Await the Chinese backlash
The latest European passenger vehicle emissions standard (“Euro5″) was introduced in September 2009. Since that date, in Europe it has been illegal to sell new vehicles that do not meet this standard. Older models that only met the Euro4 standard can only be exported outside Europe to markets with more lenient standards. Within Europe the cars have little value – they can only be disassembled in order to reuse the components – and this value is therefore below cost.
This situation alone raises the possibility that dominant carmakers in the other markets will already be very suspicious of Euro4-compliant automakers. But it can get worse, much worse. Imagine that Read more
Taking your watch and telling you the time
Just a bloglet today – a more substantial post will be arriving soon.
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I subscribe to Get Abstract (registration required) which provides 5-page abstracts of business books, allowing me to keep up with trends without spending my entire life reading books. Usually I find it very useful. But today I received an abstract that included the most banal statement ever. Read more
What about tobacco?
Recently I was re-reading Theodore Levitt’s epochal Marketing Myopia and considering the basic premise that companies are not defining their markets correctly (by being product-orientated or service-oriented rather than customer-oriented) and therefore not following the market as it migrates to an alternative product or service to fulfil the same underlying desire.
Then it struck me that maybe there is an exception for which a replacement has not been produced, and maybe cannot be produced … Read more