if everyone lived like me, we would need 3 planets

Yup, this is the latest discovery i have made about myself. Before we get more into this here is some background.

This quarter i am taking a “Marketing Strategies for Sustainability” class. As part of the class requirements we will be blogging our personal efforts to reduce our ecological footprint. So in a similar effort to preserve the finite amount of web space i own, i am integrating this assignment in marketwala as a category called “Marketing 488”

Ok now back to business. So as i was saying if the whole world were to live my lifestyle we would need 3 planets to support us. Now now, before you start to tell me i am killing the planet i would like you to take the test and find out how you are doing. If you take the test post the results in comments, i will try to post results from the rest of our class to add some frame of reference to this number.

Quick Stats for me:

• If everyone had my lifestyle we would need 3.2 planets (yes i rounded it down)
• It take 14.2 acres of earth’s productive area to support me
• The 14.2 acres generates 15.3 tons of carbon dioxide
• Most of my land consumption comes from Energy land

photo break: Shark Month @ NatGeo

The photo is from a montage of photos showcasing creativity in marketing from Alex at Net Frontier Marketing.

the engagement diamond – tradition or marketing?

“If you can imagine it, you can achieve it;
if you can dream it, you can become it.”
– William Arthur Ward

Gerold M. Lauck, the president of N. W. Ayer (a leading advertising agency in the US) was approached in September of 1938 by Harry Oppenheimer son of the founder of DeBeers. Oppenheimer offered Lauck exclusive rights to US media and seed money to research the market. The result was the engagement diamond. The act of giving a diamond when proposing was a purely marketing strategy perpetuated with smart use of television shows and Hollywood movies as advertising media.

Rough early timeline of the campaign:

• 1888, De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd. incorporated in South Africa (The cartel)
• 1919, end of WW I, total amount of Diamonds sold in US declined by 50%
• 1938, N. W. Ayer approached by Harry Oppenheimer
• 1941, US diamond sale up by 55%
• 1947, N. W. Ayer emphasizes psychological approach in future advertising
• 1948, N. W. Ayer copywriter came up with “A Diamond is Forever”
• 1951, Campaign to make Diamond as a symbol of betrothal.
• 1960’s, Campaign to internationalize Diamonds (Japan, Germany and Brazil)
• 1967, Diamond campaign begins in Japan
• 1970’s, Billion-Dollar-A-Year market in Japan
• 1981, 60% of married Japanese women wore diamonds

photo break: kitkat

section inspired by flickr interlude from rob walker’s murketing blog

twitter : why should i join?

innovation is not doing extra-ordinary things, its doing ordinary things in extra-ordinary ways.  Twitter, is the latest in this endeavor. The service has done amazingly well here are some stats from Hubspot’s Mike Volpe (@mvolpe) in a report he calls State of the Twittersphere.

• Twitter is dominated by newer users – 70% of Twitter users joined in 2008
• An estimated 5-10 thousand new accounts are opened per day
• 35% of Twitter users have 10 or fewer followers
• 9% of Twitter users follow no one at all
• There is a strong correlation between the number of followers you have and the number of people you follow

demographics: transcending many demographic profiles is a great way for a service to become mainstream, with the simple model of twitter it is welcoming to everyone. Here is the Quantcast demographic website profile for twitter.

• More than 50% are females
• Almost 50% between 18-34
• 73% do not have children
• 63% have college education or more
  With an estimated monthly traffic of 2.4 million (US only) twitter is all set to take over the interwebs.