The book says: in the long run, every market becomes a two-horse race. McDonald & Burger King. Coca-Cola & Pepsi. Nike & Reebok. Crest & Colgate.

My comment: even if that was universally true, how does it help a marketing person? There's little a marketing person can do about the position of his company in the market. The only conclusion I can make is that if I were a marketing person and worked for No. 3 company, I should just quit and apply for a job in No. 2 or 1.

The other problem is that it isn't universally true and the book again makes a big simplification of reality and it tries to support this simplified picture with selectively chosen examples. There are market where 2 brands can't fulfill all the demand (there are more than 2 well-known car manufacturers). There are markets that tend to fall into monopoly (e.g. Microsoft has 95% of operating system and office software markets). I'm sure there are many markets that are two-horse race, but then again there are also three-horse race markets as well as highly fragmented markets. This "law" is nothing but a sometimes true observation and it's not true frequently enough to be worth anything.

   

The book says: marketing strategy depends on your position in the market. If you're No. 2 you use different strategy than when you're No. 1 or 3. Avis was No. 2 in car rental and when they advertised as "finest in rent-a-cars" the had losses because their marketing wasn't credible (you can't be "finest" being No. 2). That had profit when they switched to "Avis is only No. 2 in rent-a-cars. So why go with us? We try harder". Then they had another disastrous campaign when they started claiming "Avis is going to be No. 1".

My comment: I agree with the premise (kind of marketing depends on your position in the market). However the book says very little about what kind of strategy one should use in a given position (except for a few examples). Additionally their examples feel like they oversimplify complex reality. Even assuming that the data about e.g. Avis is fully correct (i.e. that there is strong correlation between Avis profits and the kind of marketing campaign) I find it hardly unlikely that there's a causality relationship. I don't think that good or bad marketing champaign can make or break a company. I can see how this point of view can be attractive for marketing people but I would think that success depends on more factors. Marketing might be an important factor but certainly not dominant.

   

Changing Radio theme

I've been less than happy with my previous, old and busted Radio theme and I just found a nice, new hotness one so I made a switch.

The problem: Radio isn't a dynamic thing, it pre-renders everything to static HTML files so all my previous entries were still in the old theme.

The solution: run Radio tool, from menu choose "Radio\Publish\All weblog pages". It seems to re-render all the pages. I'm all happy now.

Oh, and I just found a more complete tutorial

   

The book says: it's fruitless to try to take over a word that is already owned by a competitor. Burger King tried to own word "fast" which was already owned by McDonald; and failed miserably. FedEx tried to take over "worldwide" from DHL.

My comment: this talk about "owning" words is a bit silly. The book doesn't say anything about how to actually own the word. I guess you're supposed to use it in your marketing/advertisement material but such statement is not very helpful for a marketer (I think; I'm not one).