libertango: (Default)
Seth Godin had a great blog post yesterday. Great enough, and short enough, that I'm going to quote it in full here:

Pushing the spectrum

Marketers have long tried to turn happy events into shopping opportunities. Macy's and Gimbels and others pushed us to see Christmas as a chance to buy gifts. Shopping is right next to happiness on the spectrum of emotions, I guess, just as green is next to blue in the rainbow. They did it to Valentine's day and now, of course, Halloween.

Lately, some marketers would like to push us to move from fear to hatred. It makes it easier for them. We honor and remember the heroes who gave everything, the innocent who were lost, the neighbors who narrowly escaped. A day to hate? I hope we can do better than that.


*^*^*

My only concern is, one could view the push to market "a day to hate" as being the embodiment of another recent post of Seth's: Sell the problem. Alas.

Dumb

Jan. 10th, 2008 12:51 am
libertango: (Default)
Seth Godin has a great post on the business consequences of "dumbing down."

"The thing is, when you dumb stuff down, you know what you get?

Dumb customers.

And (I'm generalizing here) dumb customers don't spend as much, don't talk as much, don't blog as much, don't vote as much and don't evangelize as much. In other words, they're the worst ones to end up with."


So, here's the thing:

Apply this analysis to news media.

And politics.

UPDATED TO ADD: D'oh! Only now have I noticed the most important part. Think about education. I really believe half of our school problems are because we're convinced our kids don't want to learn.

Profile

libertango: (Default)
Hal

March 2022

S M T W T F S
  12345
6789101112
13141516 17 1819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 26th, 2025 09:28 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios