[lbo-talk] Advertisings effects (was Death of Dean)

[T Fast]

Mr. Dean is not a pair of levis or a new cola on the street. The analogy you
and your Kellogg wish to make here is fallacious.  Try this.  Let us say a
soft drink company produces a new flavour.  However, for your analogy to
hold, (a) I would never be allowed to actually taste the real product; (b) I
would only be able to make a decision on purchasing the product based on an
idea of what drink tasted like; (c) the idea of its taste would be based as
much (in this case more) on a rival company's description of the taste of
product as on the producing company's advertising.  Now if all three of
these conditions held then your analogy would be a good one.

    The irony here though is that you have listed in Kellogg's CV that she
works for Mr. Jobs.  How have the sales of that low key focussed on quality,
stability and not hype computer company been doing relative to Mr hard sales
and hype over at Microsoft?  Seems like a 40 billion to 1 no-brainer to me.
All in the context of being able to actually test drive a Mac and get
testemonials from those who own them.

The dairy farmers love to argue the cream always rises to the top.  The
chicken farmers tell me that after heavy rains on the plains its always shit
that rises.

Travis


>
> I asked expert friend about the conventional wisdom in
> B School about the efficacy of advertising. I
> specifically did not impose on her for research or
> citations. She has a PhD in marketing from the Kellogg
> School of Management at Northwestern (one of the top
> B-schools in the country), a former B-School prof, and
> now a consultant to (among others) Steve Jobs. She is
> author or coauthor of several standard texts and
> widely cited articles on e-marketing. (I believe that
> is what they are about.) She is an extremely liberal
> Democrat who likes Clinton, and she of the very
> smartest people I know, which is going some. She likes
> Kerry, predicts a Kerry/Clark ticket.
>
>
> She says:
>
> The first bit of conventional wisdom that pops out of
> my head is something [that a professor of mine from
> Kellogg) frequently says in his talks:  The easiest
> way to ruin someone's career is to give them a bad
> product and a huge advertising budget.  That I will
> agree with.  . . .  If you spend a lot of money on
> advertising, lots of people will go examine/sample
> your product......but if they then decide it's not any
> good, you'll have managed to prevent them from ever
> considering it again, thereby rendering it obsolete.
> (That does sound rather like what happened to Howard
> Dean,
> don't you think?)
>
> * * *
>
> So, for what's it's worth, that what she says, Sounds
> like common sense. . . .  Don't  kinow if there is
> research to back it up, but she like is likely to know
> more than we do about this stuff. It's her field and
> her job, and I trust her brains and instincts. Her
> prognostication record in my experience is scarily
> accurate.
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
> http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>