Come Again?

So someone asks the following question on LinkedIn: "Is branding more on the product or the emotional attachment between the customer and the product?" To me, the answer is obvious - the point behind branding is to tell people who made something, so that whatever marketplace reputation a person or company has built up can be attached to a novel offering. In other words, branding is how a party proclaims: "I/we made this." (Of course, there are exceptions.)

Clearly, I'm not a marketing person. Most of the answers that people have posted have been directed towards linking a customers emotion's to a product, one person even positing that "what matters isn't how consumers think of the product, but how the product makes them think of themselves." Okay, whatever. I thought that more people would focus on the more concrete aspects of products and branding, but the discussion seemed to quickly turn to marketing people justifying their salaries and being mainly self-congratulatory.

And then someone said (in part) the following: "We also use certain products in symbolic forms according to our beliefs. So marketing would have to play on the cultural affects of the product." Huh? What does that even mean? And I'm as confused by affect versus effect as anyone else, but I can't even begin to fathom how either word fits into that second sentence. I never thought that I'd see an example of Poe's Law applied to marketing.

But this is why I stay away from marketing conversations, unless I have a buzzword bingo card with me.

Meanies

Today's David Horsey cartoon at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer shows a smarmy-looking man in a black suit labelled House GOP having raided the pan of a mother and her children begging for money on a sidewalk. Their sign reads "Federal poverty programs."

"Mom!" the woman's young son shouts, "He just took our food money!"

"Be a patriot, kid!" House GOP replies. "Somebody's got to pay to balance the budget."

I enjoy David Horsey, in no small part because for a political cartoonist, he's a clear and technically-adept artist, able to put emotion and movement into his characters in such a way that his drawing tells excellent stories. But, like many political cartoonists these days, he's a political chauvinist, wearing his politics on his sleeves, and clearly favoring one side over the other.

I understand the basic point - that it seems heartless to seek to cut social programs rather than raise taxes on wealthier people. And it plays into the stereotype that Republicans, despite their avowed disdain for anything that smacks of "class warfare," consistently side with the wealthy against the poor and middle class. And, let's be honest, the combination of new found Republican zeal for budget cutting, their faith that business will be the answer to America's problems and the lingering ghost of the disaster that was "trickle-down economics" doesn't do them any favors in this regard.

It's easy (perhaps too easy) to paint the Republicans as looking for new ways to injure the poor. It's certainly a lot easier than believing that there's nothing politically motivated about their policy choices. But it's also easier than presenting a more nuanced view of what's happening. Although I'd be mightily surprised to find that the programs targeted for cuts aren't mainly those things supported by Democrats, I'd also be very surprised to find that there was any actual intent to injure people. While I'm not the sort to think that social safety nets should be done away with as a matter of principle, I do understand that a reasonable case can be made that they aren't the only or best way to help people. (Republicans also suffer from the idea that they subscribe to a supposed Ayn Randian worldview that seeks to blame the poor for their circumstances, and thus are hostile to hand outs, hands up and anything in between.)

I'm not sure that I understand how you create a cartoon in which the man tells the family that he's acting in what he understands to be their (and everyone else's) long-term best interests, and not have him come off any better than he does as a brazen thief. But if political cartooning is nothing more than illustrated partisan commentary, what purpose does it serve, other than to be just another outlet to preach to the converted and irritate the non-believer? Do we really need yet another vehicle for polarization? Another mirror for the faithful to see their prejudices and judgments reflected back at them?

Auditory or visual, such is the nature of echo chambers. They fill with information, yet you can learn nothing from them.

The Standard P.O.V.

So I'm browsing around on Slate, and in the "More From The Web" sponsored links section, I find the following: "A trillion-dollar missed opportunity – enough to pay U.S. deficit (from ExxonMobil's Perspectives)." This was worth raising an eyebrow. Yes, I know I'm a cynic, but I was curious to see what sort of self-serving profiteering that ExxonMobil would put forth as the lost potential solution to the nation's budget woes. Because surely, by letting the modern incarnation of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil company have what IT wants, we ALL benefit. (It's true. I read it on the Internet.) Rather than click through the link given, which I knew would redirect me through some advertising server somewhere which was just waiting for the chance to load up my computer with enough tracking cookies to sugar crash my processor, I moused over the link, and transcribed the URL into my browser.

And was greeted by a request for a username and password. Which was perhaps the one thing that I didn't expect (it does seem sort of strange to sponsor a link to a site that's not available to the public). Oh, well. I'm sure that ExxonMobil will find another way to share its perspective with me.

The Magic of Politics

The good news is that there is a formula for getting out of poverty today. The magical steps begin with finishing high school, but finishing college is much better.
Juan Williams Enough pg. 215

Although it's clear when you read the entire passage that Mr. Williams isn't saying that his simple anti-poverty formula is literally magical, in that it invokes some sort of non-scientific causality, he does view it as pretty much a slam dunk, the sort of thing that would clearly and spectacularly successful. But its the fact that Williams is actually willing to use the term "magical" that makes him stand out. Political philosophies are often described in ways that trigger charges of magical thinking from critics, and with good reason. The proponents of policy choices are often (quite understandably) loath to make any mention of the potential downsides and pitfalls of their suggestions. Along with this, they often describe the potential upsides as inevitable, utopian and utterly foolproof.

For example, the Libertarian Party of Minnesota quotes several passages from "Short Answers to Tough Questions" by Dr. Mary J. Ruwart in the Frequently Asked Questions section of their website. In the "Crime and Restitution" section, a simple model of Criminal Justice is laid out. Criminals are required to make restitution, and the criminal justice and corrections systems fund themselves by assessing fees: "Prisoners could work off their room and board in the prison or pay for it out of their own resources," and in the case of bad debts, "The courts and police would probably write off bad debts, and factor them into their fees, just as businesses do today. Since the criminals pay these costs, you won't!" Huzzah! Everybody (but the criminals) wins!

Except if the whole system is run on the money that can be collected from lawbreakers, and it system determines who is a lawbreaker... I can't be the only person who sees a massive conflict of interest there that could easily lead to the sorts of corruption that we currently associate with the Third World. I mean, incentives matter, right? Sure, you could put in an oversight system, but if the answer to "Who would pay for it?" is what I think it is... Of course, more mainstream political parties, like the Democrats and the Republicans can be just as bad. I don't mean to pick on the Libertarians - their choice of Questions and Answers simply made them a convenient example.

It's said that there are three things that you never talk about at dinner parties: Sex, Politics and Religion. Sex is easy - the United States is a more Puritanical nation than we like to think of ourselves, and so talk about sex squicks people out pretty quickly. Politics and Religion, on the other hand are taboo because of the difficulty of having really constructive conversations about what are basically articles of faith - there's about as much evidence of the efficacy of most policy positions as there is for the existence of apples in the Garden of Eden. But a willingness to move politics away from magic and more towards the scientific method - or at least evidence based study, would do a lot to remedy this.

Are You Sure You Want To Do That?

I'm starting to think that too much "New Media" causes brain damage. Is there any chance of calling a moratorium on video racist rants, disaster trolling videos and mocking catastrophes in tweets? Can we get a week, maybe?

Granted, it's not like these sorts of things are new. We've been engaged in a desperate race to produce a bigger idiot for what seems like ages. So this isn't the first time that anyone's said something so moronic, you wonder who they borrowed the I.Q. to tie their shoelaces from. But now people seem to think nothing of making statements into what are basically permanent repositories for what they say. Once you post something on YouTube, Tweet it or post it on a weblog, for that matter, it never really ever goes away... all it takes is one chap to be quick with a "download" button or some copy-and-paste keystrokes, and scrubbing the Internet for all Eternity won't manage to wash away the taint.

I don't doubt that I've said some stupid things on this weblog. I do try to be careful though, because my name is in the URL for this thing, and I don't want something I say now to become a millstone around my neck in 2025, even though I know that I don't have a particularly large audience. You'd think that people who're actively looking to reach out to as many people as possible would put as much thought into things.

Edited --

I almost forgot... we should add threatening to kill people because they said stupid things on the Internet to the list.

Sigh.