Google Reader Feed: My Shared Items
This was just too good to wait until I came back from vacation, combining my love of signaling and unadulterated hatred of all things Jersey Shore (the show, not the location): Allegedly, the anxious folks at these various luxury houses are all aggressively gifting our gal Snookums with free bags. No surprise, right? But here’s [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: applied signaling, Brands, market signals, signals | 2 Comments »
Joel Spolsky, an entrepreneur and columnist for Inc., wrote an interesting piece last month asking whether his strategy of slow, consistent growth was actually a recipe for failure: I have always believed that there is a natural, organic rate at which a business should grow, and that if we expanded too fast, the wheels would [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Brands, Business, Economics, LinkedIn, Strategy | 3 Comments »
Ana Andjelic channels my thoughts on data- and fact-based decision making in an interesting post on ad campaigns: How can we then decide that a campaign was “better” than another one? We rarely look at a campaign data – partly because the actual metrics data is proprietary and not available to anyone beyond walls of [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Advertising, Brands, data, data-driven world | Leave a Comment »
Kevin Randall at FastCompany pens an interesting piece on the rising tide of sentiment analysis–the players, the technologies, the possibilities, and the current pitfalls. The idea behind sentiment analysis is pretty simple (but the execution is difficult): to identify and code attitudes, whether written or verbal, towards particular topics. The explosion of activity on the [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Brands, coding, data, market research, marketing, Sentiment | 1 Comment »
Sam Becker at Brand New discusses the recent branding and spin-off of AIG’s property-casualty unit. Unlike it’s namesake, the P&C unit turned a $2B profit. The unit is being spun-off in an attempt to generate capital to help pay back the large government bailout of the parent firm. And while the unit itself is doing [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: AIG, Brands, Strategy | 1 Comment »
In another sign that companies and storied brands are being brought down to earth by the current recession, Proctor & Gamble has rolled out a less potent and cheaper version of its flagship Tide product called Tide Basic. The new product costs about 20% less than the premium brand. The discount-brand is seemingly a reaction [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Brands, Proctor & Gamble, Recession | 1 Comment »
I am in the process of fleshing out a post examining of whether professional service firms (PSF) are conspicuously consumed by businesses, much like luxury goods are by consumers. I’ve been wondering to what extent PSF’s can set higher prices based on their brand and any “Veblen Effects” that follow. Are high-end PSF’s subject to [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Brands, Conspicuous Consumption, Professional Service Firms, Status goods | 1 Comment »
Fiction
Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)
Non-fiction
The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball
Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value
The Numbers Game
Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate
Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception
The Rational Optimist
The Quiet American
How Doctors Think
The Wisdom of Whores
Switch
Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
