Archive for April, 2011
Thursday, April 28th, 2011
How They Sleep at Night
Guilt nips at every big business marketer’s heels. Over the course of a long and distinguished career in the trade of telling intricate lies for money, the nips add up. The conscience yearns to justify the work. Luckily, experience renders the aging marketer adept at lying not just to others, but to the self.
Hence, we see the latest work by Philip Kotler, S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Having spent 50 years as one of the profession’s leading gurus, Kotler is now trying to console himself with the most outlandish fantasies about how big business marketing is supposedly about to enter into “Marketing 3.0,” an age in which maximizing profits for shareholders will no longer be the sole aim:
Marketing 3.0: From Products to Customers to the Human Spirit, Kotler’s new book—one of more than 40 that he has written, including Marketing Management, which has become the preeminent marketing textbook and now is in its 13th edition—describes an evolution in marketing from a narrow, rational process built around a corporate mission (1.0), to a visionary process defined around winning hearts and minds (2.0), to a new values-based discipline that seeks to support the spirit and soul of humanity (3.0).
“A company that’s mission is to make a good product e fficiently and pro fitably, that’s all there is to a marketing 1.0 company. No broader agenda. … Customers need toothpaste and the company delivers. It’s a vertical view,” Kotler says. He sees marketing 2.0 companies as more horizontal and more visionary. “ These excellent companies delight the consumer and their employees,” he says. “ Thee 2.0 company appeals not only to the mind of the buyer, but to their heart.”
Marketing 3.0 organizations, meanwhile, play at an entirely di fferent level. They’re “values-driven,” Kotler says. “I’m not talking about being value-driven. I’m talking about ‘values’ plural, where values amount to caring about the state of the world.”
ROFLMFAO.
And, by the way, check out how deeply serious Kotler is about all this. His examples of 3.0 corporations?
Kotler points to General Electric, which hopes to do well by doing good and pro fit by solving societal problems in the energy field. He points to IBM and its advertised agenda of making the world a “smarter planet.”
Yes, GE and IBM — two charities in action!
Tuesday, April 26th, 2011
Progress of the Corporate Spies
Here are a few recent items on the most predictable of all human events, the growth of big business marketing.
An ex-Yahoo spy gone “independent” reports this in Ad Age:
Well, thanks to the rise of data and audience buying, there’s a relatively new offering now available to marketers called search retargeting. Search retargeting is the ability to target display ads based on user search history. This allows marketers to show advertisements to the right “in market” consumers and entice users who are already looking to buy a specific product or use a service. This combination of search and display results in the acquisition of new customers and drives targeted awareness across all sites.
With this in mind, other “news” is rather easy to reckon:
For Facebook users, the free ride is over.
For years, the privately held company founded by Mark Zuckerberg in a Harvard dorm room put little effort into ad sales, focusing instead on making its service irresistible to users. It worked. Today more than 600 million people have Facebook accounts. The average user spends seven hours a month posting photos, chatting with friends, swapping news links and sending birthday greetings to classmates.
Now the Palo Alto company is looking to cash in on this mother lode of personal information by helping advertisers pinpoint exactly whom they want to reach. This is no idle boast. Facebook doesn’t have to guess who its users are or what they like. Facebook knows, because members volunteer this information freely — and frequently — in their profiles, status updates, wall posts, messages and “likes.”
It’s now tracking this activity, shooting online ads to users based on their demographics, interests, even what they say to friends on the site — sometimes within minutes of them typing a key word or phrase.
Facebook’s ability to pinpoint paying customers has dazzled some small-business owners, including Chris Meyer. Over the last 18 months, the Minneapolis wedding photographer had Facebook aim his ads specifically at female users who divulged the following information about themselves on the social networking site: college graduates, aged 24 to 30, who had just gotten engaged and lived within a 50-mile radius of Minneapolis.
Meyer says his $1,700 ad buy generated $110,000 in sales.
“I could not have built my business without Facebook,” he said.
And, as always, the whole enterprise rests on exploited emotions and false promises:
The researchers found that spending a lot of time online was not linked to having a larger number of “offline” friends. Moreover, the relationships of people who socialized online weren’t any closer or stronger than people who didn’t socialize online.
And on this:
The social media giant Facebook, for example, has nine third-party data centers in the US, with plans to build a tenth in Oregon. Current estimates are that Facebook uses 60,000 servers to help its more than 500 million members reconnect with people they didn’t even like in high school.
The company’s data centers range from from 10,000 square feet to more than 35,000 square feet, and their energy use is enormous. The average leased data center uses between 2.25 megawatts of power and 6 megawatts of power. This could provide electricity for one month to somewhere between 1,730 and 4,615 homes.
Google is thought to have 36 data centers.
Saturday, April 23rd, 2011
More on Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens seems to be in very big health trouble. He is not a complete wipe-out, despite his crazed support for recent US wars.
But, unless it’s very late and very surprising, he isn’t going to recant his great and obvious mistake.
Dig it:
“The pattern and origin of all dictatorship is the surrender of reason to absolutism and the abandonment of critical, objective inquiry.”
That’s what CH says to atheists, whom he seems to be grooming as his legacy. One trusts that CH also remembers a bit about levels of abstraction and logic. Does CH still apply what he claims to be incontrovertible about God to human affairs?
If so, he still has some ‘splainin’ to do.
Friday, April 22nd, 2011
Retraction
I was too dismissive in that last post, as readers have said. John Michael Greer remains a highly astute and valuable analyst of ecology, as well as a source of good advice about how to plan for your personal adaptation to likely future events.
As a student of politics and society, I believe he has much work to do, and I would suggest that it is wise to take what he says about the social dimension of existing societies with extreme caution.
I also think it’s interesting that Greer thinks his theory that no power elite exists in the United States is a source of hope. The obvious follow-up question is what makes him think Americans will ever choose anything different, if everything we have has been freely and co-equally chosen all along? Cultures don’t make spontaneous leaps.
Personally, I think it’s not only simple realism to observe that we have been massively dominated by institutions owned by our elite, but the existence of this domination offers far more hope than does Greer’s mainstream consensus view of our history. Power structures and political policies are a lot easier to change than the way everybody thinks about the world (whatever that is).
Thursday, April 21st, 2011
Not Necessarily a News Flash: Beware of Archdruids
I find myself embarrassed to say that, until today, I had been taking the Personage at left quite seriously, despite His navel-gazing view of politics.
Then, today, the Archdruid — I shit you not, that’s what He calls Himself — published this amazingly ignorant expression of His unreconstructed (one wants to say uninformed) conventionality, the thesis of which is that We, All the American People, got together and chose to remain stupid “30 years ago.” Why “30 years ago?” Either His Archness greatly overrates Jimmy Carter and/or that’s when His Archness first started thinking about things (and, hence, We The People missed our first chance to heed His Archness’s commands).
In trying to get Him to debate this preposterous, baseless claim on His Archness’s Holy Website, I found out the answer is good luck to you. His Archness not only screens all comments, but refrains from posting those that dig a little too close to where he keeps His unexamined suburban white kid’s socio-political worldview buried. This, despite talking at length about the crucial value of dissensus.
I’ve always said, scratch a hippie, find a Republican. Take a look at the Archness’s post above, and see if you can disagree. Sad, because He isn’t stupid about ecology.
News flash to His Archness: Social reality is almost as powerful as Natural reality. Knowing the latter is not a hall pass to skip knowledge of the former.
And note also that His Archness frames His own political and historical conventionality as an antidote to nihilism!
Thursday, April 21st, 2011
Why Whites Are Over-Represented in TV Ads
In the UK, opinion leaders are currently feigning surprise and perplexity at the fact that there, just as in the USA, TV ads show too many white people. “Why? How can this be?,” wonder the writers and industry spokespeople.
If ever there were a question that was easy to answer, this, despite the media reportage suggesting otherwise, is it. There are two extremely basic and overwhelming reasons why white people are over-represented in television advertisements:
1. In societies with substantial racist histories (to say nothing of those with epic, paint-peeling racist histories like the UK and USA), whites still have way more money than non-whites, so the whites simply count more (and more often) as marketing “targets.”
2. Big business marketing is inherently conservative, inherently afraid of offending the most backwards parts of its targeted audiences. Hence, on topics like race and gender, capitalist advertising is always going to be at least a step behind the overall population, to say nothing of reason, enlightenment, and truth/justice.
Recall the self-report of Ed Vorkapich, long-time Pepsi-Cola advertising director, which I cited in the TCT book:
“You’ve got to be careful that the white guys don’t relate too much to the black girl and that the black guy doesn’t relate too much to the white girls.”
Such is the behind-the-scenes stuff of our dominant institutions.
