweight or obese, and many would like not to be, this book may have an appeal I am blind to. I am not and never have been part of that 67%.

I found the author's name-dropping annoying. He only focused on the business of advertising for about 80 pages, but he does have good insights - he has a sharp mind for the game, but the book has a split personality. The rest of the book, about 120 pages, is rooted in his weight loss journey.

I give it 3 stars because it's well-written and does have a section containing some insights into what interests me. Not a bad book, just not my cup of tea.

The author of this book is a celebrity in advertising circles, and I was looking forward to reading this book.

Unfortunately the book left me very underwhelmed.

First, it focuses more on his personal triumph with weight loss (not a mean feat by itself, but there are better books on that subject out there) rather than on his prowess as a marketing/branding genius. For instance, the discussion on branding/positioning triumphs are too cursory to make it into any text on marketing.

Second, the personal reinvention advice provided is too vague to be of much use. It feels like a motivational book that has a few pages missing in each chapter. Do note that I didn't disagree with the concepts - but that was the problem - there was nothing to get excited about, one way or the other. For example, the whole "Go Helium" idea is nothing but recycled 'aim for the sky' advice.

Third, the author indulges in serious name dropping - which begins to grate after some time. Anecdotes with these "big-names" mostly tend to focus on how much of a visionary and high-achiever the author is, rather than providing any specific insights to the topic at hand. For instance, comments from Eunice Shriver and Bill Clinton laud the author's ability to think big and achieve the impossible.

In conclusion, the biggest disappointment to me was not what the book was, but what it wasn't. The author is one of the most colorful characters in the advertising business - an eccentric genius according to some and a fraud according to others (see the Newsweek article by Daniel Lyons for a quick snapshot).

Instead of providing a cool view into the mind of a visionary, this book ends up being little more than a 30-second commercial spot.

Happy Reading!
~Damodar

I was really hoping to get a lot out of this book, but after reading the whole thing, I honestly learned nothing about branding. It is mostly about Arnell's weight loss, which he mentions over, and over, and over, and over, and...

Arnell's firm has done some great branding work (DKNY), and some terrible work (new Pepsi logos), but he has so many years of experience I was really hoping to get some great insight out of this book, and I just didn't really learn anything.

One more thing, it's pretty annoying how Arnell keeps saying "I" instead of "we". Arnell's firm employs a lot of people. I wish he would say "we came up with a great solution", but instead, he always says "I came up with a great solution". It's such an easy thing to say, "we" instead of "I", and makes everyone feel appreciated for their hard work, but the way Arnell writes, it makes it sound like he works alone and comes up with every idea himself, with no support from his team.

I had high expectations for this book. A branding expert talkign about personal and business transformation sound very interesting.

This is a small book, written in a very conversational and enteratinging voice. It started great with the story about how the author lost 140 pounds with an orange diet. I was eager to continue reading. The next few chapters were quite disappointing. The orange diet weight loss story was told way too many times. The branding stories were very shallow to be educational and sounded like self-promotion for Arnell's agency.

At the end, I was left dry. There was no big a-ha, no lesson learned, no scribbles on paper about insights, no list of things I would do next to transform my life or my work. Not recommended.

I bought this book because of its proclamation of strategies to create change in one's life, work, etc. What I got was a self congratulatory ditty which served no purpose other than to stroke the author's own ego. Disappointing.

I found nothing new and insightful in this book. Early on one is treated to a long narrative about the author's weight-loss story. Great. Do we need another how-to on weight-loss? Later on there is much on branding which frankly I found boring. I loaned the book to two friends WITHOUT giving them my opinions and both more or less agreed with me. This is not a bad book but neither is it anything to rave about.

For a branding guru of his reputation, I expected more discipline from Peter Arnell's book. Instead, he mashes together two distinct and brief themes in barely 200 pages. The first half reads as a transcript from an Oprah sofa interview where Arnell glosses over his childhood, his achievements and his inspirations all the while sprinkling the pages with celebrity names and surprisingly few details about how the weight loss process that helped him lose more than 250 pounds.

The second half is the self-help marketing book I expected. However, Arnell is a victim of timing here, too. By the time I received the book, I was much more interested in reading Arnell's explanation for the failure of the Tropicana redesign than hearing dusty anecdotes about his work with Donna Karan.

The reason for my two-star rating is not because the book didn't meet my expectations. I'm game for surprises. No, the rating reflects the disjointed feel and lack of compelling material. The book doesn't convey the passion Arnell is so well known for displaying and selling to clients.

Shift promises to provide a rebranding guide for readers who want to make a major - business, career or personal brand (read: health) - lifestyle change. Yet, by the book's end, a clear path or direction is not provided, replaced instead with a scattering of anecdotes. I expected the Shift formula to have a game board approach with methodical, step-by-step achievements. Instead, Arnell's Shift comes across like a game of 52-pickup. He tossed a deck of ideas in the air and simply walked away.

Rating: Two stars.

Peter Arnell has changed his life and his image by losing over 200 pounds. and as a branding expert, he has helped develop some of the world's strongest brands, like DKNY, Pepsi, and Banana Republic. He turns his expert eye toward helping others rebrand themselves and their businesses. Full of passion, insight, advice, and examples, Shift will help you look at your own personal and professional brand with new eyes. My only complaint is that the book tries to tackle personal and professional branding, and I think it would have been stronger of it had focused on one or the other, All the same, there is a ton of great inspiration and advice that I'll be using immediately!

Most of the book is a series of tales of his marketing success linked together with his anecdotal wisdom on how to best market a product, be that product and actual product or yourself. So he helped to recreate the image of Pepsi and DKNY and various other brands. It seemed like typical marketese which is to sell the dream rather than the product.
Sell happy, not a soft drink (which is exactly what he did w/Pepsi, recreating the logo as a smiley face). Frankly this type of dishonesty is interesting and terrifying all at once--when are we going to stop selling lies as the truth and then writing the book about our great successes?

The anecdotes are interesting as a memoir of the author, but the connecting wisdom was often pedestrian and hackneyed. He actually told the story of the emperor's new clothes and then explained what it meant. Thank you for the insight! This book isn't that long but could use more editing on the hackneyed wisdom and more anecdotal details about his life. That would've been more interesting.