I Could Never Sell

Why wouldn’t a political party form to oppose the business of the people, as needed?

Best advice in the groundswell: Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.  — Thomas Jefferson As now, in the age of the Internet, and the surging groundswell, and DNA, we know about Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. === addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Ficouldneversell.com%2F%3Fp%3D478′; addthis_title = ‘All+the+World+Watching’; addthis_pub = ”;

My favorite story in Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies isn’t there. I lost some time looking. It’s the perfect groundswell story, I thought, so that’s where I looked. The book by Forrester research talks mainly about business, the groundswell in business: Right now, your customers are writing about your products on [...]

What sells now?  The Dream, says Tom Peters in Re-Imagine.   What still sells when everything else has sunk into commodity hell?   The Dream. Harley-Davidson doesn’t sell motorcycles, he says.  They sell a way of life.  A way for a middle aged accountant to drive through town and make everyone afraid, says an unnamed [...]

Is our economy that delightful wood-block fire truck, distracting us from the baffling fire truck at the curb, and the smell of smoke in the house, and the eerie flicker from the kitchen?

Of course we all chase the youth market, says Stugots. Orders from the Red Queen, says Stugots.  Everybody’s selling.  Selling mate-bait. I want to send out my double helix, says Stugots.  Make my double helix bigger.   Bigger than me, to go where I can’t go. Whatever we sell, it’s mate-bait underneath, says Stugots.  I sell [...]

…the marketing equivalent of ventriloquism, where instead of walking the talk, you talk in one direction while walking in the other, to throw pursuers off your trail.