My apologies for not explaining why I haven’t been posting. I shattered a wrist badly in a fall 13 days ago and I’m still not able to keystroke.
A great Duke surgeon, a plate and 13 titanium screws and soon I’ll be good as knew. More later but no it wasn’t off my Harley.
In fact if you must know it was in a bar fight down in Raleigh defending Durham’s reputation – if there hadn’t been three of them I would have been okay…right Harvey?
More later…
For all I know, although the location is in Durham, the company mailed similar announcements to residents of other communities in that celebrated mall’s catchment area, covering much of the state. Equally smart for those outside Durham would have been “Ann (heart’s) North Carolina!”
According to a survey by the organization representing chief marketing officer, 49% believe localized marketing such as this is essential to business growth and profitability and another 21% believe it is key to differentiation and competitiveness.
Arriving in my mail on the same day was an example of a business that isn’t as marketing savvy as Ann Taylor. It uses the name of the jointly-owned airport, Raleigh-Durham which isn’t located in either Durham or Raleigh but midway between.
Most likely though, using the airport name was a substitute for the name of a huge, obsolete media-measurement designation, Raleigh-Durham-Fayetteville spanning 22 counties dozens of communities and parts of three states.
Durham and Raleigh co-own a great airport but there is simply no such place named Raleigh-Durham. Some use it to mask their geographic uncertainty and others out of careless disregard for how important specific locations are to businesses and consumers.
The 22-county media designation, stretched to drive the price of advertising as high as possible, may be relevant to the owners of media outlets but it has absolutely no relevance to consumers. In fact, surveys show that it is irritating.
Located in Downtown Durham, the parent company of The Arts Institute of Raleigh-Durham made the same mistake. Unfortunately marketers at Education Management Corporation based in Pittsburgh, PA may have failed to take advertising courses taught at the for-profit chain’s forty-five campuses. While proud to be home to an AI campus, the mistaken nomenclature is a source of irritation and an insult to Durham residents, not to mention confusing to potential students.
Demonstrate the propensity of some marketers to dig themselves into a hole and then keep on digging when it comes to their ego and in this case to the embarrassment of people who work there, the parent company plastered the errant name on the side of a building facing fans at Durham Bulls Athletic Park and search engines often bring up a paid result that is even worse, “Raleigh Art School.”
While some marketers like those for Ann Taylor make their advertising all about customers, for others it is all about them and once they step in the bucket, they pretend they did it on purpose. Now, there’s an approach that will endear your product to consumers!
Marketers need to grasp the fact that Nearly 8 out of 10 residents prefer to characterize where they live by the name of a specific city, town or country. The next most popular category is a specific neighborhood. Only a tiny sliver prefer a general area or region and no one uses the name of an airport or a designation for media measurement.
Potential shoppers and the general public also appreciate knowing specific and accurate locations. No one likes being tricked by confusing references.
Using the name of a community on marketing materials will appeal to residents there. Using the name of an area designated by media outlets may endear a marketer to the owners of the outlet but no one else.
If marketer gets it right, impressing customers with the name of their community is a great way to show that the are all about their customers. If they want to show they don’t care, just substitute the name of a jointly owned airport or a media market designation or a general area.
Republicans appear to oppose “class warfare,” unless they are waging it!
Representative Paul Ryan, Republican from Wisconsin, titled his speech to the Heritage Foundation last week in part as “Rejecting Fear, Envy and the Politics of Division.” While there is much for which to recommend reading or listening to the speech at that link, I couldn’t help but remember a line on page 25 of the budget proposal he authored stating that it will:
“…ensure that America’s safety net does not become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.”
As David Stockman noted as a former senior official in President Reagan’s very conservative Republican administration and also a former Republican member of the House of Representatives, wronte in an April op-ed in the New York Times:
“Trapped between the religion of low taxes and the reality of huge deficits, the Ryan plan appears to be an attack on the poor in order to coddle the rich.
To the Democrats’ invitation to class war, the Republicans have seemingly sent an R.S.V.P.”
Ryan’s seeming hypocrisy aside, a line caught my eye in an excellent essay published in the same newspaper last Sunday by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen co-authors of the new book published in October entitled Great By Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck – Why Some Thrive Despite Them All:
“The difference between Mr. Gates [Bill Gates] and similarly advantaged people is not luck. Mr. Gates went further, taking a confluence of lucky circumstances and creating a huge return on his luck. And this is the important difference.”
Calling it a “Return On Luck” (ROL, the authors make a good point that people like Gates “zoom out to recognize when a luck event has happened and to consider whether they should let it disrupt their plans.” But it isn’t that simple and fortunately Gates is very articulate about the dramatic need to improve education and to reinvigorate upward mobility.
People in their 30s tell me horror stories of friends and older relatives, many even from very conservative, values-based cultures such as Mormonism, who do just what Ryan was describing in that line above from his budge proposal. Some phony business expenses to cheat on taxes, others go on Medicaid while going to college, others milk unemployment benefits until they are dry before looking for work and some cavalierly recommend foreclosure to friends as an easy way to game the system.
Maybe the safety-nets have become too complex and instead of simplifying them to root out fraud, bureaucrats unwittingly add layers of complexity that make them harder to detect. However, starving fraud out of the system through the draconian budget cuts Republicans seek are far more likely to thwart only the innocent, the hard-working, those legitimately pursuing the American dream.
There are just as many stories of people using forms of “corporate welfare” to achieve a phony upward mobility, many documented by Pulitzer-prize winning investigative journalist David Cay Johnson in his book Free Lunch including the insanity around the prescription drug benefit passed during the last Republican-era that was not only un-funded, fueling much the current deficit, but grossly inflated healthcare costs by prohibiting government from seeking bids from companies to provide drugs for the program.
Where in Ryan’s plan is the effort to address that end of the so-called “class-warfare” spectrum?
I’m not sure staying “lost in the 1960s” as many Democrats seem to recommend is the answer. And the chart shown as an image in this blog definitely confirms that retaining the Republican zero-sum policies of the 1980s would be worse.
Occupy Wall Street is more than a talking point and much more than metaphorically using the greed of the financial services industry, unbridled by deregulation. From those I’ve met and talked to, I am convinced that the movement is about the need to dramatically overhaul the tax code and reinvigorate the post-WWII policies which were focused on growing the middle class as well as the cultural values as the heart of the American dream.
Exploring ways to do this is anything but “class warfare.”
