#grifters custom creations

[eponymous-v]

honestly i wanted to stay out of the ai art discourse because i don’t feel like dealing with the inevitable influx of brain dead takes defending it, but at the same time, just. holy shit dude.

even before we get into the ‘what is art really though’ discussions, as much as people claim it’s ‘just a tool’, the truth of the reality is that these tools are being abused. ai art IS taking artists jobs. dmca scams are a thing - and now they’re more insidious since people began using ai generated images to make a claim seem more legitimate. ai generator companies charge fees to use their products, making millions in the process, and never pay a single penny to the people whose work they needed to have a functional generator in the first place. online art platforms and art program companies already seen as grifters are trying to cash in and sell their customers’ work without consent. people are already scraping publicly available music and writing to come up with other creative ai. there are completely ai generated influencers. people are working to create ai generated porn, not only creating more avenues for csem, but also adding another difficult hurdle for public figures whose images are being used without their consent to create porn of them, and individuals trying to take down revenge porn that targeted them. hell, ai are scraping confidential medical records and using the photos to train itself without removing the patient identifying information. if reading that stuff still hasn’t changed your mind on why ai art is the latest techbro scam, yeah, fine, i guess the next part is directed to you personally.

the biggest, and most complicated, defense i’ve seen is ‘ai art isn’t any different from artists using reference!’ obviously, artists of all kinds use reference. this is an over simplification, but in the visual artist’s case references are for two things: accuracy, and deliberate inaccuracy. put another way, it’s learning the rules so you can break them.

using a reference is not cheating, or a short-cut: it is used to teach. while you can sit down and draw a horse off the cuff, reference will help immensely if you wanted to portray what a horse looks like accurately, regardless of your stylization. on the other hand, if you want to base a monstrous creature (or part of it) on a horse, you will make a much more convincing monster if you have a reference of the real thing in front of you (the uncanny valley is a thing and it’s a both a blessing and a curse.)

some artists defend will ai art with this, using the generators as the tool they were originally design to be, saying that the ai is more akin to a ‘pre-production assistant’ than a replacement. however, the difference between an artist using an ai to concept vs an ai artist is that ai artists don’t seem to understand is that the work does not stop after the generator spits out an image. and it cannot replicate what comes next: organic creation.

what you see on a page is not the result of just mashing references together like legos until you get something nice. it’s having a concept and then trying to execute it with intentional consideration. only, it never goes like that. art is not linear. it’s extraordinarily intimate, tedious, and frustrating. it is countless hours of trying and trying and trying again until you finally have something that is ‘good enough.’ it is coming up against a roadblock and trying everything you can to get around it - something that’s extra frustrating when its a roadblock you’ve dealt with (or thought you dealt with) before. because of this, rarely does a piece of visual art stay exactly the same as it was originally conceived. the entire process is, as bob ross would say, a series of ‘happy little accidents’, some of which influence entire art movements. thinking about it another way, art is just failure after failure until something good comes out of your creation.

so where am i going with this? apart from the money angle, i argue the real, bone-deep reason why visual artists are pissed is that ai artists ignore the entire point of learning a skill - and the pitfalls that come along with it. what you see in the final product is literally thousands of hours of failure. failing upwards for sure, but failure is failure and it is fucking humiliating, even if what you make never sees the light of day. this is the biggest hurdle people have when first starting out - faced with such bleak prospects, art is intimidating as hell, sometimes making it seem out of reach. and the art community is angry because ai artists have pulled out the bowling lane bumpers so they won’t have to experience what that kind of failure is like. sure code can be altered and eventually perfected, but the ai artist themself learns nothing about the creation of visual art, just their ai. to an ai artist, once the image is generated, nothing else needs to be done, there’s no reason to improve. which is a shame, really, because failure is where creativity truly lives.

(before you ask, yes i do think coding is an art form. the sciences and the arts are more intertwined than people like to think. but programmers aren’t safe from this either: microsoft is facing a lawsuit because they scraped github and made an ai using the code it read without crediting the original programmers.)

y’all, i don’t know where to go from here. ai generators had the potential to be an amazing tool. but they’re being utilized at large by people who don’t want to put in the work - they’re just in it to make a quick buck off of other people’s backs before moving on to the next overhyped thing they can market.

so i guess this entire rant was just to say, my man, art was never inaccessible to you. you were just afraid of failure.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Recommendation engines and "lean-back" media

In William Gibson’s 1992 novel “Idoru,” a media executive describes her company’s core audience:

“Best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth…no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”

It’s an astonishingly great passage, not just for the image it evokes, but for how it captures the character of the speaker and her contempt for the people who made her fortune.

It’s also a beautiful distillation of the 1990s anxiety about TV’s role in a societal “dumbing down,” that had brewed for a long time, at least since the Nixon-JFK televised debates, whose outcome was widely attributed not to JFK’s ideas, but to Nixon’s terrible TV manner.

Neil Postman’s 1985 “Amusing Ourselves To Death” was a watershed here, comparing the soundbitey Reagan-Dukakis debates with the long, rhetorically complex Lincoln-Douglas debates of the previous century.

(Incidentally, when I finally experienced those debates for myself, courtesy of the 2009 BBC America audiobook, I was more surprised by Lincoln’s unequivocal, forceful repudiations of slavery abolition than by the rhetoric’s nuance)

https://memex.craphound.com/2009/01/20/lincoln-douglas-debate-audiobook-civics-history-and-rhetoric-lesson-in-16-hours/

“Media literacy” scholarship entered the spotlight, and its left flank — epitomized by Chomsky’s 1988 “Manufacturing Consent” — claimed that an increasingly oligarchic media industry was steering society, rather than reflecting it.

Thus, when the internet was demilitarized and the general public started trickling — and then rushing — to use it, there was a widespread hope that we might break free of the tyranny of concentrated, linear programming (in the sense of “what’s on,” and “what it does to you”).

Much of the excitement over Napster wasn’t about getting music for free — it was about the mix-tapification of all music, where your custom playlists would replace the linear album.

Likewise Tivo, whose ad-skipping was ultimately less important than the ability to watch the shows you liked, rather than the shows that were on.

Blogging, too: the promise was that a community of reader-writers could assemble a daily “newsfeed” that reflected their idiosyncratic interests across a variety of sources, surfacing ideas from other places and even other times.

The heady feeling of the time is hard to recall, honestly, but there was a thrill to getting up and reading the news that you chose, listening to a playlist you created, then watching a show you picked.

And while there were those who fretted about the “Daily Me” (what we later came to call the “filter bubble”) the truth was that this kind of active media creation/consumption ranged far more widely than the monopolistic media did.

The real “bubble” wasn’t choosing your own programming — it was everyone turning on their TV on Thursday nights to Friends, Seinfeld and The Simpsons.

The optimism of the era is best summarized in a taxonomy that grouped media into two categories: “lean back” (turn it on and passively consume it) and “lean forward” (steer your media consumption with a series of conscious decisions that explores a vast landscape).

Lean-forward media was intensely sociable: not just because of the distributed conversation that consisted of blog-reblog-reply, but also thanks to user reviews and fannish message-board analysis and recommendations.

I remember the thrill of being in a hotel room years after I’d left my hometown, using Napster to grab rare live recordings of a band I’d grown up seeing in clubs, and striking up a chat with the node’s proprietor that ranged fondly and widely over the shows we’d both seen.

But that sociability was markedly different from the “social” in social media. From the earliest days of Myspace and Facebook, it was clear that this was a sea-change, though it was hard to say exactly what was changing and how.

Around the time Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace, a close friend a blazing argument with a TV executive who insisted that the internet was just a passing fad: that the day would come when all these online kids grew up, got beaten down by work and just wanted to lean back.

To collapse on the sofa and consume media that someone else had programmed for them, anaesthetizing themselves with passive media that didn’t make them think too hard.

This guy was obviously wrong — the internet didn’t disappear — but he was also right about the resurgence of passive, linear media.

But this passive media wasn’t the “must-see TV” of the 80s and 90s.

Rather, it was the passivity of the recommendation algorithm, which created a per-user linear media feed, coupled with mechanisms like “endless scroll” and “autoplay,” that incinerated any trace of an active role for the “consumer” (a very apt term here).

It took me a long time to figure out exactly what I disliked about algorithmic recommendation/autoplay, but I knew I hated it. The reason my 2008 novel LITTLE BROTHER doesn’t have any social media? Wishful thinking. I was hoping it would all die in a fire.

Today, active media is viewed with suspicion, considered synonymous with Qanon-addled boomers who flee Facebook for Parler so they can stan their favorite insurrectionists in peace, freed from the tyranny of the dread shadowban.

But I’m still on team active media. I would rather people actively choose their media diets, in a truly sociable mode of consumption and production, than leaning back and getting fed whatever is served up by the feed.

Today on Wired, Duke public policy scholar Philip M Napoli writes about lean forward and lean back in the context of Trump’s catastrophic failure to launch an independent blog, “From the Desk of Donald J Trump.”

https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-trumps-failed-blog-proves-he-was-just-howling-into-the-void/

In a nutshell, Trump started a blog which he grandiosely characterized as a replacement for the social media monopolists who’d kicked him off their platforms. Within a month, he shut it down.

While Trump claimed the shut-down was all part of the plan, it’s painfully obvious that the real reason was that no one was visiting his website.

Now, there are many possible, non-exclusive explanations for this.

For starters, it was a very bad social media website. It lacked even rudimentary social tools. The Washington Post called it “a primitive one-way loudspeaker,” noting its lack of per-post comments, a decades old commonplace.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/21/trump-online-traffic-plunge/

Trump paid (or more likely, stiffed) a grifter crony to build the site for him, and it shows: the “Like” buttons didn’t do anything, the video-sharing buttons created links to nowhere, etc. From the Desk… was cursed at birth.

But Napoli’s argument is that even if Trump had built a good blog, it would have failed. Trump has a highly motivated cult of tens of millions of people — people who deliberately risked death to follow him, some even ingesting fish-tank cleaner and bleach at his urging.

The fact that these cult-members were willing to risk their lives, but not endure poor web design, says a lot about the nature of the Trump cult, and its relationship to passive media.

The Trump cult is a “push media” cult, simultaneously completely committed to Trump but unwilling to do much to follow him.

That’s the common thread between Fox News (and its successors like OANN) and MAGA Facebook.

And it echoes the despairing testimony of the children of Fox cultists, that their boomer parents consume endless linear TV, turning on Fox from the moment they arise and leaving it on until they fall asleep in front of it (also, reportedly, how Trump spent his presidency).

Napoli says that Trump’s success on monopoly social media platforms and his failure as a blogger reveals the role that algorithmically derived, per-user, endless scroll linear media played in the ascendancy of his views.

It makes me think of that TV exec and his prediction of the internet’s imminent disappearance (which, come to think of it, is not so far off from my own wishful thinking about social media’s disappearance in Little Brother).

He was absolutely right that this century has left so many of us exhausted, wanting nothing more than the numbness of lean-back, linear feeds.

But up against that is another phenomenon: the resurgence of active political movements.

After a 12-month period that saw widescale civil unrest, from last summer’s BLM uprising to the bizarre storming of the capital, you can’t really call this the golden age of passivity.

While Fox and OANN consumption might be the passive daily round of one of Idoru’s “vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organisms craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed,” that is in no way true of Qanon.

Qanon is an active pastime, a form of collaborative storytelling with all the mechanics of the Alternate Reality Games that the lean-forward media advocates who came out of the blogging era love so fiercely:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/06/no-vitiated-air/#other-hon

Meanwhile, the “clicktivism” that progressive cynics decried as useless performance a decade ago has become an active contact sport, welding together global movements from Occupy to BLM that use the digital to organize the highly physical.

That’s the paradox of lean-forward and lean-back: sometimes, the things you learn while leaning back make you lean forward — in fact, they might just get you off the couch altogether.

I think that Napoli is onto something. The fact that Trump’s cultists didn’t follow him to his crummy blog tells us that Trump was an effect, not a cause (something many of us suspected all along, as he’s clearly neither bright nor competent enough to inspire a movement).

But the fact that “cyberspace keeps everting” (to paraphrase “Spook Country,” another William Gibson novel) tells us that passive media consumption isn’t a guarantee of passivity in the rest of your life (and sometimes, it’s a guarantee of the opposite).

And it clarifies the role that social media plays in our discourse — not so much a “radicalizer” as a means to corral likeminded people together without them having to do much. Within those groups are those who are poised for action, or who can be moved to it.

The ease with which these people find one another doesn’t produce a deterministic outcome. Sometimes, the feed satisfies your urge for change (“clicktivism”). Sometimes, it fuels it (“radicalizing”).

Notwithstanding smug media execs, the digital realm equips us to “express our mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire” by doing much more than “changing the channels on a universal remote” — for better and for worse.

Image: Ian Burt (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/oddsock/267206444

CC BY: https://creativecommo

ns.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[novapark]

You know it’s funny seeing that patreon thing floating about. My SO asked me once why I don’t have one for like world creation, custom skins, recolors, and so on because he thought I’d probably do okay with that (he’s only seen some of my work tbh). I told him there are three major reasons I haven’t: 

1. I am inconsistent as fuck. Like I make shit whenever I feel like it. I don’t think people would appreciate that.  2. I am still learning and a lot of my stuff is not up to quality in my own eyes.  3. I am from an old way of simming where I just don’t like charging people money for cc. If I get really good at meshing or even more consistent with releasing world projects maybe I’d do a donate system (without timed release though) but that’s as far as I can kind of bring myself to go because I’m damn dirty idealist.  And no shade at people making money this way. I personally am unable to work because of my health issues, I understand this is a great way to enjoy sims, do something creative, and make some much needed cash. However if you’re gonna do it, don’t be a grifter, have some pride in your damn work. Don’t release broken and poorly textured CC. If you have to be late for quality, just do it. Yeah some people will get testy but just set that as a standard.

[barbiecharlotteblog-blog]

Fun and Profit Collecting Barbies

Being the most popular doll on this planet, Barbie was capable of reinvent and remodel herself since her creation and introduction in 1959. Through the years, Barbie came in several varieties and style with a view to present extra choices for its rising market.

To have the ability to meet the demands of the instances, the creator of Barbie--Mattel, Inc.--continues to supply and design totally different Barbie prospects that would prolong the potential of probably the most-promoting doll.

Watching Barbie in a Film

Barbie, the style doll, has not solely captured the hearts of doll collectors around the world but in addition the hearts of film goers regardless of their age and nationality. Being in a movie, Barbie is given life by her creators and truly touches the lives of those people who love her.

If you are a Barbie fan or you know any person who is an avid Barbie fan and you'd wish to shock her by giving her a present, try to take into account giving a few of the films Barbie was capable of take part in over time.

Most of these Barbie movies are categorized as animated movies which are motion, adventure, romance and household. In these Barbie movies, Barbie--America's most favourite pint-sized and plastic sweetheart--stars in different interpretations of basic and fashionable tales.

The Nutcracker. That is thought of as Barbie's first film. Launched in 2001, this Barbie film provides life to the story based on the beloved Tchaikovsky ballet. Here, Barbie breathes life to "Clara," the story's main character and to the "Sugarplum Fairy.

In this timeless Christmas story, Barbie and her animated co-stars dance superbly to choreography by the New York Metropolis Ballet's Peter Martins and to music by the London Symphony Orchestra. Directed by Owen Hurley, this basic Barbie film is taken into account as a timeless piece as a result of it is stunning and inspirational whereas selling extremely life-like CGI animation.

Rapunzel. Within the custom of constructing Barbie films impressed from traditional fairy tales, Barbie is featured in this film as Rapunzel. The world's most loved doll comes to life in a fully-animated characteristic movie that's primarily based on the story of beloved long-haired princess that has been locked away in a tower.

This Barbie movie is offered in detailed computer graphics that can absolutely appeal to younger and adult audiences. Except for presenting great computer graphics, this Barbie movie additionally featured the voices of actresses like Angelica Huston from The Grifters, Kelly Sheridan and pop-singer Samantha Mumba.

The Swan Lake. This Barbie movie is claimed to be one of the crucial favorite Barbie films of all time. Here, Barbie puts on her ballet slippers once again to play one of the dance world's most famous heroines, the enchanted princess Odette.

The story tells Barbie and her prince's search for true love. Swan Lake options Barbie in a lead function while that includes the voices of Kelsey Grammer from Frasier and Maggie Wheeler of Friends.

The Princess and the Pauper. That is the movie the place Barbie seems in her first singing function. Here, Barbie sings for both the princess and the pauper. This Barbie film retells the story of Mark Twain's original story whereas giving it an unusual and galvanizing twist.

One of the well-liked collector's gadgets is dolls. Collectible dolls can vary from antique dolls to fashionable collectible dolls. In case you are excited about accumulating dolls, it might be a good idea to give attention to a specific sort of collectible doll.

Actually probably the most rewarding and thrilling is collectible Barbie dolls. Barbies have turn into extremely common since they first got here out in 1959. What little woman is there that doesn't own a minimum of one Barbie. The value of collectible Barbies is sort of excessive, so much so, that as we speak there are even Barbies that can be specially designed in line with collectors' wants.

Individuals Who Acquire Barbies

Whereas each little girl owns a Barbie, most of them do not acquire them. Let's face it, the enjoyable of a Barbie is dressing her and doing her hair for those dates with Ken, however the price for this fun is that the financial value of the doll is shot.

The general public who truly collect Barbies are adults. It's believed that there are well over a hundred thousand adults that personal these wonderful collectible dolls. Nearly all these adults are ladies, and about ten % of Barbie collectors are male. Furthermore, the ladies that personal such collections are statistically usually in their forties, and purchase an average of twenty such dolls annually, sometimes spending a few thousand or extra dollars in the course of.

How to Gather Barbies

Rule Quantity One: Maintain It in the Field

In case you wish to keep the value of your collectible Barbies, you must leave them of their packing containers. Part of the value of a Barbie is the original box; therefore most experienced collectors don't ever take away their collectible Barbies from their packing containers. The value of collectible Barbies can depreciate by as much fifty p.c if they're taken out of their bins.

As a collector of Barbie dolls you may have a choice to make about whether to take the doll out of its box to enjoy while losing out on worth, or just console your self that the doll in its field is gorgeous and can preserve its value despite the fact that you'll not get an opportunity to the touch and play with it. Nevertheless, you can buy a collectible Barbie doll packaged in a raise-off field, so you possibly can still enjoy enjoying with and feeling your Barbie. On this method it's going to nonetheless look nice whereas it retains its worth as a collectible.

Rule Quantity Two: Ask An Skilled

Discovering collectible Barbies shouldn't be a difficult process, but attending to know the worth of your collection can require a bit of effort. Before you'll be able to precisely judge the worth of collectible Barbies, you could have to ask an skilled or read up on the literature pertaining to collectible Barbie dolls. In case you are new to this exercise, make sure you realize that there are a variety of sources so that you can tap into in your quest for information on collectible Barbie dolls.

There are two courses of collectible Barbie, classic and fashionable. Classic dolls are those produced from 1959 to the early eighties; fashionable dolls are produced from the mid-eighties on. Each lessons have collectible worth.

The worth of your Barbie can rely upon a number of elements. For instance, if you happen to look on eBay, the price can fluctuate according to who is selling the Barbie (if it is a respected supplier the price shall be extra), additionally on the photograph of the doll, and the spending energy of the purchaser. Evaluating the current value of collectible Barbies could be a bit complicated. You will find that a Barbie reward set in excellent condition can fetch anything from one hundred thirty dollars to 2 hundred fifty five dollars.

What Types of Barbies to Gather

Most collectors who gather Barbies due to their value will gravitate towards Label dolls. These pieces have very detailed attention paid to clothes and equipment. The Platinum Label doll is produced in limited editions that do not exceed a thousand such dolls, and are typically only found in a selected retail store. The White Chocolate Obsession Barbie Doll is a wonderful instance of such a collectible doll, and the identify refers to the scent of white chocolate that exudes from the doll's hair. Other similar collectible Barbies include Faerie Queen, Badgley Mischka Bride Barbie, as well as the very restricted Nurse Barbie doll that has been designed by Robert Finest.

However, Barbie dolls are so in style that also they are made based on TV exhibits, movies, and well-known personalities. Collectors discover them appealing, and the worth of these in style Barbies will usually admire. When contemplating collectible Barbies, these are perhaps the kind of collectible Barbie doll that can come to thoughts first.

Barbie was first released by Mattel in 1959 and for the reason that earliest Barbie doll had her hair pulled again in a Ponytail, she is known as the Ponytail Barbie by vintage Barbie collectors. There are six different incarnations of the Ponytail Barbie and so she is referred to by her quantity, i.e. #1 Ponytail Barbie or #2 Ponytail, and so on. What follows is a short guide to figuring out every one as the variations between them are normally refined, but hugely important to worth.

#1 Ponytail Barbie

The #1 Ponytail Barbie will be either blonde or brunette. Extra blonde dolls had been made so the brunette is extra helpful. Her hair is tied again in a ponytail and she or he has curled bangs. Her irises are white and her lips are crimson and she additionally severely arched eyebrows. Pointy, truly. She can be peering off to the facet.

Constructed from heavy vinyl plastic, she has a solid torso and holes in the backside of her feet and copper tubing in her legs so she could be fitted to her pedestal. The bottom of her right foot additionally says "Japan" on it.

Due to the nature of the plastic she was constituted of, she is normally pale to a very white color. Her original outfit consists of a black/white zebra striped swimsuit, open toed black excessive heels (with holes in them!), white sunglasses (blue lenses) and golden hoop earrings.

#1 Ponytail Barbie is also marked: Barbie (TM) Pats. Pend. ?MCMLVIII by Mattel Inc.

#2 Ponytail Barbie

The #2 Ponytail Barbie is actually exactly the same because the #1 Barbie except she now not has holes in her toes and no copper tubing. Her new pedestal has arms to hold her in place. She bears the same mark as above.

#three Ponytail Barbie

#3 Barbie is like the #2 besides she now has blue irises and softer eyebrows. She might have either brown or blue eyeliner.

#four Ponytail Barbie

The #4 Barbie now comes in a brand new type of plastic and customarily retains her flesh-colored tone over time. She also only comes carrying blue eyeliner.

#5 Ponytail Barbie

The large modifications to the #5 Barbie are that her torso is now hollow and he or she bears a new mark: Barbie ? Pats. Pend. ?MCMLVIII by Mattel Inc. Observe the ? instead of the (TM).

In addition. #5 additionally is accessible in a new hair colour, Titian. Barbie's hair can be a bit stiffer now. The Titian #5 Barbie may be very exhausting to search out and the most collectible. Unfortunately, #5 Barbies are Happy birthday Charlotte liable to greasy faces as a result of some problems Mattel was having with the vinyl. A greasy look will reduce worth as the issue is not common and there are some dolls still displaying lovely matte faces to be discovered.

#6 Ponytail Barbie

#6 has a new outfit, a red jersey swimsuit and crimson open-toed heels. Her lips are now watermelon coloured as a substitute of red. Her fingernail polish matches her lips. The vinyl issues were fastened so she will not have a greasy face anymore both.

Is she a number 6 or number 7?

A while in 1963, there was a significant change to Barbie. The #6 dolls produced in 1963 and 1964 have broader faces and still have a distinct mark: Midge(TM)/? 1962/Barbie?/? 1958/by/Mattel, Inc and they're accessible in different hair colours -- lemon blonde, ash blonde, titian and brunette (not raven black like the #1's). Her lips and nails are actually coral.

Typically the Barbie with the new mark is known as the #7 Barbie by collectors and sometimes she is referred to as the #6. If you are contemplating adding certainly one of these dolls to your assortment, the essential thing is to know that Barbie had a bit of a makeover between 1962 and 1963 and the 1962 doll was solely manufactured for one year so she could also be more collectible.

On a last be aware, there are many artists doing restorations and repaints of vintage Barbie dolls. Like all vintage, any classic Barbie that has been altered from her unique situation will likely be far much less invaluable even if the repaint restores her beauty. If you're bidding on an auction for a Barbie doll and you have questions on any doable restoration work performed to her, do not be afraid to query the seller.

[maximumbouquetwombatcvxvxcv-blog]

Marketing 4.0 in the digital economy: Moving from ancient to digital promoting

Traditionally, promoting continuously starts with segmentation—a apply of dividing the market into solid teams supported their geographic, demographic, psychographic, and activity profiles. Segmentation is often followed by targeting—a apply of choosing one or additional segments that a whole is committed to pursue supported their attractiveness and match with the whole. Segmentation and targeting square measure each elementary aspects of a brand’s strategy. they permit for economical resource allocation and grifter positioning. They additionally facilitate marketers to serve multiple segments, every with differentiated offerings.

However, segmentation and targeting additionally exemplify the vertical relationship between a whole and its customers, analogous to hunter and prey. Segmentation and targeting square measure unilateral choices created by marketers while not the consent of their customers. Marketers verify the variables that outline the segments. The involvement of shoppers is proscribed to their inputs in research, that typically precede segmentation and targeting exercises. Being “targets,” customers typically feel intruded upon and aggravated by digressive messages aimed toward them. several take into account unidirectional messages from brands to be spam.In the digital economy, customers square measure connected with each other in horizontal webs of communities. Today, communities square measure the new segments. in contrast to segments, communities square measure naturally shaped by customers at intervals the boundaries that they themselves outline. client communities square measure proof against spamming and digressive advertising. In fact, they'll reject a company’s commit to force its means into these webs of relationship.

To effectively interact with a community of shoppers, brands should provoke permission. Permission promoting, introduced by Seth Godin, revolves around this idea of requesting customers’ consent before delivering promoting messages. However, once requesting permission, brands should act as friends with sincere needs to assist, not hunters with bait. almost like the mechanism on Facebook, customers can have the choice to either “confirm” or “ignore” the friend requests. This demonstrates the horizontal relationship between brands and customers. However, corporations could still use segmentation, targeting, and positioning as long because it is created clear to customers.

From whole positioning and differentiation to whole clarification of characters and codes

In a ancient sense, a whole may be a set of images—most typically a reputation, a logo, and a tagline—that distinguishes a company’s product or service giving from its competitors’. It additionally is a reservoir that stores all the worth generated by the company’s whole campaigns. In recent years, a whole has additionally become the illustration of the general client expertise that an organization delivers to its customers. Therefore, a whole could function a platform for a company’s strategy since any activities that the corporate engages in are related to the whole.

The construct {of whole|of brand name|of name} is closely coupled with brand positioning. Since the Eighties, whole positioning has been recognized because the battle for the customer’s mind. to determine sturdy equity, a whole should have a transparent Associate in Nursingd consistent positioning likewise as an authentic set of differentiation to support the positioning. whole positioning is basically a compelling promise that marketers convey to win the customers’ minds and hearts. To exhibit true whole integrity and win customers’ trust, marketers should fulfill this promise with a solid and concrete differentiation through its promoting combine.

In the digital economy, customers square measure currently expedited and authorized  to judge and even scrutinize any company’s brand-positioning promise. With this transparency (due to the increase of social media) brands will now not create false, subjective guarantees. corporations will position themselves as something, however unless there's basically a community-driven accord the positioning amounts to nada over company conceit.

Today, systematically act whole identity and positioning in an exceedingly repetitive manner—a key success think about ancient marketing—may now not be enough. With troubled technologies, shorter product life cycles, and speedily dynamic  trends, a whole should be dynamic enough to behave in bound ways in which in bound things. What ought to stay consistent, however, square measure the whole characters and codes. The character is that the brand’s raison d’être, its authentic reason for being. once the core of the whole remains faithful its roots, the outer imaging may be versatile. consider it this way: by having myriad emblem adaptations—Google calls them doodles—MTV and Google stay solid nonetheless versatile as brands.

From marketing the ‘four P’s’ to commercialising the ‘four C’s’

The promoting combine may be a classic tool to assist set up what to supply and the way to supply to the shoppers. basically, there square measure four P’s: product, price, place, and promotion. Product is usually developed supported customers’ desires and desires, captured through research. corporations management the bulk of product choices from conception to production. to determine a damage for the merchandise, corporations use a mixture of cost-based, competition-based, and client value–based rating ways. Customers’ disposition to pay, calculable in client value–based rating, is that the most vital input that customers have in reference to rating.

Once corporations decide what to supply (product and price), they have to make your mind up the way to supply (place and promotion). corporations got to verify wherever to distribute the merchandise with the target of constructing it handily obtainable and accessible to customers. corporations additionally got to communicate the knowledge concerning the merchandise to the audience through varied ways like advertising, promotion, and commercials. once the four P’s of the promoting combine square measure optimally designed and aligned, marketing becomes less difficult as customers square measure interested in the worth propositions.

In a connected world, the construct of selling combine has evolved to accommodate additional client participation. promoting combine (the four P’s) ought to be redefined because the four C’s (co-creation, currency, communal activation, and conversation).

In the digital economy, co-creation is that the new development strategy. Through co-creation and involving customers early within the cerebration stage, corporations will improve the success rate of recent development. Co-creation additionally permits customers to customise and modify product and services, thereby making superior price propositions.

The construct of rating is additionally evolving within the digital era from standardized to dynamic rating. Dynamic pricing—setting versatile costs supported market demand and capability utilization—is not new in some industries like welcome and airlines. however advancement in technology has brought the apply to different industries. on-line retailers, for example, collect a huge quantity of knowledge, that permits them to perform big-data analytics and successively to supply a novel rating for every client. With dynamic rating, corporations will optimize profitableness by charging completely different customers otherwise supported historical purchase patterns, proximity to store locations, and different customer-profile aspects. within the digital economy, value is comparable to currency, that fluctuates reckoning on market demand.

The construct of channel is additionally dynamic . within the sharing economy, the foremost potent distribution construct is peer-to-peer distribution. Players like Airbnb, Uber, Zipcar, and disposal Club square measure disrupting the edifice, taxi, car rental, and banking industries, severally. they supply customers easy accessibility to the product and services not owned  by them however by different customers. the increase of 3-D printing can spur this peer-to-peer distribution even additional within the close to future. Imagine customers wanting a product and in an exceedingly matter of minutes receiving the merchandise written ahead of them. in an exceedingly connected world, customers demand access to product and services nearly instantly, which might solely be served with their peers in shut proximity. this can be the essence of communal activation.The construct of promotion has additionally evolved in recent years. historically, promotion has continuously been a one-sided affair, with corporations causation messages to customers as audiences. Today, the proliferation of social media permits customers to retort to those messages. It additionally permits customers to converse concerning the messages with different customers. the increase of customer-rating systems like TripAdvisor and Yelp give a platform for patrons to own conversations concerning and supply evaluations of brands they need interacted with.

With a connected promoting combine (the four C’s) corporations have a high chance of extant within the digital economy. However, the paradigm of marketing has to amendment likewise. historically, customers square measure passive objects of marketing techniques. in an exceedingly connected world, the concept is to own each side actively acquire business price. With raised client participation, corporations square measure partaking customers in clear commercialisation.

From client service processes to cooperative client care

Prior to purchase, customers square measure treated as targets. Once they plan to purchase, they're thought of kings in an exceedingly ancient customer-service perspective. Shifting to the customer-care approach, corporations read customers as equals. rather than serving customers, an organization demonstrates its real concern for the client by listening, responding, and systematically following through on terms set by each the corporate and also the client.

In ancient customer-service, personnel square measure to blame for activity specific roles and processes in step with strict pointers and normal operative procedures. this case typically puts service personnel in an exceedingly perplexity over conflicting objectives. in an exceedingly connected world, collaboration is that the key to customer-care success. Collaboration happens once corporations invite customers to participate within the method by victimisation self-service facilities.

[thatjayjustice]

1. there is no ‘race war’ in the US, there is widespread oppression and the power is very much one sided with minorities struggling to be treated equally & to receive equal pay, rights & justice under the law 2. When someone literally says that you as a black woman are making racism worse by speaking out about how you have been discriminated against, it’s time to disengage. We speak out to bring awareness, to empower each other, to educate. There is no need to educate here. There is no will to learn. There is only a refusal to accept reality. 3. I have never actually held a panel called ‘Being a Minority In Cosplay’ but why not, we do face unique challenges. Being silent will never lead to us living in harmony because racism persists even when we do nothing but exist.  4. Yes, this is the same Alexander Grifter who is known for recasting props, bullying & threatening others in the cosplay community and not delivering goods to paying customers. Buyer beware, for many reasons.