The Shape of Engagement: The Art of Building Enduring Connections With Your Customers, Employees and Communities

There is honestly a lot that one can appreciate in The Shape of engagement. First and foremost, this is an easy book to read and not one which drags on forever. Gould is able to concisely, clearly, and easily educate the reader and share his knowledge and perspective. He gives an in-depth and detailed analysis and explanation of engagement and makes his material particularly easy to digest by associating a graphical representation, or “shape” with each of his models, which explains the book’s title.

Something which would have been nice to see would have been real world examples and case studies of his methodology in practice. While Gould cites a few statistics, some examples of what companies did right or wrong, whether deliberately or by accident, would add to the depth of this book.

Engagement is the big buzz word today: experts tell us we should be doing it, the research says people want it, and the companies that are doing it are growing from it – to the tune of 29.9% increase in stock price year on year.

Yet. For all the talk of it, do you still shrug your shoulders in bewilderment and ask yourself what earth is engagement? Do you know how to go beyond mere tactics and make it work at a strategic, consistent level? Is your senior management team onboard, or confused about the benefits of engagement? And critically, do you know how to make it work for you and your organisation?

Enter The Shape of Engagement: the result of 18 years work across all the professional frontiers of engagement. It has been eight years in the making, redrafting and deconstructing almost two decades of experience into seven profoundly simple frameworks that demystify what engagement is, how it happens, and how to strategically create enduring relationships with your customers, employees and communities.

In The Shape of Engagement, expert consultant and international speaker Scott Gould will reveal to you:

• how engagement is already at work your in business and your brand, and indeed, is at work while you read this description!
• what five things motivate engagement, and what’s getting in the way of you engaging deeper
• the difference between engagement, connection and participation, and why a click is NOT engagement
• what the three universal processes of engagement are, and how to harness them
• how to discern what level of engagement maturity your organisation is operating at
• where your customers, employees and members are in their own engagement journey
• what the six psychological steps of engagement are, and what strategies to use at each stage
• how to implement engagement at an enterprise level

Best of all, it’s a process that you can quickly learn and apply with just a little bit of focussed effort.

Using the experience and insight from working in a broad range of industries as diverse as media and entertainment, aviation, education, local councils, advertising agencies, tourism, national government, digital marketing, youth work, and even from being a church minister, Scott will show you how to put the shapes of engagement into practice, so that you never again scratch your head wondering what to do to engage.

Gould lays out an easy to understand framework for understanding engagement with an application specifically geared towards implementation within business. Thus, this is an invaluable book for anyone who works with any form of engagement and relationship building whether it be with customers, employees, partners, etc. This can also be a valuable piece of literature for anyone in business wishing to have a better understanding of how to build and maintain relationships in general.