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John Mackey, the legendarily combative CEO of Whole Foods Markets (NASDAQ: WFMI) is back. Back to blogging, that is after an 11-month self-imposed hiatus while the SEC considered whether his two thousand + Yahoo! posts under the anagram “rahodeb” (borrowed from his wife Deborah Morin) violated securities regulations. Equal parts enfant terrible and éminence grise, Mr. Mackey seems surprised by all
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It seems that having a nice town that people like to visit, or even a state that draws holiday and business dollars, just isn’t enough these days. If you really want to matter, you’ve got to have a “Destination Brand”. So locales as recognized as San Diego (Active Relaxation), as large as California (Find Yourself Here), and as sexy as Mackina
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In these modern times, there’s still a kitchen item you can give a woman as a present that counts as a real gift, rather than a gender stereotyping offense. I found out the hard way at Christmas ’06 that it’s not an immersion blender. No, it’s the KitchenAid stand mixer – a product whose throwback design and positioning hit a number of consumer sweet spots and command a serious price premium at retail.
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"13 Year-Old Boy Hires Hookers to Play XBox at a Motel." This is a recent headline from Asylum.com, a site aimed at that discerning cohort of twentysomething males whose interests span the gamut of testosterone-laced content, from the violent to the prurient. Oh yes – and spo
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"I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." -- Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine, 1789 Every year the fifty courts in Los Angeles County handle 2,700,000 new cases. This gives the system the ignominious distinction of being the largest court in the country. To fuel this formidable juggernaut of justice, Los Angeles calls 2.68 million residents every year for jury service – the equival
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There always has been and likely always will be a contentious relationship between creatives and number-crunchers. Market surveys, and even focus groups, which require more art than science to analyze, are often seen by designers and writers as a gauntlet to be survived rather than an opportunity to gather unbiased information. Some advertising firms like Crispin Porter & Bogusky now eschew focus groups e
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A former boss once asked me if I knew what the most important word in the English language was. “Perspicacity?” I offered keenly. “Persiflage?” He shook his head and with great sobriety said: “Authenticity.” I can think of other words that might be more important (love, defibrillator, and plunger come to mind), but since that day I’ve seen authenticity become a buzzword among branding agencies and their clients. It makes a lot of sense. Generation X is filling the “prime earning year
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I just read an interview with Samuel Culbert—a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and the author of Beyond Bullsh*t—arguing that how people talk to each other at work affects the success of their businesses. Culbert asserts that “bulls—t has become the etiquette of choice in office life,” and that it can undermine a workplace because “it makes people feel beaten up, deceived—even dirty.” He defines “bulls
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A recent study reports that the average North American adult’s attention span for print ads is 1.8 seconds. One-point-eight seconds! That’s less time than it’s taken you to read these three sentences! Now you won’t find this study in a medical journal, as it was a qualitative research effort undertaken and guesstimated by yours truly, but marketing experts do agree that consumers have less patience for and more skepticism toward traditional advertising than ever before. So why are some companies
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