Wall Street Journal Edition
Just poking around my feed reader this morning and there is so much great stuff out there you oughtta see. This morning I found some good reading in the Wall Street Journal. For example,
- Have you ever wondered what it is like aboard one of our aircraft carriers? Check out Naval Gazing – A Top Gun fantasy comes true. Bret Stephens is spot on when it comes to his assessment of the people on that carrier. The world may think that America’s military edge is just about technology. But our true military edge is found in our people who choose to don a uniform.
I deployed with the last two cruises of the USS Saratoga before she was decommissioned in the mid 90’s. I was shocked when I got out to the fleet and found the planes I was flying in at the tip of the lance were nearly as old as I was. The avionics packages in the fleet planes I flew were not as modern as some of the training aircraft I flew in had. Yet we did the job because of the quality of motivated people that surrounded us.
Stephens is right to point out that is something the Chinese will have a hard time duplicating.
- As long as we are on the subject of China, take a moment to read through the Chinese Fake Out – Beijing gets a lesson in brands and quality control. The recent spate of significant quality control issues and brand knock offs coming out of China is creating concerns for importers. When we are faced with everything from poisoned pet food, antifreeze in counterfeit toothpaste, tainted fish, and salmonella in snack foods,
Brand protection will become more important than ever. Witness Colgate’s extensive efforts to warn consumers about tainted toothpaste bearing counterfeit Colgate labels. Brand protection is a bigger concern for smaller companies than for huge multinationals like Tylenol and Pepsi that have weathered safety scares in the past. Smaller companies may get only one chance with consumers.
Which is more important to you – Quality or Price?
- Finally, some large corporations are finding themselves Caught in a Web of Comment – How corporate marketers can reach out to blogs. Had you heard how Sony got caught?
Apparently they secretly put a program on their music CD’s that would automatically down load into your computer, hide itself in your Windows operating system by making some changes that opened it up to viruses, and secretly transmitted what music you listened to back via the internet to a Sony Database.
It was a blogger who broke that story and exposed what they were doing and got them to take corrective action. Power to the bloggisphere!
Grab yourself a cup of coffee and enjoy!
