Category: Psychology

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 Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Politics, Psychology Tagged with , , , ,

Jumping in on a long discussion about online bullying in LinkedIn discussion groups and people hijacking discussions, I found a need to add my two cents. (You may need to be a member of that discussion group to see it–not sure).

 

OK, I write as a US-American who has traveled widely and made a point of meeting and talking with people of the cultures where I was visiting (often through homestays, as well as through conversations on bank lines and public transit, etc.)

1. Yes, like every other country, the US has its share of boorish, know-nothing, blinders-on bigots. The difference: in the US, they tend to have more money and power, and more influence on the news media and the political, umm, “process.” And the media, in turn, influences those citizens who get their news from TV toward a very distorted worldview, driven by celebrity “news” and the things that TV execs think hold people’s interest in a newscast: fires, terrorism, natural disasters, and all the other “if it bleeds, it leads” crap.

2. However, the US also has millions of people who care deeply about the world, actively work to learn more about it, and engage in citizenship in a deep and true way (as do most other countries). Many of these folks have at least a functional grasp of one or more languages other than English—unlike the mainstream US population.

3. I’d encourage several of the posters to get out more. Meet your neighbors. Find people who agree with you, and those who don’t. Have open-ended, nonjudgmental conversations. You may be surprised at what you find. I know I was, when I started doing just that back in the mid-1970s. I have many friends with whom I acutely disagree on politics. Sometimes we argue. Sometimes we find other topics where we have common ground. The way to break down stereotypes is to engage with people.

I’ve done this an an organizer, too–for example, running for City Council on a platform focused on affordable housing, traffic safety, and honest/open/transparent government: “Mom and apple pie” issues that cross all demographics. If I had come out right away with an agenda of peace, economic justice, and environmental restoration (back in the 1980s and early 90s when I was a candidate), I would have been dismissed as “too radical”–but we could build consensus around the need for stop signs and crosswalks at dangerous intersections.

Later, I founded a successful campaign to save a threatened local mountain. Once again, I was able to make common cause with people who vehemently disagree with me on a host of other issues. But they could agree on saving the mountain.

And meanwhile, I go out to coffee with my Republican neighbors when I happen to be free on a Wednesday morning. We have fun, share stories of the neighborhood and its past and present residents, and sometimes get into it about politics.

The person who I disagree most strongly with is a fascinating guy, retired from a career as a TV news cameraman with a major network, including much experience abroad in various hotspots. I consider him a friend, but our views are worlds apart. He is a true Tea Partier, and I am basically a Green who usually votes Democratic since there are no viable third parties in the US. I think the others who attend these gatherings are actually amused when we have at it.

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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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