Your Marketing Exam

Audible.com offers seven different books with the title The Long Road Home.    For valuable prizes, explain what this says about (a) the practice of book-titling; (b) the demographics of the Audible.com audience.

Fn.: None, as it happens, is the book I am looking for.

Am I Old Fashioned or What? Kindle Pricing

Folks at Digitopoly, channeling Matt Yglesias, are exploring a(n alleged) puzzle in pricing: should Amazon sell Kindles cheap and charge a lot for content?  Or vice versa?

Now I know I'm a codger.  Nobody seems to be conceptualizing in terms of what I thought was the ancient maxim, i.e., "give away the pipes, sell the bubbles."   Or is this maxim so discredited that no one need speak of it any more?

Footnote:  This new blog is getting more buzz than any introduction I remember (I'm a fan). I wonder how it will look in a month?

Marketing and th Dark Night of the Soul

"In the real dark night of the soul," wrote F.Scott Fitzgerald, "It is always three o'clock in the morning."   On this line, I agree with Keith Humphries that watching TV in the middle of the night is a pretty depressing experience but I think he has it backwards.   We learn from such lugubrious inquiries, Keith says:

(1) You are not all right the way you are (i.e., you are fat, lonely, unattractive, out of work, poor)

(2) There is a product you can buy that will immediately make you all right

But watching TV at the lonely hour is not the cause of self-contempt; it is the consequence.  Nobody has to tell you that your life is screwed up;you knew that already or you wouldn't be here.  That's why you are a secure for a cure.

It all makes me remember the late Hugh Slate, LA lawyer and the proprietor of the first bankruptcy mill with which I was ever closely acquainted.  Some thought Hugh was a shyster and I recognize a fair basis for that belief: there is good reason to suspect that any lawyer who advertises on TV is a shyster. But I have another opinion: I think  was just an early master of mass marketing and economies of scale.   I do remember his ads, where he'd repeat, with his rich Tennessee accent (as a commentator remembers it): "we make bill collectors leave you alone, and that means leave you alone."

 
Got it? Now go and get some sleep. And call me in the morning.

Afterthought:  I suppose the counter would be the idea that "three o'clock is not a good time to start anything, whether morning or afternoon."  And BTW, yes, Keith said four o'clock, not three, but same difference.

Defensive Update:  You were watching, Buce?  Got some self-contempt issues, have we?  No, not really, but I've always been a patchy and inconsistent sleeper. 

Costco Marketing: Make 'em Beg

I'm back from one of my periodic forays to Costco. I'm basically a believer--lots of good stuff at high quality. But I never go there for anything more than a simple prescription refill but what I find myself wandering the aisles slump-shouldered and sad-eyed, looking, looking, looking for--whatever I am looking for. It's never in the same place twice. You won't find a clerk to ask and if you do, the chances are s/he'll tell you--oh, it used to be right here but we've stopped stocking that. Indeed, "we've stopped stocking that" is one of the most hopeful phrases in the Costco liturgy prasebook because it is pretty good index that they have not stopped stocking that, and that you will find it right around the corner.

Wiser heads than mine will say: suck it up, big guy! This the price you pay for low prices. Oh, I suppose so, but I think there may be a more sinister undertone. That is: I'm guessing tht somebody down at the University's market research operation told them that a secret to their success is to keep customers humble--meek, a little off stride, with a feeling that they don't really deserve to find what they're looking for. As a market strategy, it works great for prostitutes; why not at out most beloved big-box retailer?

Crank on the Broomstick

Crank offers a first lesson in marketing and enterprise organization:

Years ago I met a well-to-do man who told me how his struggling immigrant family put him through college.

“Mom and Dad owned little New York corner deli. Mom hung a kitchen broom next to the cash register. As each customer checked her stuff out, Mom would add in the price of the broom.

"If a customer balked, Mom would say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I thought that was your broom,’ and she’d give the money back, but customers didn’t catch her often. Well let me tell you something, that broom sent me and my brothers to college.”

It's a good first principle except--they sell broomsticks in a deli?

Markets in Everything -- VT

Carpetbagger has a good post up on how the American Family Association is using the VT shootings as a marketing opportunity. I’ve done my best to keep out of the snark game on VT, actuated by some residual shred of human decency and also figuring that most of what I say would have been said a thousand times elsewhere anyway. But let me offer one wrinkle I haven’t noticed elsewhere. That is: AFA and the chorus are treating all this as a visitation of God’s justice on Godlessness. I don’t know much of anything about VT except that (a) it sounded (and still sounds) like a pretty nice place; (b) it’s a Virginia state school; and (c) it is tucked back in the Appalachians.

Now, what are the chances that VT is a center of Godlessness? Okay, granted it is not Pat Robertson U. But Area Connect lists 48 churches—all apparently Christian, if you count Mormon. I don’t know quite what to compare with but it seems like a pretty impressive layout for a town of 39,573 (link). I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that VT students rank high on almost any index of church participation (apparently the shooter himself had some sort of church tie, but I suspect we don’t know enough about that to press it very far). That is, if God has any kind of campus visitation schedule, I wouldn't be surprised to find that VT has long been high on his regular route. Seems to me that a really ticked-off God would have found more to suit his impulse for vengeance here.