Live Your Life Be Free!

My inbox if full of discussion on India’s Tata taking over Jaguar. I was sent an interesting article from Time Magazine about  how traditional white brands are reacting to mergers and acquisitions from Indian companies. One of my friends mentioned that there is a similar problem for Chinese companies. No one ever questions the ability (or right) of Western companies to
buy out firms in developing countries, but people get upset when it
goes the other direction. Every time a Chinese firm tries to buy out a
Western one, people worry about Chinese imperialism.

The Time article talks about how when the India luxury chain Taj received a letter from the Orient Express that its overtures were not welcome. Indian Hotels Vice-Chairman R. K. Krishna Kumar wrote that he was offended by the letter.

White’s letter, he says, "will go down as one of the most uncivilized
exchanges of views between two companies in the 21st century." Its
sentiments, Kumar says, reflect "an era that is now prehistoric."

India’s Economic times was later quoted as saying:

The days of "white supremacy are disappearing rapidly, and white brand
value with it," the piece went on. "When Arab financiers are needed to
rescue Citigroup, notions of white cachet seem ludicrous."

Orient Express said that the statement had more to do with branding than anything else. As a Marketer, I can’t disagree more. My thinking is that if an Indian company can make Jaguar make good cars again, then that will be good for the brand – who cares where the improvements come from. And by the way, being an intolerant global brand in today’s world… is totally off-brand.

I am here on a Saturday night building my plan for my business, and I just found an excellent tool for generating flow charts. It is called Gliffy. With a free account you can create flow charts, network diagrams and parent-child type diagrams. It is a pretty good tool and I was able to get charts pretty easily and they look beautiful. Enjoy!

TTC Subway
Originally uploaded by Craig James White

I have been taking the TTC to work since August or so and I find that it is busier now than it has been in the seven or so years I have lived in the city. My boyfriend who has been here for 25 years says he has never seen it worse. He now stands and watches several trains go by in the morning before being able to get on.

Meanwhile, being an entrepreneur able to set my own hours, I am gaming the system, trying to come and go on less busy times. It is okay in the morning – if I leave at 9:00 the Bloor-line subway is usually free enough, and I can usually get a spot on the Spadina streetcar.

But… the problem is the evening. If I leave at 6:30, 7:30 and even beyond 8:00… it is always having a sardine-like atmosphere in the streetcar with the bodies of Toronto squished together and it is standing-room only on the subway. The Toronto automotive rush-hour does not last that long, so why should the public transit one be so extended? There is obviously a problem here.

The province is now stepping in to try to take the heat off of the city with a facelift to the GTA transit agency calling it Metrolinx. The chair Rob MacIsaac said the following recently:

"Be bold. Look around the world to see what other cities are doing," said MacIsaac. "In a couple of decades, we’ll be as big as London is today. We should be thinking in those terms."

He says London… but lately the line-ups for the streetcars look more like Communist Moscow.

In learning about negotiations, I remember studying the “anchor”, you can see HBS discussing the anchor here:

Research into human judgment has found that how we perceive a particular offer’s value is highly influenced by any relevant number that enters the negotiation environment. Because they pull judgments toward themselves, these numerical values are known as anchors. In situations of great ambiguity and uncertainty, first offers have a strong anchoring effect—they exert a strong pull throughout the rest of the negotiation. Even when people know that a particular anchor should not influence their judgments, they are often incapable of resisting its influence. As a result, they insufficiently adjust their valuations away from the anchor

.

Lately, I have realized that I have had a “fitness anchor”, a level of fitness determined by the friends around me. I generally think of myself as pretty fit – able to go on 100k bike rides, lifting relatively heavy weights (for a girl of course). Even at an aerobics class the other week the instructor commented on the fitness of my core due to many months of consistent yoga practice. But – since Lori, one of my fittest friends, started training for competitive Mixed Martial Arts, my anchor has been reset. You can see her training regimen on her Jiu-Jitsu Sensei Blog here:

We went through a series of conditioning exercises, including: 100 squats, 60 leg lunges, 2 minutes of jumping up and down from the ring, 2 minutes of sit-ups (while lifting a 4kg medicine ball up over the head then passing it back to my partner), 2 minutes of sprawl push-ups (while passing the medicine ball back and forth with my partner in between), 2 minutes of doing boxing punches with resistance bands. And after that, we started our skills training.

So – with my anchor reset by Lori’s example, I am stepping up my fitness routine by adding more weight workouts and two spinning workouts a week. This whole situation has reminded me how much your friends and people around you influence you and your decisions in life… and it has made me think how my friends anchor me in different ways, both positively and negatively. How about you?

I have been doing research for a client on display advertising (some may still know it as banner advertising but really that name represents only one size) lately, and was surprised by some of the findings. Here is some stuff I wanted to share publicly:

- The typical clickthrough rate is between 0.1-0.3%. Clickthroughs on display advertising has been going down since the beginning of the internet (In the 90s people clicked on banners out of curiosity, now people are less enthusiastic).   

- Display advertising accounted for 22% of the US Internet Advertising revenue in 2006. This is well below the 56% market share it had in 1999 before search marketing came along.

- More targeted ads get a higher clickthrough, at about 0.5%

- Video ads increase clickthrough to 0.4% (doubling from the typical 0.2%) .

- Behavioral and demographic targeting also increase clickthrough rate to up to 1.5% .

I got these results from both public resources and by phoning a dozen or so sites and ad networks. I am very surprised how low the clickthroughs are on display advertising – just another reason to stick with search marketing.