Archive for the ‘Commerce’ Category
Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
You think writers are the only ones concerned with telling a story? Listen to this.
Earlier this month three of six agency owners and recruiters interviewed by blogger Arik C. Hanson said the ability to tell a story was the leading trait they want to see in PR professionals. They believe storytelling reflects the facility to identify themes and execute a strategy. Yet when many of their peers screen applicants, they ask for experience that exactly matches the job they’re offering. They’re focused on the product, not the process, like the ability to build social networks, negotiate for information or get along with others.
For those in marketing communications, here’s the wake-up call: financial planners have discovered the power of story. In a column for MarketWatch, MIT’s AgeLab Director Joseph Coughlin said the traditional model of financial planning won’t work in these unsettling times. Neither will an appeal to reason through a recitation of statistics. He believes advisers who tell stories that elicit emotion and inspire people to act will achieve greater success–for their clients and themselves.
“We’ve got to be good storytellers to get that emotion, to make us relevant, responsive and realistic for what the consumer needs today to plan for tomorrow.”
Let’s hope the people who hire are willing to make that investment.
Tags: communications, hiring, hiring managers, interviews, jobs, Marketing, PR, public relations, Writing
Posted in Business, Commerce, Culture, Nonfiction, PR, Social media, Writers, Writing | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011
Beauty pays. That’s the conclusion of Daniel Hamermesh, economics professor at the University of Texas in Austin, who measured the economic benefits of looking good.
His conclusions:
- Attractive people are likely to earn about 3% to 4% more than a person with below-average appearance.
- Better-looking people tend to sell more products or attract more new customers.
- White-collar criminals are more successful if they are better-looking.
For us mortals, is plastic surgery the answer? Hamermesh says research doesn’t support that conclusion. “Surgery pays back less than $1 for every $1 spent. But it might make you feel better.”
Tags: appearance, attractive, beauty, customers, income, looks, research, salary, sales, success
Posted in Business, Commerce, Culture, Marketing | No Comments »
Monday, November 14th, 2011
Today’s guest post is from Amanda Kaiser, one of the fresh young minds on the marketing scene. Amanda has worked with some of the heavyweights in the consumer sector and brings a lot of practical knowledge to the trade. Here’s a sample.
This summer I vacationed with my family in Cape May, N.J. If you’ve never been to Cape May think up-scale, cute, sea-side village with very interesting Victorian architecture. At the end of the day we’d take long walks that always led us past a small inn that was being renovated. Maybe renovated is not the correct term – semi demolished would be more accurate. The historic-inn-renovation company placed its beautiful sign out in front of the property like many construction companies do. But at that time the place couldn’t have looked worse – landscaping had been trampled, paint scraped, windows and doors were missing; it was gutted and looking very sad.
Unwittingly the renovation company was probably sending exactly the opposite message to prospective customers than they intended. Instead of saying “Please hire us, we do fantastic work” the overall feel was more like “Want to go through renovation hell? Call us!” Installing their sign just as things were starting to look really nice could have been far more productive.
Many marketing tactics run on auto-pilot so it’s worth regularly revisiting the things you always do and make sure they say what you need them to say, look how you need them to look, happen at the right time and appeal to your prospective customers.
Amanda Kaiser is the creator of The Smooth Path, a blog of simple marketing ideas for small business owners. She is the director of marketing for a non-profit association and has worked for some of the most well-known brands in the United States. When she’s not doing all-things-marketing she’s traveling, hiking, camping and baking with her husband and son.
Tags: Amanda Kaiser, auto-pilot, Cape May, construction, landscape, Marketing, overlooked, renovation, unintended consequences
Posted in Business, Commerce, Culture, Marketing, Writing | No Comments »
Monday, November 7th, 2011
Writing that flows is often based on a solid structure.
Take the piece “Why impulse spending can be a good thing” by Katherine Rosman, who writes the Checks & Balances column about finance and marriage for the Wall Street Journal. The article is designed to read like a short story with comments, unfolding through scenes with increasing drama. We want to determine what happens between Rosman and her husband Joe, who in their struggles to mesh their opposites-attract financial styles have become persons of interest.
The article is structured in three parts. The first details a recent event, the second one that took place a while ago, the third the night the two met. All involve charity auctions. All create an orderly march backward in time, from a seemingly frivolous exchange to a defining moment. Each segment seems ordinary yet together they build toward a quiet but profound insight you’d see in the work of Anne Tyler or Anna Quindlen.
The parts consist of anecdotes, all of which bring to life the article’s theme—that contrary to popular wisdom occasional impulse spending can provide rewards to even the most budget-minded couples. Those mini stories also illustrate a greater wisdom: we can argue about spending but what we really value is not the behavior but the relationship. The real prize isn’t the money, it’s the person.
When I worked as a writing coach for a newspaper owned by the publisher of the Wall Street Journal I studied briefly with the great Roy Peter Clark. Now vice president of the Poynter Institute, Clark taught us to use the tools of fiction writers while rigorously adhering to the facts. Structuring a story that way is more than playing dress-up. It’s a process to present and order events with all of the immediacy and emotional resonance of direct experience.
It’s good to see other non-fiction writers have adopted the storyteller’s technique. Using those tools, Rosman ratchets up the conflict between spouses with a deceptive calm that shows rather than tells about their relationship. The story flows without effort. Even the ending feels natural, a surprising valentine to financial and emotional conservatives everywhere.
Talk about impulse control.
Tags: auction, budget, budgeting, charity, Checks & Balances, column, control, couples, form, impulse buying, Katherine Rosman, marriage, opposites, spending, structure, struggle, Wall Street Journal, Writers, Writing
Posted in Commerce, Culture, Nonfiction, Writers, Writing | No Comments »
Monday, October 31st, 2011
How do you market a traditional brand to an emerging audience? By hiring the people who can build relationships with many cultures. That’s what one of my clients has done with some success. For a look behind the scenes at dealerships that know how to reach new audiences, tag along with one sales rep near LA in this article on my SlideShare site.
Posted in Business, Commerce, Culture, Work of the Week, Writing | No Comments »
Monday, October 31st, 2011
Plastic surgery is no longer for the middle aged.
In the last five years elective cosmetic procedures among patients age 65 and older have rise by 29% while procedures among the overall population fell 17%, according to the Wall Street Journal. Nonsurgical techniques, like Botox injections, accounted for most of that work–88% of cosmetic procedures performed on patients age 65 and older last year.
Why? Competition with younger workers for scarce jobs could contribute to the trend. So could the rebellious belief among boomers that we’ll live as long and as well as we want to, and we might as well look the part.
Tags: 65, aging, baby boomers, competition, cosmetic surgery, facelift, seniors, vanity, youth
Posted in Commerce, Culture, Healthcare | No Comments »
Friday, October 21st, 2011
As the economy stumbles through recovery and more people worry about meeting basic expenses, here’s something you may not hear much about: The IRS says you can contribute an extra $500 to your 401(k).
Contributions to the tax-deferred retirement plans will rise from $16,500 to $17,000 next year as the IRS adjusts those amounts to reflect increases in the cost of living. This is the first increase in the rate since 2009.
Participants who reach the age of 50 before the end of 2012 can withhold an additional $5,500 from their paychecks for a total contribution of $22,500. The catch-up amount has remained the same since 2009.
The AP reports that in 2009 some 33 percent of workers ages 21-64 used 401(k) plans.
The IRS also announced new dollar amounts for a variety of tax provisions that affect 2012 returns filed in 2013:
- The value of each personal and dependent exemption is $3,800, up $100 from 2011.
- The new standard deduction is $11,900 for married couples filing a joint return, up $300; $5,950 for singles and married individuals filing separately, up $150, and $8,700 for heads of household, up $200. The IRS says nearly two out of three taxpayers take the standard deduction.
- Tax-bracket thresholds increase for each filing status. For a married couple filing a joint return, the taxable-income threshold separating the 15-percent bracket from the 25-percent bracket is $70,700, up from $69,000 in 2011.
The question now is whether participants worried about jobs and inflation will have the cash to fund their futures.
Tags: 401(k), contribution, deduction, finance, income bracket, IRS, pension, pension plan, retirement, retirement plan, savings, standard deduction, taxes
Posted in Commerce, Culture, Finance | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 11th, 2011
Two contemporary American authors recommend themselves for their use of the English language, mystery writer Will Thomas and poet Barbara Hamby. They have little in common. Their subject matter and style don’t match. Yet each handles the language with vigor and grace without sacrificing the forward motion often missing in literary works.
In the five novels in which he chronicles the adventures of Cyrus Barker and his assistant Thomas Llewelyn, Thomas writes at a studied rate that matches the pace of the Victorian England he portrays. As narrator, Llewelyn describes action with a sharp ferocity, which is to be expected in mysteries and thrillers. It’s in the descriptions and transitions that the author shines, passages that in lesser hands would read as filler, or asides.
Here Llewelyn describes Irish beauty Maire O’Casey in Thomas’s second book in the series, To Kingdom Come: “With her hair pulled back loosely, she looked fresh out of one of the paintings by the fellow Renoir, who obviously had a passion for redheads. A jolt of electricity ran down my spine as if I were a tree trunk split in half.”
Poet Barbara Hamby abandons quiet passion for the full-throated kind. Here’s the beginning of her tour de force, “Mambo Cadillac,” from her book All-Night Lingo Tango:
Drive me to the edge in your Mambo Cadillac,
turn left at the graveyard and gas that baby, the black
night ringing with its holy roller scream. I’ll clock
you on the highway at three a.m., brother, amen, smack
the road as hard as we can, because I’m gonna crack
the world in two, make a hoodoo soup with chicken necks,
a gumbo with plutonium roux, a little snack
before the dirt-and-jalapeño stew that will shuck
the skin right off your slinky hips, Mr. I’m-not-stuck
in-a-middle-class-prison-with-someone-I-hate sack
of blues.
Remind you of the early short stories of T.C. Boyle? You can hear Garrison Keillor read “Mambo Cadillac” on The Writers Almanac and Hamby’s own reading for the Southeast Review in Tallahassee, available from the iTunes store.
If you like a little kick to your writing, you’ll want to ride with these two.
Tags: Barbara Hamby, Cyrus Barker, librarian, mystery, Novel, poet, slam, suspense, Thomas Llewelyn, Will Thomas
Posted in Commerce, Culture, Fiction, poetry, Writers, Writing | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 7th, 2011
Laura Larsell has posted a thoughtful article on Mashable called “Why Browsing Is So Important to Content Discovery.” In it the librarian and information organizer at Trapit argues that the practice is a crucial component of information discovery.
Today we find information directly through search engines or indirectly through social media contacts, but those processes narrow the chute from the beginning. Larsell says browsing offers value in that it opens us to chance and opportunity before we dig too deeply. “It allows an information seeker to expand organically upon an initial vague, often unarticulated need.”
In a phrase, browsing gives readers the big picture, not just the details, a critical advantage when starting a project. “Browsing gives information seekers a high-level sense of what exists within a collection, while presenting easy entry points to explore the unknown. It also allows for lesser-known works to stand alongside — and compete with — the more canonical ones they resemble.”
Tags: books, browsing, Google, internet, library, publications, research, search engine, Social media
Posted in Business, Commerce, Culture, Internet, Nonfiction, Novel, Social media, Writers, Writing | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 24th, 2011
You remember that scene in “Minority Report” when the character played by Tom Cruise is on the lam in a shopping center. The video display read his retinas and called him by name as it served individualized ads. Marketers knew who and where he was. So did the police.
Last year the Japanese rolled out sophisticated vending machines with touch screens and cameras that work in a similar but more generalized way. “When a person stands in front of the screen, a camera captures his image and a sensor determines the person’s gender and approximate age,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “Based on that reading, the machine ‘recommends’ drinks that fit the customer’s profile.”
It was only a matter of time before companies in North American began deploying the technology. This week the Los Angeles Times reported that the Venetian resort, hotel and casino in Las Vegas has started using facial-recognition technology on digital displays to tailor suggestions for restaurants, clubs and entertainment. While the screens can’t identify you by name they can determine your gender and age—the same as the vending machines in Japan. Kraft Foods Inc. and Adidas have signed on to experiment with the technology.
A group of bar owners in Chicago has taken the concept to the next level by combining facial recognition with cameras and mobile apps to give potential patrons a read on the ratio of men and women in those places.
“The technology works by digitally measuring the distance between the eyes, the width of the nose, the length of a jawline and other data points,” the Times reports. “Law enforcement agencies that use facial recognition — as was done during the recent London riots — compare the measurements against photos in databases. But for most marketing uses, the measurements are compared to standardized codes that represent features typical of males and females in various age brackets.”
Facebook has deployed similar technology. If you hover your cursor over a photo that you just uploaded Facebook will display the person’s name to you and your friends. (The Los Angeles Times provides an article on how to opt-out of the system.) And while it does not use recognition technology, Google has faced a dust-up in Germany over its deployment of street-level cameras to augment its mapping service.
While the move toward the Big-Brother-is-watching-you dystopia of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is gathering attention, it isn’t creating a lot of protest. Both the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have severe reservations about whether such information can be used to identify and track individuals, as in this article by EFF on the FBI’s massive database of personal and biometric information called “Next Generation Identification,” or NGI. And Consumer Reports quotes a study by Carnegie Mellon University that suggests that facial-recognition software can reveal a person’s Social Security number. Yet judging by comments of consumers and lawmakers alike, both groups seem steeped in the naive belief that the technology is as benign as the people who use it.
All of this is done in the name of commerce and convenience but that begs the bigger question — when does this kind of surveillance become an invasion of privacy? Once the province of law enforcement, facial-recognition technology is sweeping into the consumer sector as marketers constantly look for the Holy Grail of advertising — serving messages customized for the individual. That requires the tracking of a consumer’s behavior and location, and the storage and comparison of that data.
Given the recent history of online security breaches and warrantless data searches after 9/11, does this type of marketing violate your privacy? Is the information safe? Are you safe?
Tags: data breach, Facebook, facial recognition, FBI, images, Las Vegas, photos, privacy, spy, vending machines
Posted in Business, Commerce, Culture, Internet, Marketing, Privacy | No Comments »
