DC TechDay was invigorating yesterday. Better put: the more you engaged in it, the more you got out of it. Talking with so many marketers, designers, founders, and coders yesterday made me grateful that we live during the exciting world of smartphone-centered, cloud-based technological power. Prior to 2007, it was never so much fun as it now is to be …
Like a lot of people, I’ll use hashtags to accent a social media post, notably among friends on Facebook. The hashtag serves as sort of a tongue-in-cheek addition to my main message. Yet while the hashtag has been around for a while, I still see people misusing it, notably on Twitter. Well, maybe “misuse” is too strong a word, but …
World-renowned wine expert Jancis Robinson, in this morning’s particularly fine FT Weekend, is refreshingly honest about the changing role and status of “experts” like herself in today’s society and economy. A couple quick quotes by Ms. Robinson succinctly state today’s new reality: “In the 21st century, the internet and now, particularly, the smartphone have changed everything.” “I have gone from …
Just came upon some of these commercials from ’93-94 – I barely remember them. Amazing to see how much of this became true (and how some of it didn’t – at least in the exact ways the commercials are phrased). Remember that the Mosaic web browser came out in early 1993, the Netscape browser a year or so later, and …
“We care about the environment” … “Let’s preserve our world” … “Help us go green” … Hotels all over the United States push their green credentials using varying terminology, but in the end it all comes down to those little cards you find in every hotel bathroom, inviting you to hang up your towel after your shower. But I just …
Today I just published a new post to LinkedIn as a reaction to Paul Mason’s article on the emerging post-capitalist economy in The Guardian. Mason discusses three interesting, emerging aspects of post-capitalism: The nature and definition of “work” The market’s price-setting mechanism in the emerging “economy of abundance” The spontaneous rise of collaborative production My reactions to his article as …
We are surrounded by sameness in our lives. Commercial institutions (you could call them “companies”) of all kinds succeed in delivering the status quo: hotels, airlines, banks. The list is endless. Embracing “conventional wisdom” appears to be the conventional wisdom. So what makes a market? Or rather, makes a new market – breaking old markets? You could say it’s someone …
A required element of this six-week cross-country trek for me was the Butte Drive-By – in the arid semi-deserts of the southwestern United States. There’s something special about a butte: timeless, majestic, and spiritual. Spiritual in the sense of: I can see how the ancients would attribute some aspect of deity to these impressive natural formations. This trip would have …
Itamar Simonson, professor of marketing at Stanford, tells the American Marketing Association that, in a world full of online reviews and “experience-based information,” the value of branding has been eroded: “Consumers rely increasingly on information sources like reviews by consumers and by experts…. They’re less dependent on … cues such as brand names.” This may be true in the B2C …
