One Red Hot Country Mama!

Market research has its place, but sometimes I like to use quick, pulse-taking methods instead of investing the time and money into something formal.

Teleconference Customer Panel: Right now for my main client I run a monthly customer panel to get their insights upcoming Marketing campaigns. The set-up is easy, we ask for volunteers through our opt-in newsletters, and offer points towards free merchandise depending on how many panels they attend. We then e-mail them the creative or scripts and ask them for their observations.

The panels usually take about 45 minutes, and we try to limit the conversation to 6 participants. These panels may be informal and always taken with a grain of salt, but in every single one of them I always learned something interesting about my market. One of the main problems with Marketing is that you get so involved with your own product that you can’t imagine what it is like from an outside perspective. For example, in one panel we realized that the users had no idea what we were talking about for an entire brochure, until we gave them a simple example. That example made it to the final print run.

Online Surveys: I find that surveys help a lot in quick and dirty analysis. My favourite inexpensive and simple tool is Survey Monkey but I am sure there are other great ones available. Although it usually lacks the statistical samplings you would get in a formal survey, it can help with a basic litmus test. For example, a few years ago a marketing team I was on was tasked with creating inspirational posters for a large branch network. We sent out a survey with 42 words, asking how much each represented the heart of the company’s corporate and cultural values. In the end, the posters were celebrated as some of the best marketing pieces the company ever made.

In 2002, I was fortunate enough to attend a public lecture of Dr. Sima Samar, who was the Deputy President of the interim government in Afghanistan. Her words, her bravery and her mission were impossible to forget. She wanted to improve the human rights situation in Afghanistan (for example, making rape illegal) and allow women to go back to school and work (under the Taliban, women were not allowed to work, and buying a girl a pencil and notebook was considered a crime.) Not long after I saw her speak, she was threatened with death and harassed for questioning Islamic laws and subsequently left her post.

I tried to find a transcript of her talk at University of Toronto, but I couldn’t. The closest I could see was her speech at Brown. The following quotes are from that speech. On human rights violations:

As a part of our national consultation process, we released our report, A Call for Justice, that represented the opinions of the Afghan people on transitional justice. We conducted interviews of 4,151 people and more than 200 focus groups involving thousands more people. Of the people surveyed, 69 percent identified themselves or immediate family members as victims of human rights violations in the course of the last two decades of conflict.

On women going back to school:

The media shows thousands of girls going to school, but they do not show what the quality of education is and how many girls do not have access to education facilities. It is the lucky girl that walks for two hours with a piece of bread to get an education, but even these facilities are not available to most girls. The media also does not show the more than 30 girls’ schools that have been set on fire or bombed by fundamentalists in the past three years.

On thesouthasian.com from 2001, speaks about the problems from a medical point of view:

Sima also has a medical clinic in Kabul. "Almost every woman I see has osteomalacia," Samar says. "Their bones are softening due to a lack of Vitamin D. They survive on a diet of tea and naan because they can’t afford eggs and milk and, to complicate matters, their burqas and veils deprive them of sunshine. On top of that, depression is endemic here because the future is so dark."

I find this woman to be one of the most inspirational people I have ever seen speak. Despite her uphill battle, she still keeps fighting for the cause she believes in. She says:

I have three strikes against me,- I’m a woman, I speak out for women and I’m a Hazara, one of the minority tribes.

Even with those strikes, she still continues to be strong and to speak out for and inspire others around the world. In her speech at Brown she finishes with:

Sometimes I think of the world as a bird. If a wing or a country is broken, the bird cannot fly. As a global community, we are all responsible for treating the bird so that it will fly.

I wrote this post a few years ago… and I this theme still repeatedly comes into my life. Many of my friends are now married, or want to be married… but I am still not sure about the idea. It seems like the modern marriage is what you make it and having someone around for the long-term and adopting them as family seems great… but I have seen so few marriages that I know that work well in practice. I think I am more open to the idea than I was when I wrote this though – since after living alone for almost two years – I realized… living on your own doesn’t make sense either!

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Marriage Doesn’t Make Sense

"Forget about the dog, beware of my wife!"

I saw this on a pick-up truck the other day.

"Wow – who would want to marry this jerk," I think.

"Well, maybe they have a laughing relationship, where they good-naturedly joke about these things"… joke about her being worse than a dog.

It makes me wonder – does marriage make sense anymore, given the way that the rest of the world has changed? Women can support themselves. Families are smaller. Loyalty and commitment are traded for individual well-being. Someone who worked at the same company for 25 years used to be celebrated. Today, it seems more like they were not brave or capable or they lacked other opportunities.

When people get married they stop being sexual beings. "Now I have to only make love to the contractually obligated person." was how my best married-friend described it. Something about that predictability and obligation makes each person less alive and vibrant. Some stop caring about how they look. Others stop living in the present and taking risks and lead an increasingly conservative life.

Married people move to the suburbs – suddenly they don’t seem to be living life to the fullest. I always thought that their priorities were simply changing – away from living their lives for themselves and creating their own destiny – and moving towards taking care of children and carrying the responsibility of land-ownership. I figured that there was a whole new fulfillment there.

It seems that the new fulfillment is just a myth. As I have been working in the suburbs for five years (commuting out from the city) I have been surprised to find that many married people are still vibrant inside and long for something else. They are good, nice, kind-hearted people – doing exactly what their parents would be proud of them for – but they are profoundly affected by the constraints of marriage.

A fundamental part of being a man is that when a beautiful woman passes, he turns his head. He wants to talk to her, look at her more closely, and touch her. I am a young, professional woman on the trade-show circuit – no matter what your looks are like, in this situation you get approached by married men. Of course I say "no" and feel embarrassed even if I really want to be with him. Situations like this make men bring their passions underground, with affairs, prostitutes and for the more decent ones, pornography.

A fundamental part of being a woman is that she wants to be noticed and appreciated. One of the most beautiful married women I know, doesn’t get noticed by her husband much less fully appreciated. Men send her drinks regularly, even across an NHL hockey arena once, but she has to instead go home and be ignored. Many talk about their love-affairs with their husbands as something in the past, rather than something they feel every single day. Others just totally let themselves go and all they have as proof that they were once beautiful is a smiling, well-polished wedding-day picture of themselves on their desks.

One reason many people get married is because it is much easier to raise kids together than alone. They talk about great benefits for kids who grow up in a two-parent homes with two people who love them, two income earners, two decision makers and two role-models.* This is a very natural and noble reason – but is it possible to really give up on your own needs altogether and be entirely fulfilled living only for someone else? Also – after kids have grown many marriages stay together. We celebrate 25 and 50 year anniversaries, but is it really an achievement? Isn’t it insulting that we have to congratulate couples on staying together because it is such a chore?

It is sad, that for many many people getting married is an end of something. Even the "good guys" sit on the couch and watch young, sexy women on TV all night. Even the "good girls" crowd around the single girl’s desk on Monday morning vicariously living through her weekend as she tells it.

So… if it makes people unhappy, why don’t we find another way? We all know that half of marriages end in divorce. Why do we insist on getting married just because that is what couples are supposed to do? Some people might have no confidence and think they can’t do any better. That is simply a sad case. What about the rest of us? Why don’t we let ourselves fall in and out of love naturally, and build our institutions around it, instead of sticking to something outdated?

It is difficult to find a substitute for marriage that still makes everyone comfortable and avoids pitfalls like jealousy and still does the right thing for children. It has perhaps remained an institution because people simply can’t think of a smarter way. Some say that serial-monogamy is the answer. Hopefully… one day we will find a better arrangement that fits today’s world. Marriage doesn’t make sense anymore. Maybe we should be the generation who finds something to replace it.

*There are many effective single parents in the world who have kids who grow up to be amazing (I say this as a child of a single mom.). This is just stating reasons why people get married. I am not at all insulting people who raise their children alone.

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Originally uploaded by d.rex.

I have a friend who is such a feminist that when she plays cards she makes it so the Queen is more valuable than the King. She is sick of the idea that the male card is more valuable than the female card, so she changes the rules. What about the Jack? I don’t know… so, I am not sure if I agree with the consistency of logic, but I definitely like the idea of changing the rules of the game when it does not suit me.

Sure, she is not playing cards by the universal rules, but who cares? Most people make up their own rules of games to make it more fun (I have seen all kinds of crazy rules around the "Free Parking" loot for Monopoly for example), or to make the boring parts of the game move along more quickly… so why not (like my friend) change the rules for ideological reasons as well?

The more that I think of it, the more I see room for changing rules and doing things my own way. In life, in work, in relationships… why not step outside, break the norm and do things differently? Maybe you can think of some ways to step out of the norm too. For ideological reasons, for fun or just to move more quickly through the boring parts .

This expression just doesn’t make sense to me. Yes, bad experiences CAN make you stronger, but they can also make you weaker – it all depends on your reaction to it. For example, no one could say that having a traumatic childhood makes someone stronger. In fact, usually the opposite is true. Some people can become stronger from it, and can break the cycle, but that is not typical.

I think that "whatever doesn’t kill you" gives you an opportunity to grow personally, but you can also choose not to grow – you can choose to stay the same. Or… you can be not strong enough or aware enough to grow. So – I find this expression pretty useless, especially for people that are going through difficult times. It isn’t helpful. Sometimes people just want to put a happy face on things, which I get, but for me it is better to live in truth.

Here are some possible rewrites:

• Whatever doesn’t kill me gives me the chance to get stronger
• Wouldn’t it be great if this thing that feels like hell but isn’t killing me could make me stronger?
• This thing that isn’t killing me could be the next train to self-improvement, but maybe I will wait for the next train.