Hey writes,
“Why do banks spend so much money on marble lobbies, high ceilings and yes, $400 million to name a baseball stadium?…Do you really want to invest money at a bank run by a guy with nothing but a bridge table and a cheap suit? Probably not. At some level, we like the confidence that we get from that big lobby. We are more likely to perk up when the reporter has her cameraman aim a huge black video camera (with lights!) at us, even though the little hand held camera might work just as well…”
He argues that more genuine marketing, such as good customer service, is more powerful, which I agree with.
However, expensive buildings and the like is a classic example of the handicap principle in signaling theory, developed by Amotz Zahavi and John Maynard Smith in biology and Michael Spence in economics. Building a big building wastes resources which proves the bank has enough resources and will therefore probably stick around. There may be a ‘complex’ to building big buildings, but there’s also more to them.
Oh, really? Worst ad ever.
Check out my guest post at South Africa Connect, a blog run by Alex Comninos, my advisor for research I did on access to technology in South Africa. He’s also my friend and a very intelligent ICT researcher in South Africa. Check out the blog if you get a chance.
There’s all kinds of interesting things going on with ICT in SA, and this blog is a good place to stay up to date. We often lose touch of how pervasive connection is here in the US (and especially in San Francisco), but there’s ample work to be done with connecting the rest of the world so that they have access to the powerful tools the web offers.
In addition, check out this Times article about Obama and White House email (or lack thereof). I was really hoping that he’d continue to use Twitter and tap into the network he built during the campaign to continue to affect netroots change. No one says that just because you’re president, you can’t continue to be smart about rallying the base. The legal issues, however, are tricky, so we’ll see.
At least the weekly address is on YouTube. Isn’t that cool?
Good question from the week