Dec

19

Look at the Pretty Books !

December 19, 2006 | Leave a Comment

I have previously confessed a slight obsession with the home improvement shows on HGTV. Well it appears that HGTV and I have reached a crisis of values. On a recent episode of Sensible Chic the designers were creating a “gentleman’s study” as a surprise for someone’s deserving husband.

Dec

12

Apple is “Top Dog” with iPod

December 12, 2006 | Leave a Comment

As of September 2006 there had been a reported 67.4 million iPods sold worldwide along with 1.5 billion songs sold at iTunes. With more than 8 million iPods being sold each quarter, Apple is a force to be reconned with in the world of digital music players. In fact, just as Microsoft enters [...]

Dec

6

Brand Communities

December 6, 2006 | Leave a Comment

According to Muniz and O’Guinn
“brand communities are largely imagined communities”. (2001 p.426) “They are explicitly commercial social collectives centered around a brand, not incidental contact with commercial space… Community is arguably the fundamental social relationship often used to describe relationship marketing.”(427) “Deprived of their social connections, the value of these brands to consumers [...]

Dec

4

Marketing: Victim of Its Own “ing”?

December 4, 2006 | Leave a Comment

I was recently paging through Everett Rogers’ classic “Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition” (Everett M. Rogers, Everett Rogers) when I bumped smack into the following passage:
“Marketing” has a negative connotation in some academic circles because the term is narrowly construed as synonymous with manipulating human purchasing behavior for commercial advantage. Undoubtedly, marketing may sometimes [...]