You Sleep When You Die

The New York Times app is awesome. It’s actually my favorite right now – I use it multiple times a day. It’s well designed and user-friendly – unlike a lot of other newspaper apps currently available – and it’s FREE! It’s obvious that the NYT recognizes the importance of having an outstanding app. Instead of just slapping something together for the sake of saying they have an app, they went ahead and invested a significant amount of time and money into developing an outstanding one.

This makes me wonder why more companies aren’t doing the same…

Estimates from the Boston Consulting Group suggest that women are currently the biggest emerging market ever seen…

These statistics shouldn’t be that surprising. We’ve been hearing for years about women’s growing buying power. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that women are becoming THE decision maker in more and more households. What is surprising is that more marketers aren’t taking more notice!

According to numbers released by the Commerce Department, sales continued to rise at retail stores in April at a rate higher than expected by industry experts. Combined with other recently released data on industrial production, manufacturing and consumer confidence, these figures seem to indicate that we’re well on our way to economic recovery.

However, upon further inspection, recent numbers might not be as encouraging as they originally seemed. Decreases were actually reported in several categories of retail stores, including sporting goods, electronics, hobbies, music stores, home furnishings, grocery and department stores.

So what does all this mean? Are we on the road to economic recovery or not??

Have you ever been standing in the freezer section of your local grocery store, trying to decide which brand of ice cream to buy, when someone walks up beside you and starts talking about how much she loves the Friendly’s brand?

Have you ever been sitting at your kid’s little league game and started talking to a nearby parent, only to find out he’s treating his son’s team to White Castle after the game?

Both of these are examples of cleverly placed ‘buzz agents:’ people whose job is to influence your opinion about a particular brand or product, all without your knowledge. If done correctly, buzz agents make potential customers stop and think, “If they’re doing it, maybe I should too.”

Thanks for your questions! Remember, get your questions about advertising, business, the economy and more answered every Wednesday by posting comments to blog posts or on Twitter via #askjz.

“It seems there are hopeful signs for the US economy and there is much media coverage focused on Wall Street trading errors, and the Euro Zone bailout. Add in an oil spill and it seems there is little taste for discussing topics necessary to solve our underlying financial problems, including lingering unemployment.”