Shopportunity!

How to Be a Retail Revolutionary

By: Kate Newlin

Narrated by: Kimberly Schraf

For millions, the daily shopping experience has devolved from the resonant personal ritual of our memories and dreams to the boring zombie-like process we wander through daily. We're wasting our time and money, at the cost of our patience, good will, and joie de vivre. The new entitlement of discount prices has driven out creative, customer-centric thinking, far more than is commonly believed.

In Shopportunity!, highly respected business strategist Kate Newlin provides an insider's view of how consumers' needs and wants are researched, identified, and responded to at the manufacturing and marketing level of companies, and then systematically ignored by those same manufacturers and their retailers when it comes time to bring brands to market. Indeed, she demonstrates how one generation of marketers has addicted three generations of consumers to the heroin of price promotion and what it means to our waistlines, credit ratings, and life experience. From Wal-Mart to Shop-Rite to CVS and Home Shopping Network, Newlin will reveal what the world's leading brands really know about us and how they ultimately sell the products we buy.

Drawing on powerful reporting and her three decades as an insider, Newlin traces the tragic arc of the great freefall between what consumers want of their brand choices, what brands are able to deliver, and the torture retailers put consumers through in order to acquire the transformational promise of the brands. Her critique culminates in a shopper's bill of rights that lays out 10 principles of consumer transformation that should liberate shoppers, as well as the manufacturers and channels that serve them, from the tyranny of the cheap.

©2006 Kate Newlin (P)2006 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

"Useful insights." (Publishers Weekly)

This opportunity wasted

I was hoping that this book would be able to provide a different perspective on the state of business today. Unfortunately, I was disappointed with both the content and the narration, which was distracting. If you enjoy the voice from "Desperate Housewives" this narrator is a dead-ringer. Otherwise, it exacerbates the slow-moving pace of the book's content.

I almost always avoid an abridbed audiobook, but in this case, that would have made it a far more enjoyable listening experience. The concepts are very, very basic, which may very well be the point of the book, but the author does very little to delve any deeper into the subject matter than a cursory glance would afford. In the immortal and never-uttered words of Sherlock Holmes, it was all "Elementary, my Dear Watson."

Just in time!!!

Kate Newlin hit the nail on the head. Working in a service industry, it has become apparrent to me that the level of service and experience that is relayed to the customer has exceedingly diminished. This has led to business grabbing for the short straw, discounting the services and de-valuing their business all together. I was able to take alot of information from this book and communicate to colleagues and accounts that it is all about the experience, not the price tag. In fact, we all the deserve the best and there is a customer base out there willing to pay for it!