Marketing - It Is All About Getting Your Attention - Northern Italian Lady Gets It Right! Umm Does She Ever!


Selene

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Merlin,

Gates used one of the most effective marketing tools--a dramatic product demonstration.

Elevators needed this, too, to take off (see here--sorry but not enough time to search for a better link).

Just think... without that 1854 dramatic product demonstration at the New York Crystal Palace Exhibition, people would still be afraid to get into elevators. No elevators, no skyscrapers. No skyscrapers, no The Fountainhead.

God know where this would have ended. :)

Michael

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Michael, I just felt like clarifying my point because it's likely I've done a poor job of communicating here:

We were talking about safe cigarettes... so let's say I smoke, and I'm on the Internet and I see this banner blu-electroniccigarette.jpg

Now, in an ideal world I'd go. "That looks interesting... I'll look into it." Now, the "looking into" is not going to be going to their website but by going to independent review sites or looking for customer feedback. This is how the free market would optimally work, anyway. Consumers communicating increases the "regulations" of the free market by ditching bad companies sooner and rewarding good companies more often.

The Internet is a world saving invention. What would eventually happen is marketing dies out because products speak for themselves. Word-of-mouth will become the #1 form of advertising, which is how it should be.

In my ideal world consumers demand information before giving up their money, and this helps everybody because it keeps businesses honest and makes competition about quality rather than fake hype and manipulation.

You made that Kony thread, and I'm assuming you would rather a world where people are not stupid enough to fall for that without further investigation.. right?

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Marketing and advertising has grown a lot since I used to be interested/involved.

But, really, where's the fundamental change?

Used to be bill-boards and media - now you find 'bill-boards' (many more) while

driving down the internet 'highway'.

One thing of huge value for me, is the proliferation of consumer-review sites.

Several photographic forums now exist where you can get helpful feed-back and commentary

on x camera, or y lens from keen photographers, worldwide - before (of course) ordering online

from Adorama or whoever.

Maybe nothing changes except the numbers; buyer beware, still applies.

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If the U.S. went back to the gold standard and money was once again rooted in valuable work the benefits of smart consumerism would be much more evident than they are now.

Most of the stuff I've said in this thread comes from the premise that pumping illegitimate money into an economy by any means has incalculable ramifications.

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You made that Kony thread, and I'm assuming you would rather a world where people are not stupid enough to fall for that without further investigation.. right?

Calvin,

Wrong.

I go on the premise that in order to evaluate something correctly, you have to identify it correctly first.

People do not fall for the Kony 2012 video because they are stupid. But you need to study some in order to understand that.

You keep talking about an "ideal" world, and I keep wondering about what kind of creatures would inhabit this "ideal" world--because they certainly would not be human beings.

The few times widespread attempts have been made at your kind of approach, they ended in disaster. For example, we got eugenics at the turn of last century (to perfect the human race to the "ideal" by weeding out the bad apples from the gene pool) and that led to the gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps. And we got the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in communist countries, which was only supposed to last until man became improved enough to live in the "ideal" world they were devising. We have seen how that turned out and it hasn't been pretty.

Nope. I don't agree with your approach at all.

I am for understanding correctly what a human being is, then devising any "ideal" worlds to suit that understanding. In other words, I am for identifying correctly, then evaluating.

Michael

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The few times widespread attempts have been made at your kind of approach, they ended in disaster.

Attempts? I'm not saying anything should be done other than sorting out the U.S. dollar. I mean, inflation is basically a hidden tax, so I guess the real issue is the government's redistribution of wealth. It's impossible to say what could be without government intervention, but I believe it's not just businesses that advance, but consumers as well.

People who fall for that KONY BS are too naive to investigate further, and are prepared to run around the city putting up posters and make a big fuss for a cause that is likely dangerous to America. Call them whatever you want... I think stupid fits.

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Attempts? I'm not saying anything should be done other than sorting out the U.S. dollar.

Calvin,

You misunderstood. I was not talking about economics.

I was talking about your use of the term "ideal world." This concept has three implications. The first is that the world you are talking about essentially means society, not nature, the earth and so forth. The second is that this world of human beings in your conception is not "ideal," but instead flawed and needs fixing. The third is that mankind as a whole can be improved to fit into such an "ideal world." If this last were not the case, how do we get to your "ideal world?

Ah yes... another implication. You "ideal world" is not only suitable for everyone, you are the one who provides such "ideal" standards.

And this is where the danger resides. In philosophy (and religion), there are two main currents on human nature. The first is that man has a specific nature we study and the other is that man has a nature that can be molded (by philosophy, by society, by conditioning, whatever). This is usually expressed as man is imperfect and man can be perfected--although I don't like that way of saying it because it uses incomplete standards (and that is a whole other discussion).

When the "man has a specific nature" folks get their hands on power, you get social constructions like constitutional republics based on individual rights and freedom. When the "man has a nature that can be molded" folks get power, you get democracy and nice sounding things to get them in power, then you get totalitarian systems with mass deaths. They eventually and quite literally go about killing off the "imperfect" ones and letting the ones they are "molding" live.

Since your "ideal world" has nothing to do with human nature as a whole, but instead lops off some universal aspects of it, I don't agree with your conclusions. I don't believe they are possible and I would not want them if they were--because I know the price mankind would pay. History is full of examples.

You say you were not proposing anything to be attempted except to fix the dollar. I say people who promote your approach--that fundamental human nature things would be different in a superior "ideal" world--always pave the way for the bloody dictators who come later.

"Ideal" for me is not the equivalent of lopping off parts of the human brain.

People who fall for that KONY BS are too naive to investigate further, and are prepared to run around the city putting up posters and make a big fuss for a cause that is likely dangerous to America. Call them whatever you want... I think stupid fits.

I say you yourself "fall for" similar techniques as those used in Kony 2012 every waking hour.

For just one easy example (and there are oodles I could cite), when was the last time you bought some thingamajig with money you really needed for something else important because you just had to have the thingamajig right then--and soon after you took it home (maybe a few days later), you put it away somewhere and forgot all about it?

This is the same thing as what is in Kony 2012 working on you. And I say you are not "stupid" for having done that, although you might feel that way when you find the thingamajig several months later and wonder, "What in hell was I thinking when I bought this damn thing?"

Want a good concrete for the thingamajig example? Maybe you don't have this, but I have no doubt you have the equivalent. Do you have a treadmill that takes up too much space and works more like a clothes hanger than anything else? Try to remember what you felt like when you bought it. (Or bread making machine, or special home gardening tool, or course in Sanskrit, or automobile enhancers, etc.)

When you deny that the mental hooks like the ones in Kony 2012 are part of your nature as a human being and call people who fall for them "stupid" and so forth, you become extremely vulnerable to those who know how to use them.

For masters of deceptive persuasion, the person they love the most is the one who says he isn't stupid enough to fall for their techniques. He is their biggest cash cow simply because he turned off his awareness by himself and does not need to be tricked to do so.

A similar thing can be said for political leaders who use deceptive persuasion. They easily get their followers to call outright lies the truth, even when faced by solid contrary facts. Yet these people are not stupid--in fact, they see the truth without a hitch in other contexts.

Michael

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Michael, man has a specific nature alright, and that nature is an inclination to mold his own nature and improve himself.

You can say that everything we do is natural, and that anything that we are not doing would be unnatural and therefor is undesirable, since it would disagree with our nature.

I don't think anyone should help other people improve themselves (nor could they), but they definitely shouldn't obstruct that natural need for self-improvement and growth.

I bought an espresso machine without doing my research first. Won't happen again, because I made sure I understood that what I did was stupid. I'm not normal though; I take things that I do seriously.

I don't believe the trends of marketing and the fact that they have been working are anything but an unfortunate aspect of reality; like the unfortunate urge a mosquito has to fly towards a bug-zapper. That the consequences of popular consumerist behavior have been continually postponed, and that the natural and necessary denouement of such activities has not been allowed to play out to the benefit of humans capacity to plan towards a civilized and prosperous (productive) future, is a tragedy.

My ideal world is one in which everyone tries to create the life they want, rather than distract themselves from the fact that they're living.

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Here's a marketing cookie for you to add to the one you posted earlier:

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Michael

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That's like saying everyone should decide for themselves whether they eat or not. Of course they're going to eat, if there's food.

Meaning: If people are kept unaware of the consequences of their actions, they will not be able to react and adjust to reality the way they would naturally be inclined to.

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