Ion Enache

Ion Enache

Nov 23 / 10:51pm

VOTE

If you don't vote because you're trying to teach politicians a lesson, you're tragically misguided in your strategy. The very politicians you're trying to send a message to don't want you to vote. Since 1960, voting turnouts in mid-term elections are down significantly, and there's one reason: because of TV advertising.

Political TV advertising is designed to do only one thing: suppress the turnout of the opponent's supporters. If the TV ads can turn you off enough not to vote ("they're all bums") then their strategy has succeeded.

Source

Nov 23 / 2:10pm

Sizes

[...] one marketing strategy to get people to buy more stuff is to manipulate sizes. In the case of clothing, companies often use “vanity sizing,” labeling clothes as a smaller size than they really are. Food serving sizes have followed a form of vanity sizing of their own, with portions getting larger over time. Ben Ostrowsky sent in a great example of changing norms of consumption, highlighting the enormous increase in what is considered a standard serving of soda.

Source

Nov 6 / 12:19am

Social Economics

At a minimum, businesses are starting to realize that checking-in, Tweeting, Liking, and sharing are forms of social currency as well as a personal endorsement. Recognition is the least that a business can do to attract and incentivize social consumers. Introducing special offers and rewards is how we amplify these lucrative endorsements, extend brand reach and transform businesses into social objects where everyday people contribute to ongoing presence in social streams. The benefits are not only mutual, they are empowering.

Read the entire piece over at Brian Solis

Oct 29 / 1:37pm

Digg Saga

Digg’s collapse has become a cautionary tale for so-called Web 2.0 companies in Silicon Valley, even the current crop of superstars, like Facebook and Twitter. The basic problem is that these new-media companies don’t really have customers; they have audiences. Starting a company like Digg is less like building a traditional tech company (think Apple or HP) and more like launching a TV show. And perhaps, like TV shows, these companies are ephemeral in nature. People flock in for a while, then get bored and move on. [...]

Link

Oct 29 / 12:18pm

Web 3.0

La prochaine étape sera, semble-t-il, un Internet devenu "sémantique" c'est-à-dire "au lieu de simplement afficher le contenu d'une page, la machine pourra en comprendre le sens et faire des liens avec de l'information de même nature se trouvant ailleurs sur le réseau Internet", explique Alexandre Cayla, doctorant en Sciences de la Communication à l'Université de Montréal.

 

Nouvelobs

Oct 25 / 9:06pm

Momentum: a political marketing fiasco?

When people say a particular candidate has momentum, what they are implying is that present trends are likely to perpetuate themselves into the future. Say, for instance, that a candidate trailed by 10 points in a poll three weeks ago — and now a new poll comes out showing the candidate down by just 5 points. It will frequently be said that this candidate “has the momentum”, “is gaining ground,” “is closing his deficit,” or something similar.

Each of these phrases are in the present tense. They create the impression that — if the candidate has gone from being 10 points down to 5 points down, then by next week, he’ll have closed his deficit further: perhaps he’ll even be ahead!

There’s just one problem with this. It has no particular tendency toward being true.

 

Entire report available here.

Jun 23 / 8:54am

It's not just a car, it's an experience!

But what about the car itself? Many of us drive huge thirsty cars solo Monday-Friday because we hope to pile the whole family in on the weekend and do something fun. So we select a car based on 20 percent of the usage. The other 80 percent of the time it’s too big, too hard to park and thirstier than we’d like. What we need is a different model. Instead of buying your car from one of the car companies you could buy a package for your transportation.

Alex Bogusky

May 23 / 1:13pm

Swimming in a rubbery situation

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Having in mind the remark Raiffeisen Bank's CEO Steven van Groningen made on his blog, Edward Lucas of The Economist talks about the unusual power the rubber stamps develop under (post-)communism:

Under communism, rubber stamps were a kind of currency. If your documents didn't have the right ones, they were worthless. And getting one made was very difficult: it was part of the regime's apparatus of repression to control tightly who was allowed to exercise any kind of institutional power. [...] Steven van Groningen has a nice piece about the way in which the rubber stamp mentality shaped business life in that country even after the collapse of communism

Source

May 18 / 8:33pm

Guilt free computing with Granola

Granola makes computers more energy efficient without slowing them down. Granola is safe, easy to use, and allows your computer to operate with the performance of a Ferrari when speed counts but also with the efficiency of a Prius so you don't waste energy.

http://grano.la/

 

May 9 / 6:50pm

Random election mishap

The voting system and the electorate have botched this election. […] In Chingford, an Independent candidate decided to do something frightfully amusing and changed his name to ‘None of the Above’. But because of the way names were presented, he appeared as ‘Above, None of the’ – at the top of the ballot.

- http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2010/05/08/john-lanchester/gravitas-frenzy/