No Shock...Values Matter When Marketing

In The Benefits of Marketing to Values Abny Santicola, assistant editor, Inside Direct Mail and Target Marketing, writes:

"According to Ken Beller, co-author of the book "The Consistent Consumer: Predicting Future Trends Through Lasting Values," understanding the cultural environment in which people's values are formed gives you a "lens of perspective" on how they view the world." (continues)

Analyzing history and the thousands of significant events that would effect the way society was behaving during a given time led the authors to see clear changes in society that caused value sets to shift. These shifts resulted in delineations that form the five value populations highlighted in the book: Patriots, Performers, Techticians, Believers and Transformers.

(continued)
Each value population is different and responds to different marketing approaches due to the events that helped shape their values, posit the authors, who suggest marketing to these values rather than past purchase behavior.

"These are emotional triggers that cause people to react," says Beller. "In any marketing and certainly in direct mail, what we're looking for is triggers. What will trigger somebody to act?" According to Beller, while past behavior can show what did trigger somebody at one point in time to make a purchase, it is not necessarily what's going to trigger them in the future. "It just happens to be a random event at times," says Beller. "As opposed to if you focus on their values and you market to their values not only in content, but in format."

"The Consistent Consumer: Predicting Future Trends Through Lasting Values" (Dearborn Trade Publishing, $25) can be purchased at www.amazon.com.

There is Always a First Time

So here I am at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas and who would have guessed... I agree with Sam Donaldson. I'm still shaking my head over that but it doesn't stop there. I also agree with Jeff Greenfield. Now that's down right scary. Well, I agree with Jeff's (may I call him Jeff?) thoughts on bloggers, of which I am a fledgling participant.

So what's all this agreement about? Network News! Read all about their comments given here at the NAB convention...

Requires a trial, free registration.

Book Title Speaks for Itself

The Psychic Sasquatch and the UFO Connection

(Note: I did not ghost write this book.)

How's Your "Simulated Annealing"

Have you ever suspected that a lot of what passes for doctoral dissertations and published scientific papers in academia these days is just so much jargon, thesis-ese, and gobbledygook? (Or is it just me?) Well here's confirmation...

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) -- In a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific conference.

The paper was titled: "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy."

Here are a couple of gems from the bogus paper:

"..the model for our heuristic consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning"

AND...

"We implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented with opportunistically pipelined extensions."

I want one of these...

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Courtesy of the Michael Jackson Trial...

More instances of the words "lick" and "licking" than I ever hoped to see in a single news story...here...if you must.

My Political Clout

Well, a few days ago I came out in favor of abolishing Daylight Savings Time. So in response to the awesome power of my influence, Congress is considering EXTENDING it.

That's right. Two more months per year of a bad idea. No need to thank me. Happy to be of service.

Putting an End to Speculation

As the Cardinals prepare to sequester themselves to elect the next pontiff, I'd like to personally remove my name from consideration. I will not run if nominated and will not serve if elected.

I cite, as justification for my reticence, my poor grasp of Latin; a well-documented fallibility in discerning the will God; and my overall non-Catholic-ness.

(Note: Any white smoke coming from my chimney this week should not be construed as anything other than my disposing of some old tax receipts.)

Downloads at 1 Billion Bit per Second?

Cable companies are ready to bring you Internet speeds 16-times faster than the current download rates, according to an article in today's USA Today.

Lot's of new applications and services will rush in to take advantage of the new speeds, but one obvious implication for Christian television program producers is the ability to finally deliver a decent viewing experience online. That is, screen boxes can get larger and the image sharper.

For me, Strong Bad emails and multimedia presentations "powered by The Cheat," will download instantly. This alone will result in big productivity gains for me.

For Non-Profits: More Scrutiny, Regulation

Various pieces of legislation currently floating around on Capitol Hill would increase the level of scrutiny currently directed at tax-exempt organizations. Some of these proposals include mandatory annual audits, mandatory review of tax-exempt status every five years, and more assertive enforcement and penalties for Form 990 problems.

Fun, eh?

And there's much more. Many of the proposals will increase the paperwork burden on non-profits and steeply increase direct and indirect compliance costs.

Frankly, all this was my greatest concern about President Bush's faith-based initiatives. For non-profits, the quid pro quo for greater access to federal funds is exposure to calls for greater oversight and scrutiny.

It's time to keep an eye on Congress (and have a good accountant).

A New Low for CBS News

After more than 20 years of involvement in news and media, I have wearily come to expect outrageous bias, distortion and ax-grinding from the MSM (mainstream media). But this morning a report from CBS radio news managed to shock even me.

The report focused on SFC. Paul R. Smith who was to be posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor by President Bush later today. Sergeant Smith displayed extraordinary heroism two years ago in Baghdad, Iraq?saving the lives of more than a hundred of his fellow soldiers and losing his life in the process.

Here's the steaming pile of journalism that came out of my car radio...

The female CBS reporter (didn't catch the name) was interviewing Sergeant Smith's 11-year old son, David. Her question to the little boy? "Does having President Bush award this medal make up for losing your Dad?"

Young David meekly replied, "I'd rather have my Dad back."

Of course he would. What a manipulative and dishonest question. What lazy reporting. What filth.

What the ilk of this CBS reporter would never think to ask is, "Are you proud of your father? Given that he gave his life serving his country and saving the lives of others, are you glad that he's being honored by the President of the United States?"

Or better yet, leave the poor, grieving kid alone rather than cynically using him to score cheap points against the hated Bush. But it seems that brand of decency and intellectual honesty is hard to come by in a CBS newsroom these days.

Rethinking Daylight Savings Time

You'll be relieved to hear the Holland family has successfully sprung forward without injury or incident.

Because we attend church on Saturday night, and have done so for years, this annual handcuffing of the hands of time never affects us as much as it does those poor, tradition-shackled masses doing the Sunday-go-to-meetin' thing.

But is this bi-ennial to-ing and fro-ing with the clock really necessary? Writer, John J. Miller thinks not. He has a point.

I want my hour back.

Jonah Goldberg on the Passing of Pope JPII

"Though I am not a Catholic, I can muster many emotions at the the thought of John Paul II passing away. But grief really isn't chief among them. The man has been suffering for a long time and he has endured that suffering with greater dignity than most of us could dream of mustering.

He lived a long life of great courage and conviction, acting nobly when acting otherwise would have been much easier and less dangerous. Through his actions and his example he left the entire world a better and safer place than when he left it. When his time comes, be it in hours or days or whenever, few will say he hadn't done more than his fair share. This is no tragedy. His life isn't being brought short by the hand of man. There's no cause for rage. But there's room for gratitude and the sort of remorse one feels when the world is made a little less by the loss of someone it sorely needed. So why overly grieve for a man who is surely worthy of reward in the next life?

Perhaps the answer is simple, because it is human to do so."

Well said, Jonah. DH