Tom Asacker

• Home
• Tom's books
• About Tom
• Thought pieces
• Contact

Watch highlights from Tom's speeches

 

Goethe on thinking

"Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking."

Is it okay if I think out loud again? Thanks!

• Florida's Supreme Court forbade two personal injury lawyers from advertising their services on a billboard featuring a pit bull with a spiked collar because "there is no way to measure whether the attorneys in fact conduct themselves like pit bulls." Measurement being all the rage in marketing today, I'm sure someone, somewhere is working on it.

• According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American now spends more money on entertainment than on gasoline, household furnishings, and clothing.  The most affluent 20 percent spend more on cable TV, high-speed Internet connections, movies, sports events, and other diversions - $4,516 a year - than on health care, utilities, clothing, and food eaten at home.  A friend emailed me to report (unconfirmed) that 2005 was the first year that people spent more on entertainment than advertisers spent on advertising. Looks like advertainment will be the big marketing buzzword in 2006.

• According to Harris Interactive, 42% of Americans are worried that China will wind up as a more powerful nation than the United States. Hmm. Well, as of September 2005, the U.S. government owes China $252.2 billion (and growing).

• Last quarter Apple's iTunes online store (Long Tail) surged past music retailers Tower Records, Sam Goody, and Borders to become the seventh-largest music retailer in the U.S. Yup. The Internet is a fad.

• Wal-Mart is selling upscale items on its website; e.g. a 60-inch plasma TV ($7,688) and a 1 3/4-carat yellow diamond ring ($9,988). But I thought they were a low-end retailer. Nope (see page 90 in A Clear Eye for Branding to understand why).

• Society affects commerce affects society affects commerce . . . ad infinitum. For example, a new study found that most adults can no longer receive injections into their butts because the layer of fat there is too think. The study recommended that doctors buy longer needles.

• "I am an information warrior and a perception manager." So says John Rendon, head of the Rendon Group, a private consulting firm that helps market wars and regime change to the American public, in Rolling Stone.  One of his best ideas, he says, was "embedding" American journalists with U.S. troops during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. That let the Pentagon "take control of the story." Now, though, Rendon says, news organizations are back in control, which is why the coverage has soured. "We lost control of the context. That has to be fixed for the next war." Wow! You see. Marketing doesn't kill. Marketers do!

• Half of cigarette smokers who are diagnosed with cancer continue to light up, according to a new study. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, thank to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

• According to the NY Times, Big Pharma increasingly finds drug salespeople in the ranks of perky college cheerleaders. Imagine that. Appealing to rational physicians through their libidos.

• I was thinking about last Sunday's New York Times magazine article about Texas Tech's coach, Mike Leach, and the subsequent blogs by Tom Peters and Grant McCracken that liken Leach's strategic moves on the gridiron to value innovation in the marketplace. Wonderful analogy, and I'd like to see follow up postings when No. 2 total offense (Tech) loses to No. 2 total defense ('Bama) in the Cotton Bowl. Final score: 24 to 21.  One person with a good idea eventually gets clobbered by a bunch of people whose only idea was to plagiarize it. We call this capitalism.

Posted December 16, 2005
Email this post     

The comments to this entry are closed.