Month: September 2006

Skinny Models Stay Home, sez Spain

This isn’t totally new news, but it’s worth noting:

Madrid’s fashion week has turned away underweight models after protests that girls and young women were trying to copy their rail-thin looks and developing eating disorders.

[snip]

The Madrid show is using the body mass index or BMI — based on weight and height — to measure models. It has turned away 30 percent of women who took part in the previous event. Medics will be on hand at the September 18-22 show to check models.

And a good thing too.

Tip Of The Iceberg (I Hope)

This is just the beginning of more to come, if we’re lucky:

[Massachusetts] state yesterday shut down seven mortgage brokers … and banned a variety of deceptive lending practices in what regulators called a sweeping crackdown on rogue brokers who steer customers in poor urban neighborhoods to loans they cannot afford.

[snip]

Regulators have also gathered evidence of other abuses in the industry, including brokers discouraging homebuyers from hiring lawyers to scrutinize mortgage documents and persuading borrowers to sign blank loan applications. As a result, the division has adopted emergency, and permanent, regulations banning fraudulent practices, particularly scams that target poor consumers with limited English skills.

Here’s hoping other states follow suit, and quickly. Like, say, two years ago.

9/11/01: Five Years Later

The WTC from Brooklyn

Five Years.

When something really horrible happens to you, it can warp your sense of time. You feel caught in your agony like a fly in amber; it’s as if the intensity of your pain will never end. And although nothing is completely the same again, sooner or later, the pain begins to release its grip on you, and slowly time begins to move in a more normal manner. Then one day, you realize that weeks, months, even years have gone by since the horrible event.

And here we are, five years after 9/11.

I’ve been doing my damnedest to avoid most of the media hoopla leading up to this day. I don’t need to watch the images again, hear the stories of grief and pain retold. It’s all inside me still. The rawest edges of the horror and sorrow and shock have been worn smooth over time, but even so, all I need to do is close my eyes and it’s all still there.

For those of us for whom New York City was not a series of iconic images on their TV screen or an occasional travel destination, but rather their home, 9/11 can be an intensely personal pain. Those hijackers tore a gaping hole out of my life. My memories of the World Trade Center span not just special events like the dinner with my family at Windows on the World the night of my 18th birthday and drinks with my friend Diana and the rest of her wedding party on her bachelorette weekend in NY, but also hundreds of morning and evening commutes, lunches, trips to the FedEx dropoff in the lobby, visits to friends in their offices. Not to mention that for 10 years, the towers were the first thing I’d see coming out the front door of my old Soho apartment. That those towers no longer exist is something I still haven’t fully come to terms with.

Terrorists cannot steal my memories, but they destroyed the tangible reminder of those memories. It’s a small loss compared to so much else that was destroyed that day, but it’s a real loss nonetheless.

And then there’s Kath.

She was only 40 when she went to work that brilliant September morning. And she never came home. AA Flight 11 slammed right into her office on the 97th floor of One World Trade; we’ll never know for sure, but I’m told her desk was on the opposite side of the building from the impact point and it’s possible that she never even knew what hit her. I pray that that is the truth, because thinking that she might have been standing there at a window, watching the plane heading right for her, is just too painful.

For the first year or so after 9/11, not a day went by that I didn’t think of Kath. And to be honest, five years out, I don’t think about her every single day anymore. But even so, in a way, I feel that I’m living for both of us. That sounds a little odd, and it’s not exactly what I mean, but I do feel a connection and an obligation. Or perhaps a better way of saying it is that I feel a responsibility to use this time that I have, which she did not get, in a way that honors her.

We never know what day will be our last. We never know what goodbye will be the final one. And yet, all too often, we waste our precious time. We waste our days at jobs that bore us, we don’t stay in touch with the people who matter to us, we think, ‘There’s always tomorrow’. But sometimes, there isn’t. There’s only a sunny morning, and an airplane flying low over New York City, and the ending of all our dreams.

UPDATE: Read Keith Olbermann.

On Frustration versus Persuasion (or, yet another post on what the Democrats should do…)

I know that in left-leaning circles, it’s not really fashionable to talk about politics and marketing in the same breath, but sometimes I get really frustrated when I see people forgetting one of the principal rules of marketing. You are not your customer, and as such, you need to tailor your message to them if you want to have a real impact.

It usually pops up on a blog in the form of an angry rant along the lines of, “Why doesn’t Joe/Jane Sixpack WAKE UP and get outraged about The War / The Bush Administration / Global Warming / [insert latest outrage here]?”. And I sympathize, I really do. I’m amazed at the capacity of people to rationalize and accept things that go against their own self-interest. But the fact of the matter is, they do. Ranting about it might let off some steam and help you feel better, but it’s not going to change the facts on the ground.

The question then becomes, what do you do about it? And this is where a lot of people go off-track. They either write off those people as “sheeple” too stupid to know their own minds, burn out and stop trying, or (if you’re a blogger) write long venting blog posts. What they rarely seem to do is take a good long look in the mirror at why they’re not making any headway.

Let’s say you’re an activist with an Important Issue, and you want to raise awareness about that issue and move people towards taking action on your issue. You can write a blog, and issue press releases, and send mailings to targeted lists, and lobby Congress, and do a LOT of other stuff to try to raise awareness. And if you’re good at your job, sooner or later, you get a group of people who are in your corner, and you feel good. But then, eventually, you seem to hit a plateau. You’re doing OK with your core group, but there’s large numbers of other people you just can’t seem to reach. You get frustrated. Your issue is Important. You’re doing everything right. Why do so few people seem to care?

Good question. This is where the marketing comes in. This is what you might call a market segmentation chart for political action:

demochart.jpg

In looking at the overall possible audience for your mission, there’s four basic groups aligned along two spectrums: Interest / Non-Interest and Belief / Disbelief. Your initial success is going to be in that group of people who both are inclined to believe you, and are interested in the issue — the Simpaticos. At a certain point, though, you’re going to run out of Simpaticos and need to reach out beyond them. Your next choices are the Skeptics, who are interested in your issue, but for whatever reason, they are not inclined to listen to what you have to say about it, and the So Whats, who have no reason to distrust you but are just not interested in your particular mission. (The Skips are people who don’t trust you and don’t care about your issue. Skip them, they’re not worth the time until you’ve gotten the others on board.)

The problem is, what worked for the Simpaticos is not going to work for the So Whats or the Skeptics. Yet, especially in politics or policy work, many people seem to feel that changing their approach or their message in order to reach out to new groups is somehow tantamount to “selling out” and hurting their original mission.

At which point, I have to ask, what are you really trying to achieve? Do you want to be right, or do you want to actually get something done? If you want to change the world, you have to change THIS world, not the idealized one in your head. And that means accepting the fact that not everyone thinks like you do and cares about what you care about. If you want to reach out beyond the Simpaticos, you need to stop getting frustrated that the Skeptics and the So Whats aren’t listening to you and figure out how to communicate with them effectively.

It’s not easy. Going beyond your comfort zone rarely is. But it beats losing.