Chapter 14 lifestyle

people who can concentrate for a long time It is widely believed that Americans' concentration time is shrinking.Decades ago we whittled down a 60-second ad to 30, and now it seems the "right" length for an ad on the Internet is 15 seconds.We've pared down our presidential campaign platform to a bumper sticker, our lives have sped up, we're texting our friends and we're impatient to spell out full words. How come there are so many people with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) in the United States? However, let's slow down the tempo a little bit, just for a minute.There is (TuesdayswithMorrie), and there are novels by Tom Wolfe.On your computer screen, there is a lively two-minute advertisement that jumps out automatically; on your TV screen, there is a well-arranged 30-minute commercial—this is an annual event. A $90 billion industry.

Some people's rhythm of doing things is completely different.What they want from books, movies, products, and news is deeper and richer information, answers that can actually solve life's problems.They want to know basic facts, not fleeting representations.While many marketers, as well as politicians, have been trying to perfect their message to ADDA America, they believe that their audience or viewers have very limited time for them, so They compress large amounts of information into nano-seconds.However, it would be wiser to also look after those "Long Attention Spanfolks" (Long Attention Spanfolks, LAS) in the United States.

How do we know that there are people in America who can concentrate for a long time? Let's look at sports first.A marathon is more than 26 miles long, yet a full half a million people in the United States run marathons.A triathlon consists of a full marathon, plus a 2.4-mile swim, plus a 112-mile bike ride, but nearly 200,000 people in the U.S. participate in the toughest sport.Participating in such a sport is not as easy as winning the 50-meter sprint. It requires total dedication and concentration far beyond what people expect.People who participate in such sports have the ability to concentrate for a long time.

Golf is also a sport that requires full dedication, and it will definitely take more than 4 hours to play a ball.Over the past 20 years, golf has grown into a $62 billion-a-year industry, leaving far behind the short-lived gratification industries of "entertainment, gaming and leisure."The fast-paced tennis has gradually lost its former charm, because more and more people hope to slow down the pace so that they can think and exercise calmly for a longer period of time. Let's look at reading again.It takes about 60 seconds on average to browse a web page on the Internet, and an in-depth article in a magazine has about 13,000 words. Even so, the readers of "Atlantic Monthly" (Atlantic Monthly) have increased by nearly 500,000 People, or to put it another way, have nearly halved since 1980.Another full-text magazine without pictures, Foreign Affairs, saw its circulation increase by nearly 13% between 2002 and 2005 alone.

The real surprise is the crossword puzzle.It is said that 50 million people in the United States play crossword puzzles.It's a game that can last from minutes to hours, as people with limited spelling skills have to rack their brains to untangle difficult synonyms and lame puns.We all know that the East Coast and West Coast are the most time-crunched, but the people there are especially fond of crossword puzzles. Of course, Sudoku should also be mentioned, which is a game in which numbers 1 to 9 are filled in nine small squares vertically and horizontally, and it is also a very fascinating game. In 2003, almost no one had heard of the game; now, books on Sudoku fill several shelves in major bookstores, and global sales of Sudoku titles have topped $250 million.

Whether it's the 500,000 people who run a marathon, or the people who read The Atlantic, or the 50 million people who do a crossword puzzle, people who can concentrate for a long time are not a marginalized group in the United States.In fact, no matter what the marketing courses say, the real mainstream group is precisely these people who can concentrate for a long time. Titanic, the highest-grossing movie in U.S. history, ran for more than three hours. In 2006, the TV series "24hours," which won five Emmysawards, required you to watch an entire season to find out what happened in a single day.

Harry Potter, topping the world bestseller list, is also proof that we love long stories and people wait patiently like Lord Voldemort's snake for the next episode .The novels of Thomas Pynchon and James Michener, among others, are long works.The series of popular novels by John Updike and Patricia Cornwell have also attracted people's attention for more than ten years. In 2005, the average page count of a best-selling book in the United States was more than 100 pages longer than it was 10 years ago.And even 10 years ago in 1995, the average number of pages of the top 10 best-selling books was 385 pages!

I love political speeches.All the speech experts in the world agree that short and concise speeches are the most powerful.Everyone knows that the Gettysburg Address (Gettysburg Address) was less than 300 words, and President Lincoln's entire speech took less than 3 minutes.But in 1995, President Clinton's State of the Union address was 9,000 words long, and the entire speech took 76 minutes. It was the longest speech in history and one of the most successful.In the United States, the number of people who tune in to the president's State of the Union address is more than double that of the Major League Baseball Finals every year.

So while many politicians try to cram big ideas into small words in their speeches, President Clinton has mastered the art of campaigning on issues.He can ask questions seriously, treat voters seriously, and he will not give voters the kind of "incendiary speeches that suit his taste" (it is said that John Kerry is famous for being good at this), Clinton is very good at it. The explanation of the problem is thoughtful and in-depth.Senator Hillary Clinton was that type of statesman, and so was Richard Nixon, despite his other problems.No doubt some voters will find their speeches dry and trivial.However, candidates speak in this way out of respect for people and because they firmly believe in what VO Xiaoji said 50 years ago in the "Preface" of this book: "Voters are not fool."

I also mentioned in the "Preface" of this book that VO Xiaoji had a profound influence on me on how to conduct opinion polls and how to treat voters.He has done systematic research on the US presidential election, and he believes that everyone will make a well-considered decision based on real and rational reasons, and will not make a decision based on whose tie looks better.I've done a lot of polling based on his idea that in many areas of life people's rational side is far more powerful than pure intuition or emotion.Some people make a decision in the blink of an eye, while others make a decision only after a serious mental struggle.The latter type of people are usually swing voters who decide the outcome of the election. They will not make hasty decisions, and their judgments are carefully considered.

The significance in the political field of a man who can concentrate for a long time should not be underestimated.The United States is a country that takes voluminous ideological documents as the foundation of its nation, and the important ideas contained in the founding documents have also been debated for a long time.In many other countries, my colleagues and I have done American-style problem-based advocacy, handily beating old-fashioned blustery advocacy. Finally, consider the business world.There is a kind of "subversive" advertisement in the business world, such as the advertisement of Dyson vacuum cleaners (Dysonvacuums), in which the boss of the company takes pains to explain the physical characteristics of the vacuum cleaner he invented. As a result, Dyson's products occupy a very large market share. It quickly surpassed the opponent who was ahead of him. Americans can't concentrate, Americans can't listen to long speeches, the candidates who win political office are always the ones who can come up with the most sensible slogans, etc., these are generally accepted, but don't take it lightly and so on.In fact, for a large number of Americans, as long as you can speak, they will listen; as long as you can write, they will read; People are often the most important decision makers.In some cases, some people don't talk much, not because they are smart marketers, it's because they don't have much to say. neglected dad Marketing experts in the fast food industry have spent years groping to realize that children have direct and indirect purchasing power as high as 200 billion U.S. dollars. Marketing to children is indeed a shrewd strategy to expand sales.It may be recalled that Ronald McDonald, with his red shoes and clown face, didn't draw families to McDonald's for dinner. This strategy didn't become fully effective until the mid-1990s, when mothers began to pay more attention to what their children were eating.Later, despite the introduction of "Happy Meals" (Happy Meals), mothers objected to their children going to fast food. (In Britain, mothers who forbid their sports-focused satellite television are known as the "female handbrake.") The impacted fast-food industry judged the situation and once again focused their attention on mothers. In order to make mothers feel more at ease eating with their children, they added dishes such as salads.If children control spending of $200 billion a year, women control spending of roughly $7 trillion a year. McDonald's focus on moms culminated in 2004 with the launch of a new program called "McMom" that offers moms a variety of services.For example, there are newsletters on the Internet about parenting experiences, women's health, nutrition, etc., as well as places reserved for mother and child meals such as "Mom Corners" and "Momparking", etc. In 2005, a senior executive of the company simply summed up the company's grand strategy as "It's All About the Moms" (It's All About the Moms). In fact, only a few people care about these details like fast food marketing experts. These are men between the ages of 18 and 34 who eat more than others and know what they eat. For "The Young and Hungry Man". (The "supergroup" should be them, not moms.) Still, there may be one trend on the horizon before the fast food industry settles for a two-way strategy of catering to busy and worried moms as well as young and hungry men. At a recent meeting at McDonald's to discuss mom strategy, the company's top executives asked me what the next trend they should be thinking about.I looked at their "McDonald's Moms" program and told them, "Dads". The amount of time dads spend with their children has been increasing since the 1970s.A 1999 University of Michigan study has shown that in the late 1970s, fathers in two-parent households spent only one-third as much time with their children as the average mother did with their children.By the early 1990s, that rate had risen to 43 percent.In 1997, fathers spent 65 percent of the time mothers spent with their children at home from Monday to Friday, and 87 percent on Saturday and Sunday. Two important trends are driving the increase in father-son time spent together.The first trend is that more women go out to work, and when they return home after a tiring day, they will ask their children's fathers to make their children's beds.Come Saturday, many women simply say, "It's your turn."The second trend is that divorce rates have risen, meaning more children are spending time alone with their fathers on a regular basis. The researchers believe that the father-son coexistence in this situation is an important father-son interaction.Both father and child have to eat, so why isn't there a "McDonald's Dad" plan?Dads are the kids' free coaches, and there's always a place to go after Saturday practice with the kids, but who's marketing them?Mom has been working hard for a week and needs to relax. It is logical for Dad to take care of the child. This is an opportunity not to be missed, but who would think of asking Dad to take the child to a restaurant for dinner? Mr. Cleaver in "Leaver It to Beaver" (Leaver It to Beaver) is a very respected father, but today's fathers are not, they do not receive attention.Marketing pundits seem to think that society today is still a tribe in the Amazon jungle, where the women make the decisions and the men do what they are told. Today's marketing pundits simply don't notice that there are dads who are raising their kids on their own, and there are dads who are expected to babysit on weekends or after school. In 1996, I participated in the "Soccer Moms" survey because women with young children play a unique role in politics, and they are very important swing voters.In the 2006 midterm elections, it was actually married men who played the role of swing voters.As employment in manufacturing has shrunk dramatically, a new breed of “Office Park Dads” (Office Park Dads) who are more educated, work new types of jobs and are more family-oriented has become more common.In fact, 4 million fathers are now handing over the responsibility of earning money to the mothers of their children, and taking on the responsibility of raising children themselves. This changing role of dads in the family has many marketing implications that go unnoticed.Billy Joel's book on how to be a father is such a smash hit because it's the rare children's book about a father.So, are there any works that describe the relationship between father and son?In this regard, fathers are also neglected, although the children go back to school, they have to buy clothes, and during the holidays, they have to buy their children holiday gifts. (Do an Internet search for "dad buys kids gifts" sites, and you'll find sites that help kids buy gifts for dads.) I think there is also a marketing issue with household cleaning appliances.A 2003 study at the University of California at Riverside found that school-age children who shared their father's chores were more likely to socialize with their peers and make friends, and they were less likely to be troublesome at school. Also less likely to suffer from depression.And not only that, according to the "love labs" (lovelabs) research led by Dr. John Gottman of the University of Washington, men who do more housework are more attractive to their wives. (Goldman says wives see husbands doing housework as a sign of love and concern, and that they love their husbands more for it.) However, there are quite a few commercial advertisements for household cleaning appliances every year, not to mention fathers as the target, but men as the target, right?A man's world is a world of change.The typical man, changing more diapers for his kids and taking out fewer loans than he used to.In some parts of the world, fathers have staged violent protests for their right to visit their children.The amount of time men spend with their children has increased, but neither Madison Avenue nor the media have picked up on the trend.And, father-son relationships remain an untapped potential market. Women's power in the workplace and at home has changed dramatically over the past 50 years, with a majority of women now employed and an increasingly important role in everything from voting to buying a car .And at the same time, in the past 10-20 years, we have finally seen that men are also beginning to adapt to this new reality of life, whether it is in nuclear families or divorced parents. More, more shared responsibilities, and a closer relationship with the children. So, dads need some kind of marketing attention, too.I am a father, hear my voice.