Author Archives: Lois A. Bolin, Ph.D.

Once upon a time, the purpose of marketing was simple: create customers. Today, that purpose is more to create repeat customers by building relationships through brand identification, that special association that gives a customer a certain feeling to go along with an image. It’s more than a name or a logo; it’s a feeling. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could create a brand on our own and take out all of the trial-and-error guesswork? But the new paradigm truth is that branding is a co-authored experience between a business and its customers.

After the Japanese news agency, Domei, announced Japan’s unconditional surrender on Aug. 14, 1945, Emperor Hirohito addressed his people asking for full cooperation with Allied occupation forces under the new leadership of Gen. Douglas McArthur. As a coup attempt to take over the Imperial Palace to prevent surrender failed, across the Pacific, the success of a “cease fire” in Asia was announced from Washington followed by the news that automobile production would commence immediately.

A tool whose only claim to fame is that it obeys the laws of gravity has played a mighty role throughout world history, beginning with the Egyptians, who created the earliest surveying instruments: the plumb-bob, the A-Level, T-Level and plumb square.

Is that it?” I wondered out loud to my Fakahatchee Strand swamp mates who in turn noted, in a collective gleeful chorus, “Yes!”

So this is what all the fuss is about, I said to myself as my mind’s song for the morning shifted from the snappy beat of “Ghostbusters” and “I ain’t afraid of no ghost” to Peggy Lee’s mournful existentialist song from 1969, “Is That All There Is?”