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Here's a great visual from The Deal that explains the packaging and re-marketing of credit. Sort of explains how the badness was turned into goodness and everyone slept soundly at night until the day they realized the badness was real bad. It's also the system that propped up the consumer economy. An economy driven by cheap and easy credit isn't sustainable. For years, the US economy has been running on cheap credit. What happens when it goes away remains to be seen, but companies are need to get amazingly creative if they want to continue to sell in these tough times.



From Paul Kedrosky


Posted by Ed Cotton We might be in real trouble, but our experts are confused and uncertain.

"Is the global financial system headed for a meltdown? From Nobel Prize-winning economists to captains of industry, the world’s top experts are united by a common answer: We don’t know."

From Foreign Policy


Posted by Ed Cotton If the continuing financial crisis has told us one thing, it’s that you can’t trust the experts. Everywhere you look supposed experts and authority figures seem to have been clueless; from the ratings agencies, to governments and senior officers and large financial corporations.

It appears the experts where on a “lunch break” when we needed them most.

Perhaps the world has gotten too complex for experts and they need to band together in complex neural nets to have a grasp of what’s happening.

In other areas, it also seems that experts aren’t all that they appear to be. In a new era of community participation, individuals can emerge as de-facto experts, providing them have the ‘chops” and are seen by the community to be making valid contributions.

The concept has considerable appeal because they appear to have the “secret sauce” of objectivity. Amazon is often sited as the best example of this community of experts, where reviews are given great currency and can be massively persuasive in generating sales. However, according to Slate, these critics appear to be suffering because they have stressful full-time jobs, they’ve become the people they were supposed to replace and their skills and objectivity have to be called into question.

"However, by refashioning Web 2.0 as a proprietary marketplace, Amazon's reviewer rankings subject enthusiasts like Grady Harp to the same pressures that confront the professionals they were supposed to replace. To keep writing, lest another reviewer usurp one's spot. To say something nice, in hopes that someone will say something nice about you. And to read for work, rather than for pleasure. "I have a tall stack of books staring at me," Harp wrote, in a wistful moment."

When it becomes a job, who are they working for?

In fact, the world of the customer review has become a business, you can by a “plug and play” system for your website or brand to help bring that supposedly valued objectivity.

Everywhere you look it appears the expert is in trouble, bothered by a world that’s now too complex for them to understand or in danger of loosing their objectivity because they are bowing to commercial pressures.

In an expertless world, who should we be listening to?



Posted by Ed Cotton The subprime mess was the big business story of 07 and is likely to continue to be the major story in 08.

Always a difficult concept to explain and understand, so it's rather revealing to hear this comedians talk about it in a sketch. It's clear from watching, that the humor comes from the insight that nobody really understands what's going on, least of all, those supposed experts regulating the markets and those highly paid individuals working in them.

Uncertain times indeed.

Here are the Two Johns on the subprime crisis..

Posted by Ed Cotton The latest news from Fidelity investments announcing the departure of a key marketing executive who developed its recent brand campaign, is yet another example of the ongoing marketing battle between product and brand marketers.

Focusing on brand building made sense as Fidelity had a great opportunity to carve out its own mind space with the Baby Boomer audience.

Perhaps the company feels that the brand job has been done and they can now switch to products. Clearly the market is changing and there's going to be more pressure on selling.

However, the only solution is to do both, build brand and sell product at the same time because success internally and in the marketplace depends on finding the right combination of brand and product message, focus too strongly on one and you can end up in trouble.

Ironically, Fidelity was supposed to be presenting its brand case study at the ANA conference.





Posted by Ed Cotton