Einman and the Lehman prophecy
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David Einhorn - a well-known US Fund manager - gave a speech to several hundred people at the Time Warner Center New York on May 21 this year. Investors pay up to $3,250 for a seat at the conference.
The following is the last para of a report on it in an article published June 15 in New York magazine:
‘His firm had a short position on Lehman Brothers, he maintained, not only because Lehman had fudged its numbers but because its recklessness had put the financial system as we know it at grave risk. He ended with a call to federal regulators to “guide Lehman toward a recapitalization and recognition of its losses—hopefully before federal taxpayer assistance is required.”If only someone had listened.
You can reach the full article here:http://nymag.com/news/businessfinance/47844/
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The myth of USP
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USP (Unique Selling Point or Unique Sales Proposition) is a useful concept, but is a poor description of a brand – and, inappropriately applied, fails to deliver what many brand owners want it to achieve. That’s because it can encourage narrow thinking about what a brand is, and how best to promote it.
A lot of original brand thinking was done by ad agencies and I would argue that USP is a construct of the advertising mindset. Advertising requires a process of reducto ad absurdum, because it requires simplicity and single-mindedness of thought to get its message across in the limited time or space available.
But brands aren’t simple. They are complex and our reasons for inter-acting with them are often multifarious. The example I use in the
In other words brands are about a sum of knowledge - all the little things that we know and deem important to us. And it is all the touchpoints that confirm or force us to confront that knowledge.
The model I used to use was ‘brands as diamonds’. The top face might be the one we notice (the USP) but what makes it shine is all the other facets and how well polished they are.
Have you ever looked at the underside of an Innocent Smoothie bottle? To go so far as writing little messages there (I particularly liked”If you are reading this you must be really bored”) without ever talking about them in your marketing shows a brand that really understands itself and its consumers.
More recently I have been intrigued by the idea of brands as Velcro – lots of little hooks that people attach on to. A colleague - James Gordon-Macintosh - introduced me to this and has written about it here>.
I suspect that the truth lies somewhere in between - brands aren’t just about lots of little hooks - but they aren’t just about the ‘one big thing’ either.
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Beware the upgrade - mobile phone contracts are a rip-off anyway
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The last post got me thinking about mobile phone contracts. If you think about phone minutes as a commodity (like pork bellies in Trading Places), then what you’ve done is agreed to buy a set number of minutes for a price that’s fixed for a year or eighteen months. Lucky you.
Because that’s where the rip-off comes. If you don’t use your minutes, you get charged anyway. If you go over your minutes, then you pay at an extortionate rate. So, you might think, the only way to win is to get it right and use up your minutes and no more. But even then, you’d be wrong. What happens if the price of your commodity goes down? You lose out, because you’ve agreed to pay that price for 18 months. And you could lose out big (my current contract is 25p a minute, and there are people out there doing 10p a minute or less).
Ah, but the price might go up. Unlikely - there’s too much competition (and regulator pressure) for mobile rates to go up. So we are all losing out big time. No wonder we keep getting free phones and upgrades - it’s so they can lock us in to another over-priced contract.
As they say, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. .
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A great Land Rover viral
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I’ve just been sent this great viral created by Land Rover. Click here to see it and click on ‘watch’ once you get onto their site.
It’s a great example of a what makes a viral - original and compelling content, presumably created specifically for the web, with alternative endings that make you want to look at more. Great bit of casting for the lead.
They could have done a bit more with the out-takes, even though the dog and ball one is reasonably funny.
Sneeze it on!
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