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Friday, May 22, 2009

Re-Branding

Mass marketing seems to be an American (United States) invention and may be the single most impactful innovation of the last century. Please note that I made no value judgment. We each have to make up our own mind whether the impact was positive or negative.

Certainly, it has served to increase wealth so if your standard is ROI then you would have to view mass marketing as a positive development.

The downside effects are much more difficult to measure--plus virtually nobody wants to talk about the downside. Just as clearly, people have been convinced that they "need" something that they didn't even know existed. To that extent, a lot of raw materials were consumed and a lot of byproducts were produced because of the success of marketing.

Perhaps the biggest downside from my own perspective is the continual re-branding of technology practices. The effect of this is that everyone is on their heels all the time. We are bombarded with new acronyms and substantial effort must be expended to learn about them. Unfortunately, the common result of this effort is the realization that this "new" thing is really a 20 year-old concept with a new name.

Those not equipped to realize this invest even more time and energy in trying to make this new thing be their magic carpet without ever discovering what it was that kept the rug from flying the first time around. Technology folks are easy marks since they often are completely unconcerned with history--newer is obviously better after all.

Lots of money is being made but society is paying the price. Healthcare is the perfect example. Technology churn is costing billions at a time when everyone recognizes that costs are out of control. No worries though, we'll just focus all the lights on insurance premiums, thereby diverting attention away from the decision makers.

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