Category: Demographics/Psychographics

By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

I’d been wanting to see “No Impact Man” since it came out a few years ago. It’s a documentary of a family who tries to live for a year with zero net impact on the environment, phasing down gradually from the conveniences we take for granted.

Last night, we watched the movie. What I had never realized is that Colin and his at-first-skeptical wife Michelle are doing this in New York City—in the capital of consumerism, in the belly of the beast. And Michelle in particular came from a superconsumerist lifestyle, a self-identified shopping addict who purchased lots of designer clothes and either ate out or got take-out almost every night.

The Bicultural Perspective

Dina and I were both raised in New York City; we were both living in Brooklyn when we met. But 32 years ago, we moved from Philadelphia (we’d lived there for nine months) to Greenfield, Massachusetts, population 20,000 and the hub town for farmy Franklin County.

Six months later, when Dina got a job 40 miles south of us, we moved 20 miles south to Northampton, a hip, urbane small college/arts town of 30,000, also surrounded by farmland.

And then, after 17 years in Northampton, we moved across the river 15 years ago to Hockanum, a tiny village of about 200 souls. We live on a working farm that’s been in our neighbors’ family since 1806; they raise 400 cows as well as hay and corn to support the cattle.

Our farm neighbors sold us a house that was built in 1743, and they were only the second family to own it. Mount Holyoke (the mountain, not the college) is literally right behind our house; Mount Tom is just across the Connecticut River.

It’s pretty darn different from the 26-storey apartment building in a 35-high-rise complex where I lived during high school, or from the noisy urban melting pot neighborhoods of my earlier childhood and Dina’s entire upbringing.

For many years, we’ve called ourselves “bicultural.” We can still function well in the fast-paced, loud, crowded setting of New York. But after 32 years in the Pioneer Valley, we’re actually more at home with our country neighbors—talking about our gardens, hiking the hills, and sharing an ethic that values the land. Frugality and green choices have always been a part of our lifestyle, even before we left the city.

With this history, our viewing of “No Impact Man” reflects both our urban past and our rural present: two very different worlds. (to be continued tomorrow)

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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, General Commentary, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, poverty Tagged with , , , , ,

I’ve always enjoyed Bruce Springsteen’s work: his hard-driving melodies, brilliant working-class lyrics, sense of justice, and enormous passion.

And last night, seeing the amazing movie “Springsteen & I,” I’ll add—he has a huge heart. 40+ years into his career, he clearly remembers his roots, and he’s willing to get down with ordinary folks. He has not let stardom go to his head.

And it was really nice to see a celebrity musician movie that was not all about a slow decline due to drugs and/or alcohol. This movie, much of it shot by amateurs—fans giving tribute to The Boss and remembering special moments or personal encounters—is a tribute not only to the passion his fans have for him, but also for the passion he has for his fans. He comes across as very human, very likable, and a hell of a performer. And it says a lot about his character that several of the musicians in the concert footage from the 1970s are still in his band.

Watching this working-class hero in action, I remembered the 1984 attempt by President Ronald Reagan and columnist George Will to co-opt Springsteen for the right wing, and Springsteen would have none of it. The big flag on the cover of “Born in the USA” fooled them.

The song, of course, is a Vietnam veteran’s lament about his bleak economic prospects in the age of Reagan—with this lyric, among others:

Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says “Son if it was up to me”

Click here for full lyrics to “Born in the USA”, along with a nice write-up of the kerfluffle.

Of course, the marketer in me is always alert when I interact with popular culture. And wearing that hat, let me note that yes, Bruce is a man of the people, but he’s also a very smart marketer. Springsteen has fully documented his own career, making it easy for the producers of this movie to find footage of the exact moment a fan is talking about—whether inviting up a show-hogging Elvis impersonator or jamming on the street with a local busker.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Demographics/Psychographics, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business, People Helping People Tagged with , , , , ,

A friend sent me a link to a very interesting article, “A Locavore’s Dilemma: On the Fantasy of Urban Farming” by Will Boisvert

According to Mr. Boisvert (whose name, ironically, translates as “green woods”), we would all do more for the planet to buy big-agro chemiculture food from thousands of miles away than to develop food sources in or close to urban areas.

I’ve heard this argument before. And I do think it’s important to do our research and know the numbers; it’s important to make a business case for local food sustainability, whether urban or rural.

But I’d say Mr. Boisvert totally misses the point.

He says the most sustainable thing we can do in NYC is build more housing, to avoid further stress on the exurbs and suburbs, which are very UNsustainable. But I don’t see why it has to be housing vs. food. Build that 600-person apartment building he wants, and THEN use add urban agriculture and solar arrays to harness the roof for food and energy.

And his attack on COmmunity Supported Agriculture farms (CSAs) is just bizarre. I don’t think our annual membership fee for the organic CSA we belong to here in Massachusetts would even cover the same amount of factory food at our local supermarket, and it’s far cheaper than buying the nonindustrial stuff at Whole Foods, a pricy organic grocery, or the farmers markets.

We do need to look at the economics/carbon impact of urban agriculture and the urban food movement, and often, they’re not pretty. But no uglier than mass-scale farming.

He writes:

Hauling each spud from upstate thus requires as much fuel as moving it 585 miles by corporate semi or 2,340 miles by rail. I don’t know the numbers, but I think truck is a lot more common than rail.

If that’s true, then even with the much-reduced efficiency per mile, the number of miles is so much fewer that local food, especialy urban agriculture, comes out way ahead. If the potatoes go 127 miles at 28 ton-miles/gallon vs. 2500 miles from Arizona at 120 tm/g, the Catskills come out way ahead: 4.5 gallons vs. 20.8 for the far-shipped chemiculture ones. And his analysis doesn’t recognize that the efficiencies of big trucking disappear rapidly when that huge truck is running 4 mph stop-and-go in NYC traffic, while those of urban farming increase.

As he notes, a neighborhood urban farm might use one gallon to transport to multiple sites across the city, in a small van. And if we’re really talking hyperlocal, your neighborhood rooftop or small-lot urban farm could efficiently deliver in a five-mile radius with a bicycle (more efficient in time as well as fuel, in NYC’s traffic-choked streets)—which can offset the fuel costs of hauling the soil up to the roof by crane. Equipped with a handlebar box, a rear rack, and maybe even a small trailer, bicycles can carry quite a bit. Even back in the 1960s when I was a kid in the Bronx, a lot of local merchants offered bicycle delivery (using massive one-speed bikes with huge handlebar boxes).

Even if it’s trucked in a van, the fuel cost of a three-block delivery is pretty close to zero.

And unlike Mr. Boisvert, I don’t discount the many other benefits. Better quality food, community-building, job skills training for those interns and volunteers, and an understanding of the food cycle. My own first garden was in Brooklyn, in fact, and the thrill of growing my own food in my mini-urban farm definitely helped push me to the locavore mindset. I discovered a new crop: radish seed cones; the young ones are terrific in salads. And that was also around the time that I started advocating using flat roofs as food and energy resources.

I do have some concerns, and would like to see research, on how urban agriculture can avoid pollution-borne contamination of the food. But he doesn’t talk about that.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Advertising, Demographics/Psychographics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Aaargh! Tomorrow is an election day in Massachusetts. We’ve been getting calls for months, but today, its completely out of hand.

–> In the past two hours, from 6 to 8 p.m., I have received FOUR calls. Two from Democratic Party volunteers, one human from the National Writers Union and one NWU robocall. This doesn’t count the barrage of calls over the past week and earlier today.

In an era where the NSA can read our phone logs, I don’t understand why the Democrats and their allies can’t run a “merge-purge” to eliminate duplicates. That technology has been part of the direct-mail world since the 1970s.

If Republican Gabriel Gomez wins tomorrow against Democrat Ed Markey, I’d wager that it was because the Dems over-called to the point of harassment, and turned people off. Since there are more Democrats than Republicans by a huge margin, more Democrats than Republicans will get annoyed.

Personally, I have a low regard for Mr. Gomez and a reasonable degree of agreement with many of Congresman Markey’s positions. And so I will vote Democratic tomorrow. But I also have a ery low opinion of repeat intrusion marketing. I will vote for Markey despite the campaign’s tactics, and not because of them.

As a marketer, I hope the campaign can survive its own excesses.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Demographics/Psychographics, Politics, poverty Tagged with , , , , ,

Our local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette of Northampton, Massachusetts, runs a political column by a local conservative, Dr. Jay Fleitman. I know him a little; our kids went to preschool together, back in the day.

And thus I can say that Jay is a bright guy—and in person, quite pleasant. But you wouldn’t know it from his columns, which closely parrot the right-wing talking points of Fox News bloviators and the more extreme Republican politicians, whether or not they have a basis in fact. His writing is very typical of those who claim to speak for Republican voters these days.

Sometimes, I write letters to the editor debunking his statements. But I can’t rebut yesterday’s column that way, because I recently submitted a letter on another topic; the quota is one per month. Fortunately, I have no quota on how often I blog.

His column was called “Not an Accidental Republican.”

He writes:

Unemployment is crushing in the black population after four years of this president…yet 97 percent of blacks voted for Obama.

Where did this crushing unemployment come from? From the wildly unregulated chaos of Wall Street under George W. Bush, undermining both the Main Street economy—rewarding “job creator” companies through tax loopholes for “creating” jobs overseas—and the housing market, writing mortgages that no reasonable person could justify and frequently yanking those mortgages without anything even close to due process (often in communities of color). Bush inherited the strongest economy of my lifetime, if I’m not mistaken—and, not coincidentally, a country at peace. He gave the megacorporate multinational foxes not just the keys to the henhouse, but to the entire farm. And he wrecked the economy, the peace, and our status among nations.

Has Obama fixed the economy? No. He’s made a start. But he’s too timid, too much of a closet 1970’s-style Republican to do what needs to be done. A massive federal jobs program focused on clean energy and infrastructure repair would be a long step forward, but he’s not willing to take it. (I’ve been advocating such a plan for years.)

My wife has another great solution to the unemployment problem: provide tax breaks around job creation only when a job is created in the U.S. Voila—jobs in the private sector, in this country.

Describing the reaction of a young Democrat who was interviewing him, Jay writes,

I think that he was taken aback by the perspective that there is nothing particularly enlightened or sophisticated in the notion of a big centralized government intruding widely in society, that this is an old model found throughout human history with varying degrees of despotism.

That which makes the American experiment so unique was the founding of a government with a primary directive of protecting the degrees of freedom of its citizens. And yes, it is his political party that is the party of enlarging government.

Hmmm, let’s see…what’s the biggest expansion of federal government authority and what are the most obvious instances of U.S. government despotism in recent years? Oh yes, the Department of Homeland Security including the TSA…the imprisonment without trial, waterboarding and other torture at places like Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram…the crackdown on dissent at home in violation of the First Amendment…and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan—sovereign nations—under false pretenses. Who was president at the time? Well, what do you know; it was George W. Bush. Why didn’t Jay speak out against these appalling attacks on liberty?

Once again, Obama’s failings here are in not doing enough. He broke his promise to close Guantanamo, and he has taken his time about winding down the wars—to name two among many examples.

By the way, I asked, if we don’t have the fiscal conservatism of Republicans, then who did he think was going to be stuck with the $16 trillion debt? It’s not my generation, as we’ll be skating into Medicare, Social Security and retirement. It will be his generation, so what were they possibly thinking with over 70 percent voting for Obama?

Again, this is the Republicans’ debt. Bill Clinton left not just a balanced budget but an actual surplus, which Bush utterly squandered (wars and attacks on civil liberties are expensive, and so was the decision to slash revenue). If Republicans are serious about ending that debt (which would be a good idea), why are they so resistant to raising revenue?

During the Republican presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, when both Jay and I were born, the top-earner tax rate was 91 percent; it was 50 percent during Reagan’s first term. So why is it considered so burdensome to bring the top income tax rate back from today’s 36 percent up to the 39.6 where it had been under Clinton (a time of enormous, unparalleled prosperity)? Also, let’s not forget that the income for many high-net-worth  U.S. citizens is actually a good deal lower, because much of it is taxed at a much lower rate as capital gains—this is how Mitt Romney got away with paying about 14 percent. And don’t get me started on the way many highly profitable U.S.-based corporations pay little or even nothing in taxes.

The gap between rich and poor in the U.S. right now is beginning to look like some kind of Third-World banana republic. The income inequality, or disparity, is obscene. Social services have been slashed by successive presidents from both parties for 30+ years, since Reagan took office; the poor have been disproportionately hit by programs to shift money from the have-nots to the haves. Taxes for high-income earners are actually far lower in the U.S. than they are in much of Europe; Germany, Portugal, Austria and the United Kingdom all have high-earner tax rates of 45 to 50 percent. France’s 40 percent maximum tax rate kicks in at just €69,783 ($91,083.52) per year.

Why do we need taxes? To pay for three things:

  • Government services, such as roads, traffic lights, police and fire, teachers, food inspectors, and disaster relief—which help rich and poor alike—as well as assorted subsidies to people and economic entities at specific economic strata: food stamps, tax breaks for investment or education, subsidized insurance for nuclear power, etc. etc.
  • War.
  • The debt.

If you support the idea that governments should provide those services, you have to support paying for them—and you cant keep funding them disproportionately out of the torn and ragged pockets of those who have the least. If we stopped getting into wars and funding a military many times larger than even Russia’s, we wouldn’t have created the debt (again, this happened during the Republicans’ watch).

It’s time for people like Jay Fleitman to stop throwing red herrings around, to stop whining about the Democrats who are trying to clean up the Republican mess, and to come together as a nation to solve our problems. A fair revenue program is a logical step to move forward.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Demographics/Psychographics, Green Business, Politics, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , ,

In light of the close defeat for the California GMO-right-to-know ballot initiative in this month’s election, it’s worth reading this article on Sustainable Brands that shows customers want non-GMO even more than they want organic.

They say, “if the people lead, the leaders must follow.” We WILL win this  one. Eventually.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, People Helping People, Politics, poverty, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

Apparently, a lot of people who voted for Romney would like to secede from the United States.

OK–let’s put aside for now the clear absurdity of this…the condemnation of the idea by Republican governors…the enormous difficulty of getting a majority of any state’s citizens to go along with it…the likelihood that this is based in crude racism…and the zero percent success rate of state secession movements in the United States.

Let’s just say they really do secede.

Most Southern states extract more money from the federal treasury than they pay in. And many people in the region work at US military installations or government offices. Everyone in the region relies on federal funding to maintain their transportation infrastructure, civil defense/disaster response And then of course there are those getting by with the help of federal assistance programs such as food stamps and Social Security (the ones Romney derided as “the 47 percent”).

In other words, if the secession movement succeeds, the secessionist states are going to take a huge economic hit. Bob Cesca, in one of the links cited above, says the federal government could simply starve them out and have them rejoin without military action. He’s probably right.

But here’s something perhaps more important that I don’t hear anyone saying:

If the Red states secede, Democrats will have a whopping majority in Congress and could actually get a much more humane, people-centered society in place–which the Red states would have to accept as reality when they come crawling back in a few years, IF the US will have them back.

Wouldn’t it be grand to have a country with a European style single-payer health plan…a solar-powered economy with jobs for all…a military designed to actually defend our shores instead of pursue imperialist wars in countries where we have no justification for our invasion (can you say Iraq?)…an education system that values science and knowledge, and prepares the next generation to play a leadership role in advancing society through technological progress…and so on?

So I say…let ’em Secede!

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics Tagged with , , , , ,

The amazing thing to me is that 18 to 24 months ago, it looked like if the Republicans put up a candidate who could breathe and talk, the White House would be theirs. We don’t know exactly what combination of factors created Obama’s near-sweep of battleground states and overwhelming Electoral College mandate yesterday. So that allows the luxury of putting forth a list, and people can make their own choices about which ones were significant.

Here’s my list:

  • The American public is smart enough to see that the reason why Barack Obama didn’t make as much progress as we all wanted—despite his own reluctance to make this much of a campaign issue—can be laid directly at the feet of a recalcitrant and hostile Republican Party that consistently refused to negotiate in good faith, and whose stated priority (as expressed by its own Senate leader Mitch McConnell) was  not to rescue the country but to deny Barack Obama a second term.
  • Trust in Mitt Romney is very low, because on most major issues, he’s had at least two and often more contradictory positions. He has developed a well-deserved reputation for saying what he thinks people want to hear at that moment, and conveying the impression that he has no core beliefs or principles—and because his attack ads and debate points were so blatantly based on outright lies.
  • Mitt Romney managed to alienate enough constituencies that he sabotaged his chances: women, people of color, students, people on Social Security (although, surprisingly, he apparently carried much of the elder vote in general), gays and lesbians, even veterans and dog lovers.
  • Mitt Romney’s amazing gifts for putting his foot in his mouth and for presenting himself as completely out of touch with ordinary people didn’t help him. Barack Obama’s progress on the economy despite lack of GOP cooperation helped him strongly—in the Upper Midwest, especially.
  • Citizens United and the infusion of enormous amounts of money by the Koch brothers, Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS SuperPAC, Sheldon Adelson, and others may have actually created a backlash against the influence of money in politics (one that perhaps we can harness to create real and meaningful election reform). Even in Massachusetts, a state that was never in contention, we must have gotten somewhere between 30 to 50 calls and at least that many mailed fliers, to the point where we were totally sick of it. I can only imagine the barrage voters in battleground states were getting.
  • Despite massive reports of voter suppression and fraud (see for example https://www.thenation.com/blog/171079/whats-scope-voter-suppression-election, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/06/2012-elections-polling-places_n_2036228.html, and the truly despicable vote manipulation techniques highlighted at https://www.bradblog.com/?p=9706 (with video of a Pennsylvania touchscreen recording Barack Obama votes as Mitt Romney votes)—margins of victory were wide enough to prevent another election theft. However, this is a problem waiting to happen again, and a fix has been overdue since at least the aftermath of the 2000 election. I support electronic voting machines that use paper ballots, which can be scanned instantly for a preliminary tally, but then get safeguarded through proper chain-of-custody procedures and hand-counted over the next few days if there’s any question at all about the preliminary tabulation’s accuracy. Machines that do not keep a paper trail should be BANNED. end of story.
  • Polls can be wrong. Margins of victory were not even all that close in states like Pennsylvania and even Paul Ryan’s state of Wisconsin. Yes, Florida, Ohio, and Virgina, among others, were quite close—but overall, Barack Obama’s victory in the so-called swing states was generally decisive, with spreads in excess of five points.
  • Barack Obama was able to pull out his core constituencies to show up on voting day, even though these include groups that historically have had low voter turnouts: youth (pretty much written off by the pundits ahead of the election), people of color, women’s rights advocates, LGBT people and their supporters).
  • The US is getting more socially liberal: ballot initiatives supporting such causes as gay marriage and not just medical marijuana but even recreational marijuana passed.
  • The day of the ultra-right is drawing to a close. Even Missouri, which went for Romney, returned Claire McCaskill to the Senate, repelling a challenge by Todd “Legitimate Rape” Aiken. While the party has shifted so far to the right that I heard one commentator refer to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch as part of the party’s moderate wing, real moderates have nowhere to go in the Republican Party right now, so they vote Democrat. My personal belief is that if Mitt Romney had taken a consistent moderate platform—as he did when he was governor here in Massachusetts—throughout the primaries, he would have easily won the primary contest as all the other (extremist) candidates competed for the extremist vote, then gone on to win the presidency. I am glad he chose instead the “Etch-A-Sketch” approach. Trying to be first ultra-rightist then moderate was a failed strategy from the beginning, in an age of instant world-wide communication; it might have worked if there were still such a thing as private conversations from candidates to voters.
  • People saw this race as important enough not to risk anything on third-party candidates. The top six third-party candidates candidates together only got about 1.43 percent of the vote (fewer than 1.7 million votes out of a total of 116.8 million votes cast)—with just over a million of those going to Liberatrian Gary Johnson, bringing him 1 percent, and Green candidate Jill Stein (whose votes—including mine—I’m guessing were nearly entirely in non-swing states) got 0.3 percent, a whisker under 400,000.  votes. None of the others, not even comedienne Roseanne Barr, got even one-tenth of one percent. (all stats from https://www.google.com/elections/ed/us/results with “display all candidates” enabled)
  • Other than during the first debate, Barack Obama outmarketed Mitt Romney, by presenting a better and more believable picture of the next four years to average Americans, and by at least making some sideways attempts to take credit for some of the substantial list he actually accomplished in his first term—and inspiring, once again, a horde of volunteers to get involved. While he was effective in this only compared to Mitt Romney (remember the 47 percent?), Barack Obama’s modest effort outshone Mitt Romney’s pathetic self-aggrandizing.
  • With galvanizing speeches by Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton, the Democratic Convention gave Barack Obama a significant lift that he never really lost.

There are other factors too, but I’ll stop there.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Business Ethics, Demographics/Psychographics, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, media-general Tagged with , , , , ,

(continued from yesterday)

Scary warnings and official-looking documents from Publishers Clearing House
Scary warnings and official-looking documents from Publishers Clearing House
  • Publishers Clearing House still believes in direct mail that scares people into action. The envelope and packet are full of legal-looking documents, dire warnings in big bold print, etc.
  • The “involvement devices”—labels to pull off and attach, gold-covered panels to scratch off, very complicated instructions to follow exactly—are variations on the same stuff I remember from Publishers Clearing House mailers in the 1970s and 1980s. And they were old and tired even back then.
  • Publishers Clearing House apparently never got the memo on credibility in marketing. Instead of using real credibility builders such as testimonials, they fill the mailing with official-looking layouts, fake stickers with bar codes, and language on the return form with language like “I am claiming eligibility…” Oh yes, and they’re still using celebrities, as they used the late Ed McMahon for many years (in fact, I first heard of Ed McMahon through PCH sweepstakes, and had to find out later that he was a TV star). Now, it’s Brian Williams.

Back in 2000, the PCH sweepstakes mailings inspired this quote in the Direct Mail section of my earlier book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World:

Forget about glitzy, complicated sweepstakes offers, with seemingly dozens of different-sized papers, foils, stickers, and scratch-off cards; your production cost will be enormous before you even start. Besides, they cost you tons of money mailing to and following up on false prospects.

A simple, straightforward approach is far better. Use ordinary paper sizes and stocks, and win the prospect over through the strength of your offer—not gimmicks or packaging. You’ll stay within your budget, and target serious prospects, not a bunch of chiselers hoping for a million dollars from you, Ed McMahon, or the tooth fairy.

That was true when I wrote Grassroots Marketing, and even more true now.

PCH sweepstakes-related inserts vs. ad delivery from other companies
Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes-related inserts vs. ad delivery from other companies
  • Of the 44 pieces of paper in the envelope, only 9-1/2 were actually related to the PCH sweepstakes and offer. The others, including the back of one of the Publishers Clearing House pages, were ads from other companies. Given that so much magazine content is available online, for free, that a whole generation will barely pick up a paper magazine any more, and that numerous other channels provide the information we used to get from general-interest magazines, it makes sense that Publishers Clearing House realized its business model had to change. Now they’re apparently in the business of delivering cheesy offers from other merchants—what could have been a good use of the partnership strategy I advocate, if the offer quality and targeting hadn’t been so pathetic.
  • Geotargeting has become more sophisticated. One of the slips announces “SHEL HOROWITZ, THE SEARCH FOR A MAJOR PRIZE WINNER IN THE SPRINGFIELD-HOLYOKE TV AREA INCLUDES YOUR 01035 NEIGHBORHOOD!… There will DEFINITELY be a   Major Prize Winner of $1,000.00 from Your Local TV Area, which includes your Zip Code!” (capitalization, punctuation, and underlining are exactly as they were in the original). So Publishers Clearing House is now matching zip codes against media markets, and guaranteeing at least one winner—note the SMALL dollar amount—in my media market (which contains dozens of zip codes).
  • Technology isn’t perfect. My envelope contained two copies of a several-page ad bundle (one of several in the mailing)—and DID NOT contain the actual form to select magazines! Even if I’d wanted to subscribe, I couldn’t do so from this mailing.

I may get an onslaught of comments pointing out that Publishers Clearing House’s methods are obviously working, or they wouldn’t keep at it after all these decades. Of course they work! I freely grant that.

But to what effect? What’s the real benefit of developing a large list of purely transactional contacts who didn’t necessarily even buy—they entered a chance to win big bucks for free. Do these people have any loyalty? Has PCH done any segmentation other than geographic? Can they market to these people as individuals in any meaningful way?

The negative answer is obvious in the kinds of junk offers crammed into the rest of the PCH sweepstakes envelope: tchatchkes and trinkets and home repair products of dubious value—the sort of stuff that gets sold on late-night TV ads over obscure cable channels. It’s these clueless merchants that I actually feel sorry for.

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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, language, Politics, propaganda Tagged with , , , ,

My local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette of Northampton, Massachusetts, ran an AP  story about the foundering Mitt Romney campaign under the headline,”Slipping in polls, Romney tries to seem caring.” (The link may not work if you’re not a subscriber, but here’s a link to the same story with a slightly different headline, on the AP website.)

Two things I’d like to explore about this, and not what you think. I’m really not going to discuss the content of Mitt Romney’s campaign at the moment, though I could certainly “take him to the woodshed” about a lot of his messaging (I might do that next time). Today, I want to look at the linguistics of this headline: specifically, the use of “tries” and  “seems.” I’ll use comedian Stephen Colbert’s framework of “truthiness” as a lens.

Trying is different from doing. It’s one of those words I’m working hard (notice I didn’t say “trying”) to excise from my vocabulary, and from the materials I create for my marketing clients. Trying, rather than doing, predisposes toward failure: “well, I tried.”

Language influences us in ways we’re only just starting to imagine. If your language includes a dozen words for cooperative problem solving, but none for war, how does that shape foreign policy?

In Spanish, there are two distinct verbs that translate into English as “to be”/”is”: Ser (to be in a permanent state) and estar (to be in a temporary condition or location). If you’re describing a permanent condition, you use ser. Examples: “I am a mother” or “I am a father” or “the mountain exists.” Gender takes ser, because until recent decades, that was seen as permanent.

Estar is for conditions that could change: “I feel tired” [right now]; “I am at the cafe”; “the food is on the table”; “she’s pregnant.”

Oddly enough, your profession, even though it could change, takes ser: “soy escritor”—”I am a writer.” What does it say about the class ladder of a society that sees a job title as permanent?

In English, we don’t have the ser/estar distinction.  Thus, I chose to write above, “I feel tired” because I don’t want to ascribe permanence to that kind of negative thought—even as an example in a blog post and not as a statement of reality—by using “I am.”

So, that the writer perceives that Romney is only trying, and not accomplishing, is very telling.

And then there’s the other trigger word in that headline, “seems.” Which brings us to Stephen Colbert’s elegant concept of “truthiness”—stating something that you wish were  true as if it’s fact  (something many senior George W. Bush administration officials as well as quite a few pundits—especially but not always on Fox News).

Romney’s attempt to “seem caring” is a great example of truthiness; the real Romney, behind closed doors, wrote off 47 percent of the American public.

Of course, in fairness, it wasn’t the Romney campaign that said he’s trying to seem caring; it wasn’t even the Associated Press, whose headline was “Slipping in polls, Romney assures voters ‘I care.'” The “tries” was inserted by a headline writer at the Gazette. But I think that person actually nailed a few central problems with the Romney campaign. He appears incredibly clueless in his interactions with ordinary people…he can’t decide where he stands on many issues, or on his past accomplishments…and these two together combine to present an image and aura of inauthenticity. Someone who “seems” to go for “truthiness,” rather than a man willing to stand on the facts of his record or his positions.

(For more on the life choices that stem from your word choices, I strongly recommend this interview with Donna Fisher, which is available without charge through the end of the week, and then will go behind a firewall. I have no affiliation with Donna or that teleseminar series—but I have listened to it four times, and it’s very rare that I listen to a call more than once. The relevant section starts about 13 minutes in.)

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