Dame Stephanie Shirley CH speaks about her life lessons, from child refugee to $3 billion IT entrepreneur to philanthropist – an amazing and extraordinary story told in her book Let it Go. An ardent venture philanthropist with an unrelenting energy for creating positive change, she arrived in England as an unaccompanied child refugee at the…

Author and thought-leader Tracey Camilleri comments on her amazing book The Social Brain – The Psychology of Successful Groups. In The Social Brain leading experts from the worlds of evolutionary psychology and business management come together to offer a primer on great team working. They explain what size groups work and how to shape them…

On The Strand Review of Books, Author Phil Barden explains the behavioural science techniques that can be so valuable in sales and marketing campaigns. Decoded delivers a practical framework and guidelines for applying science to the marketing practices you use every day. As a marketing professional, you can look to this book for behavioural knowledge,…

How will our children and grandchildren view the combustion engine? Even now, a diesel truck seems as old as a pony and trap; the rorty-snort of a petrol-powered muscle-car seems quaint, almost from another era. Mechanical dinosaurs. We’re better off without them.

You may have come across software solutions that score text for readability. Often, the scores are based on the Flesch-Kincaid (F-K) system. Yet at an F-K of 65.88, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix rates close to Moby Dick at 57.9, which seems peculiar. Whatever happened to engagement, emotion, peril, revelation, surprise…? In…

ChatGPT is a classic case of garbage-in-garbage-out. For one client, we trialled ChatGPT to write blog posts, which produced well-phrased outpourings of a lunatic. In that example, we asked ChatGPT to write posts based on prompts concerning industrial chemistry. But ChatGPT is not an expert; it generates content based on its training model’s sources, regardless…

C6H3 HO HO HO.

Quick intro: Strand helps B2B technology companies sell the business benefits of their solutions, principally by writing case studies and thought leadership papers. “When I brief Strand, I have total confidence that the final job will be done exactly as we want. I find your service invaluable and unique, and see Strand as an extension…

Let’s face it, you’re not reading this because of the typeface. You’re reading this because the words might convey a useful thought. How to get free stuff. How to make money. Find a partner. Dump a partner. Whatever. Many marketing managers start by looking for design, marketing, or branding agencies. Sooner or later, they discover…

In March 2019 (aaaages ago), Harvard Business Review published an article on operational transparency (https://hbr.org/2019/03/operational-transparency). The summary is: If you hide how hard you work, people think you do not work hard. Yet in sales and marketing materials we constantly strive to make things look and sound easy. How many times do we say “smooth deployment” and “streamlined…

Here’s a marketing stat that might be of interest to you: year-to-date, Strand has already handled around 10% more writing and design projects than in 2021. In fact, the 2022 year-end project numbers might be 15% higher than last year – though not necessarily more budget! Perhaps the figures above provide you with a barometer…

For some time, a sure-fire way to gain media attention has been to write about Artificial Intelligence. No matter how obscure or tenuous the connection, AI was marketing pixie-dust, to be sprinkled liberally on blog posts, white papers, and solution briefs. However, here at Strand we think security may be emerging as the new hot…

The latest advertising, sales and marketing techniques borrow heavily from the B2C marketplace: emotional engagement and impact. For example, knowing that a logistics management solution helps to deliver humanitarian aid will engage potential buyers more deeply than ROI. But now you have their attention, what criteria will buyers use to assess the solution? My instinct…

Read this book! Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, by K. Rundell. Toby Chapman-Dawe [email protected]

…and to create new content for September onwards, such as eBooks, white papers, videos, and written case studies. Strand offers: Fixed fees per project No limits on amendments No retainer, no monthly fees Not-happy no-fee guarantee “When I brief Strand, I have total confidence that the final job will be done exactly as we want….

As the year accelerates away from us, you may be interested to hear about the growth of combined video and written case study projects. In essence, the idea is to promote the business benefits of your solutions by asking your customers to go on-camera. We have found that today’s customers are very comfortable with being…