Betterness by Kawika Holbrook

The Blind Leading the Bland

Scient and iXL will climb into the same life raft to survive the rough market waters. “Scient and iXL expect a range of synergies to result from the proposed business combination and implementation of the combined company?s business plan,” reads the press release. Ah, synergies: Do together what you can’t do separately. And now they want to compete with the Big 5? Have a nice swim.

Chalk One Up for Big Blue

Is IBM’s iconic appropriation of the peace, love and Linux symbols ad creep? Sure. Is it effective? Absolutely. Not only did Big Blue garner millions in free press for a pittance (stencils, chalk, and some underpaid production assistants), but the campaign succinctly positioned IBM against The Establishment (read: Microsoft and Sun) while alerting IT departments that IBM might know something about open source software. I’m an Apple man myself. And Lord knows we’re choking on marketing messages. But give IBM credit: They bet a billion dollars on Linux and created a campaign that’s lasting long after the chalk is washed away.

Replies: one comment so far

I still think IBM came away a winner on it’s sidewalk campaign (even though I disagree with corporate-sponsored vandalism), but here’s another take from The Industry Standard.

“On paper, the company’s marketers did everything right. They matched message and method (who better to appreciate a guerilla technique than open-source programmers?). Then they found the right venue – a tech-savvy city that slouches left, presumably toward open source.

“So what went wrong? Well, IBM, for all its replication of the “No More Prisons” approach, seems to have misunderstood Wimsatt’s strategy. The strength of “No More Prisons” was that within weeks after Wimsatt pointed his first spray-paint can, graffiti artists from Vancouver to Washington, D.C., picked up their own and began spreading his message for him. Wimsatt’s campaign didn’t just throw down the seeds of grassroots marketing; it planted little saplings of activism. The strategy didn’t just talk at people, it got them involved.

“Sure, the IBM campaign drew some free press for the company, but hardly of the meaningful kind. Most of the articles covered the vandalism controversy; few of them hashed out the virtues of open source.”

posted by kawika at 11:13 p.m. on wednesday, august 01, 2001

Like to Watch?

When blogging, mixing business and pleasure can be voyueristically satisfying. Then again, it can make you queasy. That’s why I’m thinking of razing www.kawika.tv (note the dot-tv extension) and rebuilding the home page like this mockup, inside pages like this mockup, giving the whole thing a broadcasting theme, and using CSS2 instead of tables and RSS for syndication. Then I can dedicate fluxray.com to work and kawika.tv to play. Tune in, won’t you?

Best of the Best

So, some of the Webby winners actually lost. Still, this year’s list of nominees makes a great bookmark best Web practices. Better still are last year’s 5-word acceptance speeches—catchy concision at its finest.

Irrational Spending Rationalized

You are not prone to error, irrationality, and emotion about your money. You always act in ways consistent with your own financial well-being. And have no bias toward the status quo, causing you to put premiums on new risks and casualy discount familiar ones. Why? Because you live in the neoclassical world of economics, where the market prices are always right and you adjust your rate of spending with each fluctuation in your portfolio. Of course, you certainly give no credence to a small band of renegade economists promoting heresy on the scale of Galileo. Right?

Replies: 2 comments so far

Gosh, Kawika, you’re so brilliant. Thanks for sharing.

(posted by Kawika at 03:16 p.m. on sunday, july 22, 2001)

Business 2.0 covers similar ground:

“...when people and economics intersect, listening, learning, and acting differently don’t automatically follow—largely because, contrary to conventional wisdom, economics isn’t about data and numbers. In Shiller’s view, economics is about emotion and psychology…. What drove the astonishing run-up in stock prices in the latter half of the 1990s had little to do with earnings or dividend growth. Instead, it was a reflection of human psychology—a kind of collective belief that almost anything was possible and that financial gravity did not necessarily apply. (And by the way, Shiller notes, the same forces of human psychology can drive the economy into a downward spiral, with equal disregard for economic data.)”

In other words, economics is now mob psychology.

“The behavioral power of human forces that compel people to do what they do will triumph. If the basic force is optimism or greed, then markets will remain exuberant. If the basic force is pessimism or fear, then no earnings or dividend increase will assuage it.”

(posted by Kawika at 01:23 a.m. on tuesday, august 28, 2001)

Lightweight Fat Matters

I’m no programmer or designer, but this pedantic mush from Business 2.0 magazine—Web pages must “weigh” no more than 40 to 50 kilobytes—ignores common sense. Yes, Google’s 12KB home page is smaller and loads faster than Nickelodeon’s 638KB Flash-encrusted home page. But guess what? Nick pushes pabulum to kids (stick around and play) while Google searches sites for adults (find it and split). It’s fat, not weight, that matters.

Anti-Marketing May Be Habit-Forming

We pigged out with Webvan, gorged with Kozmo, and looted with Napster. And now, apparently, some of us lament our exploitation of their desperate munificence. So much so that our relationships with brands can be linked to our perceptions of business models, burn rates, and other variables. “eBay is a rewarding experience because each visit confers a sense of cozy complicity in a business model that works,” according to Salon.com. “The antithesis of the classic dot-com marketing model, eBay built its reputation not out of ad dollars or free logo mugs, but out of users’ actual experiences.” How? By cultivating habituation over mindshare (not to mention providing a marketplace for Pets.com sock puppets).

No-Name Brand Building

A store so self-aware, it doesn’t even need to sully it’s logo with the company name? Apple’s strategy? Do for computer shopping what Barnes & Noble did for book browsing and what Starbucks did for coffee. “The McLean [Virginia] store is an emblem of the Apple aesthetic,” opines The New York Times. “But as Apple has learned … design may stimulate sales, but it is no substitute.” Still, you couldn’t script a better branding brief than 11-year-old Dominic Buckner: “Some of the computers at CompUSA you can look at but you can’t touch,” he told The Times. The Apple store is more like an arcade. “It’s nice that they want you to have an experience with the computer so you want to buy one.”

Shakedown Crackdown

Last week, he reported how Microsoft quickly caved into pressure over Window XP’s “feature” of inserting its own contextual hyperlinks (called Smart Tags) into every Web page. Today he reports on another “feature,” forced registration, which (among other odious requirements) requires owners of Windows XP to “beg the company” to re-activate their operating system if new hardware confuses it. As long as Microsoft keeps shaking down consumers, I hope Walter Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal will be there to shake things up. Clear writing, cogent arguments, consumer focus—Mossberg’s style and substance make him the best and most influential tech writer out there. [Some external links may require registration.]

Declaration of Independunce

A Gallup poll found only 85 percent of Americans know why we celebrate the Fourth of July. Only 76 percent of Americans know England was the country from which the U.S. declared its independence. Of course, with middle school text books claiming the equator passes through the southern United States and singer Linda Ronstadt is a silicon crystal, is this news? [Sigh.] Happy birthday to us.