Arthur, Zolli's discussion of the future was interesting along with his methodology. However his discussion of brands and his mention of McDonald's and Wal-Mart's shows him to be completely outside the world of ordinary people.
The fact is that McDonald's provides not bad food at a relatively cheap price. Sometime ago, when Consumer Reports surveyed the world of the hamburger, they said that the McDonald's meat was excellent, but there wasn't a lot of it. At that time, the meat in the hamburger weighed about 3 oz. As I've mentioned, I may have been in a McDonald's once or twice in my life. So, I can't give a personal recommendation. However, the millions of people who buy McDonald's all the time must consider them good value. We've discussed Wal-Mart, but we haven't discussed the enormous benefit to communities when a Wal-Mart locates there. Apart from (apparently) the 14% increase in wages of all those who shop in Wal-Mart's, the company provides good low-level jobs to people in the community who otherwise would not have any job at all. This is happening in Inglewood at the moment. I think Inglewood is entirely black, with precious little opportunity for those kids who leave high school. A job at Wal-Mart is a step along a road that hadn't previously been there. Obviously, the local merchants are opposing it through the council, and which is their voice. The ordinary people of Inglewood don't really have a voice, but they do want Wal-Mart in their community. That's because they are 'iggorant drop-outs' not able to make those clear, calm, informed, decisions that we better educated people can make. In their ignorance, they think that Mac Donald's is a good cheap way to feed their families. And worse, they think that Wal-Mart supplies them with what they need at lower prices, and with courtesy and friendliness. Silly people. Harry ******************************************** Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 Tel: 818 352-4141 -- Fax: 818 353-2242 http://haledward.home.comcast.net ******************************************** -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2004 10:01 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Futurework] interesting take on brands and branding This excerpt from futurist Andrew Zolli can be accessed in full at http://www.gain.aiga.org/content.cfm?alias=andrewzolli We're in a world now where companies are increasingly in the business of making culture as well as products. Where people use brands to construct their personal and social identities. Where the meaning of brands is appropriated and regurgitated, redistributed reconstituted, reconstructed, represented in a kind of semiotic back and forth that is so complicated that we need new sciences like complexity science and semiotics to make sense of what's actually going on. _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
