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banananutsmuthie · 2 years

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Idol Club Shareholder Letter

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A/N: NOT SMUT. This is Idol Club lore written in the form of a shareholder letter. I promise you'll be rewarded with a bunch of easter eggs and future Idol Club spoilers if you read the whole thing. Enjoy while I prepare a proper comeback soon!

My fellow shareholders,

I was there on Opening Day next to Founder Kim as the VP of Public Relations when we officially opened the doors to our maiden Idol Club branch in Gangnam. Since then, I’ve risen through the ranks at Idol Club Entertainment, serving as the Chief Communications Officer for the last eight months. I’ve given many speeches on behalf of this company, addressed our employees through countless emails, and weathered the storm of numerous media queries during the Aberration scandal. Yet, never could I have imagined addressing you all in this annual shareholder letter, a job usually reserved for Founder Kim who has served as chairman since day one.

Founder Kim has been a pioneer and visionary in leading this company into the next golden age of technology and entertainment, so it came as a shock to receive Founder Kim’s resignation from the company last month. We wish Founder Kim all the best.

Rest assured, as the newly elected chairman of Idol Club Entertainment, I will do everything in my power to continue to steer this ship in the right direction, staying true to Founder Kim’s original vision while maintaining the best interests of our stakeholders.

That said, the transition in leadership could not have come at a worse time. These are murky and uncertain waters, and I’ve been tasked with guiding us through a global economic crisis, war, a chip shortage, and rising inflation across the world.

But we remain resilient.

2022 has shown us that as the world slowly emerges out of the pandemic and we find our cadence to the “new normal”, our customers are flocking to Idol Club for things they lacked in 2020 and 2021: social interactions, intimacy without consequence, and a damn good time.

And our numbers support that. Even though we temporarily lost the licensing rights to Everglow’s Yiren (one of our highest-rated and popular models) due to her sudden hiatus, we saw our profits soar to unimaginable heights in 2022, bringing a 403% increase in profits compared to 2021! This could not have been possible without all the strides we’ve made across all sectors of our business. From our engineers to the hosts at the front lines and even all the way down to our sanitation specialists, each one of our employees has helped us deliver an exceptional product and live up to our slogan to “make dreams a reality”.

Differentiators in 2022

But profits aren’t the only thing to smile about as we close out the fiscal year: reviews and ratings are up not just for the company, but also across all of our android models, finishing the year with an average rating of 4.92 out of 5 stars, up from 4.89 in 2021. We also received the prestigious Club of the Year award for the third year in a row. There were also a couple of huge accomplishments we achieved this year which helped differentiate our brand from our competitors:

Idol Club Goes International

Earlier this year, we launched our first Idol Club branch overseas in the heart of Singapore’s red light district, which has outperformed initial profit estimates by 32%. Customers are flocking to the affluent city-state in Southeast Asia and have helped us carve out a hearty 60% market share in Singapore’s escort sector. I’d like to thank the local government, our staff, and our external risk assessment vendor for making this all possible.

This is just the beginning. As part of Idol Club Entertainment’s five year plan, we are looking into entering the three largest markets in the world: China, Japan, and the United States. This is not an easy task, however. Each market has its own local laws and regulations that inhibit our current business model. We’ve hired local teams in these markets working around the clock with the hope that we can eventually enter these markets in a viable and legal way.

JYP Entertainment Signs Exclusive Idol Club Contract

I am proud to announce that after months of negotiation, we were able to land our biggest client to date in JYP Entertainment Corp (JYPE, KOSDAQ: 035900). This brings aboard TWICE, by far the most requested group by our customers, to the Idol Club family in addition to other JYPE girl groups like ITZY and select members of NMIXX and NiziU. This exclusive contract helps to diversify the products and services offered by the Idol Club brand as well as keep us ahead of our competitors.

It has only been a few months since we onboarded JYPE to our family of companies, but our Chaeyoung and Nayeon models have already been wildly successful at our Idol Zoo subsidiary, accounting for nearly 36% of all 2022 sales in just Q3 alone. Our plan is to introduce our Tzuyu models at our Singapore branch in early Q1, followed by the rest of the JYPE idols spread across our various brands. This further cements our commitment to providing our customers with the largest catalog of idols in the adult idol entertainment industry, joining our already star-studded premium lineup featuring BLACKPINK, Red Velvet, and aespa.

First Subsidiary Idol Zoo Launches

Expansion of our Idol Club flagship branch successfully completed in Q1 this year, introducing Idol Zoo, our first subsidiary, to the family of companies. This has led to numerous opportunities for brand exposure to the public.

Currently, Idol Zoo houses numerous ‘exhibits’ that our customers have access to, including free public shows known as the ‘Exhibitionist Exhibits’, such as the monthly Chaeyoungs show and the daily topless teasers. For the not-so-adventurous, we also offer private encounters for our paying customers. Among the exhibits our customers can peruse and enjoy: the Feline and Rodent display with the aforementioned Chaeyoungs; our popular Bunny Breeding Grounds featuring such idols as TWICE’s Nayeon, ex-IZ*ONE leader Kwon Eunbi, Kep1er’s Yujin, and Billlie’s Tsuki; and the Aquatic Animals Squirt Zone, featuring various idols who really know how to make a splash.

In 2023, we plan to further expand our exhibits, bringing in TWICE’s Mina to headline the new Penguin Habitat, as well as adding a new Screaming Deer Show to our line of Exhibitionist Exhibits featuring Oh My Girl’s Arin and NMIXX’s Sullyoon.

Endorsements from Idols

We’ve been fortunate this year to feature some surprise appearances from idols, both as clients and cameo performers, ranging from Weki Meki’s Choi Yoojung to ex-IZ*ONE’s Kang Hyewon, and many more who have preferred to not be named. And although this represents a tiny fraction of our sales, their endorsements and appearances at Idol Club have helped strengthen our brand reputation as the leader in adult idol entertainment. Their continued partnership undoubtedly will help us develop relationships with other labels not yet licensed to Idol Club Entertainment. These endorsements alone accounted for 12% of client referrals, not an insignificant number to our bottom line.

The Road Ahead

As we look ahead toward the next fiscal year, we are launching a bunch of new products and services that we hope will entice more customers and bring in new revenue. There are many great things to look forward to, but there’s also things we need to account for in our 2023 forecasts as well.

Generation 2 Androids

With our Gen 1 androids nearing the end of their lifecycle, we began replacing our fleet with the new Gen 2 androids at the start of Q4 this year, continuing the rollout into Q1 until we are 100% transitioned. Our engineers have made enhancements to the current hardware and completely revamped the software, providing customers with an even better sensual experience with the addition of reactive sweat glands and more realistic skin made with a polymer built in-house.

The software has been finely tuned to ensure a 0% chance of any Aberrations, but perhaps the most exciting development with these next-gen androids is the limitless options for customizations. The new models are modular, meaning each part of their body can be switched out quickly for different parts to create the customer’s ideal idol.

We plan to roll out the customizations in Q3 with an OTA update, allowing our customers to change the stock model androids to their heart’s desire: hair color, eye color, breast size, you name it. If they can dream it, we can build it.

More Product Offerings

As an entertainment company, we cannot be complacent with our current product offering. Customers will always seek out more thrills, and we must be ready to pivot and innovate when the tides change in order to meet the growing demands of our customers. We are exploring different ways to increase profits in 2023 by making our product more accessible to a wider audience without sacrificing the brand reputation and trust that Idol Club Entertainment has come to be known for.

In early Q1, we will be testing a weekly ‘lottery’ where one lucky winner will be chosen at random for a 1-hour session with any of our androids from our product lines in Tier 3 and below. Each ticket to the lottery will be sold at an affordable price yet to be determined, thus making it more accessible for customers who may not normally have access to Idol Club. Our research indicates there is an itch that needs to be scratched in this demographic, one that has not yet been tapped into by our competitors. If profitable, we plan to roll out the offering permanently, simultaneously introducing a secondary monthly lottery with a higher ticket price, with the winner given access to our premium Tier 4 and Tier 5 product lines.

For our current customers, we are rolling out a tiered subscription plan in Q2 that will work in tandem with our current on-demand pricing scheme. In total, there will be three different tiers, each offering unlimited visits to Idol Club for a specified time period: a week, a month, or a year. Each of the three tiers is broken down even further into a basic plan which allows access to Tier 3 and lower products, and a premium plan offered for an upcharge, allowing the customer access to our full line of androids across all product tiers.

A possible Idol Club Rewards program is also currently in the works. Though I have no further information at this time, our teams are working hard to roll out this program in Q4 of 2023.

Proposition 12

It would be irresponsible of me to end this letter and not mention Proposition 12 currently being voted on, and I’ve saved this issue for last because it is the biggest detriment to Founder Kim’s dream and affects every single employee and shareholder of Idol Club Entertainment. If Proposition 12 passes legislation, our successes from this past year and our roadmap for next year will be all for naught. Proponents of Proposition 12 want the general public to believe that our androids are sentient, that they should be afforded the same rights as human beings, thus making Idol Club operations illegal under current South Korean laws. Meanwhile, other proponents argue androids should be shut down entirely because they are dangerous, citing the Aberration scandal.

I want to assure our shareholders that these arguments hold no merit. We’ve hired an external research team that has concluded that while our androids are best in class, they are not sentient. Their findings also concluded that there was no evidence of remaining Aberrations. We continue to deliver a sound product; our engineering teams worked tirelessly to quickly rectify the bugs shortly after news of the Aberration scandal first broke. Still, the possibility looms that Proposition 12 proponents could sway public opinion enough to make it the law of the land.

I want to thank our legal team and lobbyists who have fought for us to make sure that Idol Club Entertainment stays in business. However, it will ultimately fall into the hands of the voters, so I am asking our shareholders to be proactive and vote ‘No’ on Proposition 12 in this upcoming election. Tell your family. Tell your friends. Together, we can make sure Idol Club continues to operate.

In the event that Proposition 12 passes, we have contingencies in place to make sure Idol Club Entertainment continues to operate in some capacity, and we are also exploring other sectors to further strengthen our current contingency plans. These plans aren’t 100% fool-proof, which is why I cannot stress enough just how important voting against Proposition 12 is.

Closing Statement

Idol Club Entertainment started from just an idea from Founder Kim, an idea that sprouted into a dream, and a dream that blossomed into a reality. There’s a storm brewing in the form of Proposition 12 that threatens our budding business, but all storms pass, and from the clouds emerges the sunlight. We will weather this storm, and when the clouds clear, we will prevail.

I would like to thank all of our shareholders for continuing to believe in us enough to invest in our product. I look forward to serving as your new chairman for the foreseeable future and hope to make Founder Kim proud. And as always, I will continue to operate this company with our core value in mind, the same core value that Founder Kim used as the foundation for Idol Club Entertainment, and the same one that continues to drive our company to be the best in the world:

“The customer always comes first, and the customer always comes.”

Regards,

Chairman Choi

#idol club #lore #non-smut #bns spoilers #bns easter eggs

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discluded · 2 years

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Hi! I really like your blog! Can I ask what is your opinion in regards to the recent BOC and Chinese statement issue? Please feel free to ignore if not appropriate ❤️

Hi Anon,

Thanks for asking politely. I'll answer because I can present it as a business case study which allows me to talk about BOC's failures somewhat objectively. It's clear at this point it doesn't matter how much feedback BOC gets from fans, so at least hopefully some of y'all can learn some things. *jazz hands* Didacticism.

Warning to everyone else this does not mean I am opening my inbox to complaints about how BOC sucks or how certain fans are entitled 🤪 I will block you. Open your own blog.

Be On Cloud's Communications Crisis – Business Case Study

So first, we need to define a couple of things: what is the difference between communications, marketing, and PR. Other folks with experience, please feel to add your opinion too, but how I see the difference is:

Communications is usually the the written or spoken content by which events/occurrences of a company are shared with both those internal and external to the company.

Marketing focuses both on the process by which that information is disseminated outwardly, and also usually aims at a high level to sell you an idea or product. Often the goal of a marketing campaign is explicitly measurable, whether it's in sales, conversions, email opens, etc.

Public relations (PR) is the process by which a company aims to maintain a positive public image to those outside the company

As you can see, those each have quite a bit of overlap with each other while also being distinct. Depending on the size of the company, each of those teams can be the same or differentiated. The fourth piece I want to add on to this is strategy. All three of the above are the actual day-to-day implementation of work, while strategy is the overarching goal posts by which they operate. Executives (like Mile being a CEO) influence strategy. When things go wrong, new strategy needs to be developed quickly and implemented.

(Aside: Mile has mentioned that he is an executive at BOC, but I want to clarify "executive" positions may also include being on the executive board/board of directors, who advise on strategy to the CEO or possibly of another department, and wouldn't have influence over marketing/comms. He isn't doing that work at his own businesses so I can't imagine he'd run comms for another one.)

The Earlier Crisis: Global Auditions 🤦🏻‍♀️

It might help to read these as well: The 6 Best PR Crisis Management & Communication Cases and PR Crisis Communication & Management Planning

Here are important key takeaways from the planning link:

Sound familiar? :')

I'll keep this brief, allow me to highlight a practical differentiation of the four of the above succinctly and is something the fandom collectively can agree on was a massive comms flop and PR nightmare.

Strategy: We want to recruit new talent for an upcoming series as well as generate fan hype for this series/season

Marketing: We will announce global auditions for this series/season

Communications: Unfortunately forgot to have marketing, which handle the social media posts, mention that "global" means three cities in Asia, as well as only looking for men between 16-22 despite most fans -- who saw the post -- being female.

PR: Not only makes the company's strategy look inadequate by the details of the audition only following the SM marketing announcement rather than sharing those details first/simultaneously to manage fans' expectations but also makes BOC look sexist. They haven't recovered. 🤷🏻‍♀️

I started with this one because where it went wrong was way more clean to see the breakdown.

The Case: What happened on Sept 12

BOC somehow managed to generate a PR crisis out of something that originally had the fans rallying around them, which is...impressive(ly bad).

I'm not going to document the triggering event too much but at approximately 10pm on Sept 12, stalkers tried to break into Be On Cloud's offices. I maintain my stance that it's not the company's fault or responsibility this happened, especially since these people obviously didn't succeed into getting into the building.

BOC issued a statement in Thai condemning these actions and immediately issued a following statement in Chinese on Twitter, due to the stalkers being Chinese-speakers. Obviously, a large number of KPTS fans are Chinese-speakers, but some Chinese fans pointed out that there was no immediately second translation/third set of tweet of the statement issued in English on Twitter which a large portion of the KPTS fanbase also used, especially on Twitter.

Chinese fans immediately disclaimed the stalkers as being fans but also felt they were specifically being targeted/attacked for the behavior of the stalkers.

Sept 13: The next morning, BOC issued three statements, in Thai, English, and Chinese this time. Many Chinese fans felt that the explanation in the Chinese statement was both overly brief compared to the English version and comparatively aggressive/unapologetic. BOC stood their ground and did not issue any more statements. Chinese (former?)fans then began to unfollow Apo on Weibo as well as perform a number of visible acts of quitting fandom.

What broke down? (Hint: Everything, for no reason)

I'm not going to give out too much free advice here, but here we go.

Strategy: They clearly don't have a PR crisis strategy despite the fact this isn't the first go-around. It's pretty clear they likely don't even have a PR strategy most of the time and are flying by the seat of their pants. Everything they do in terms of comms is almost reactive rather than proactive.

Marketing: The dissemination of information via socmed isn't terrible; that being said, there appears to be very little discipline over what is being sent through which channels such as if it's vetted at all (ie, the admission of being heated in the Chinese statement on Sept 13) and how well it's vetted (eg, wrongfully tagging accounts of their talent). There's a reason a lot of companies' CEOs have a personal twitter account. It allows a reiteration of statements, especially apologies, to be more personalized. Actually a lot of fans interpret Mile and Apo going online and making statements as doing damage control for BOC. Whether or not that's true, it's certainly unwise to use your talent to do that rather than your CEO who's ego should be able to take it

Communications: I'm not bothering to read the statements in depth. But It's not unreasonable for your audience to have the expectation that what's posted in one language is reasonably equivalent in other languages. Don't treat your audience like they're dumb, can't speak other languages, or don't have access to Google translate.

PR: BOC is creating these PR crises, not managing them. This isn't even the first one they've put themselves through. I think that's incriminating enough how good they are at PR.

Do I have an opinion? Sure.

Can I see where the Chinese fans are coming from? Actually yes. Fans want and deserve to be treated equally.

Do I think they're being unreasonable overreacting? Absolutely. Speaking as a Chinese-speaker too. If your personal reaction to BOC's comms team messing up is more heated than how your feel about the actors you care about being threatened by stalkers ... that's a lot.

That being said, I'm not going to waste my energy judging how individuals handle their lives or emotions. I am, like many fans, deeply concerned about how BOC is mishandling comms because BOC is not going away (for now).

Fans say lots of reactionary things, but the process by which BOC's comms team is failing is so overwhelmingly loud and public that I'm here writing a business case study about it. And that's part of PR too. Fans are always reactive -- this is not limited to KPTS or BOC. There are publicists and managers that manage Beyonce, BTS, Taylor Swift, etc. who all have loud fanbases. It's embarrassing to see a talent agency fuck up so badly it then begins to reflect on the talent. That's not just about fan reactions. BOC really needs to hire a consulting company and a new director of communications.

Should we be worried about the 2023 Film/KPTS Season 2

Surprisingly: probably not. BOC has at least two branches: a management (talent) branch and a production (art) branch. We see they're capable of handling the art.

This discrepancy between the art/artists being actually emotionally effective while the marketing side of the company just being a disaster is very reminiscent of the creators who work on Disney movies and Disney's extremely weird marketing team/s.

I'm sure Mile and Apo will do their utmost to bring us a beautiful piece of work. We likely just have to suffer BOC's continuous comms disasters while they do it.

#be on cloud #pr #marketing #business #business case study #business analysis #pr crisis #crisis management #the way this is fun for me because i spent all day staring at code #trying to find missing commas and typos #it's actually enjoyable to use your brain other ways sometimes #hope you learned something

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joyxjwang · 2 months

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How to build brand mythology for D2C brands?

In my VC career before Sloan, investing in D2C was an investment thesis for many VC investors. The driving powers of that trend include the high flexibility in manufacture, the slow innovation in product design from the incumbents, and the booming social media and efficient digital marketing allowing new brands to accumulate customers with less resources.

I have made several investments in this field, and looking at their growth trajectory, I still have confusion about how can those new brands build mythology via what kind of communications with the customers. I raise this question because, as startups, most of the energy from the founding teams and the capital are allocated to the product design and manufacture and the digital marketing to drive sales and customer base growth. And the digital marketing channels for the e-commerce merchants are mainly Amazon and social media such as Tiktok and Facebook. Amazon is such a pain for them because the platform recommend mechanism doesn't help with the building of brand mythology at all. The differentiators of brands are not easy to stand out and only the price and some reviews are helpful for moving the needle. And for media like Tiktok, the marketing related videos have to attract audience attention within seconds, which is also not an effective way of the communication of brands with their target customers.

With all the frustration, most of the D2C brands are just focusing on selling, without knowing much about what does the customers profile look like and their behaviors especially in retention and churn rate, as well as the reasons behind. Most of the startups are hanging there as they still are able to drive the sales growth, but very few of them have built any brand equity. To put it in a very straight forward way, if they increase price to somewhere higher than the incumbents' comparable products, a great portion of the customers will go back to the latter very fast. During our discussion with the founders, I suggested them increase exposure in the offline, brick and mortar stores, which I believe is a way to increase the touch points and communication opportunity with the customers. But in markets like China, their target customers are making most of their purchasing online, and the costs in the offline channels are even higher than the online channels. Therefore, most of the D2C model companies are struggling, leaving investors like me doubting if they even have a brand. How should new comers in the market to build their brands, mitigating through the digital world?

#MITSloanBranding2024B

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ksewaramani · 2 months

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15.846 Find your beach!

Heineken and Corona have carved distinct niches within the beer market through their unique branding and advertising strategies, emphasizing different aspects of consumer experience. Heineken has traditionally focused on the quality of its product, a strategy that, while reinforcing its premium positioning, has at times been perceived as aloof, leading to a disconnect with consumers looking for more than just a high-quality beer. On the other hand, Corona's approach has been to sell an experience — the quintessential "fun in the sun on a beach ," complete with the iconic lime ritual that transforms drinking beer into a mini-vacation. This branding strategy has not only differentiated Corona from its competitors but has also created a unique customer experience that resonates deeply with consumers seeking relaxation and escape. The "Corona and lime" ritual is a potent symbol of this experience, offering a sensory reminder of the brand's promise of leisure and enjoyment.

For Heineken, the challenge and opportunity lie in evolving its marketing strategy to weave a narrative that connects more deeply with consumers on an emotional level, much like Corona has successfully done. Heineken's realization that it needed to pivot towards a more market-driven approach indicates a move towards embracing the emotional and experiential aspects of beer consumption. To maintain its leadership position, Heineken could benefit from creating more engaging and relatable campaigns that highlight moments of enjoyment and connection, much as Corona has with its laid-back, beach-centric lifestyle imagery. For Corona, the key to continued success is to build upon the strong foundation of the "Corona and lime" experience, innovating around this theme to keep the brand fresh and relevant. By doing so, Corona can continue to capitalize on its unique position in the market as not just a beer, but a gateway to moments of relaxation and escape, solidifying its bond with consumers and setting the stage for lasting brand loyalty.

#MITSloanBranding2024B

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haugaardhead36 · 3 months

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odiyi · 6 months

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Online Entrepreneurship: Mastering the Art of Digital Success

Entrepreneurship is a field that has gained significant attention in recent years. With the advent of the internet, there has been a growing demand for online courses and educational resources related to entrepreneurship. This document aims to provide an overview of entrepreneurship online, highlighting its benefits, popular platforms, and key factors to consider before embarking on an online entrepreneurial journey. Benefits of Online Entrepreneurship 1. Flexibility: One of the main advantages of online entrepreneurship is the ability to work from anywhere. With an internet connection, entrepreneurs can conduct business remotely, eliminating the constraints of traditional brick-and-mortar offices. 2. Global Reach: The internet acts as a global platform, allowing entrepreneurs to connect with customers, business partners, and suppliers from all over the world. This opens up new opportunities for expansion, market penetration, and cross-cultural collaborations. 3. Reduced Overheads: Online businesses often have a lower startup cost compared to traditional brick-and-mortar businesses. Entrepreneurs can avoid the physical infrastructure expenses, such as rent, utilities, and employees. Additionally, digital products and services often have lower production and distribution costs. 4. 24/7 Accessibility: The internet provides entrepreneurs with round-the-clock access to their business. Whether it's managing administrative tasks, communicating with customers, or promoting products or services, entrepreneurs have the freedom to work whenever it suits them.

Online Entrepreneurship: Mastering the Art of Digital Success

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allbusinessplan · 3 months

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AI & Business

Data-driven Decision Making: AI enables businesses to make decisions based on data analysis, leading to more informed strategies and actions.

Automation of Repetitive Tasks: AI can automate mundane and repetitive tasks, freeing up human resources to focus on more complex and creative endeavors.

Improved Efficiency and Productivity: By streamlining processes and optimizing workflows, AI systems can significantly enhance efficiency and productivity within businesses.

Personalized Customer Experiences: AI-powered algorithms can analyze customer data to provide personalized recommendations and experiences, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Predictive Analytics: AI algorithms can analyze large datasets to identify patterns and trends, allowing businesses to make predictions about future outcomes and adapt their strategies accordingly.

Cost Reduction: Through automation and optimization, AI can help businesses reduce operational costs and increase profitability.

Enhanced Risk Management: AI can analyze vast amounts of data to identify potential risks and vulnerabilities, allowing businesses to proactively mitigate them.

Innovative Products and Services: AI enables businesses to develop innovative products and services, driving competitive advantage and market differentiation.

Supply Chain Optimization: AI can optimize supply chain management by predicting demand, reducing inventory costs, and improving logistics efficiency.

Improved Employee Experience: AI technologies can support employees by providing them with tools and insights to perform their jobs more effectively, leading to higher job satisfaction and retention.

Ethical Considerations: Businesses need to consider ethical implications such as data privacy, algorithmic bias, and job displacement when implementing AI systems.

Continuous Learning and Adaptation: AI systems can learn from data and user interactions, continuously improving their performance and adaptability over time.

Regulatory Compliance: Businesses must navigate regulatory frameworks related to AI usage, ensuring compliance with laws and regulations governing data protection, fairness, and transparency.

Partnerships and Collaboration: Collaboration with AI technology providers, academia, and other businesses can facilitate access to expertise and resources necessary for successful AI integration.

Investment in Talent and Skills: Businesses need to invest in talent development and upskilling programs to ensure their workforce has the necessary skills to leverage AI effectively.

#technology #business #business ideas #ideas #plans #creating #experience #business development

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dieuthaosposts · 4 months

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Slow Fashion and Social Media

The slow fashion movement is made up of companies that value craftsmanship, good stewardship, and high-quality items. As a result, they naturally encourage sustainability by employing more ethical sourcing and manufacturing processes and using organic, recycled, or long-lasting materials (Brewer 2019). Furthermore, labor participating in the production of such items is paid higher salaries and is better protected than its counterparts in the fast fashion industry's supply chains. Slow fashion companies encourage sustainability in sourcing, manufacturing, and consumption by emphasizing connections between raw materials, designers, craftspeople, retailers, and customers. Slow fashion does not relate to a slow manufacturing process, but rather to a concept of attention that considers stakeholders' requirements as well as the impact of fashion production on workers, customers, and ecosystems (Chhabra, Sindhi & Nandy 2022). The term “slow fashion” is used to segment and differentiate garments produced in the growth fashion model freshly; and to offer a new marketing angle on products and brands that happen to have a long heritage, durable pieces or classic designs (Fletcher 2010).

Slow fashion is also described as something long-lasting and made from recycled or natural components. Sharon Astyk authored an article about "slow clothing" for the online Groovy Green Magazine in 2006. The author expresses worry about the garment industry's effects on impoverishment, agricultural production, pesticide use, and animal abuse. Slow fashion is a notion that promotes sustainability in the fashion business based on contemporary ideals and goals. It demands additional infrastructure and a slower flow of goods (Johansson 2010). The slow fashion customer is concerned about all individuals in the value chain, including manufacturers and society itself. They are concerned about sustainable businesses in sustainable markets (Domingos, Vale, & Faria 2022).

Social media is an essential instrument for spreading slow fashion's influence and changing customers' perceptions about the environment. Fashion Revolution's most well-known campaign set up the hashtag #WhoMadeMyClothes, which encouraged customers to ask firms they buy from on social media. Another social media campaign using the hashtag #LovedClothesLast has turned the emphasis from transparency to the use and disposal stages of the fashion life cycle, encouraging customers to find ways to keep their clothes in use for as long as possible. Significantly, social media provides a forum for different opinion makers and influencers to magnify their views in support of sustainable lifestyles (Vladimirova et al., 2023).

In conclusion, slow fashion is a movement that promotes sustainability, workmanship, and good governance in the fashion business. In contrast to quick fashion, it prioritizes responsible purchasing, sustainable production practices, and the use of organic, recycled, or durable materials. Slow fashion firms are concerned not just with the quality of their products, but also with fair labor standards and better working conditions for all manufacturing workers. Slow fashion is gaining popularity as a result of social media campaigns and the advocacy of more sustainable lifestyles by public figures and influencers. Consumers who support slow fashion may help to create a better future for the fashion industry, workers, and the environment.

Reference list

Brewer, MK 2019, ‘Slow Fashion in a Fast Fashion World: Promoting Sustainability and Responsibility’, Laws, vol. 8, no. 4, p. 24.

Chhabra, S, Sindhi, S & Nandy, M 2022, ‘Factors Affecting the Adoption of Slow Fashion – an Exploratory Study of Multiple Stakeholders’, Journal of Macromarketing, vol. 42, no. 4, p. 027614672211162.

Domingos, M, Vale, VT & Faria, S 2022, ‘Slow Fashion Consumer Behavior: A Literature Review’, Sustainability, vol. 14, no. 5, p. 2860.

Johansson, E 2010, ‘Slow fashion - the answer for a sustainable fashion industry?’

Vladimirova, K, Henninger, CE, Alosaimi, S, Brydges, T, H. Choopani, Hanlon, M, Iran, S, McCormick, H & Zhou, S 2023, ‘Exploring the influence of social media on sustainable fashion consumption: A systematic literature review and future research agenda’, Journal of Global Fashion Marketing, Taylor & Francis, pp. 1–22.

#mda20009 #slow fashion #social media

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ecommerce-yourguide · 7 months

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Seller Guide for Amazon Cyber Monday 2023

Competing on Amazon, especially during Cyber Monday, can be challenging due to the high number of sellers and the price-driven nature of the marketplace. To overcome this challenge and achieve product differentiation, consider the following strategies:

1. Unique Product Features: Highlight the unique features of your products that set them apart from competitors. Emphasize what makes your items special and how they address specific customer needs.

2. High-Quality Images and Descriptions: Ensure your product listings are visually appealing and informative. High-quality images, clear descriptions, and compelling product titles can make a significant difference in attracting customers.

3. Bundling and Exclusive Packages: Create exclusive bundles or packages that combine related items for a discounted price. This can make your offerings more attractive and can help you stand out.

4. Limited-Edition or Exclusive Items: If possible, offer limited-edition or exclusive products that are only available for a short time. This creates a sense of urgency and exclusivity, encouraging customers to buy.

5. Exceptional Customer Service: Provide top-notch customer service by responding promptly to inquiries, offering hassle-free returns, and ensuring that customers have a positive shopping experience.

6. Reviews and Social Proof: Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews. High ratings and positive feedback can set your products apart from competitors.

7. Loyalty Programs and Discounts: Offer exclusive discounts or loyalty programs to repeat customers. This can foster brand loyalty and encourage customers to return to your store.

8. Optimized Pricing Strategies: While pricing is essential, it's not just about being the cheapest. Consider dynamic pricing, where you adjust prices based on demand, competition, and other factors to stay competitive without sacrificing profitability.

9. A/B Testing:Continuously test different elements of your listings, such as titles, images, or pricing, to see what resonates best with your target audience.

10. Stay Informed: Keep an eye on market trends and your competitors. Be ready to adapt your strategies to evolving market conditions.

Remember, successful differentiation doesn't always mean being drastically different from competitors; it's about finding ways to stand out in a way that resonates with your target audience. These strategies can help you navigate the challenges of competition and differentiation, especially during Cyber Monday on Amazon.

And, here's the big news: CedCommerce, a renowned integration app provider is providing heavy discounts this festive season. Hop on to - https://bit.ly/3tYMnZG

To integrate your store with world class integration tool, head to CedCommerce Amazon Integration - https://bit.ly/3RRJh3x

#ecommercestore #ecommerce #ecommercebusiness #cedcommerce #shopify #shopifyseller #amazon products #amazon #blackfriday #marketplace

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jakecontor · 1 year

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How do marketing agencies develop marketing strategies tailored to individual businesses?

Marketing agencies develop marketing strategies tailored to individual businesses through a systematic and iterative process. Here are the key steps involved:

Understanding the Business: The agency begins by gaining a deep understanding of the client's business, its industry, target market, products/services, competitive landscape, and unique selling points. They may conduct interviews, research, and analysis to gather this information.

Defining Goals and Objectives: The marketing agency works closely with the client to establish clear marketing goals and objectives. These goals should align with the client's overall business objectives and be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).

Conducting Market Research: Thorough market research is conducted to gain insights into the target audience, consumer behavior, market trends, and competitor strategies. This research may involve surveys, focus groups, data analysis, and studying industry reports.

Identifying Target Audience: Based on market research findings, the agency identifies and defines the client's target audience segments. They develop buyer personas or customer profiles that capture the characteristics, needs, and preferences of these target segments.

SWOT Analysis: The agency performs a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) to assess the client's internal capabilities and external market conditions. This analysis helps identify areas of competitive advantage and areas that require improvement.

Defining Value Proposition: The agency works with the client to articulate a clear value proposition that differentiates their products/services from competitors. This involves understanding the unique selling points and crafting compelling messaging that resonates with the target audience.

Strategy Formulation: Based on the gathered information and analysis, the marketing agency develops a comprehensive marketing strategy that outlines the key approaches, tactics, and channels to achieve the defined marketing goals. This may include digital marketing, content marketing, social media, advertising, public relations, events, etc.

Setting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): The agency establishes measurable KPIs that align with the marketing goals. These KPIs could include metrics such as website traffic, conversion rates, customer acquisition, brand awareness, engagement levels, or return on investment (ROI).

Implementation and Execution: Once the strategy is finalized, the agency creates a detailed marketing plan with timelines, budgets, and action steps. They collaborate with the client to execute the plan, utilizing various marketing tactics, platforms, and creative assets.

Monitoring and Optimization: Throughout the implementation process, the agency closely monitors the performance of marketing activities against the defined KPIs. They use analytics tools, data tracking, and reporting to measure results and make data-driven adjustments for optimization.

Ongoing Evaluation and Adaptation: Marketing agencies continuously evaluate the effectiveness of the marketing strategy and tactics. They analyze data, gather feedback, and make necessary adaptations to the strategy based on market changes, customer feedback, and performance insights.

By following these steps, marketing agencies can develop marketing strategies that are customized to suit the unique characteristics, goals, and target audience of each individual business they work with.

#marketing agency

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conscienceincommand · 10 months

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The Historical Development of the U.S. Proletariat: A Rebuff of J Sakai’s Settlers

“With this general prosperity in which the productive forces of bourgeois society are developing so luxuriantly, as much as this is at all possible within the limits of bourgeois relations, there can be no question of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible in those periods where these two characters, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois forms of production, come into contradiction with one another. A new revolution is only possible in consequence of a new crisis. It, however, is just as certain as the latter.” -Marx and Engels

J. Sakai’s Settlers is a book which completely vulgarizes our understanding of the U.S. proletariat’s history, using manipulated statistics, nonexistent or otherwise unreliable sources with literary prose to argue from a standpoint of race science that is distant from historical materialism. The conclusions largely promote petty bourgeois abstentionism from the hard work of struggling against white chauvinism and dealing with contradictions among the people. Sakai takes some general historical truths and highlights the racist oppression of the most oppressed parts of the working class, pointing to numerous examples of social chauvinism, but he must resort to an unscientific understanding of colonialism to argue that this chauvinism is somewhat fixed, as white proletarians semi-permanently have a petty bourgeois, or settler, consciousness, rooted in material relationships of aspiring class ascension on the backs of their oppressed brothers and sisters. We will start by discussing what a settler is, then touch on how the founders of Marxism dealt with racism and the problems of America’s foundation in settler colonialism.

The leaders of world proletarian revolution—starting in the First International, up to Lenin and the Communist International, and beyond that with Mao Zedong—equipped themselves in the most painstaking fashion with a thorough knowledge of the conditions in the U.S. so that they could give as authoritative advice and instruction as possible. There was no doubt about the fact that all saw America developing as the powerful mainstay of imperialism, with its lacking of a legacy of feudalism and developing in a “purely bourgeois fashion” [2] making the development of a proletarian movement slower. Unlike Sakai, however, their role was in marking the objective events that made the subjective possibility of revolution available and inevitable. All saw the conversion of whatever class some white people belonged to into being proletarian as the basis for being able to make revolution. Meanwhile, Sakai and his supporters make an argument for disunity and will go to great heights to push against this analysis.

The Concept of Settler Colonialism’s Uses and Misuses

As discussed in “Race, Class, and Stratification” by Cathal, Marx and Engels both went to lengths to explain what role that settler plays. Contradiction between colonizer and colonized does not remain the principal one forever, a colony can become its opposite with its own proletariat. And this is precisely what happened in the United States.

What characterizes a settler society in the years of early colonialism is that land is the basis of capital accumulation. This means that most commodities are agricultural, with settler farmers combining their farming with craft production and petty trading of any marketable surplus, making land the most important commodity to acquire. They take the cash crops which were tilled and bring them to a merchant—representing commercial capital—to make a profit. This commercial capital spurred the development of the money economy and commercial agriculture, taking some land out of the hands of colonial authorities with which to speculate and sell. There is some differentiation among settlers, with the Southern landlord class developing large estates and broad acres tilled by slaves, selling rice and tobacco in large amounts to English commercial capitalists. Market centers developed unevenly in this area as this landlord class did not need to buy certain goods; the goods they needed to live could simply be produced on the plantation by enslaved artisans. Then there is the small farmer, who live more inland or in geographic areas with less advantageous soil and weather, requiring them to strive to be more self-sufficient and more dependent on growing capitalist relations in towns to buy from smiths, weavers, wagon makers, etc.

Though the contradiction between these developing classes would become sharper later, they both however were dependent on the ability to acquire more arable soil. There arose companies and royal charters which would title land to pioneers, or seek to restrict it, all based on the economic needs of the Crown. As Marx explained in Capital Vol. 1:

“We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free colony, on the contrary, consists in this – that the bulk of the soil is still public property, and every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into his private property and individual means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the same operation. This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their inveterate vice – opposition to the establishment of capital.” [3]

Indeed, in the town themselves, there was early proletarians working in shipbuilding, textile manufacturing, and in iron and glass works, but these towns largely remained places for the export of raw materials and agricultural produce back to England, the opposition to establishment of capital being the main tendency as England began to seek out its world monopoly. This slowed the more rapid development of capitalism that was seen elsewhere. With an almost endless amount of land that could be acquired by violence against the lands’ original inhabitants, the propertyless that grew in seaboard towns could become landed bourgeois and were not convinced of the necessity of becoming waged workers. Marx noted that in such circumstances it was hard to develop a cohesive proletariat, as there was no ability to create a reserve army of labor to regulate the value of labor power, and that native-born workers would develop certain extra-privileges by being able to negotiate higher wages considering the constant shortages:

“In colonial countries the law of supply and demand favours the working man. Hence the relatively high standard of wages in the United States. Capital may there try its utmost. It cannot prevent the labour market from being continuously emptied by the continuous conversion of wages labourers into independent, self-sustaining peasants. The position of a wages labourer is for a very large part of the American people but a probational state, which they are sure to leave within a longer or shorter term. To mend this colonial state of things the paternal British Government accepted for some time what is called the modern colonization theory, which consists in putting an artificial high price upon colonial land, in order to prevent the too quick conversion of the wages labourer into the independent peasant.” [4]

Indeed, the Bacon’s Rebellion that Sakai notes reveals how such restrictions on colonization led to the early pangs of colonial dissent. The large issue behind this insurrection was not just a question of class inequality but also a demand on the royal authorities of the Virginia colony to protect against the Susquehannock tribe and to open more land for African slaves and indentured white settlers. There would be more loose policies when European immigrants were needed to be a bulwark against indigenous raids and as a pressure release valve of class contradictions in the colonies themselves—opening the frontier when need be to keep poor, propertyless whites from rebelling and restricting it when they needed more production through “free” labor. The 1763 Proclamation Line after Pontiac’s Rebellion, where indigenous people went on an offensive to destroy several English forts and posts from the Great Lakes area to the Ohio River Valley, represented likewise a probation on the further acquisition of land and would lead to the further development of settler nationalism.

By the time American independence was won, the first bourgeois revolution would sweep away much of these restrictions and open areas west of the Alleghenies to conquest, with canals and steamboats leading a westward movement, later followed up by railroads and locomotives. Likewise, the vicious importation of slaves and the growth of chattel slavery became the most reliable way to maintain a pool of labor. By this time England now enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the world market and the role of cotton in its production in its great mills led Marx and Engels to conclude that this new bourgeois republic rested upon slavery and the production of cotton, the agricultural backwater of the Crown’s ambitions to rule the world.

“This was perfectly correct for the year 1847. At that time the world trade of the United States was limited mainly to the importation of immigrants and industrial products and to the export of cotton and tobacco, hence of products of southern slave-labor. The northern states produced chiefly corn and meat for the slave states…” [5]

Both Marx and Engels saw the United States as a means of propping up European reaction for these reasons. America, at that time, was essentially still a colony, a dumping ground for the products and proletarians to be transformed into settlers, leaving it without a large proletariat. Engels noted that the promise of land acted as diversion from class struggle; the hope of obtaining it was highest in generations when there was more to expect from speculating in it:

“Land is the basis of speculation [in the United States], and the American possibility of and craze for speculation is the chief influence of the bourgeoisie. Only when we have a generation of native-born workers who have nothing more to expect from speculation, will we have firm ground under our feet in America.” [6]

Soon indeed this chief influence would receive its significant blow. Throughout the 19th century, the discovery of gold in California and the swift settlement of the Midwest, along with the sprouting of new towns in the New West, started to spell the end of the frontier and also show signs of ascendancy of a new imperialist country. Likewise, the introduction of rationalization and new machinery translated into great productive leaps in output but a lower standard of living for the farmer. Before 1860 it took 61 hours to produce an acre of wheat. Within the next 4 decades, it took 3 hours and 19 minutes [7]. In 1890 the Bureau of the Census officially declared that the internal frontier was closed, and in the 1870s and 90s the U.S. experienced its first major crises of overproduction, in part because the prices of wheat completely collapsed.

Soon practically half of all farmers in the U.S. no longer owned their farms, becoming tenants, managers, or part owners instead. Nearly half of the value of farms belonging to full owners already belonged to bankers, mortgage brokers, and local merchants. Farmer’s debt amounted in the billions, and the value of all agricultural land was largely not appraising. [8] Many would go on to have their land foreclosed on and would migrate to the factories and mines, being transformed from the settler subject who profited by their ability to enterprise on the land, to having to sell their labor power to be able to secure any sort of living in a new, open labor market. Sakai’s thesis is that white workers historically were able to be in receipt of stolen land in a way that persistently bourgeoisfied them, but it is hard to account for this enduring benefit as it was taken from them.

With the advent of industrial capitalism, those who were formerly settlers were divided into two, either proletarian or bourgeois. The indigenous were taken from their hunting and fishing grounds and were likewise made proletarian where they were not annihilated by genocide and the spread of infectious disease, and, as we will see in the next section, African slaves went through a similar process.

On the U.S. Civil War

The United States was born from an independence struggle that had remarkably little social revolution as part of its program. And, as a result, half of the new country was a network of slave labor plantations. Half of the ruling class were slave owners. And the class interests of the slaveowning class marked the new society in its mode of expansion, its foreign policy, its culture, its approach to the Native people west of the Appalachians, its tariffs, and so on. Sakai takes this contradiction and the importance it held for the development of class struggle in the U.S. and makes it out to seem as competing clashes between cross-class alliances of those supporting the slave system and those wanting the eradication of freed slaves. In doing so, he promotes an idealism in history masquerading as materialism.

Sharp contradictions developed since independence between the Northern industrial capitalists and the Southern slaveowning landlords. In looking at what the planters gave to the Northern merchants, slaver statistician J.D.B. De Bow calculated that tens of millions had to be paid to shipowners, to financiers who manipulated foreign imports, etc. For the landowning class, it was proposed that if they were to hoard up their cotton, they could realize seventy to one hundred million more than that which otherwise went to the North. Southern dependence on the North, according to De Bow, “stands in the attitude of feeding a vast population of [Northern] merchants, shipowners, capitalists, and others who, without claims on her progeny, drunk up the life blood of her trade. Where goes the value of our labor but to those who, taking advantage of our folly, ship for us, buy for us, sell to us, and, after turning our own capital to their profitable account, return laden with our money to enjoy their easily earned opulence at home.” [9]

To respond to this, the reactionary Southern ruling class drew up a program that demanded opposition to Northern policies, against the cheap labor generated by new Irish and German immigrants, protective tariffs raising prices of manufactures for agricultural enterprises, subsidies for ships to increase the tonnage of trade in Northern areas, greater internal investments to spur movement westward, and against a national banking system to stop the issuance of paper currencies regionally that could spur inflation. In other words, they opposed the consolidation of a bourgeois democratic revolution.

Likewise, the slave system was reaching its own crisis, as the productivity of the Old South was becoming increasingly overextended. As Marx explains:

“The cultivation of the Southern export articles, cotton, tobacco, sugar, etc., carried on by slaves, is only remunerative as long as it is conducted with large gangs of slaves, on a mass scale and on wide expanses of a naturally fertile soil, which requires only simple labor. Intensive cultivation, which depends less on fertility of the soil than on investment of capital, intelligence and energy of labor, is contrary to the nature of slavery.” [10]

On the other hand, the emerging industry of the North proved to be more efficient. The total value of capital invested in industry would exceed the value of all farmland between the Atlantic and Pacific. [11]

To survive, the slave system needed to expand and acquire new arable land. The plantations themselves acted as large labor camps that tilled the soil in a way that was not sustainable, reducing the total acreage available over time. Seeing themselves reduced to the status of an agricultural vassalage to the growing manufacturing power of the North, the slaveholders likened themselves to their forefathers who fought for independence against the British empire before them. Marx continued:

“Finally, the number of actual slaveholders in the South of the Union does not amount to more than three hundred thousand, a narrow oligarchy that is confronted with many millions of so-called poor whites, whose numbers have been constantly growing through concentration of landed property and whose condition is only to be compared with that of the Roman plebeians in the period of Rome’s extreme decline. Only by acquisition and the prospect of acquisition of new Territories, as well as by filibustering expeditions, is it possible to square the interests of these poor whites with those of the slaveholders, to give their restless thirst for action a harmless direction and to tame them with the prospect of one day becoming slaveholders themselves. A strict confinement of slavery within its old terrain, therefore, was bound according to economic law to lead to its gradual effacement, in the political sphere to annihilate the hegemony that the slave states exercised through the Senate, and finally to expose the slaveholding oligarchy within its own states to threatening perils from the poor whites. In accordance with the principle that any further extension of slave Territories was to be prohibited by law, the Republicans therefore attacked the rule of the slaveholders at its root. The Republican election victory was accordingly bound to lead to open struggle between North and South. And this election victory, as already mentioned, was itself conditioned by the split in the Democratic camp.” [12]

Marx saw that the defeat of slavery was an essential precondition for developing a proletariat class in the U.S. He worried of President Buchanan’s resolutions of spreading slavery through early U.S. imperialism in Mexico and Cuba, and took note of the growing conflict happening in the western territories. And during this same time, many of America’s first proletarian revolutionaries were emerging, taking note of the conflict.

In St. Louis, for example, a river town situated where the Missouri River and the broad Mississippi meet, there emerged one of the heaviest concentrations of factory workers in the country and most were not native born. A great many of them came from Germany, and formed part of a very large German speaking population from St. Louis to Chicago, to Cincinnati and into Pennsylvania, many coming remembering Europe’s great battles in 1848. Radical Republican John Charles Fremont recruited heavily among these class-conscious German workers, and one of the first known actions of communists in the U.S. was the armed struggle led in part by Colonel Joseph Weydemeyer, a student of Marx.

The heralding of this conflict came through slave rebels and John Brown. For his part, Sakai is careful to note the quotes of one of Brown’s financiers while ignoring freed slave Frederick Douglas’ contribution to the rebellion and tactically ignoring Brown’s vision. John Brown and his followers, walking away from successfully defeating the slavers of Kansas through violence, tried to launch a revolutionary war of slaves against the slavemasters and against the armed forces of the United States. They raided a federal armory at Harpers Ferry, on the fringe of the Virginia farmlands, hoping to seize arms to distribute among the slaves. Brown’s vision was to use the Appalachian mountain trails as a roadway—moving armed slaves to strike against plantations, rushing freed slaves northward, and bringing volunteers and arms into the mountain base areas of the revolution. He planned to proclaim an independent republic of freed slaves. [13]

Brown’s forces were defeated. He was captured, tried, and hanged. But his action sharply polarized the United States and spurred the events which then led to the war and complex alliance of forces that overthrew slavery. Sakai takes great time in his chapters around this contradiction to depict the Republican Party as mostly interested in the repatriation of slaves out of America.

The actual incoming war was (in real life and history) led by leaders who were representatives of the northern capitalists, like Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and William Tecumseh Sherman. There were revolutionaries advising and pushing from the wings, including antislavery revolutionary Frederick Douglas, the great representative of freedman and slaves, along with Radical Republicans like Thaddeaus Stevens. These and John Brown were the American Jacobins, representing the radical petty bourgeoisie, wanting a utopian “liberty” and “justice for all” that they thought could be arrived at once the bourgeois republic was liberated from the mark of slavery. They would never come to lead the war against slavery; the Northern industrial bourgeoisie would ultimately lead it, but this push did compel the war and later Reconstruction effort to take on a progressive character.

For Sakai this is a challenge to his historiography that he cannot accept, because his certain kind of non-materialist identity politics is unable to see that the end of slavery did not mainly come from slave revolt—though slave revolts, desertions from plantations, and armed ex-slaves did play an important and often decisive role—but that the main material force which crushed the slavocracy was an army of a million plus white men and newlyenlisted Black men, backed by the whole economic and military apparatus of the northern farm-and-capitalist society (grown on stolen soil), that the main leaders of this revolution were representatives of the Union who had been vacillating on abolitionism as a cause, and were always ambivalent of the idea of social equality between black and white, and that the forces of Lincoln and Grant were not the ones who betrayed African American people, but it was their successors within the Northern bourgeoisie.

Sakai and his followers want to desperately ignore Lincoln’s role and declare it “social patriotism” to recognize the historical fact that the final consolidating act of the American republic was at its central drama the abolition of African slavery. For opportunists it is stressful to see that such abolition happened under the flag of the Union, not under John Brown’s Slave rebel flag, as they think that to admit such a thing would mean to uphold the same stars and stripes to today. We should ignore Sakai and see Marx’s point that the bourgeoisie, in its struggle against feudalism and slavery, has played (for a particular historical period) a dynamic and revolutionary role, that ended up establishing a new and oppressive system, but that also helped develop its gravedigger.

In what would serve as the opening salvos of bitter battles and strikes in the coming decades, many workers joined the Union army or militias that fought against slavery. In 1860 Missouri governor Clairborne Fox Jackson, a proslavery diehard, was scheming to pull his state into the Confederacy, and preparations were made to take the state’s armory in St. Louis, the largest warehouse of weapons on the western frontier. Revolutionary immigrant workers meanwhile themselves prepared with drills and unit movements they had learned from the 1848 revolutions and would go on to seize St. Louis and the armory, shattering the schemes of the slaveowners, ultimately cutting off the slaveowners of the Missouri from the rest of the Confederacy. These antislavery units would defy Lincoln’s orders—he did not want to offend the border states—and would free slaves from plantations in this area.

The war would come to its conclusion soon as the U.S. army waged its war in a way that reflected the changing nature of U.S. society: it mobilized great industrial strength and the growing population advantage, ultimately carving up the Confederacy and destroying its ability to continue the war by wearing down its troop strength and destroying its rail system. Marx foresaw that this would be how the war would be concluded. The march by General Sherman to the sea and, likewise, Sheridan’s destruction of Lee’s granary in the Shenandoah valley, were methods that were used to defeat the slaver army that the North could not defeat otherwise. These same methods of “total war” would foreshadow what would see be used against the Native people of the plains.

Soon Black slaves would see the Northern capitalists abandon the bourgeois democratic aspirations of Reconstruction to draw on the South’s labor supply, ultimately converting those slaves into tenant farmers through what Lenin termed to be a “semi-slavery system” of share cropping and debt peonage which was maintained by the ruling class by use of lynching through the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations. With the continued crisis in agriculture with mechanization but also with the flow of southern and Eastern European immigrants being disrupted by the First World War, many would start heading north with the Great Migration.

Years after the end of the Civil War and with the election of Grant, Marx wrote to Engels:

“What do you think of the workers of the United States? This first explosion against the associated oligarchy of capital, which has arisen since the Civil War, will naturally again be suppressed but can very well form the point of origin for the constitution of an earnest workers’ party. The policy of the new president will make the Negroes, and the great expropriation of land (especially the fertile land) in favor of railways, mining, etc., companies will make the peasants of the west, who are already dissatisfied, allies of the workers. So that a nice sauce is being stirred over there, and the transference of the center of the International to the United States may obtain a very remarkable post festum opportuneness.” [14]

Marx demanded that the first Communist organization be constituted in the U.S. because of the changes that took place since the Civil War (the “nice sauce”). In this connection he stressed that farmers in view of their growing agrarian crisis and the question of land for Black people be placed in direct connection with the formation of a proletarian Party. Seeing how important the question of the U.S. was, Marx saw the Civil War as being equal to the Paris Commune in its historical importance, as it crystallized class relationships in a way that converted millions into proletarians and thus provided ground for unity, including for Black workers. It was also made clear with the “Compromise” of 1877 where the bourgeoisie, under President Rutherford B. Hayes, relocated federal troops from the South where it had been enforcing Reconstruction back to the north so that it could skirmish against the growing proletariat in the battles to come.

Racial Integration and the CPUSA

The next large part of Sakai’s book is dedicated to showing that the trade union movement in the U.S. was never just a movement for the protection and improvement of worker wages and conditions. There was indeed an element where the trade union goals were the restriction of the labor market, which in the case of the United States involved Asian exclusion and the Jim Crow separation of Black people out of trade union organizations. The notorious racist outlook of the skilled trades was grounded on this. There were many times where the worker’s movement in Western states (California, the Sierra Nevada mines, beyond) where the struggle appeared as pogroms. Sakai’s method in looking at this is to extract every occasion where the struggle of oppressed workers was opposed (or betrayed) by some representative of the “white workers” to present a false theory that there is no white proletariat and on why there cannot be positive assimilation.

How are racist ideas operationalized and used by the ruling class? Working people are attempting to sell a commodity (individual labor power) and, as such, are taught to often meet and confront others of their class as competitors in the labor market. This gives rise to ideas that are promoted by the bourgeoisie which serve the self or “group” over sections of the class in general. Every time a worker goes forward and says, “let’s keep our jobs at home,” or “they took our jobs,” similar sentiments are at play when workers scab on each other, oppose affirmative action hiring, or demand tariffs on trade. This is promotion of the internalization of the competitive divisions not created by them but by capitalists, rooting the worker in thinking of themselves as highly individualized sellers of their only commodity, which is their labor power.

For Black workers, the First World War boosted the demand for labor as immigration from Europe paused and the need for military production shot through the roof, ultimately proletarianizing many former sharecroppers. U.S. imperialism had used the vestiges of slavery and of Jim Crow to lower the value of Black labor power, both explicitly and implicitly through the use of job recruiters who collected a percentage of pay, and which ultimately drew them into work which was generally the most unsafe, dirtiest, and lowest in wages. Likewise they were subject to the effects of the boom-bust cycle of crisis, where they would be placed into work during periods of expansion only to be expelled at higher rates than white workers to be part of an industrial reserve army which exerted pressure on the entire working class to not raise its sights or risk being replaced. Race riots and lynchings would ultimately be organized by the bourgeoisie to maintain this relationship in the new urban concentrations in which Black workers lived.

The Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) under Comrade Stalin’s leadership of the Communist International had the task of forging class unity against such division, and to organize against racial oppression in all its forms—standing against segregation, lynching, discrimination, and the various exploitative arrangements Black workers faced. The 6th Congress of the Communist International emphasized that this could only be done when Black and white workers were united around this question:

“[T]he Negro masses will not be won for the revolutionary struggles until such time as the most conscious sections of the white workers show, by action, that they are fighting with the Negroes against all racial discrimination and persecution.” [15]

Going from this, the CPUSA created a National Department that worked with the Central Committee to formulate policies on work with Black people and to direct that work. Districts were instructed to create committees focused on this. Over the next ten years a concentrated fight developed in the CP against white chauvinism that underestimated the importance of the role of the Black masses in the struggle, against open and indirect antagonism to Black comrades and the masses, against failing to organize and carry out work around issues Black people were concerned with, against the failure to fight for the integration of the reactionary trade unions, and against not bringing Black comrades into leadership and other responsible posts.

In areas where Black and white workers were more integrated in production and where landlord plantation ownership and share-tenantry were not the main social trend, Communist shop units would act as a nucleus of the struggle and in making sure Black workers were organized together with white workers on the basis of full equality. Because of this policy and the struggles it garnered, the Party went from having 200 Black members at the start of the 1930s to over 6,000 throughout the late 1920s to the 1930s. Soon these policies began to bear fruit.

During this time there were struggles such as the Gastonia textile strike, when white workers battled against a racist mob which planned an ambush on Otto Hall, the Black Communist organizer for the union. The white workers smashed through a police cordon and rescued him from a planned lynching. Likewise in Bridgeport, Ohio, Black and white workers came to the protection of Alex Dorsey, a Black Communist organizer with the National Miners’ Union.

In fact in the many CIO unions that Communists worked in, contracts that preferred white workers around seniority and promotions were exposed and opposed. There was organized struggles against unequal accommodations, around different company housing for workers, and around different conditions. Earl Browder’s Tehran line and the liquidation of the Party spelled the beginning of the end of struggle among Black proletarians and tenant farmers, and the CP entering the New Deal coalition tore up the organized work in these fronts for the sake of unprincipled peace with the Democratic Party.

Ultimately such divisions are real but the contradictions created through imperialism can only ultimately be defeated by proletarian unity centered in the Communist Party. The history of the Party shows that, to the extent that the CP was able to lead the proletariat, racial unity was in fact forged on the basis of common struggle, in opposition to what Sakai calls for. This does not mean ignoring or closing one’s eyes in the struggle of Black people against white supremacy, quite the contrary. There can only truly be revolution in this country by this fight being wedded to the development of socialist revolution.

Sakai goes to great lengths to a point of inventing quotations and source material to argue that there cannot be a proletarian Party capable of unifying both Black and white proletarians, and where the history proves otherwise it must be reinvented to make his point. Sakai’s historical method around such invention is not one rooted in proletarian internationalism and Marxism but on a syncretism of petty bourgeois nationalism and inchoate identity politics. Using things like the presence of racist ideas or having a mortgage on a home as a structural determination of class, we are given a picture of white people as the principal oppressors and the contradiction as principally racial rather than based in class. Racist mob violence and segregationist policies supported by the backward sections of white people are to be fought with revolutionary integration, and the struggles of the most oppressed sections of the proletariat for equality must be tied to the fight for socialist revolution. Negating one or the other obscures the role of the movement.

[1] “Marx and Engels on Revolution in America,” by Heinz Neuman. Little Red Library.

[2] “Letter to Sorge, September 16, 1885,” Friedrich Engels.

[3] “Capital, Volume 1,” Karl Marx.

[4] “Wage Labor and Capital,” Karl Marx.

[5] “Poverty of Philosophy,” Karl Marx.

[6] “Letter to Sorge, January 6, 1892,” Friedrich Engels

[7] “Labor Used to Produce Field Crops: Estimates by States” Statistical Bulletin No. 346. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Farm Production Economics Division. Economic Research Service.

[8] “The Economics of American Agriculture,” A.B. Richman.

[9] “History of the United States,” Mary and Charles Beard.

[10] “The North American Civil War,” Karl Marx.

[11] Charles and Mary Beard.

[12] “The North American Civil War,” Karl Marx.

[13] “Purged Away with Blood: John Brown’s War.” American Battlefield Trust

[14] Heinz Neuman.

[15] “Our Negro Work,” Cyril Briggs.

#communism #history #sakai #maoism #political economy #marxism #economics #revolution #socialism

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oleworm · 2 years

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What comes into my mind when I think about a story I want to write, or those that I've liked to read. A free-writing exercise to figure out what I'm thinking (ha).

A society described in ethnographic detail. Social types, customs, relations, its economy and trade and how they are interrelated.

The commonplace is horror when looked at directly. Class society is horror, gender is horror, the institution of marriage is horror, motherhood is horror, childhood is horror, indispensable economic activities are social and ecological horrors. Bureaucracy is horror, debt is horror, laws and beliefs taken as true things, as tangible as the things that can be held in your hand, that is a horror.

The question of how knowledge can be acquired, stored or communicated. What physical medium, what language, what are the limitations and possibilities of each choice. The attempts to communicate the incommunicable, the metaphor as explanation. Relationships that cannot be described in themselves but only in approximation, compared to the relationship between two other, unrelated things. The gaps between what is assumed in one language yet must be clarified in another. And what if the author is dead? The translator’s subtle agenda.

Why create a machine for that which a human can create? Discussion of the positives and negatives. There must be things left for a human to do–and if there are fewer and fewer of these activities for humans to do then the value of one cannot depend on their capacity to become proficient in a task that has not been taken over by new technologies. If production were to be completely automatised, would societies continue to maintain a lower subclass of people among its ranks? Yes or no. Yes—there would be other modes of differentiation then. Despite abundance of resources an impression of scarcity is created, as it happens now. The existence of this lower class of people is a threat to keep the others in line. No one wants to lose what little they have and if they’ve been there before they’ll do what they can not to go back even when it means that another will have to take their place.

Utopia. A place that does not exist. A place that cannot exist, and yet one can move in its direction. Utopia as a miracle—of history, of a higher power. Utopia built on the blood and bones of the workers and of those who opposed it. A shape that makes sense in a dream and that one forgets upon waking except for the most general impression. How the worst elements in a society will take over any movement because those that have any sort of principle would refrain from the violence that the seizure of power requires. When the better ones have been removed we will have to make do with what is left: mercenaries, cowards, and those that are untrained—but who will teach them?

Those that have something to offer are those who have accumulated influence and other resources well before the situation comes to be. “Big man” theory and studies of hunter gatherers and other preindustrial societies as they are called, about self-aggrandisement and the consolidation of power. History is a process but acknowledge the advantages of being a charismatic man. There was a girl who cried when she heard the news on the radio that the great leader had died.

Empire is a rotting corpse. Empire is a body on a life support mechanism receiving the most aggressive methods of treatment. Like the tree that is constantly being eaten by insects and must grow just to remain in place Empire must continuously incorporate new territories and markets to maintain a semblance of authority in whatever happens to be its sphere of influence in any given moment. Provinces and satellite states break away when the hand is not strong to wield both the carrot and the stick. Empires expand quickly and then break apart after a short time, a few centuries at most. Those that claim to have lasted a very long time are those that do not acknowledge the interruptions, the territories that became independent and remained so for a significant period before being reconquered. A polity that has taken major territorial losses or a government in exile can maintain the fiction that they still constitute an Empire. Major powers may deny that they are Empires because their power over others is held indirectly. Convoluted arguments in either direction are made in a way that is intentionally theatrical, and for those that make them it is not a part of the question whether these claims are actually true or actually believed by them, which is the same.

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jobynstuff · 8 months

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Everything To Know About Value Proposition Canvas (VPC)

WHAT IS A VALUE PROPOSITION CANVAS?

The Value Proposition Canvas is a valuable tool used to gain a deeper understanding of your customers and create a compelling value proposition for your product or service. It begins by identifying the needs of your target customers, which can be both functional and emotional in nature. These are the things your customers actively seek or desire. Simultaneously, it's crucial to grasp their pains or challenges, which are the problems and inconveniences they encounter in their lives. Pains can be related to cost, time, effort, risks, or other hindrances.

With a clear understanding of customer needs and pains, you can then analyze how your product or service can effectively address these issues. This involves highlighting the features, capabilities, and attributes of your offering that directly alleviate customer pains and fulfill their needs. This alignment between what the customers seek and what your product provides is where the value proposition comes into play.

The value proposition is the central element of this framework, serving as a promise to your customers that your product will satisfactorily meet their needs and alleviate their pains. It's a concise and compelling statement that communicates the unique value your product offers to customers. In essence, it answers the question: "Why should a customer choose our product over alternatives?" This value proposition assures potential customers that they will gain value from using your product, ultimately increasing the likelihood of successful product adoption.

VALUE PROPOSITION CRITERIA

IT'S SPECIFIC

A specific value proposition effectively conveys the merits and benefits of your product or service without resorting to vague or generic language. It is tailored to a clearly defined target audience, addressing their specific needs and desires. This level of specificity aids potential customers in gaining a clear understanding of what they can anticipate from your offering.

IT'S PAIN-FOCUSED

A value proposition centered on addressing pain points identifies and tackles the specific issues or difficulties that your intended customers encounter. It showcases how your product or service can ease these pain points or offer solutions. This understanding and empathy for your customers' challenges enable you to establish a deeper connection with them.

IT'S EXCLUSIVE

An exclusive value proposition emphasizes the unique qualities that set your product or service apart from competitors. It effectively conveys the reasons why customers should select your offering over alternatives available in the market. This distinctiveness can arise from various aspects, including features, advantages, quality, or any distinguishing factor that differentiates your offering.

TWO CATEGORIES OF VALUE PROPOSITION CANVAS

CUSTOMER PROFILE

A customer profile is a fundamental component of any business or marketing strategy, with its primary focus on gaining a deep understanding of the customer's perspective. It involves the systematic collection and analysis of pertinent information to construct a detailed and comprehensive portrait of the typical or ideal customer for a product or service. This profile encompasses various dimensions, including demographic details like age, gender, location, income, and occupation, providing the foundation for effective customer segmentation. Furthermore, it delves into psychographic information, exploring lifestyle, values, interests, and behaviors, painting a holistic picture of customer motivations and aspirations.

In addition to demographic and psychographic data, a well-constructed customer profile delves into the specific needs and pain points of the customer. It seeks to uncover the problems customers are attempting to solve and their overarching goals. By identifying these aspects, businesses can position their products or services as effective solutions, creating a stronger connection with the customer.

Understanding the customer's buying behavior is another critical facet of a customer profile. This entails analyzing the processes and factors that influence their purchasing decisions. It helps businesses align their marketing and sales strategies with the preferences and habits of their target audience. Also, customer profiles encompass insights into how customers prefer to communicate with brands and their interactions with competitors, offering a comprehensive view of their engagement preferences and potential gaps in the market.

VALUES PROPOSITION/MAP

The "Value Map" is an integral part of any well-structured business strategy, serving as the connective tissue between a customer profile and the product or service being offered. It plays a vital role in detailing how the offerings align with the characteristics, needs, and preferences of the target audience as identified in the customer profile. This alignment is a strategic imperative, as it helps businesses develop a clear and compelling value proposition that resonates with their customers. By establishing this connection, the value map accomplishes several key objectives.

Firstly, it bridges the gap between customer requirements and the product's attributes, ensuring that the offerings effectively meet the needs, desires, and pain points discerned from the customer profile. Secondly, it enables businesses to tailor their value proposition in a way that speaks directly to the specific attributes most valued by their audience. The value map is not just about addressing customer needs but doing so in a manner that distinguishes the offering from competitors. This involves emphasizing unique selling points, whether they involve distinctive features, superior quality, cost-effectiveness, or any other factors that set the product apart.

Furthermore, the value map lays the groundwork for crafting a persuasive value proposition. This proposition is a concise and compelling statement that communicates the distinct value the product provides to the customer. It assures potential customers that the offering will fulfill their needs and alleviate their pains. Importantly, the value map is not a static document; it's part of an ongoing, iterative process. Businesses continuously refine their offerings to ensure that they remain closely aligned with customer expectations. By actively monitoring customer feedback and staying attuned to market trends, businesses can adapt their value maps to maintain relevance and competitiveness.

HOW TO CREATE A WINNING VALUE PROPOSITION

Step 1: Research Your Audience

In any successful marketing strategy, understanding your target audience is paramount. This involves delving deep into your potential customers' demographics, behaviors, preferences, and pain points. By doing so, you gain insights into what motivates them, what problems they need solutions for, and how your product or service can address these needs. This knowledge is essential for crafting effective marketing messages that resonate with your audience. It also allows you to pinpoint the selling points of your product or service, enabling you to tailor your communication in a way that highlights its unique benefits and value to your target market.

Step 2: Create an Ideal Buyer Persona

Once you've gathered extensive data about your audience, the next step is to distill this information into ideal buyer personas. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, and it encompasses key traits, behaviors, and preferences. Analyzing the qualitative data collected from your audience research allows you to identify patterns and commonalities among your potential customers. Creating different personas based on these patterns helps you categorize your audience into segments. This segmentation is valuable because it allows you to personalize your marketing efforts, tailoring your messages and offerings to suit the specific needs and desires of each persona. In essence, it makes your marketing more precise and effective.

Step 3: Research Your Competitors

Competitor research is not about undermining your competition, but rather, it's about gaining a comprehensive understanding of the market landscape. By studying your competitors, you can learn from their successes and failures, identify trends, and uncover opportunities for innovation. This step is essential for discovering a unique edge or advantage over the current offerings in the market. It involves analyzing your competitors' products, marketing strategies, pricing, customer feedback, and any gaps or weaknesses in their approach. This information can guide your own innovation and help you position your product or service more effectively.

Step 4: Determine the Primary Benefit of Your Product

The last step is you need to identify the core advantage of your product including the main value it provides to your customers. This primary benefit is the key reason why someone would choose your product over alternatives. It's essential to understand and clearly communicate this benefit in your marketing efforts.

SUMMARY

he Value Proposition Canvas (VPC) is a powerful tool used to gain a deep understanding of customers and create a compelling value proposition for a product or service. It involves identifying customer needs and pains, which can be both functional and emotional. Needs are what customers actively seek, while pains are the problems and inconveniences they encounter. The VPC then guides you to analyze how your product can effectively address these issues by aligning its features with customer needs and pains. The value proposition serves as a promise to customers, assuring them that your product will meet their needs and alleviate their pains.

A winning value proposition should be specific, pain-focused, and exclusive. It should convey the merits and benefits of your product or service in a clear and tailored manner, addressing the specific needs and challenges of your target audience while emphasizing what sets your offering apart from competitors.

The process involves two categories: the Customer Profile and the Value Map. The Customer Profile delves into customer demographics, psychographics, needs, pain points, and buying behavior. The Value Map connects this customer understanding with your product's attributes, ensuring alignment with customer expectations. It also helps create a concise and compelling value proposition.

CONCLUSION

Creating a strong value proposition is essential for any business aiming to succeed in a competitive marketplace. The Value Proposition Canvas provides a structured approach to understanding customer needs and pains, aligning them with your product's features, and crafting a persuasive value proposition. By researching your audience, creating ideal buyer personas, and researching your competitors, you can gather the insights necessary to differentiate your product and communicate its unique value effectively. Ultimately, a well-crafted value proposition not only attracts potential customers but also fosters a deeper connection by addressing their specific needs and challenges, setting the stage for successful product adoption and business growth.

Written by: Jovy Rañesis

#BlogTwo #Techno #VPC

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