Refuge

I'm in southern Spain and there's light and warmth. A tranquil place high up in the mountains, perfect for big thoughts.

Living in a Material World

If you can't beat them, join them. In this .pdf I have compiled two items of interest to anyone wanting to nurse their yuppie lifestyle, based in Berlin. A car and an apartment. At the time of writing the DKK/EURO exchange rate was around 7.5, so the car costs around DKK 132.000 and the apartment costs around DKK 2.200.000.

When done shopping furniture for your Berlin-apartment, you can always go and meet your friends in the Liquidrom, listen to underwater music and relax with a healthy mango-drink. Berlin, you are wonderful.

Small-world Networks

In the book "Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks" we return to Stanley Milgrams experiment of sending out letters to random people, asking them to return the letter to a specific person somewhere, under the restriction of sending to personal relations only. This led to the notion of six degrees of separation, that everybody in the world is connected to everybody else in on average six friend of friend-steps.

Later research has shed some additional light on the social structure of human societies. The distribution of the number of relationships people participate in would intuitively follow a bell-curved distribution, as it happens for height and IQ measures. The numbers tell a different story. It follows a power law: A few persons have an enormous social base, while many have a few relations. How is this different from, say, height? In practice, many people might be 1.7 m tall, a few might reach 2.1 m. If height followed a power law we wouldn't be surprised if, now and then, we met some people measuring 4 m or in rarer cases 100 m.

Could this be an argument in favor of viral marketing? Instead of spending resources on mass media, some companies could identify the hubs of our social fabric and start a dialogue.

This kind of marketing has already been raised as an ethical-political issue in Denmark, as some companies have given away brand name clothing to primary school pupils perceived to be associated with high social status.

Wonder Why Their Sales Falter

Upon a re-reading of Kotlers marketing classic Marketing Management (9th ed.) I stumbled across a few passages, in which he links a taxonomy of market orientations with some unusual organizations: Churches and political parties.

"The product concept leads to the kind of marketing myopia we discussed ealier in this chapter. Railroad management thought that railroad users wanted trains rather than transportation and overlooked the growing challenge of airlines, buses, trucks, and automobiles. Slide-rule manufacturers thought that engineers wanted slide rules rather than calculating capacity and overlooked the challenge of pocket calculators. Churches, department stores, and the post office all assume that they are offering the public the right product and wonder why their sales falter. These organizations too often are looking into a mirror when they should be looking out of the window." p. 18.

Imagine priests in a board room meeting, listening to analysis of the most recent focus group output, outlining what grand questions are on the minds of the young and old. Should they really continously modify prayers and preaching to match up with the most recent developments on the sin market?

"[...] The selling concept is also practiced in the nonprofit area by fund-raisers, college admissions offices, and political parties. A political party vigorously “sells” its candidate to the voters. The candidate stomps through voting precincts from early morning to late evening, shaking hands, kissing babies, meeting donors, and making speeches. Countless dollars are spent on radio and television advertising, posters, and mailings. The candidate’s flaws are concealed from the public because the aim is to make the sale, not to worry about postpurchase satisfaction. After the election, the new official continues to take a sales-oriented view toward the citizens. There is little research into what the public wants and a lot of selling to get the public to accept policies that the politician or party wants." p. 19

The theoretically superior concept is the marketing concept that integrates marketing activities with all aspects of the organization. As political parties, such as the Blair/Labour party, are learning more sophisticated marketing thinking we might one day give birth to the marketing concept based democracy. So much for idealism. Remember, the customer is always right.

Goodbye Vernon

Goodbye my beloved Vernon neighbours, goodbye you wonderful, crazy americans. I hope Ceona's shoulder will heal and that her aquarium will stay beautiful, I hope Mike finds love, that Gary eventually sees a flying saucer, that Daniel will succeed in school and grow up to be an energetic young man, and that Jeannie will stay strong.

My adventures might one day bring me back to your exciting and dangerous country.