I don't wear my religion on my sleeve, like creepy fundamentalists, but spirituality is core to my daily life. Linda and I take turns reading the life of a holy person to each other every night at dinner: it's an amazing inspiration. Those saints include The Rev. Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez and monks and nuns from the 11th century.

The huge issue in my church now is the acceptance of homosexual people. According to the NY Times, there may be a split in my religious community over the acceptance of homosexuals.

My opinion: so be it. I would rather worship in a smaller congregation absent bigots than not. I won't sit under the same roof with people who, for reasons of sexual preference, color or creed, can't accept a fellow human being. Bigotry is, by definition, not Christian. How on earth can people claim to be Christian and also be bigots? What kind of human did Christ reject?
Comments 10:14:36 PM    

But it's also true that a number of companies have been successful recently without spending on marketing. Equally true, especially during the dotcom boom, that companies spent billions on marketing with little or no visible success. Remember sock puppets?

But the game has changed in at least 2 ways. Way #1 is that it's not a question of 'broadcast or print' any more: potential customers are fractionalized and microsegmented.

There used to be 3 major networks, now there are 500 cable channels. The consolidation of radio actually makes it harder to ferret out the very local, unaffiliated stations where certain classes of customers may most often be lurking.

As the Internet eats into TV watching time, millions of potential customers are starting to be available more often on the Net: witness the astonishing growth of ad revenues at Yahoo/Overture and Google. But the Net is so segmented that advertisers are down to buying words to try to get in front of the right interest groups.

Way #2 is that information flows much more freely in this networked world. You can pretty easily get actual user opinions, as opposed to marketing hype, about almost any product. So mediocre products might as well save the marketing money: indeed they may do themselves a disservice by advertising.

It works like this: a company makes a big, expensive marketing splash. The first customers buy, and then at least some of them post their less-than-positive experience to the Net, to Web-based forums, mail lists et al. If the product or customer service has problems, that gets around quickly, and will likely kill sales among the Web savvy, which also describes a relatively affluent market segment.

So the company has paid to inform people that its products aren't good, which is obviously self-defeating. Thoughts on the other side of the equation, great products with no marketing, anon...
Comments 10:22:21 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures