Category: General Commentary

By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Shel's Personal Life, travel Tagged with , ,

The famous globe at the Epcot Center entrance
The famous globe at the Epcot Center entrance
On my fifth trip to Orlando, staying 3 miles from the Walt Disney World entrance, I figured it was time. So I arranged for press comps and spent half a day at Epcot (the logical park for someone into both travel and outer space). I had low expectations, but the experience fell so far below those low expectations it was shameful.

I’d always thought that the travel half of Epcot attempted to recreate the experience of being in many different parts of the world. They featured exactly 11 countries, eight of which I’d been to. Nine of those 11 were exclusively about shopping and eating. Two actually had an educational exhibit (one of which, in the Japan pavilion, was quite well done but only took about 30 minutes to go through the whole thing). We did catch one excellent performance by a Chinese dance troupe. On the space side, the simulated space ride was excellent, but the rest of it was pretty mediocre, and the lines were very long. And considering that almost all the space exhibits had corporate sponsors, you’d think they could do something about the very high admission fees.

I’d experienced a similar space simulation 40 miles away at the Kennedy Space Center, a much more interesting park overall, and considerably cheaper, to boot. In fact, we liked Kennedy so much, we went back the next day to see the parts we’d missed. If you’re going to Orlando and you’ve got a personality like mine, it’s a better bet.

The whole experience made me very grateful that neither of my kids ever showed any interest in going to Disney. They’d much rather come with us to places like Denmark, Italy, and California (we live in Massachusetts).

Real places, in other words. Disney is a marketing machine that has very little to do with recreating reality.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, censorship, Corporate Social Responsibility, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, General Commentary, language, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, propaganda, Psychology, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , ,

This may be a new level of stupidity. Murdoch-owned publishing behomoth HarperCollins actually prepared and started to sell an atlas that does not show Israel. At all. Lebanon, Jordan, Gaza, and the West Bank are there.

No big surprise, there was lots of pushback when word got out, and HC removed the atlas from circulation and said it would pulp any remaining copies. Even the UK Bishops’ Conference Department of International Affairs condemned the publication as a blow against peace in the region.

The company sheepishly withdrew, saying,

HarperCollins sincerely apologises for this omission and for any offence caused.

But the company is talking out of two sides of its mouth. Earlier, as reported in the Washington Post, it tried to justify the omission:

Collins Bartholomew, a subsidiary of HarperCollins that specializes in maps, told the Tablet that it would have been “unacceptable” to include Israel in atlases intended for the Middle East. They had deleted Israel to satisfy “local preferences.”

HarperCollins has quickly found out that it’s also unacceptable to abandon truth in a volume that claims to offer

“in-depth coverage of the region and its issues.” Its stated goals include helping kids understand the “relationship between the social and physical environment, the region’s challenges [and] its socio-economic development.”

Ummm, hello, and just how do you intend to put the region in context if you ignore the most conflicted issue it faces? Do you really think students in Arab countries haven’t heard of it? Did you really think this would stay a safe little conspiratorial secret just for the cognoscenti?

HarperCollins would have been totally justified in marking the West Bank and Gaza as disputed territory held by Israel, following conquest. But there’s no dispute about Israel being a nation.

This is a time when we all have social media at our disposal. That means it not only should have been totally obvious that this would backfire, but HarperCollins had the tools at its disposal to make the governments demanding this absurdity to be the ones looking ridiculous. If any governments insisted on refusing entry to accurate atlases, the company could have had a skilled social media manager explain why HC would no longer sell atlases into these countries, and create a pressure movement both from outside the country and from those inside who recognize that not knowing geography is a handicap in the global economic arena, and the Gulf states would have lifted the restriction.

Instead, what HarperCollins has done is to eliminate its own credibility. It’s hard to imagine anyone in the future trusting any reference materials from this publisher. Blatant and deliberate repudiation of truth is not a recipe for success in the world of reference books—especially reference books about the world.

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By Posted on Posted in Branding, General Commentary, Innovation, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

In yesterday’s post, “Does Making Decisions Lower Our Math Skills?” I looked at Paul Petrone’s article, “The Genius of Wearing the Same Outfit Every Day.” He describes why President Barack Obama (to simplify his day) and Steve Jobs (to brand himself) wear similar outfits day after day. Yesterday, I looked at the part of Petrone’s article that supported Obama’s reasoning, claiming that too many decisions weaken our brains. I took issue with that, as you’ll see if you click through.

But I’m basically in agreement with the other part of Petrone’s article: there can indeed be solid branding reasons behind keeping a wardrobe choice to a bunch of identical black turtlenecks, as Jobs did. For jobs, the black turtleneck made a lot of sense, for several reasons:

  • It’s sleek and modern looking, like Apple’s product line (at least if you stay trim, as Jobs did)
  • It reinforces the “think different” culture at Apple, a company that has built its brand from the beginning on not being the corporate-zombie persona that wears conventional business attire and buys conventional (IBM) computers; the very first Macintosh ad said, “you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’”

So now, let me jump into uncharted (and maybe shark-infested) waters: let’s look at President Obama’s wardrobe choice from a branding perspective. And let’s start by looking at the wardrobe choices of his own bed partner, First Lady Michelle Obama.

Michelle’s fashion choices for formal occasions are quite dramatic. Typically her outfits combine three elements: they’re bold, elegant, and surprising. She’s the most fashionista First Lady I can remember, surpassing even Jacqueline Kennedy.

Her husband Barack Obama, however, tends to dress “safe,” in conservative dark suits. When he wore a sharp-looking tan suit, he was heavily criticized—but I thought it was a good move, though years too late. (In fairness—the commentator who started it all said he didn’t care that the suit was tan, but he didn’t think it fit properly.) Still, in typical Barack Obama fashion, he retreated with his actions and went back to his power suits.

The problem is, those “safe” dark suits are at odds with the brand of his 2008 campaign: “change.” The boldness of his rhetoric wasn’t matched by the drab sameness of his attire.

I empathize with him. I don’t spend a lot of energy thinking about the clothes I wear, and I usually dress for comfort. I’m not particularly comfortable in suits and abhor neckties. But I do wonder—and here’s the big heresy:

Would President Barack Obama have had an easier time pushing an agenda of “change” if he had dressed the part?

If, starting on the campaign trail in 2007, he had emphasized Michelle Obama’s three wardrobe attributes of boldness, elegance, and surprise, would he have been better able to marshall support for his initiatives? Is the conformist wardrobe secretly saying “I’m not serious about change”?

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By Posted on Posted in Branding, General Commentary, Psychology Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Here’s an odd one: Paul Petrone’s article, “The Genius of Wearing the Same Outfit Every Day,”  describes why President Obama (to simplify his day) and Steve Jobs (to brand himself) wear similar outfits day after day—and then supports Obama’s reasoning, saying that too many decisions weaken our brains. It’s gotten more than 1000 comments.

Leaving aside the flaw in the Obama example—he’s often photographed wearing something other than a suit—let’s look at Petrone’s claim, based on an L.A. Times article, “Too many decisions can tax the brain, research shows,” that too many decisions can lower math skills:

Two college professors…both found that a person has a limited amount of brain power in a day, so the more decisions they have to make, the weaker their decision-making process becomes…

Vohs…asked a group of random people how many decisions they made that day, and then asked them a series of simple math questions. The more decisions they made in the day, the worse they did on the math questions.

I was instantly skeptical.  1) I’d guess the more we train our brain to make interesting, challenging, important decisions, the more of those we empower it to make. But yes, if we fill our brains up with trivial decisions, we limit them.

And 2) there are many different kinds of decisions. Exercising critical thinking skills–or for that matter, intuitive snap judgments a la Gladwell’s “blink” theory–might actually boost our math performance. Other types of decisions could sharpen or weaken our math performance.

So I went back to the original article. The logic is far more nuanced than Petrone implies. What’s fatiguing is not how many decisions we make, but overwhelming choice in a single decision:

…When people have too many decisions to make — consumers end up making poor decisions, are more dissatisfied with their choices or become paralyzed and don’t choose at all.

And as the complexity of a decision increases, a person is more likely to look for ways—often erroneous—to simplify the choosing process. If there are 100 kinds of cereal, instead of looking at all of the characteristics, people will evaluate a product based on something familiar, such as brand name, or easy, such as price.

Now this actually does make sense. Marketers know fewer choices = more purchases.

Come back tomorrow for a look at the branding (Steve Jobs) part of Petrone’s argument. (Subscribe to this blog so you’ll be notified.)

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Business-general, General Commentary, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, privacy, Shel's Personal Life, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , ,

How many times will they try to beat us into submission before they see it doesn’t work?

It’s bad enough that I have to delete some 200 spams a day from my email inboxes…that I get at least 10 junk calls every week from robots, and another 5 or so from poorly trained humans…that I have to spend my precious time flushing spams out of the moderation queues on my WordPress sites.

It is absolutely unacceptable that today, not only did I get two bounce messages from Russia for emails I never sent, I actually got a robocall (about lowering my credit card rate) that showed up with my own name and number on caller ID!

I was among the first to sign up for the do-not-call list. I moderate my website comments, so no junk gets through. And I value my reputation to the point where if I could figure out how to track and report these scum who are trashing my good name pretending to be me, I would make things very ugly for them.

Attention spammers: if you think I will *ever* do business with someone who not only forces unwanted (and often-deceptive) intrusions on me, but actually forges my name to the attempt, you are sorely mistaken. To paraphrase Phil Ochs, “Stupid spammer, find another planet to be part of!” And in the meantime, at least get me OFF your list!

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, Customer Service as Marketing, General Commentary, Publishing, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , ,

Hyperion Contact Us page

Dear Hyperion Books:

All I wanted to do was to send you a review copy request so I could review “Stirring It Up” by Stonyfield Farm founder Gary Hirshberg. I review books on socially and environmentally conscious business.

I went to your contact page expecting to find a press contact. But all that’s there is how to write to you if I want to contact one of your authors directly. There’s no way to contact ANY of your departments, except a few social media links.

Oh yes, and from my desktop computer, your Twitter page link goes to one spammy tweet from last November that I don’t think is yours. Oddly, on my laptop, it goes to a no-such-account page, as does your Facebook link.

I even went to your bookseller page, where I found a link to the Disney media center–which includes media pages for lots of Disney broadcast properties but not Hyperion.

Surely, with all the resources at Disney’s disposal, you could have a person in charge of media contact for Hyperion, and you could list at least one way to contact you that actually works. There’s not even a phone number!

In the 21st century, there’s absolutely no excuse for companies to barricade themselves behind windowless fortress walls. Empowered customers don’t just get mad; they tell their 10,000 closest friends on Facebook or Youtube (“United Breaks Guitars” is up over 14 million Youtube views). If I were a paying customer with a gripe, I’d probably be buying “hyperionsucks.com” right about now.

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, Customer Service as Marketing, General Commentary, localism/locavore, Networking, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , ,

Thursday was full of extremes, with both positive and negative encounters.

On the positive side, I had two amazing one-to-one meetings: with the former mayor of a nearby town who just took a job with a green energy company, and then a few minutes later, with a life coach friend of mine. With both, we each brainstormed marketing ideas and helpful contacts for the other.

Then, a brief call with my own coach, Oshana Himot, who continues to amaze me with her sheer brilliance. My business is engaged in a major shift toward much deeper work, and she can take much of the credit. And finally, a Chamber mixer where I managed to have several substantive conversations. I was introduced to a gentleman I didn’t know who’s partnering with an organic farmer friend of mine to make tortillas using local corn. As a local food advocate, marketer, and foodie, I’m eager to help him succeed. Then was my friend who runs the local TV station, on his capital campaign and new building they’re going to construct. I offered him a resource about building deeply green, and he, out of the blue, offered to shoot a promo for me. And finally, a woman in my own town who will bring a much-needed progressive and articulate voice to the Selectboard.

But on the same day, I had three encounters with enormous stupidity.

1. We’d been contacted by a charity some time back to see if we had any goods to donate. We did indeed, and in the intervening two weeks, we’ve filled three large boxes with books and a huge trash bag of clothes. Originally, we were going to put all this in front of the garage for pickup, so we wouldn’t have to wait around. They’re not allowed to actually open the door. But since that was set up, it’s snowed several times and our garage is completely blocked off. So I called to explain that the crew would have to ring our bell, since we couldn’t put things out by the garage and we didn’t want to ruin it all by putting it right in the snow. And then I asked for a two-hour window for the pickup, so we could be sure to be here. No can do, she told me; they’ll be there any time between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. I told her that I wasn’t going to be stuck in my house all Saturday waiting for them. Finally, after about ten minutes of back and forth, she gave me a phone number to call Saturday morning where they’d be able to narrow it down at least a little. Not exactly customer service heroism—especially considering WE’re doing THEM a favor by donating goods.

2. Between my two morning meetings, I had to walk in a busy, narrow street in the central business district of a nearby village, because one gas station owner hadn’t shoveled his side walk. I poked my head in the office and mentioned the problem. The owner growled, “It hasn’t been 24 hours.” Yet every other property owner had managed to clear the sidewalk, Guess where I’m never buying gas again as long as I live (and yes, I have been a customer there, in the past).

3. My wife and I were the only customers in a restaurant except for one person picking up a takeout order, for about 40 minutes. Just as we were about to leave, a woman showed up prepared to make a large takeout order. It was 10 minutes to 8 and they sent her away, saying they were closed. It probably would have delayed their 8 pm closing by 10 or 15 minutes and more than doubled their take for the hour. (The owner was not present). And it would have kept that customer coming back.

In all three cases, all I could do was scratch my head in amazement. I will not beat you over the head with the obvious customer service lessons from these three encounters with stupidity. Unlike the three perpetrators, you’re smart enough to figure it out.

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By Posted on Posted in Events, General Commentary, localism/locavore, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

I choose not to participate in the always-crowded and frequently violent orgy of consumerism called Black Friday. I do my best to shop locally most of the time, I don’t like crowed craziness, and I know Black Friday is not really a help to local small businesses that can’t afford to deep-discount.

There’s an alternative celebration on the day after US Thanksgiving that resonates more with me: Buy Nothing Day: 24 hours without any purchasing activity. I can’t always do it; sometimes the gas tank is empty or I’m flying home from Thanksgiving in another part of the country. But this year, I see no reason to spend any money today.

Wikipedia has a nice page on the history of Buy Nothing Day and some creative incarnations of anti-consumerism.

Meanwhile, society at large is going in the opposite direction. I was really hoping that the big-box store openings would be a flop. Unfortunately, there were big crowds leaving their families to chase down bargains. This, I see as a blow against workers’ rights. I very much doubt that all the employees working yesterday were volunteering to work on a holiday. In fact, there are demonstrations at Walmarts all over the country today, protesting this encroachment on workers’ family time. In my area of Western Massachusetts, it’ll be 3 p.m. at the Walmart in Hadley.

 

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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 Activism, Arts & Entertainment, Diversity, General Commentary, language, media-general Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Recently, a local high school was targeted by an out-of-state hate mail campaign because it chose to produce “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told,” a gay and lesbian retelling of the Bible by Paul Rudnick. Protestors from various church groups promised to picket the performances. The story even made the Huffington Post.

It happened that the school producing the play was Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public High School, where both my children attended some years ago—a school known for its fabulous (reference intended) theater and dance departments. We’ve continued to attend many of the school’s performances even though my younger child is already a sophomore in college.

So of course, both to defend freedom of speech in the Pioneer Valley and to enjoy a night of theater we knew would be terrific, we attended. And we were gratified that in addition to the antigay protestors, a goodly multitude of pro-performance church groups were on hand to lend support.

The interesting thing is…if you accept the basic premise that gay and lesbian couples exist (and, in this play, were present at creation and right through modern times)—there’s almost nothing blasphemous in the play, which centers on Adam, through the ages, trying to find meaning in life. His questioning is very much rooted in the Old Testament tradition of prophets arguing with God. The whole alternate world is set in motion by a Stage Director (female, in this performance), which makes it clear from the get-go that this is an imaginary theatrical universe within the universe we all now, as opposed to any real redefinition of Biblical history. I found exactly one scene that fundamentalists might object to: 30 seconds out of a two-hour play that imply the Christ child was born of the play’s lesbian couple—and even this keeps the virgin birth intact.

Of course, the vast majority of those who protest this play wherever it is performed have never seen or read it. Fundamentalism, of any religion, leaves no window for dissenters and questioners.

By contrast, I just saw a 1999 movie called “Dogma,” a low-budget flick with a superstar cast (including very young Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as a pair of very foul-mouthed sin-avenging angels on a killing spree, George Carlin as a shady, street-tough Catholic Cardinal in New Jersey, Chris Rock as the delightful unknown 13th Apostle, and Salma Hayek as as a celestial being-turned-stripper). Early in the movie, we see Damon in an airport lounge, casting deep doubts about God’s existence into the mind of a confused Catholic nun. After she leaves, Affleck points out the irony that Damon’s character has known God directly.

An angel who kills with an assault weapon is only one of the many blasphemies—not all of them violent. The reimaging of several different pieces of the Jesus story as well as the portrayal of God will no doubt raise a few eyebrows among the faithful. Hundreds of people die in this funny but very gory film.

Now this is a movie that many Christians and religious Jews would find blasphemous all the way through—if they can stop laughing long enough to reflect on it. And yet, I didn’t remember any protests around it!

But Google has a better memory than I do; there were protests, actually. In fact, Disney’s Michael Eisner cut the film loose from his empire, under pressure from the Catholic League. Not only that, but the film’s director, Kevin Smith, infiltrated one of the protests—what a brilliant publicity move! He wrote and spoke (quite humorously) about his experience on this page, which also includes a TV news report of the protest, where he got recognized and interviewed.

I can understand that a film about a couple of angels cursing and shooting their way through modern America would upset people. But what does it say about our culture that people also get upset about sincere and committed expression of same-sex love?

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