by Brendon J. Wilson

Not a Target Market

There’s been a lot of discussion in my MBA Marketing course about how to manipulate…er…I mean “serve” consumers’ needs. It’s kind of interesting, but I’m not sure I believe in the theories being discussed. For example, one of the tenets of marketing is that a high price can be used to create the impression that a product is luxurious or of superior quality. Maybe it’s just the Scot in me, but from my point of view the fact that something costs more only implies to me that I’ll have less money left over when I buy it, nothing more.

Walking around downtown today, I started trying to put what I’d learned into action. Who, exactly, was the target market for that $200 pair of Nikes? And what was it about that product that would make anyone pay that amount of money? What need did that store on Robson, the one that sells only magnets, fill for a consumer? When I couldn’t figure it out, my wife pointed out that I wasn’t the target market, hence I couldn’t easily understand the motivation for the target market’s need for the product in question. And then I realized something.

I am no one’s target market.

That’s pretty weird. This has got to seriously piss off the marketing people. After all, I’m a 25 to 35 year old professional! I’m supposed to be a prime candidate for buying clothing, music, car, home stereo and other assorted bric-a-brac. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It’s not that I don’t buy anything, it’s just that I resist buying everything except for the essentials most of the time. I just don’t really see much purpose in a lot of the distractions that people buy, choosing instead to focus my attention on other things. I’m starting to come to terms with the fact that I’m not very representative of the general population. But am I really that abnormal?

I guess I must be, at least from marketers’ perspective.

in Business / Personal 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Slag Slag Slag

Nothing like a little chat with my buddy Evan to make the work go faster:

E/. says: going to see the imax attack of the clowns tonight w/ work peeps

Brendon says: Going to dinner with mom.

E/. says: imax is a huge screen w/ surround sound

Brendon says: Mom is a caring individual who didn’t shake me to death as a child.

E/. says: “to death” being the crux of that statement

Brendon says: Uh…yes. What are you implying?

E/. says: brain go “bouncy bouncy bouncy” around in that huge cranium of yours.

E/. says: much like a hamster in a habitrol

Brendon says: As I recall, it was my father who bounced my head off a ceiling beam.

Brendon says: Then again, that could just be the brain trauma talking…

E/. says: prolly. i am sure the regular probing’s have erased all memories of that time

E/. says: slag slag slag

Brendon says: Those were *anal* alien probings, how could they mess with my head…er, wait…forget I said that…

What are friends for, eh?

in Personal 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Life’s Little Lessons

On the bus the other day, I watched with fascination as a mother amused her son by putting on his hat, and letting it fall off her head. The kid loved it. But why? When you think about it, recognizing that this situation is funny requires a lot of knowledge and complex recognition. The child needs to understand how a hat is supposed to work, that the hat is too small for his mother’s head, that the hat is falling off because it’s too small, and finally recgonize that the combination of these factors is humorous. Ain’t wetware great?

On a similar, slightly tangential, note I’ve really started to notice urinal etiquette. That’s right, urinal etiquette. Unbeknownst to women, men engage in a delicate and complex dance around those ceramic portals, the rules of which are learned at a very early age. In their simpliest form, the rules are:

  1. Always leave a urinal between you and another man.
  2. Don’t talk.
  3. Don’t look.

That’s it. Simple, right? But what happens if there’s three urinals, and two are already occupied (the two end ones, obviously, otherwise they’d be violating rule 1)? What if there are only two urinals and one is already occupied? What is the right thing to do in those circumstances?

ICBE LogoWell, not to worry, someone has already created the definitive resource to answer these and many other difficult questions: the International Center for Bathroom Etiquette.

I kid you not.

They host a comprehensive manual on urinal etiquette, ranging from simple logistics to complex interactions, such as the Two Urinal Tango.

I don’t know about you, but personally, I like to go to the bathroom not to think. I can only stagger at the amount of brainpower that’s currently going to waste in the world right now trying to figure out whether to take that free urinal or grab the available stall instead.

If it took that kid a lot to figure out that a dropping hat was funny, wait until he needs to go to the bathroom. If I were him, I’d stick to the diapers.

in Entertainment 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Ringtone Hell

If there’s a God in Heaven, let him be so kind as to inspire someone to come up with a replacement for the piezoelectric speaker. These speakers, based on the piezoelectric effect, are the workhorses of many applications, providing a small and energy efficient method of providing audio in a variety of applications. And none so annoying as the dreaded cellphone ring tone.

It amazes me that people can spend so much time meticulously choosing a theme song or jingle to serve as the ring tone that captures their “personality”. And then passes that personality through the audio blender that is eight-bit sound and a piezoelectric speaker. Ouch.

The influence of the piezoelectric speaker and low-quality sound output are probably more pervasive than we might recognize. After all, how many of us had a Speak & Spell? That joyful orange box of electronics that taught us the joy of spelling. In a monotonous, Ben-Stein-meets-Stephen-Hawking, lo-res version of a real human voice. It’s a wonder any of us are comprehensible in everyday conversation.

Today, every toy is now being stuffed with a voice. And they all suck. Sure, the potential benefit of a toy that talks and responds to a kid is immense, but at what cost? Are we going to end up with a generation of children who speak with built-in distortion and the verbal gait of a Canadian Prime Minister?

in Technology 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Pave the Earth

This weekend, while channel-surfing in a vain attempt to pretend I’m doing something instead of procrastinating, I came across a program on Stephen Ibbot, a visual artist from Toronto. Wow. What a load of crappy crap crap.

Stephen puts together abstract images on his computer using a simple paint program and transforms the drawing into a painting. Whoopee. The drawings, while interesting for a four year old, can hardly be described as art. Then again, maybe I just don’t “get it”. The works have been described as “visually stimulating”. Oh, they’re stimulating alright. I can feel the back of my throat prepping to be stimulated at the tops of my lungs.

The art reminds me of the book Son of Interflux in which one of the characters, a failure of an art student, decides that his total lack of artistic ability shouldn’t prevent him from being an artist. He finally finds his niche in a branch of art that involves dipping bananas in paint and running them through a fan onto a canvas, or passing high-voltage electricity through pumpkins. Yah! Art!

Even worse is listening to art critics as they attempt to describe this visual drivel in intellectual terms. Are they really buying this stuff, or are they just trying to sound smart? It reminds me of Steve Martin’s comments in LA Story:

Steve Martin: And look at the way he’s holding her, it’s almost…pornographic!

(Camera cuts to a large abstract painting, predominantly red)

When I see this kind of pompous self-indulgence, I can’t help but get mad. Somewhere, someone is dying of malnutrition, of going without, and here we are, lavishing praise on some “artist” who’s managing to sell us some cock-and-bull story. Let’s be honest: this is a con.

While I’d like to protect people against this, the worst kind of hucksterism, I sometimes wonder: why bother? In my mind, this con-artistry (the only kind of art involved here) is no different from that employed by Enron, the tobacco industry, or anyone else that exploits other people’s ignorance. Why don’t I just join the party? Take advantage of the suckers out there and get rich in the process? Pave the Earth for a profit while I’m at it!

But I can’t.

Will this inability to rape and pillage the weak spell doom for my hopes of creating a successful company?

in Culture / Opinion 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Fix Me!

As a kid, I delighted in “fixing” my parent’s watches, radios, and various household electronics, gleefully unscrewing the backs, bottoms and sides of anything that dared to attempt to hide its inner secrets from my prying eyes. Most of the time, these efforts turned into frantic cover-up operations, the evidence destroyed, and innocent eyes turned to their highest “gee, I haven’t seen that for a long time, guess you lost it” setting.

Obviously, these efforts weren’t true attempts at repair. However, it does illustrate a difference between then and now. It used to be that if a device you owned broke down, you could open it up, swirl a screwdriver around inside, close it, and have a better than zero chance that the device would start working again. Like my childhood experiments, whether you actually fixed it through the exercise of skill or chance remained another matter entirely.

Try fixing anything you buy today. Hell, try even getting it opened.

Go to any pawn shop in your city and you’re guaranteed to find a camera from the depths of photographic history that’s at least 70 years old and, surprisingly, still accepts standard 35mm film. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. But, chances are, you can fix the camera yourself with a little care, a search on the Internet and a set of jeweler’s screwdrivers. Try to do the same thing with your 3.1 megapixel digital camera when a stray cosmic or gamma ray wanders into the camera’s CPU and fries a connection that’s thinner than the hairs on a human hair’s head.

Gazing into my crystal bowl of alphabet soup, I can foresee your camera’s future: do the letters S, O, and L mean anything to you?

When my parent’s bought our first computer, an Apple II clone called the Franklin Ace 1000, it came with schematics. Actual schematics. If anything went wrong, you at least had the option of sauntering down to RadioShack, grabbing some spare components, and spending the evening burning yourself with a soldering iron while attempting to cram a capacitor into a space marked C12 on the motherboard. Fast forward to now, where companies like Sony make crappy products and won’t even give you the schematics.

The hermetic sealing of devices we bought and we own by their manufacturers is a cunning strategy by corporations to leverage “Consumer Lock-In” (uh-oh, there’s another one of those business terms). Essentially, you no longer own the products they buy, they own you. The most chilling example in the news lately has been the use of proprietary computer systems in cars. Independent mechanics are being squeezed out by car manufacturers, who refuse to release the specifications for these systems. If you want to diagnose a GM car, you have to buy the GM diagnostic tools. Ditto Ford.

Are we putting ourselves at risk through this intellectual property hoarding? We should probably look to history to see what can happen. Proprietary file formats, hardware, software, and interfaces are all reducing the economies of scale and scope, dividing up our technological and cultural heritage. One has to wonder sometimes if the Amish might have the right idea.

in Opinion / Technology 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Recycle Grandpa

Though I like the software industry, I’ve gotten the feeling that much of the industry isn’t producing anything especially useful. Don’t get me wrong, there are some promising areas, such as data mining, that will improve society by allowing us to maximize our utilization of existing resources and turn raw information in actual knowledge. However, the use of software and computer technology in general has been disappointing and spiraled into a new arms race: my PDA is bigger/better/etc. than yours! Gadget-envy is killing this planet.

I’ve been wracking my brain of late to think of new, simpler, ways to make society more efficient and to reduce waste. I have a personal pet theory, which I’ll narcissistically dub “Brendon’s Theorem of Resource Extraction”:

We (society) have already extracted all of the natural resources from the Earth that are necessary to sustain us indefinitely.

Think about that: we’ve already dug up all the ore, chopped down all the trees, killed all the fish, et cetera, that we will ever need to continue our way of life. The problem is we extract resources, use the resources to build goods, and then throw the resources away once we’re “done” with them! Consider your typical piece of consumer electronics: we expend enormous energy and time on extracting, separating, refining and distilling precious metals and petrochemicals required for these products, only to discard all of that effort wholesale once the next generation toy comes out. All of that effort is lost. If only we could capture that waste!

Even in death, we’re wasteful! Remember when you were a kid, when science teachers would try to put the composition of the human body in perspective by relating the values to something you could understand? They’d tell you things like how many nails you could make out of the iron in your body, how many pieces of chalk out of the calcium, and how many bars of soap. A bit gruesome perhaps, but in retrospect it does beg a certain question: why, exactly, do we bury or burn our dead when they’re such useful sources of resources?

Now, I’m not suggesting something along the lines of Soylent Green, turning our dead into a tasty edible treat, but something more practical. A person spends a lifetime, distilling raw materials, purifying them; why waste that effort? Heck, if we can’t recycle our own bodies, a fairly simple bag of organic compounds and water, how can we expect to recycle anything else we produce?

in Technology 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

BusinessSpeak/BusinessThink

The secret to most professions is knowing the language, or so they say. Sure enough, the business language is slowly creeping into my brain like Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and my typically geeky vocabulary is slowly being replaced with BusinessSpeak. Value Chain. Net Present Value. Key Success Factors. Hell, I even used the word “synergy” the other day without so much as cracking a mischievous grin. The business world has gotten a hold of one of my legs and is slowly slurping its way up my body. Eep.

It’s insidious, and what’s worse is I’m starting to suspect it might be an intentional part of the program. Business terminology? I was just going to wear a tie and collect a six-figure check before retiring on the backs of my employees’ pension fund. Nobody told I had to speak like them, too! That wasn’t part of the deal!

And language is only the first step. Soon, you start to think like them.

Every week, we analyze a business case in a vain attempt to cram our views on a particular business’ woes into 600 words, an exercise that really improves your ability to focus blindly on numbers and the blatantly obvious. It’s amazing how quickly you forget to suggest simple things like, “Hey, maybe we should ask the guys who actually run the manufacturing plant for input.” No time for that, just look at the numbers! They must prove everything!

I swear, my hair is getting pointier by the day.

in Business / Personal 1 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Ah, Closure

Nothing like waiting for class to end on Friday to find out if I’m no longer “the accused”, or if I’ll be spending the rest of my University career in pinstripes. Sure, the MBA Program left me a letter at the office regarding “The Threat”. But, of course, they don’t open until noon. Agony.

The result? Read the letter for yourself:

Dear Brendon

This is in response to your September 17, 2002 email to Anne DeWolfe and me.

Anne and I met with Kara McNair and you on September 17, 2002 to discuss an allegation that you made a verbal threat on September 10, 2002 in the Core Classroom. Theresa Pan, Manager Exchange Program, thought she overheard you make a threat, which was not directed at a specific individual.

At our meeting, you were given an opportunity to respond to the allegation and you denied making the verbal threat. You also agreed with us that it would be inappropriate and unacceptable to make such a threat. Given your response, we now consider this matter closed. There is no record of this issue on your student file.

If you have concerns regarding the Core administration, please see Steve Alisharan, Core Team Leader.

Yours truly,

Brian Bemmels

There you have it. Closure.

While I’m relieved with the result, I’m still disturbed by the implication: we’re watching you. Is this the way a university is supposed to operate? Last time I checked, universities were supposed to be pillars of freedom of speech. Even my father was shocked:

But seriously, the latest “Nasty Little Shock” is really scary. Are people really that paranoid?

In this post-Columbine, post-WTC, post-Age-of-Innocence atmosphere, there’s a question we should be asking ourselves as a result of this incident: Are we, as a society, just looking for trouble in every corner now, even when it’s not there? Instead of solving the real problems, are we just going out there, looking for problems to solve because we don’t actually know how to begin solving the real problems?

Want to solve real problems? Here’s a hint: stop bullying people that have done nothing wrong.

in Personal 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Nasty Little Shock

Nothing like being called into a meeting with the Associate Dean for Academic Programs and the Assistant Dean for the Master’s Program without explanation to start a day off on an interesting note. Yesterday, I got an email from the MBA Core Administrator requesting I meet with Anne de Wolfe and Brian Bemmels in the afternoon. No other information was provided. As member of an action against the University‘s tuition increases, I was a little nervous. I requested an explanation for the meeting and got the shock of my life.

Dear Brendon

I’ve asked to meet with you today to discuss an alleged verbal threat that you made in the Core classroom on Sept 10th. The threat was not directed at a particular person but it upset one of my Managers. I will provide details at our 4:30 meeting.

I appreciate you attending this meeting on short notice so we can clear up this matter.

Anne DeWolfe
Assistant Dean
MBA Programs

Verbal threat? Huh?? It smelled fishy, so I took one of my classmates, Kara McNair, to the meeting.

At the meeting it was revealed that before one of our classes an employee of the University overheard a private conversation between me and two other students. In it, I expressed frustration at the lack of organization in some aspects of the MBA program, a common complaint of a large percentage of the MBA students. The other two students, Kara McNair and John Phan, joked that I should be careful, after all the class had microphones and the University could be spying on us. At the time, it appeared the class was empty.

As anyone who know me will attest, I have no problem in expressing my opinions in a frank manner. I stated:

“If anyone confronts me on this, you know me, I’ll tell them.”

However, what the complainant alleged I said was quite different. The complainant alleged I stated:

“If anyone confronts me on this, you know me, I’ll kill them.”

I understand the need for the University to investigate any complaint of such a serious nature. However, the manner in which the University conducted the investigation was puzzling:

  • When I left the room after making my comments, the complainant made no attempt to verify that I had said what was alleged.
  • Though the complainant was able to identify me by my name tent, neither of the other two students were identified.
  • The investigation made no attempt to identify and interview the two other students before interviewing me. I’m sure the complainant could have easily identified Kara and John from the MBA Student Roster to facilitate this questioning.

At this point it’s not clear what action may be taken, but I am filled with a sense of unease. First, it was a private conversation. While I understand the University’s need to ensure a safe work environment for their workers, it seemed a bit creepy. Second, they displayed a lack of common sense in the way they conducted their investigation. As a litigant against the University, wouldn’t it have made sense to conduct this investigation properly and avoid the possibility that it could be construed as harassment?

This is not the way to create an environment conducive to higher education.

in Personal 0 comments