Older women who aren't trawling match.com for a date every night don't need a two-bit psychobabble diagnosis of their state of mind from a celebrity writer with little more to recommoned her than a good publicist. It's patronizing and insulting. I have strong faith in marketing, but I've been doing a lot of soul-searching regarding the value of "little m" marketing (aka marketing tactics) in today's highly fragmented and very skeptical marketplace of products, services, entertainment and ideas. There's certainly no lack of opinion on the subject (expert and otherwise). Today's query on Amazon for "marketing books" returned 199,641 results and Google gave me 1.63 billion hits for the word "marketing." What's a marketer to do? Read the full posting on Friedrich Nietzsche on skepticism From Dave Pollard at How to Save the World Why would OPEC be complicit in this? Many of the non-democratic members, notably Saudi Arabia, need arms, intelligence, and political support to fend off insurrection from their people. There have also been times (even quite recently, believe it or not) when OPEC members have needed support from customers to keep demand high so that the price does not fall significantly -- their economy depends heavily on demand for oil. The US provides huge military and political support to the Saudis and others, and most US administrations have encouraged waste and discouraged conservation. Like the US-China co-dependency for manufactured goods, the US-Saudi co-dependency for oil ensures an artificially low price to US corporations and consumers in return for political support and sustained high demand for producers. Deals with the devil (or perhaps between devils). Read the full posting on Why Oil Prices Are Jumping Again Is media creating a market for sex amongst elders like the oil producers collaborating to keep oil prices to their advantage? There is plenty of data available on marketing from the big M to the little m. What do you make of it? Technorati Tags : sex, marketing, oil Powered By Qumana | 
