The Long and the Short of It: A guide to finance and investment for normally intelligent people who aren't in the industry

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Binet says the book came about as they “just wanted to know the truth” about how advertising really worked, after having an “epiphany” about emotional versus rational advertising while digging into the data for their first book, Marketing in the Era of Accountability.

A lot of people in marketing weren’t even aware of what was going on. Behind their marketing world this heavy sell was going in at the C-suite, and companies were pulling money out of brand building and developing their own performance marketing operations, and marketing was missing out on that budget. So that became the rally cry as it was going on in a rather clandestine manner.”In print for the very first time, The Long and Short of It collects eight unmi ssable short stories from the international bestselling Chronicles of St Mary's series.

Long-term brand building has a positive effect on sales, however short-term activations does not have a positive effect on brand building over time. Primarily due to people being able to subconsciously remember emotive campaigns rather than rational campaigns in the long run. This shrewdly analytic, generously appreciative inventory of a dozen microgenres breaks lots of new ground. Morson not only discriminates dictum from witticism, maxim from summons and thought, but also shows how aphorists in a wealth of cultures have invoked generic tradition and infighting to score points. He furthermore illuminates the role played by aphorisms, and the outlooks they epitomize, in the narrative shaping of works from Oedipus and Job to Middlemarch and Boswell's Johnson." Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it is also much more. In this exploration of the shortest literary works—wise sayings, proverbs, witticisms, sardonic observations about human nature, pithy evocations of mystery, terse statements regarding ultimate questions—Gary Saul Morson argues passionately for the importance of these short genres not only to scholars but also to general readers. The Great St Mary's Day Out Hooray! Hooray! It's a happy holiday. For everyone except Max the only one with her mind on the job.

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It is perfectly possible to build a brand online, it just turns out to be much more difficult than anyone imagined. And it’s only recent work that has really taught us why. Peter Field Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it is also much more. In this exploration of the shortest literary works-wise sayings, proverbs, witticisms, sardonic observations about human nature, pithy evocations of mystery, terse statements regarding ultimate questions-Gary Saul Morson argues passionately for the importance of these short genres not only to scholars but also to general readers. We are fascinated by how brief works evoke a powerful sense of life in a few words, which is why we browse quotation anthologies and love to repeat our favorites. Arguing that all short genres are short in their own way, Morson explores the unique form of brevity that each of them develops. Apothegms (Heraclitus, Lao Tzu, Wittgenstein) describe the universe as ultimately unknowable, offering not answers but ever deeper questions. Dicta (Spinoza, Marx, Freud) create the sense that unsolvable enigmas have at last been resolved. Sayings from sages and sacred texts assure us that goodness is rewarded, while sardonic maxims (Ecclesiastes, Nietzsche, George Eliot) uncover the self-deceptions behind such comforting illusions. Just as witticisms display the power of mind, and “witlessisms and ” (William Spooner, Dan Quayle, the persona assumed by Mark Twain) astonish with their spectacular stupidity. Nothing seems further from these short works than novels and epics, but the shortest genres often set the tone for longer ones, which, in turn, contain brilliant examples of short forms. Morson shows that short genres contribute important insights into the history of literature and philosophical thought. Once we grasp the role of aphorisms in Herodotus, Samuel Johnson, Dostoevsky, and even Tolstoy, we see their masterpieces in an entirely new light. The Long and Short of It: From Aphorism to Novel by Gary Morson – eBook Details

Suddenly the time-bending as well as space-bending genius of Kehlmann's construction is laid bare: we might not be able to get that excited nowadays about the Napoleonic wars - during which this novel is set - but reading Johanna's observation about cozying up makes us think about what people in the future may one day think about a present conflict, such as Iraq. So when we examined the data, what we expected to find was that the killer combination was emotional and rational together. But when we looked at [it], that is not what we found. What we found was actually quite different. We found that the more you moved away from rational messages to pure emotion, the more effective advertising was.” In the latest episode of Marketing Week’s This Much I Learned podcast, Binet and Field discuss the inception of the book and reflect on its impact on the marketing industry.

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We are fascinated by how brief works evoke a powerful sense of life in a few words, which is why we browse quotation anthologies and love to repeat our favorites. Arguing that all short genres are short in their own way, Morson explores the unique form of brevity that each of them develops. Apothegms (Heraclitus, Lao Tzu, Wittgenstein) describe the universe as ultimately unknowable, offering not answers but ever deeper questions. Dicta (Spinoza, Marx, Freud) create the sense that unsolvable enigmas have at last been resolved. Sayings from sages and sacred texts assure us that goodness is rewarded, while sardonic maxims (Ecclesiastes, Nietzsche, George Eliot) uncover the self-deceptions behind such comforting illusions. Just as witticisms display the power of mind, "witlessisms" (William Spooner, Dan Quayle, the persona assumed by Mark Twain) astonish with their spectacular stupidity.

In this vein, I wrote (with Mervyn King, now Governor of the Bank of England) a more personal account of issues in taxation, The British Tax System which ran through five editions. On Mirrlees’s advice, I applied for and to my astonishment got a permanent teaching post in the University of Oxford at the embarrassingly early age of 21. Oxford is a collegiate university – members of the faculty generally have both University and College appointments. This post carried with it a fellowship at St John’s College, an association which I have maintained and enjoyed ever since. Through the 1970s I developed a conventional academic career, publishing in academic journals, and writing my first book Concentration in Modern Industry (with Leslie Hannah, an economic historian colleague). My particular interests were in public finance and industrial organisation. A book remarkable for its originality, breadth, insight, and engaging style . . . Succeeds not just in making readers think more clearly about the nature of the short genres and how they relate to each other, but also in showing how they can inform and even help structure longer works." Binet and Field clearly communicate how long-term and short-term marketing strategies can work together, and they outline a suggested approach to divvying up the associated budget. the best campaigns are hybrid: emotional, “fame” system 1 campaign to deliver long-term brand building over a period of >1 year and a more rational, system 2 activation level campaign running in parallel to support immediate/short term salesThis book provides a guide to the complexities of modern finance. It describes the basics of investment and the sophisticated innovations of the modern financial system. It explains how the follies of finance have threatened the stability of the world economy, and describes an environment that is complex and sophisticated, but greedy, cynical and self-interested. This book explains how to put your finances in the only hands you can confidently trust - your own. Both Humboldt and Gauss were concerned with the measurement of the world - with the displacement between one part of space and another and the relation of that gap to temporal intervals and theoretical absolutes. Humboldt constantly took readings during his vast journey - the height of every mountain, the line of the equator, the exact number of lice on the head of a servant - while Gauss conceived space as a mathematical reality in which even lines were merely an abstraction; yet his space was, in its way, as full of life as Humboldt's. Readers will learn everything they need to be their own investment manager. They will recognise their investment options, the institutions that try to sell them, and how to distinguish between fact and fiction in what companies say. They will discover the principles of sound investment and the research that supports these principles. Crucially, they will learn a practical investment strategy and how to implement it. We looked at it in quite a few different ways and the only area where rational communication worked best was short term, direct response, performance marketing. Everything else it was primarily emotional.” Pursuing these interests, I moved from Oxford and joined the Institute for Fiscal Studies as its first research director. Soon after I became Director of the Institute. IFS developed into (and remains) one of Britain’s leading think tanks, respected and feared by policymakers and journalists for its fiercely independent analysis of fiscal issues.