Zero to One-Eighty » marketing

‘Tabula rasa marketing’

Adrian Cooke — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:55:58 +0000

Fake Steve on Apple’s marketing strategy:

The less you say about your product the more people want it, and when they don’t know anything about the product they are free to project all their wildest hopes and dreams onto that product, and if you don’t believe me just ask my good friend Barack Obama because this is exactly the strategy he used when he was running for president and guess what, it totally works. We call this “tabula rasa marketing,” and we were thinking about doing a book about it but guess what, we’re better off having no book and no information about how it works because then it stays all mysterious people can project whatever they want onto it.

Perhaps the less said the better. How long could we maintain our state of childlike wonder if we start thinking about this stuff?

The oracle

A serious car

Adrian Cooke — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:30:05 +0000

Porsche Boxter wheel detail, Mattabeseck, Quinnehtukqut

Whosoever first thought of making the calipers red surely got a big bonus that year. It’s a great example of “Drapering.” That is, making a distinguishing feature of a common one: every car with disc brakes has calipers, but colour them red and your car has some serious stoppers. (Disclaimer one: I just saw A Serious Man (2009)^† whence I stole this title. Disclaimer two: I don’t actually consider the Boxter a serious car — this is a serious Web Site on the actual Internet — but I bet the owner does.) See also…

† Yes, of course you should see it.

Mini with the works

Blade the sixteenth

Adrian Cooke — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 03:38:56 +0000

I know what the first dozen blades do, but after that it gets a little hazy

The author of the longest search query that resulted in a hit on my site reached a post entitled “Less is More.” It’s about razor blades…

Enhance it!

Adrian Cooke — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 16:32:20 +0000

The Devil’s contrails

Elena hates it when they say that in movies and TV shows. There is a finite amount of information in bitmap images. You can’t just keep “enhancing it.” In this case the image is both zoomed (4x) and cropped and enlarged (10x), even though the manufacturer calls the second part a “zoom” function. I want a better lens. Ever since Lydia planted the thought, I am craving an SLR. Contrails look fantastic in winter, especially in this pre-dawn Martian light.

Serious business

Adrian Cooke — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:19:18 +0000

Srsly funny:

Serious Business leverages the core competencies of our world renowned team to create revolutionary new synergies which tap in to blue ocean markets in the social platform mashup internets. Serious Business will forever redefine the way we use the web—even the way we see life itself. The first decade of the internet was fun. This decade is going to be Serious.

Also: awesome homepage design.