Semi Finalist
Assessment:
Plot/Idea: Ramping Your Brand is a finance text designed to help CPG industry newbies succeed. Richardson meticulously explains a four-step process for success and covers ideas like the essential principles of CPG design and the importance of leaning on meaninglessness and memorability.
Prose: Richardson's voice is confidently direct and funny in a cheeky way, a perfect combo of solid advice and snark that keeps this text about business from being boring. Instead, it's a consistently compelling read.
Originality: Ramping Your Brand stands out in the finance book market for the way the text refines questions and centers on young early-stage businesses. Richardson's insistence on privileging anecdotes over data is also a unique, human approach to sales.
Character Development/Execution: Richardson successfully establishes his credentials in the CPG field by explaining his market research background upfront. Ramping Your Brand then proceeds clearly and coherently, through a focus on real-world scenarios and explanatory figures.
Blurb: A smart, savvy, and assured guidebook for people new to the consumer packaged goods business world, James Richardson's Ramping Your Brand lays out the necessary steps for financial brand success in a complex, competitive field.
Date Submitted: December 15, 2021
"How to design packaged goods to serve consumers is one of the many secrets towards exponential company growth provided by James F. Richardson's [book]."
"This is the book I wish I'd had twenty years ago"
"This book provides an excellent framework to build a consumer brand in the 2020s."
"This book provides an excellent framework to build a consumer brand in the 2020s."
"I wish I'd read this book before coaching teams with CPG startups!"
Catalogued at Baker Business Library, Harvard Business School
Ramping Your Brand wins the 2021 BIBA prize for best independently published business book.
Ramping Your Brand was accepted into the permanent collection of the Library of Congress.
