"Bungee Jumping & Cocoons" is an apt title for a book on marketing--it gets you thinking about what it could mean. The subtitle, "The Dual Nature of the Industrial Marketplace," add a little more description.
This book by John D. Kenworthy, who works in marketing at Wago Corp. in Germantown, Wisc., is published by ISA. The combination of the subtitle and publishing house would lead the reader to expect a book detailing the broad expanse of manufacturing. That is not the premise of this book.
You all know the old jokes built on "there are two types of ..." Kenworthy takes this and applies it to industrial marketing. In the somewhat autobiographical first half, he discusses his roots as a baby boomer bringing that unique viewpoint to the analysis. Actually, Kenworthy is from the later part of the baby boom, having missed the defining civil rights and Vietnam War movements. Further, GenX popular lifestyles, rather than boomer, heavily influence his analysis.
Oh yes, the two types. One Gen X generation behavior is the need for extreme--extreme sports, extreme drinks, extreme personal adornment. Bungee jumping is taken as the example of this need for "extreme." Cocooning is another lifestyle metaphor. He extends some old futurist work on cocooning by forcing it to apply to today's ubiquitous personal music players. I think that this is a misapplication of the original trend, something pushed by home electronics and furniture manufacturing associations probably 20 years ago. There was a feeling that people had tired of going out so much (at least the aforementioned manufacturers thought so) and would start staying home more (cocoon) and buy lots of home electronics, furniture, comfort foods, you get the picture.
However, he does make the metaphor fit as a way of looking at two trends in manufacturing.
One, which he calls the bungee jumping or extreme part, describes the marketing behavior of especially the larger industrial suppliers to develop partnerships, plus cost reduction programs, outsourcing, and other cost slashing/productivity boosting activities usually grouped under Lean Manufacturing or Six Sigma.
Cocooning, on the other hand, is used to describe how engineers and other professionals can get almost all the information and education right at their desks. Kenworthy uses this metaphor to describe the demise of traditional trade shows. Since people don't get out much, they can find all the products and specifications they need and can even take continuing education classes at their desks over the Web. This is a trend that must be addressed by manufacturers. He analyzes the ill-fated SourceAlliance Web-based purchasing consortium as an attempt to deal with those demographics.
I think that his metaphor is a little forced and there are many more factors at play in both the trade show and Source Alliance examples. But, the book did its job. It prodded me to think about the whole issue of what's happening in the automation and control industry. That's a good thing. There are two types of manufacturers...
4:45:28 PM 
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