According to a recent report, more than two-thirds of recent immigrants to the USA send money home regularly. The worst-paid, poorest people in the country manage to save enough to send some back to the old country. The US Ambassador from El Salvador says that the two million Salvadorians in the U.S. sent enough money home to account for 13 percent
of the GDP of his country.
At the same time, nearly two-thirds of American households are in debt. Many of them in serious debt. If the housing market falters, all those triple mortgages and home equity loans go under water, which means that people will have to sell their houses to get the money to pay off the loans, and the cycle starts.
Several people have pointed us to the rich calculator, that reminds you just how insanely rich your indebted best customers are. There are millions of Americans who make more than $200,000 a year. That’s 2 million dollars a decade, five or ten million dollars over the course of a career. Add it up, then look at the number. All you can do is shake your head and say, "where did it all go…"
October 26, 2006
It’s not about hype. It’s about non-compensated third parties writing stuff like this: Cool Tool: Dr. Brown’s Baby Bottles. Could (would) someone say this about your stuff?
Neat slide show by the brilliant Rob Walker is here.
October 25, 2006
The first is fear.
The fear that you’ll have to implement whatever you dream up.
The fear that you will fail.
The fear that you will do something stupid and be ridiculed by your peers for decades.
The fear that you’ll get fired.
The fear that there will be an unanticipated backlash associated with your idea.
The fear of change.
The fear of missing out on the thing you won’t be able to do if you do this.
The second is a lack of imagination.
I believe that every single person I’ve met in this profession is capable of astounding creativity. That you, and everyone else for that matter, is able to dream up something radical and viral and yes, remarkable. So why doesn’t it happen more often? Sure, fear is a big part, but it’s also a lack of imagination.
Basically, most people don’t believe something better can occur. They believe that the status quo is also the best they can do. So they don’t look. They don’t push. They don’t ask, "what else?" and "what now?" They settle.
Fear is an emotion and it’s impossible to counter an emotion with logic. So you need to mount emotional arguments for why your fear of the new is the thing you truly need to fear.
As for the second issue, just knowing it exists ought to be enough. Once you realize you’re settling, it may just be enough to get you wondering… wondering whether maybe, just maybe, something better is behind curtain number 2.
The early adapters will use it. Actually, they’re adopters, not adapters. The mistake in wording represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how most markets work. People don’t adapt to what you make, they adopt it. They can’t be forced to adapt, so they won’t.
Half my advertising works, I just don’t know which half. Actually, it’s closer to 1% of your advertising that works, at the most. Your billboard reaches 100,000 people and if you’re lucky, it gets you a hundred customers…
Let’s do a focus group, they’ll decide. A focus group is supposed to focus you, not them. It’s supposed to lay out ideas and issues that mean little to the group and plenty to you. If you’re not prepared to focus, better to not go.
That’s a wacky idea. Actually, doing what you’re doing now is wacky. Because what you’re doing now is certain to become obsolete, possibly sooner rather than later. Just ask my old boss!
We need a bigger marketing department. Probably, you need everyone in the organization to do the marketing… from scratch. More brochures aren’t the answer.
October 24, 2006
So, Virgin Records put out a greatest hits record from a band called Cracker. A band they kicked off the label. The group saw it coming and recorded their own greatest hits album (same songs) and released it the same day.
The indie edition is ranked 22,000. That’s approximately 30 times the sell rate of the Virgin edition at 66,000. Read the reviews: Amazon.com: Greatest Hits Redux: Music: Cracker.
It’s hard to be big if you think big. It’s easy to beat the big-thinking competition if you focus on your loudest, proudest fans.
October 23, 2006
Rob points us to: Joel Makower. This is a pretty sophisticated linguistic analysis of eco-marketing. Worldview really is everything.
I found myself on the Jersey side of the Hudson, riding past a row of new townhouses overlooking New York City. Each townhouse had a single carport facing the road.
As I rode past, I noticed that every single carport, more than forty in all, had a similar car parked in it. Either grey or silver or a mix of the two. Either a lower-model Mercedes or more likely, a Toyota or a Honda. Every single one. It wasn’t until the 40th unit that I saw a red car, and a few later that I saw a pickup truck.
This is the power of demographics. This is the power of data mining.
Your choice of car shouldn’t tell us anything about what sort of neighborhood you’d like to live in, or who you will vote for in the next election. The kind of clothing you wear should have no influence at all on the kind of wine you prefer. But it does.
I don’t know which came first, the car or the townhouse, but the co-incidence of the two is unmistakeable.
This matters. It matters because the marketers at the townhouse ought to seriously consider a co-promotion with certain car dealers, and it matters because it opens a window for marketers. If people who buy novels also buy red wine, marketing your red wine in a bookstore might not be so dumb.
If you’re marketing a product or service in a cluttered marketplace, it may cost too much or be too difficult to reach the right person at the right time. Marketing red wine in a bar is intellectually compelling, but awfully expensive. But if you understand the data mining implications of the other habits of your typical prospect, you can reach those people somewhere else or sometime else.
For example, when I do a search on "grey toyota new york", there is plenty of unsold Google inventory, which means you can buy clicks here really cheap. So why not run an ad that says,
LOOKING FOR A GREAT PLACE TO LIVE?
This violates some of the precepts of permission marketing. It’s not anticipated. But it is likely to be personal and relevant, and even better, you don’t pay unless someone clicks.
Will this work for you? I have no idea. The chances that you’ll find the perfect match are unlikely. But if you do, the pay off can be significant.
Linda McCartney, beloved dead vegetarian, has a line of frozen entrees at my local market.
Robert Ludlum, well-known dead thriller writer, now has a new novel out. (the fine print on the copyright page says that someone else wrote it, but not who–I’m not sure if the McCartney entree mentions whether or not Linda cooked it from beyond…)
If you’re a famous chef, that means you’re not really a chef any more. You’re a TV personality/entrepreneur.
Walking down the supermarket it’s easy to feel like you’re in a bookstore. Bookstores always used to be about people–individuals who wrote the books. Now, we’ve got Steve and Jeremy making ice cream, Emeril and Rao making sauce and, of course, Ben, Jerry and Paul making various snacks and treats.
It’s no longer about celebrity as endorser. Now, it’s about celebrity as provider. You don’t just get their face… it’s as if they made it for you.
We don’t need another Lexus or Accelant or Verizon. Apparently, we need Frank to do our accounting and Tom to crack our backs… if you’ve got a skill, you’ve got a shot at building a brand. Possibly a lot farther afield than you ever imagined. And not necessarily for the massest of mass markets. There are already medical practices in New York where patients never meet the famous doc.
October 21, 2006
Robert’s new book is worth a look if you design just about anything for just about anyone.Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design.
