http://www.vukutu.com/blog marketing thinking, marketing doing Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:49:26 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The International Herald Tribune carried an article about [tag]viral marketing[/tag] and counter-viral marketing in US Presidential races last week.  The attackers and defenders have been at this game for a couple of centuries, only the technologies have changed. http://www.vukutu.com/blog/2008/08/viral-marketing/ Recently, I posted about probability theory, and mentioned its modern founder, Andrei Kolmogorov.  In addition to formalizing probability theory,  Kolmogorov also defined an influential approach to assessing the [tag]complexity[/tag] of something.   He reasoned that a more complex object should be harder to create or to re-create than a simpler object, and so you could "measure" ... http://www.vukutu.com/blog/2008/08/complexity-of-communications/ A key problem for forecasting demand for new products is that people keep thinking up new uses for technologies.  Who would have thought, for example, that mobile phones could be used by knitters.               (Photo thanks to Not Martha) http://www.vukutu.com/blog/2008/08/knit-one-purl-one/ Managing creative talent is always difficult, but locking artists in battery farms seems somewhat extreme. [caption id="attachment_59" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Kuntjil Cooper: Minyma Kutjara"][/caption] http://www.vukutu.com/blog/2008/07/how-to-manage-creatives-not/ One of the key ideas in the marketing of high-tech products is due to Eric von Hippel of the MIT Sloan School, the idea that lead users often anticipate applications of new technologies before the market as a whole, and even before inventors and suppliers. This is because [tag]lead ... http://www.vukutu.com/blog/2008/07/putting-the-tea-in-it/ Over at "This Blog Sits", Grant McCracken has a nice post about a paradigm example often used in mainstream economics to chastise everyday human reasoners. A nice discussion has developed. I thought to re-post one of my comments, which I do here: "The first point -- which ... http://www.vukutu.com/blog/2008/06/banking-on-linda/ The New Zealand-born economist, Bill Philiips, is best known for identifying an empirical relationship between a country’s inflation rate and its unemployment, the so-called Phillips curve.  However, before becoming an economist, Phillips had been an engineer, and in 1949 he built one of the first models of a national economy, the ... http://www.vukutu.com/blog/2008/05/macro-economic-models/ One of O. Henry's short stories has a character who refuses to say where he is from: "I've been around the world twelve times," said he. "I know an Esquimau in Upernavik who sends to Cincinatti for his neckties, and I saw a goat-herder in Uruguay who won a prize in ... http://www.vukutu.com/blog/2008/05/a-cosmopolite-in-a-cafe/ The growth of alternative trading systems competing with traditional stock markets has been a phenomenon in financial markets over the last decade.  The Financial Times has a nice article on the competition in Europe from these new marketplaces, claiming they typically compete on  speed, capacity and cost.   As it happens, they ... http://www.vukutu.com/blog/2008/04/competing-on-speed/ Statistician Dennis Lindley wrote a book called "Making Decisions" which included the stunningly-arrogant sentence: "The main conclusion [of this book] is that there is essentially only one way to reach a decision sensibly." He justifies this outrageous claim, contrary to all human experience and a moment's reflection, by saying that, ... http://www.vukutu.com/blog/2008/04/sexapedalianism/