Archive for December, 2007

Nudity as a Sales Tool (II)

Friday, December 21st, 2007

How come we don’t see “Nudity as a Marketing Tool” as a course in every biz school catalog?  When I was an exchange student in France, I remember seeing a TV ad with a naked woman who walked across the screen, and stood next to a TV that was supposed to be the must-have device of the day. Sex sells, and for some reason nudity seems to, too. (But would it in a culture where clothes are not the norm?) It’s not clear that seeing a naked woman would increase my desire for an electronic box, but someone clearly thought so.

People in various states of undress sell everything from TV to underwear to social causes. Why should getting undressed get so much attention? It just does. So nudity is a powerful weapon. Does anyone teach it, though?

Nudity as a Sales Tool

Friday, December 21st, 2007

mmsWhy am I never around when all these naked people further their cause by taking their clothes off? (photo from JJ’s Dirt, which has more coverage)

But If Harvard’s Not That Good….

Wednesday, December 19th, 2007

Spoke with an alum of the Harvard Business School today who, for reasons I won’t reveal to protect his identity, knows hundreds if not thousands of other alumni who’ve graduated throughout the past years and decades. He confided to me that it’s something of a running joke at the exalted institution that the finance portion of HBS is not all that good, and a lot of folks — at least those who don’t go in already strongly oriented toward finance — leave without a strong understanding of how to, say, manage like a CFO. “Some people derive a certain strength from that,” he said, by which I guess he meant that if you don’t know something to well, you can then hire someone who does and manage them. You don’t, in other words, get too bogged down in the pesky spreadsheet details and can concentrate on the big-think strategy stuff.

Wharton, he said, was by contrast known as a finance powerhouse.

Can This Really Be This Ad Exec’s Name?

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

Brad Adgate, the senior vice president of research for Horizon Media, which buys ad time for clients like Geico and Ace Hardware. (NY Times)

That’s just too coincidental.

Rotating Restaurants

Monday, December 10th, 2007

Do waiters in rotating restaurants get confused and have troubling finding their tables?

The First Post

Friday, December 7th, 2007

… about things that confuse me about business.