Pro Commerce

Advertising Failure

My best-selling book, Marketing Without Advertising, explains why advertising doesn’t work except on children's products and for tourists. The book explains how to do effective marketing.

A wonderful example is in today's Wall Street Journal, (8/3/2023). 

Bud Light, the most popular American beer, insulted its clients with a frivolous marketing character who is a man dressed as a woman and being silly.  Sales since the ad campaign have fallen 26% and market share has fallen from 10% to the 6% range.

Bud Light increased its national ads from 32 TV ads the same time last year, June and July,  to 34,000 this year (yes, from 2 digits to 5 digits).  While market share dropped 2% points from 8% to 6% during the same period.

Three cheers for the evidence that advertising, even at the million dollar level, is counter productive.

Fixing San Francisco

Now I’m ready to fix San Francisco.  A Japanese friend is arriving with her family and because I can’t handle guests right now I didn’t invite them to stay with me. But then I looked up the hotel they chose.  I told them to cancel the hotel and stay with me.

The hotel they found is the BEI Wyndham that rates itself a 4 star.  In fact it is at most a 1- star in a civic center neighborhood with a large and drug addled homeless population like most of downtown San Francisco. Dangerous. It also adds a $30 resort fee for each day and never mentions the fee. No resort features, not even night stands or a desk in the room. No good restaurants within five blocks. 

My mind immediately went to Sodom and Gomorrah which God destroyed because the citizens mistreated visitors.  San Francisco is Sodom and Gomorrah for sure.

So how do we fix San Francisco?

1. We find a leader of the Asian Community and have them select a new mayor and a group of supervisors.  The Asian Community has already organized a special election to replace a communist district attorney and an idiot school board. They won easily.
2. We vote on a ballot initiative to put 5 city-wide supervisors on the 9 member Board of Supervisors. The current board is elected by district and has been since 1978.  We have a bunch of totally incompetent people that never have the City as a whole as a concern.

All of this will take about five years.  Once the quiescent city leaders see that this is a path to decency they will support it.  

The negative is that the City will have a well-run government.  The weak governments of the past 175 years has meant San Francisco has been one of the most creative and vital cities in the world and most recently created the Beatniks, the Hippies and the Gay community. That global source of innovation may be lost.  

The alternative is Sodom and Gomorrah, which I can no longer countenance.

Lyin Dog Faced Pony Soldier

I’ve spent my life trying to understand hysteria and made little progress.  That means it is at least four dimensional or greater.  I’ve solved some very difficult three dimensional social problems.  See here.

This title ‘Lyin Dog Faced Pony Soldier’ is something that president Joe Biden says often in public and has absolutely no meaning.  (1) It is a subject of hysteria because it is uniquely a sign of mental impairment in the president that is not mentioned either in ordinary public conversation, in the vast global media, nor in political fencing.  (2) Just as an unplanned large crowd is part of hysteria, just as tens of thousands turning out the night Dan White (a political San Francisco murderer) was given a judicial slap on the wrist for killing the mayor and the popular gay supervisor, the absence of any discussion anywhere, the silence, about this Biden mental synapse is also hysterical.

(3) Hysteria can be a consensus of opinion that is so strong people act on it.  That applies to the trans-American belief in the 1980s that child kidnapping was common, in the hundreds of thousands a year, so common that most Americans in urban areas kept their children home when not in school. A radical change from the decades before. Behavior that remained in the decades afterward. In fact the number of kidnapped children never changed as measured by national data. (Slightly over 100 per year in the U.S)

I conceive the hysteria space as multi-dimensional; inside the hysterical part is the human brain or mind and connected to a vast number of similar people (I can’t define similar but it can be over 1 billion).  The hysterical space has dimensional components that have multiparts which can be thought of as rooms,  (A) One part that provides instant communication to the entire space or any subset. This can be a crowd or a herd, the common conception of a mass behavior. 

(B) Another part can be a view, a perspective, a vision, an idea.  Think of it as a room. Everyone in the room, all the brains and minds in there, share this same perspective.

(C) Another space is like an anechoic chamber.  No signals pass from one person to another.  That is like the silence about Joe Biden’s spoken nonsense.

(D) Still another space is a core belief that is the ground for a whole set of worldviews.  Think of these core rooms where everyone in it thinks money is a driving motive for all people. Another room where everyone thinks power is the driving motive for all people.  These are core-view rooms. Part of the multidimensional hysterical structure.

Because this hysteria is a multidimensional space, individuals can be in multiple rooms at the same time with different assortments of other people.

Now as I begin to recognize hysteria, I see that many elements resemble what I have taught as social thought.  Social thought recognizes overarching ideas as the coherent structures of institutions.  In some ways this is analogous to the rooms or dimensions of hysteria.

The difference being that hysteria is much more pervasive in life while social thought is bounded by institutional perimeters.  People who are part of a university can be part of many institutions simultaneously other than the university and can move to another institution easily. While people who are inside the hysteria that has them believing they were sexually abused by their step father can not change their opinion readily.

How will the multidimensional nature of hysteria be measured and validated?  I have no idea. We live in a universe where most of the forces are invisible but over time they are slowly being detected.  This is another one. 

Reply to Letter From Alex

Alex, is a good friend of mine who lives in Canada. He sent me an article from the NYTtimes on the Japanese stock market. Many people send me Times articles knowing I can’t read the paper because it’s Jew hate is so deeply offensive. 

After my recent month in Tokyo I bought a Japanese ETF that reflects the whole Japanese market.  

Some mistakes in the Times article.  Tourism has not returned from China, which is the largest source of all tourism and tourist spending. That will be a great infusion when it comes.  Mostly affects department stores and hotels.

Warren Buffett bragging on the Japanese stock market is right about Japan and wrong about the trading companies he bought stock in; which is something he can't understand. The biggest trading company was my client. Trading companies can never return a net on sales much over 2-3%. But they will grow with international trade.

The China boogie man will disappear with a Trump reelection.  China is not being aggressive, we are.

Japan is strong, healthy and solving the stagnant population issue.  All good signs.  They are not nuts about 'woke' in any way.  More women are coming into the labor market; working lives are getting longer and the Japanese are not stupid about CO2 and oil.  

A well-educated, honest, hard-working population is always a good bet.  None of the rampant American crime, Trump derangement syndrome, or divisive 'woke' culture.  The Japanese are happy, optimistic and enjoying the best of modernity.  The Covid did not hit them seriously; they are inherently clean, willing to wear masks (still 90% are masking in public) and still on good trading terms with India, China, Russia and most of the Middle East.

YoMama

Do you know ‘the dozens’?

In the mid 1950s, as an undergrad at the U. of Chicago,  I had two black friends. One rich one poor. The rich one was the son of a taxi cab company owner who taught me about ‘the dozens’ and the other was an anti-racism activist who was supported by the students at Roosevelt College.

The rich one told me about a common black practice of men facing off against each other, before an audience, to master trading insults.  Most started with ‘Yo mama.’.  

One was “Yo mama is so fat when huggin’ her you have to take a piece of chalk in your hand to mark where you began.” He told me many of these.  The dozens seem to have come from Ghana.

One ‘Yo mama’ had become a jazz classic ascribed to Hoagy Carmichael, Huggin and Chalkin.

He also told me about cursing contests.  The object was to curse as long as possible without repeating.  The one I remember was ‘You ain’t nothing but a lying dillydapper, your heart pumps shit and you breathe through your asshole….. 

I later learned that my grandfather Henry J. Phillips had been a famous cursor in San Francisco Union Square in the period after WWI. He had once cursed for 30 minutes without repeating.  He had a dental office on Union Square.

The poor friend took me with him to a white barbershop on 63rd where he asked for a haircut.  The barber called the police.  It was my job to be present to keep the police from beating up my friend on the way to the police car and to bail him out.  The knowledge that this fellow was a friend of mine led to the most successful and important employment discrimination lawsuit in American history. Described in two blogs. Here and here.

Understanding America

I look at my fellow Jews who are Lefty and very close to being self-hating Jews.  Their love of the Democrat party is shocking now that it is obvious that the Left wants Jews dead.  Academia hates Jews as does the NYTimes and the other mainstream media.  Hollywood and the power elite want us dead and want the Palestinians to wipe us out.

As Ruth Wisse points out, the vast European Jewish immigration beginning in 1885 are Lefties and have been The Left since they arrived.  These people never understood where they landed nor did they try.  They lived firmly in the ignorant socialist communist world that they came from. No one ever tried to help them open their eyes and see where they had landed.

The 20th century passed these sad settlers by.  It wasn’t an American Constitutional Republic that elected Hitler and followed Stalin in the slaughter of Jewish children and their feeble protectors.  It was a strong central government that continued the pogroms of Europe.

America had two things that Jews failed to appreciate.  A government deliberately designed to be weak and grass roots. A Constitution that deliberately created a divided government run by a multitude of weak states.  And a set of Amendments designed to protect individuals and minorities.  

That is all anyone needs to know to understand and appreciate America.  Since the Jews have arrived, most of them have been part of the political movement to thwart these historic Constitutional powers.  Jews were fanatic supporters of FDR in his desire to erase Supreme Court power, to weaken state governments and the ceaseless drive of the Democrats to shackle industry, support unions and control every aspect of American life.  

America did have an hereditary elite that was anti-Jew, but Jews never noticed when, uniquely on the planet, the hereditary elite disappeared in America at the end of the 1950s.  Jews still haven’t noticed.

America did not have laws regulating Jews’ clothing or the businesses Jews could enter.  It did restrict Jews from Harvard and the elite schools but that was not like Europe where they were vastly circumscribed in every domain. 

Now the big question.  Why didn’t Jews realize that America was the great haven for them?  Jews who came before 1885 did see this and they saw that the hereditary elites were weak outside New England.  They moved everywhere else in America as my great-grandfather did.  But the mass later arrivals never left New York, never left socialism, communism and labor unions.  To this day, they have been cloistered Ghetto Jews who never left the Lefty ghetto of New York.

I Was Wrong

A few blogs back I attributed a large part of the current employment dump in high-tech to widespread understanding, from Elon Musk’s example, that more than half of tech employees are a waste.  I was wrong.  Musk found a commercial truth but his fellow tech managers are not smart enough to appreciate his discovery.

What is going on, and has been for half a year, is the consequence of the most ignorant idiotic government foreign action I’ve ever seen.  The Biden government directed American companies to stop doing business in Russia.  Many complied.  Far too many.  The U.S. government has no such power and even one company could have held up such a directive in courts for many years.

So now those American tech giants who pulled out of Russia have been slaughtered.  Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce and a dozen others.  

Every business man on the planet looked at the American high-tech obsequiousness to a senile president and said ‘Am I going to buy high-tech software from a company that will not service me in the future if the American government is hostile to my government?’  The answer from any intelligent businessman anywhere in the world was ‘Hell no’.  Screw American high-tech, I’ll find a company somewhere else.

The American Democrat administration didn’t just do this stupid thing.  It banned Russia from using the global banking system SWIFT controlled by the U.S. which makes the dollar the universal planetary currency.

Now, the 100 nations on the planet, who are anti-American, are looking for ways to make the Yuan a major trading currency.  They will succeed and it will raise interest rates in the U.S., reduce American exports dramatically and cause a recession.  Maybe a long one. Good going, you Democrat anti-commerce idiots.

Business in Tokyo

The effects of covid on Tokyo are minor compared to the U.S.  Their schools were not impacted; education is far more important to the Japanese.  

Working from home on computers and Zoom was anticipated. The Japanese firm where I was the key partner (Dynax) did the research on distance working in the mid-1990s. The clients were Mitsubishi and Toshiba.

Only based on appearances in Tokyo, it looks like babies and strollers are everywhere.  My sources give credit to unlimited free child care and free education at very good schools.

Two interesting new businesses.  Vape shops and second-hand handbag shops.  

Vape technology comes from China and I’m told there is something new every month.  The American government has put vaping nearly out of business. We’re Puritans who act purely out of religious conviction.  But we’re missing an interesting global business which we have dominated for a century. The coffee shops are all responding with two separate smoking rooms.  One for tobacco-based products and another for vapes.

The second-hand handbags is a fascinating business. First, remember the richest man in the world makes his money in fashion handbags.  It's a big global money maker.  Second, Japan, to create real equity, and avoid social envy, has for centuries provided the poor with cheap versions of what the rich have. Cotton purses for one, silk for the other.

Foreign relations. I find many of my friends in the Japanese Foreign Office saying Japan has to have its own nukes.  The American nuclear umbrella no longer works with the American global suzerainty gone and a corrupt senile president in office. When Israel is forced to bomb Iran that will be a sign that the Japanese have to be prepared to act alone.

I congratulated one of my longtime friends on her most unusual contribution to society.  In the fifty years I’ve been coming to Japan I have seen a stunning change in clothing.  She played a role in that with many art and fashion shows, galleries and her close relations to Issey Miyaki.  The Japanese have always been cleaner and neater than any other people but they are now pure fashion.  Everyone.  

My female partner and I sat in a coffee shop for over an hour just watching the passing fashion show. Colorful, gorgeous fabrics and tailoring, elegant choice of separate pieces including bags, hair and accessories.  But don’t be surprised by the common athletic shoes and weird socks.  A’la Helen Mirren.  One of our Tokyo friends got recognition from the Emperor for her lifetime achievements in art, fashion and design.  It is visible everywhere.

Taxis in Tokyo now use a special model from Toyota.  Large interior with space for baggage in front and very easy access.

I don’t want to go home. In Japan, everything works.  In San Francisco nothing works and everything is getting worse. Recently a security guard shot a black thief who attacked him and the DA who was recently elected by the outraged S.F. Asian electorate refused to charge the guard with murder.  The black criminal underclass went on full protest mode in response.

San Francisco needs the vigilantes we once had and another 1906 earthquake to start over again.

I would stay in Tokyo if it didn’t mean leaving my friends and a large family behind.

Why We Are Divided

What had to be gone first, what was in place already and what was new that brought this division about?

Over fifteen million Americans served in the military in WWII.  College graduates usually became officers.  It was a source of civil behavior and meritocracy.  The rest of society accepted civility as a military necessity.

When the war was over the civility that had been needed and created after the end of the American Civil War with civic groups, dissolved. Membership in the Masons, Odd Fellows, Kiwanis, Lions, scouts and others shrank to insignificance.

More importantly, the meritocratic military officers entered the labor force and rose to the top ranks of the fifty major corporations; they formed hundreds more corporations and displaced the source of power for the American hereditary elite. By 1960 the hereditary elite was so disrupted and displaced that it no longer published the Black Book of membership (actually red) and the debutante balls sponsored by local hereditary elites were replaced with non-profit sponsors.  

America entered a period of rapid corporate expansion, globalization and technological innovation.

The absence of the hereditary elite left the second most powerful institution in control in urban areas: labor unions. Labor unions came quickly to control the politics of every metropolitan area to this day.  Unions are seniority-oriented, very rule based and are deeply anti-meritocratic.

Two other lesser institutions gained power and prominence after the fall of the hereditary elite and civic organizations.  Academia which had been Marxist for most of the 20th century took over the intellectual world and the media. 

Prison values took over fashion in pants to the knees and rap which uniquely had performers being murdered wantonly. Big bands and rock groups had never been homicidal.

All of this allowed a long simmering division in America to become visible and important as populations moved; white families left bused school cities for the suburbs and young Lefties moved to urban centers after college.

Then came the most powerful force to hit the vulnerable United States and Israel, the new social media on the Internet.  The self-fulfilling mirror.

The extraordinary impact of the Internet is not obvious.  The Internet and social media allowed individuals to expand their personal and political worldview to prominence and full blown significance.  Millions of people who played little or no role in prior civic life or politics all of a sudden had a vehicle to publish and voice their opinions in a semi public way and find allies to align with.

Voila, we had a divided America and a similar Israel where hatred could be expressed openly and civil behavior was drastically diminished.

A whole new phenomenon where individuals expanded their opinion persona and found sympathizers among strangers.

Welcome to divided America. Welcome to angry Americans.

 

Let Me Try

One of my longtime readers objected to a statement a few blogs back where I called the Democrat Party the ‘party of hate.’  I apologized for using such intemperate language, and explained what drove me to it. 
There is no excuse. My explanation was that it is my reaction to the rising and very dangerous Jew Hate in my beloved country, America. And that Jew Hate has found a comfortable home among Democrats, journalists, academics and other lefties.

I am now in Tokyo, where I see none of the recriminations and political venom that is out of control in America.  Maybe I can think about the reasons for this period of terrible anguish at home.  Anguish that is tearing families apart.

It is very worthwhile mentioning, as I did in the last blog, that I’m reading Bibi’s autobiography.  A brilliant book where the subject is his brother, Joni, who was murdered leading the first great airplane terrorist recovery, Entebbe, and then the subject shifts to his wife Sara.  An autobiography in reflection.  I might try it myself.

The whole point of bringing up Bibi is that the Israeli press and the Labor Left hate Bibi with the same malice and venom of the American press and the Democrat Party towards decent honest Republicans.  

I personally knew Richard Nixon, I knew several cabinet members of Ronald Reagan’s.  So I felt personally the endless mindless attacks on them.  And now for seven years I’ve watched with absolute horror the outrageous lies, hatred and constitutionally illegal villainy poured on Donald Trump and his family.  So where does this daily national bile come from?

While the toxic spleen may have boiled over for Bibi and Trump, it has been with us for half a century. The Left hated Nixon and Senator McCarthy from 1950.  It has only grown since then.

Unlike Jew hate, there is no social opprobrium.  Lefties feel free to pour out their acrimony with little or no restraint in public.  They are even self-righteous on many occasions.

What is it and why has it metastasized?

Two disappearances are central to what has happened.  

• The Army and the draft that went with it.  I was in the Army. We all got along even in peacetime and we accommodated each other despite wild differences in social class, politics and background.
• Civic organizations evaporated. We lost the Odd Fellows, the Lions, the Masonic Order, Kiwanis and a dozen others. These organizations created civility.  The Army satisfied the civility role and may have been the reason for their disappearance.

Religions promptly split along political lines in the 1960s.  Reform Jews, Methodists, Presbyterians, Unitarians on the left and Baptists and Evangelicals on the conservative side.

• Unions took over nearly every city as I’ve explained before with the collapse of the hereditary elite and union values of anti-meritocracy triumphed in the public square.
• Prison values took over the fashion world.
• Importantly the long-standing Marxist suzerainty of academia took over the intellectual world and the media. 
• Finally the Internet plays a role but not for the popular reason that it gives individuals a public outlet. The Internet gave each participant a place to vent and curate their political views among allies and potential converts.

There you have it.  

Six institutional forces that divided America with a venom that we have not seen since the 1850s Democrat-Republican divide.

Japan never got the divisions because it never lost its hereditary elite.  Israel got the divisive illness  because it had a monstrously powerful labor and socialist overlord. 

I’ve got it. I think I’ve got it. I will summarize in the next blog.