
From Switched
New York, in our humble opinion, has the only truly functional mass transit system in the country. This graphic, which compares the maps of every subway system in America, shows why. Most subway systems, as you can see, are built like spokes radiating out from a central hub. This makes it easy to travel to the center of the city. But the center of the city is an outmoded destination. And, the people in the vast pie wedges formed between the spokes are virtually transportation-less. New York, on the other hand has subways that cross each other, making many more areas accessible. Though, to be fair, it’s hard to compare New York to any other American city.
It's my first time see the whole subway system of the US in one map. I noticed the difference of New York City, it's system are like a web, everywhere are connected and reachable. The value of the subway in NY maybe not just where it located, it's a system bring people everywhere without driving a car. That's impossible for the rest of US.
from Good
I've spent the last few months looking at marketing textbooks. I'm assuming that they are fairly representative of textbooks in general, and since this is a topic I'm interested in, it seemed like a good area to focus on.
As far as I can tell, assigning a textbook to your college class is academic malpractice.
They are expensive. $50 is the low end, $200 is more typical. A textbook author in Toronto made enough money from his calculus textbook to afford a $20 million house. This is absurd on its face. There's no serious insight or leap in pedagogy involved in writing a standard textbook. That's what makes it standard. It's hard, but it shouldn't make you a millionaire.
They don't make change. Textbooks have very little narrative. They don't take you from a place of ignorance to a place of insight. Instead, even the best marketing textbooks surround you with a fairly non-connected series of vocabulary words, oversimplified problems and random examples.
They're out of date and don't match the course. The 2009-2010 edition of the MKTG textbook, which is the hippest I could find, has no entries in the index for Google, Twitter, or even Permission Marketing.
They don't sell the topic. Textbooks today are a lot more colorful and breezy than they used to be, but they are far from engaging or inspirational. No one puts down a textbook and says, "yes, this is what I want to do!"
They are incredibly impractical. Not just in terms of the lessons taught, but in terms of being a reference book for years down the road.
In a world of wikipedia, where every definition is a click away, it's foolish to give me definitions to memorize. Where is the context? When I want to teach someone marketing (and I do, all the time) I never present the information in the way a textbook does. I've never seen a single blog post that says, "wait until I explain what I learned from a textbook!"
The solution seems simple to me. Professors should be spending their time devising pages or chapterettes or even entire chapters on topics that matter to them, then publishing them for free online. (it's part of their job, remember?) When you have a class to teach, assemble 100 of the best pieces, put them in a pdf or on a kindle or a website (or even in a looseleaf notebook) and there, you're done. You just saved your intro marketing class about $15,000. Every semester. Any professor of intro marketing who is assigning a basic old-school textbook is guilty of theft or laziness.
This industry deserves to die. It has extracted too much time and too much money and wasted too much potential. We can do better. A lot better.
From Seth's Blog
It's great to see the education combine with technology in the future, bring practical and efficient learning environment. But another issue is the copyright, how to make life more convenient but not offending the intellectual property?
Enjoy free general admission for you and a guest to hundreds of museums and cultural venues nationwide. Saturday, September 26, 2009
How?Present the Museum Day admission card to receive free general admission at participating Museum Day locations. The admission card is available in the September 2009 issue of Smithsonian magazine or downloadable via this site.
Microsoft, home of the Zune, has just announced that they're going to launch Bing, a rebranding and reformatting of their search engine. So far, they've earmarked $100 million just for the marketing.
Bing, of course, stands for But It's Not Google.The problem, as far as I can tell, is that it is trying to be the next Google. And the challenge for Microsoft is that there already is a next Google. It's called Google.
Google is not seen as broken by many people, and a hundred million dollars trying to persuade us that it is, is money poorly spent. In times of change, the rule is this:
Don't try to be the 'next'. Instead, try to be the other, the changer, the new.
If Microsoft adds a few features and they prove popular, how long precisely will it take Google to mirror or even leapfrog those features?
With $100 million, you could build (or even buy) something remarkable. Something that spread online without benefit of a lot of yelling and shouting. Something that changes the game in a fundamental way. The internet works best when you build a network, not when you buy a brand. In fact, I can't think of one successful online brand that was built with cash.
Stupid strategy! I think people would like to seek for new thing instead of collect different versions of the copy.
There are so many social networking sites right now, they all have slightly different function or connection, attract different group of people or both. Maybe "Bing" could looking for another new service, break a new path.
Some people send text with their iPhones, and some play games. The artist Jorge Colombo created this week’s cover for The New Yorker with his.
Mr. Colombo drew the June 1 cover scene, of a late-night gathering around a 42nd Street hot dog stand, entirely with the iPhone application Brushes. Because of the smears and washes of color required by the inexact medium, it comes off as dreamy, not sharp and technological.
“The best feature of it is that it doesn’t feel like something that was done digitally; quite the opposite,” said Françoise Mouly, the art editor for The New Yorker. “All too often the technology is directed in only one direction, which is to make things more tight, and this, what he did very well, is use this technology for something that is free flowing, and I think that’s what makes it so poetic and magical.”
Mr. Colombo bought his iPhone in February, and the $4.99 Brushes application soon after, and said the portability and accessibility of the medium appealed to him. He began the scene by beginning with the buildings’ structure, then layering on the taxis, neon lights, hot-dog stand and people. (A video of the process is available at newyorker.com beginning on Monday.)
It “made it easy for me to sketch without having to carry all my pens and brushes and notepads with me, and I like the fact that I am drawing with a set of tools that anybody can have easily in their pocket,” he said. There is one other advantage of the phone, too: no one notices he is drawing. Mr. Colombo said he stood on 42nd Street for about an hour with no interruptions.
“It gives him an anonymity in the big city that an artist with the easel wouldn’t have,” Ms. Mouly said.
“Absolutely nobody can tell I am drawing,” Mr. Colombo said. “In fact, once I was doing the drawing at some place, and my wife was around, and they asked her why did I have to work so hard? I seemed to be always on my iPhone sending messages.” STEPHANIE CLIFFORDLuxury goods are needlessly expensive. By needlessly, I mean that the price is not related to performance. The price is related to scarcity, brand and storytelling. Luxury goods are organized waste. They say, "I can afford to spend money without regard for intrinsic value."
That doesn't mean they are senseless expenditures. Sending a signal is valuable if that signal is important to you.
Premium goods, on the other hand, are expensive variants of commodity goods. Pay more, get more. Figure skates made from kangaroo hide, for example, are premium. The spectators don't know what they're made out of, but some skaters believe they get better performance. They're happy to pay more because they believe they get more.
A $20,000 gown is not a premium product. It's not better made, it won't hold up longer, it's not waterproof or foldable. It's just artificially scarce. A custom-made suit, on the other hand, might be worth the money, especially if you're Wilt Chamberlain.
Plenty of brands are in trouble right now because they're not sure which one they represent.
The comparison of these two is interesting. It's true that the brand should have their own position, and identification. Once they figure out the position of their product, then can do more successful strategy of marketing.
FOOD takes a provocative and unconventional look at areas that could have a profound effect on the way we eat and source our food 15-20 years from now.
These investigations, like other probe projects, examine the possible consequences of various (long-range) social trends and 'weak signals' emerging from the margins of society. In the case of food, this involved tracking and interpreting issues like the shift in emphasis from curative to preventative medicine, the growth in popularity of organic produce, implications of genetic modification, land use patterns in growing what we eat, the threat of serious shortages, and rising food prices. The result was an extension to Philips Design's ongoing design probes program with three new projects; Diagnostic Kitchen, Food Creation and Home Farming.
PING-PONG Dining Table designed by Hunn Wai. LINK
"PING-PONG Dining table harks back to the origins of table-tennis with its duality of both being a table fit for dining and playing on. What started off as impromptu after-dinner amusement mimicking tennis in an indoor environment for upper-class Victorians became an international phenomenon with rules and standards. This is an official-sized game table with a DuPont Corian surface CNC machine-routed with French Rococo patterns interjected with Ping-pong iconography filled with gold lacquer, supported by stately hand-lathed timber legs. In the middle, a long rectangular vase filled with dainty blossoms does double-duty as a game-net and a table floral arrangement. Reinstating grandeur and pomp with neo-classical inspired embellishments , with a twist in material by using the hi-tech marble-like Corian, the PING-PONG dining table creates a remarkable conceptual and lifestyle statement in the true heart of the home, the dining area."
Well, if you define marketing as advertising, then it's clear you need the product first (Captain Crunch being the only exception I can think of... they made the ads first.) This great clip from Mad Men brings the point home. If the Kodak guys hadn't invented the Carousel slide projector, Don Draper could never have pitched this ad.
But wait.
Marketing is not the same as advertising. Advertising is a tiny slice of what marketing is today, and in fact, it's pretty clear that the marketing has to come before the product, not after. As Jon points out, the Prius was developed after the marketing thinking was done. Jones Soda, too. In fact, just about every successful product or service is the result of smart marketing thinking first, followed by a great product that makes the marketing story come true.
If someone comes to you with a 'great' product that just needs some marketing, the game is probably already over.
Source from Seth's Blog