rehumanize

Today I saw a study on "The New Affluents" and how they will be behave differently from previous generations of people with more dollars than sense. According to this study, affluent Americans are now into self-expression, not status.  They will not buy anything to impress others because conspicuous consumption is out.  Brand choices will be guided by perceptions of quality and authenticity. Sure.  If that's true we'd all be driving a Honda. I cannot remember the last time I heard somebody admit in research that they are shallow and driven by what the Jones' think.  Seriously, did the researcher expect that in the midst of the Great Recession respondents would agree that conspicuous consumption is a personal priority? I am wary of research that predicts that consumers will respond differently during this recovery than we did following previous recessions.   As I posted at the onset of this recession , the narrative of the "new normal" (i.e., grou

Only fools would start a company just as the economy was about to crater, and do so on April Fools Day. On April 1st, 2007, three guys at the top of their game left great jobs and corporate comforts to run away and join the circus.  The result was Barrie D'Rozario Murphy . The agency was hatched over multiple breakfasts when Bob and Stuart made the tough decision to leave Fallon to launch their own agency, followed by multiple phone calls from Stuart persuading me that joining a 3 person shop would be more exciting than leading Saatchi LA's 300 person shop.  Stuart is quite persuasive.  And prescient. We call our company a "grown up start up" – a handle Jon Bond kindly gave us one night in New York after we launched, inspired by several martinis and Jon's passion for giving brands a clear positioning. Three years later, BD'M has earned the trust of marketers such as United Airlines, Bissell, Best Buy, Applied Materials, Compellent, Del Webb, UnitedHealth