Home
While online competition generally drives down commodity prices, consumers have proved willing to pay more for their favorite specialty products. And there are many of them. Back when brand signaling tended to travel through broad channels like TV ads or the sides of buses, companies narrowed their offerings. They tended toward a few bland, least-common-denominator goods, like watery beer and one kind of minty toothpaste. The Internet and advances in manufacturing now allow for a much wider range of products aimed at narrower consumer interests. I might pay more for a craft beer and a bar of deluxe chocolate, but I’ll be happier than when I was saving money buying Bud Light and a waxy Hershey’s bar.
-
Port-au-Prince, Haiti, for example, is filled with numerous beautiful commuter buses that are painted with all sorts of bright, bold images — of naked women, Catholic saints, voodoo symbols, soccer players, musicians. Maintaining these paint jobs is enormously expensive. The buses need to be taken out of commission for at least a couple of weeks, and the painters demand hundreds of dollars, often more than a year’s wages in Haiti.
Yet bus owners feel the need to get a fresh paint job once or twice each year because few people will pay to ride an unpainted bus. The extravagant decorations suggest that an owner cares about his business — that he spends money maintaining his engines, tires and brakes (no small matter in a country with steep mountains and lousy roads). My hunch, however, is that many owners, short of cash, are likely to invest in a visible new paint job over invisible brake maintenance. With no external authority — government inspectors or consumer-watchdogs or online consumer forums — there’s no way to know if the signal is accurate.
I figure that it’s less likely to squander its name by skirting the rules or engaging in shoddy manufacturing than a company with less to lose. This peace of mind costs me about $7 per day.
Economists have a name for these cues that companies employ to convey their hidden strength: signaling.
-
it’s less likely to squander its name by skirting the rules or engaging in shoddy manufacturing than a company with less to lose.
-
Economists have a name for these cues that companies employ to convey their hidden strength: signaling.
- 7 more annotation(s)...
-
Creative Commons offers CC0, a universal tool that allows users to voluntarily relinquish all copyright, database and related rights to the fullest extent allowed by law. CC0 is a tool that was conceived and created out of both necessity and demand. Dedicating works to the public domain is difficult if not impossible for those wanting to contribute, voluntarily and of their own free will, their works for public use before applicable copyright or database protection terms expire. Few if any jurisdictions have a process for doing so easily and reliably.
-
This demand, coupled with the complex and lack of harmonized copyright frameworks, resulted in the creation of CC0. CC0 has been leveraged by numerous important rights holders, including the Dutch Government, the British Library, and the Personal Genome Project, and is part of the legal framework for important projects such as Europeana.
- 2 more annotation(s)...
-
Meanwhile, the licensing deal with HarperCollins is a big win for PlaySay, in that HC is the biggest foreign-language dictionary publisher in the world. It comes on top of an existing deal with McGraw-Hill, and both publishers will be incorporated into PlaySay’s upcoming premium content model: those who pay up will be able to access “professional publisher content to further enhance their language learning,” the company says.
Backers of PlaySay also speak to how the company is pitching itself in the future as an educational/business force to be reckoned with.
Top Tags
View All Recent Tags (11)
Maximillian Kaizen's Public Lists (2)
Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »
Join Diigo