MURKETING

In The New York Times Magazine: Goodwill

GOODWILL HUNTING:
Rebranding castoffs as couture — or at least as competitive with Wal-Mart.

This week in Consumed:

In the first eight months of 2008, sales at Goodwill stores in the United States and Canada increased by 7 percent over the same period last year. While that obviously runs counter to trends being reported by most retailers these days, it’s hard to say whether it counts as good news that more people are evidently buying secondhand goods. After all, many of us probably don’t think of Goodwill in terms of retail; we think of it in terms of charity.

But operators of some Goodwill stores have been making efforts to prod us to think a little differently, or perhaps more expansively, about the brand — and quite possibly the present economic gloom has primed us to be more open to that idea….

Read the column in the November 2, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

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Flickr Interlude

good tire free, originally uploaded by pierre lascott.

In NYT Book Review: The Numerati

As mentioned in the comments to this earlier post*, I reviewed The Numerati by Stephen Baker. That review is out, in tomorrow’s NYT Book Review section — first review I’ve done for them in years, though I used to write for them a lot. Anyway, it starts like this:

Maybe you’re the kind of person who doesn’t believe that the kind of person you are can be deduced by an algorithm and expressed through shorthand categorizations like “urban youth” or “hearth keeper.” Maybe I’d agree with you, and maybe we’re right. But the kind of people — “crack mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers” — whom Stephen Baker writes about in “The Numerati” clearly see things differently. In fact, they probably regard such skepticism as more fodder for the math-driven identity formulas they’ve created to satisfy the consumer-product companies and politicians who hire them….

Here’s the link.

[* Note: The review was already written and filed prior to that post, if that matters to you at all.]