MoD Book Club Premier July 16th 2008
MoD’s first book club networking event went off without a hitch! Yummy nibblies
floated around the gorgeous gallery of the Spoke Club as a group of mid to senior
level marketing junkies (equipped with a cocktail in one hand and the book Niche
Envy in the other) shared ideas and opinions of the read.
Spending just over an hour having unstructured discourse about the topics brought
forth by the book, dragged the group into discussions of ‘mass customization’,
the ‘Zoomer’ demographic, the concern of marketing spend wasted (50%
of marketing spending goes to waste? – this was a tenuous discussion point),
and a favourite by many the historical perspective on the birth of marketing &
advertising... who knew the department store and fixed pricing started it all!
The overall sentiment for the book was that it was a bit ‘academic’, and not a breezy summer read. If you are into more colloquial nonfiction(think Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink or Tipping point) you will find this book to be a bit dry to get through.
MoD rating 6.5
The success of this event makes it clear that MoD is providing a popular informal
forum that is stimulating dialogue and sharing amongst fellow marketers... this
was our goal!
Our next event is October 15th, 2008. Click here for
more info.
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From the PublisherWe have all been to Web sites that welcome us by name, offering us discounts, deals, or special access to content. For the most part, it feels good to be wanted--to be valued as a customer. But if we thought about it, we might realize that we've paid for this special status by turning over personal information to a company’s database. And we might wonder whether other customers get the same deals we get, or something even better. We might even feel stirrings of resentment toward customers more valued than we are. In Niche Envy, Joseph Turow examines the emergence of databases as marketing tools and the implications this may have for media, advertising, and society. If the new goal of marketing is to customize commercial announcements according to a buyer’s preferences and spending history--or even by race, gender, and political opinions--what does this mean for the twentieth-century tradition of equal access to product information, and how does it affect civic life? |
About the Author
Joseph Turow, called by the New York Times "probably the reigning academic expert on media fragmentation," is Robert Lewis Shayon Professor and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World, among other books, and the editor of The Wired Homestead (MIT Press, 2003).
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