Wednesday, January 11, 2012

The Week from AxSA, 11 January 2012










Dateline: 11 January 2012
AxSA Factoid of the Week
06 January 2012
The calendar year 2011 began with strong fears that inflationary pressure would take hold in our slowly recovering economy, but those fears did not prove true. Concerns about U.S. debt also faded, as investors maintained a strong attraction to Treasurys in the face of concerns over Europe and the ebbing of hyperactive growth in Asia. In fact, as investment assets, U.S. bonds like the 10-year finished the year with 16.7% returns - a performance that outmaneuvered oil and gold, both of which returned only returned 13.9% and 8.9%, respectively.


From the "Monday Morning Memo"...
09 January 2012
"Every morning, in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion, or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle, or it will starve to death. It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you'd better be running." (Unknown author)


News & Commentary
Pricing Strategies
Why Do All Movie Tickets Cost the Same?
The Atlantic Monthly
Uniform pricing buy theater owners does have its pros and cons...Read More

New Internet Pricing Rules Spark Jump in Customer Bills
The Globe & Mail
In Canada, regulators have opened a Pandora's Box on the issue of bandwidth, and now Internet customers are experiencing increased costs for usage...Read More

Leadership & Management
Nine Things Business Owners Should Never Say
Inc. Magazine
There are certain conversations that you should only have with yourself, and here's why...Read More

Passion: The Fuel of Persistence
The John Maxwell Co.
Passion enables leaders to carry out their dreams, and it is a quality that must be harnessed...Read More

Marketing
Too Much Buzz
The Economist
Though it is an excellent tool for reaching your customers, social media does offer the risk of overexposure...Read More

Economy
ECB Needs to Do More to Prevent Euro Collapse
Financial Post
The ratings agency Fitch is predicting a "cataclysmic" collapse of the euro, if the central bank does not take action...Read More

AxSA's Reading Forward
By Martin Lindstrom
Book Description:
Marketing visionary Martin Lindstrom has been on the front lines of the branding wars for over twenty years. Here, he turns the spotlight on his own industry, drawing on all he has witnessed behind closed doors, exposing for the first time the full extent of the psychological tricks and traps that companies devise to win our hard-earned dollars.

Picking up from where Vance Packard's bestselling classic, The Hidden Persuaders, left off more than half-a-century ago, Lindstrom reveals:

• New findings that reveal how advertisers and marketers intentionally target children at an alarmingly young age - starting when they are still in the womb!
• Shocking results of an fMRI study which uncovered what heterosexual men really think about when they see sexually provocative advertising (hint: it isn't their girlfriends).
• How marketers and retailers stoke the flames of public panic and capitalize on paranoia over global contagions, extreme weather events, and food contamination scares.
• The first ever neuroscientific evidence proving how addicted we all are to our iPhones and our Blackberry's (and the shocking reality of cell phone addiction - it can be harder to shake than addictions to drugs and alcohol).
• How companies of all stripes are secretly mining our digital footprints to uncover some of the most intimate details of our private lives, then using that information to target us with ads and offers 'perfectly tailored' to our psychological profiles.
• How certain companies, like the maker of one popular lip balm, purposely adjust their formulas in order to make their products chemically addictive.
• What a 3-month long guerilla marketing experiment, conducted specifically for this book, tells us about the most powerful hidden persuader of them all.
• And much, much more.

This searing expose introduces a new class of tricks, techniques, and seductions - the Hidden Persuaders of the 21st century- and shows why they are more insidious and pervasive than ever.

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