Couldn’t have said it better myself - SMH Executive Style blog: Determined to be different?.

Seth makes a good point about pricing of digital rentals. One other reason to charge less - bandwidths costs.

Seth mentions that the costs of pressing and distribution go out the window. But in the download market they don’t completely - the customer is paying for the amount they download, adding to the overall cost of the rental.

Sure, it’s still fairly small, and bandwidth is cheaper all the time. But I couldn’t afford to download a whole movie in HD on my current plan - it would blow my monthly download limit pretty fast, so I’d be v. cautious about renting this way given the bandwidth costs.

All the more reason to make the overall offer as compelling as possible to get the mental switch Seth is suggesting needs to be made.

(As an aside - I would have thought Blockbuster and the rental companies would have to pay a significant royalty based on the volume of rentals, rather than a per-physical-DVD fee. I’m intrigued now as to how that aspect of the industry works…)

Around the launch of his book, All Marketers Are Liars, Seth Godin wrote a lot about stories - the stories businesses tell when selling their products, and the ones that we, as customers, tell ourselves about products and companies.

I’ve been thinking a little about this over the past few weeks, thinking about what sort of story the (yet to be named) clothing label will tell, and also looking at what sort of stories existing ethical labels are telling.

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Treehugger was recently bought, and today I noticed graphic, animated advertisements in their RSS feed. Not. Happy. Jan! The animation is incredibly annoying, especially because it’s animated, and it’s the same ad in a number of posts.

I hope they come to their senses and give me my clean, ad-free RSS reader back. I post links to Treehugger and visit the site all the time - they can get their eyeballs there, not in my RSS reader.

Update: Seems the ads have disappeared again. Perhaps just a glitch in Feedburner or something?

Update 2:Nup - they’re back. V. annoying… And to make it worse, the same ad appears over and over and over again and are completely irrelevant to the content. Meh…

Radiohead have announced their new album. They’ve skipped labels and are releasing independently. You can pre-order the album as a download or “disc box” here.

The “disc box” contains one vinyl LP + 2 CDs, plus the access to download the album on 10 Oct, all for 40 pounds. The disc boxes themselves will begin to be shipped in December - I expect to gauge demand and to establish numbers before production.

What’s most interesting, is you get to choose how much you pay if you go for the download only option. That is, they have not set a price - you add it to your cart and then specify how much you’ll pay for the downloads. Fascinating…

Anyways - I’m tossing up whether to part with the $120 odd bucks for the full box set. I probably won’t but I’ll have a think about it for a few days before deciding…

I heard the news about Anita Roddick’s passing last night on JJJ’s Hack program. I have to admit I was quite shocked to hear it - in fact emotionally touched and saddened… still am.

As Dave so eloquently put it “She left the planet and it’s inhabitants with a much better chance of survival than if she had not been born…”

Anita was absolute hero of mine. I first heard about the Body Shop’s “different” way of doing things, and thought I’d read Anita’s semi-biography “Business as unusual“. It was tremendously inspiring to read about Anita’s journey from the small shop recycling bottles because she had to, to the spread of the Body Shop internationally.

Through the Body Shop she was a pioneer of what was to become known as Fair Trade, took an activist stance on animal testing and women’s rights, all the while building a successful international business. Proof positive that profits do not have to trump people and the environment - they can happily work together.

Throughout her life she was a passionate human rights and environmental activist, who really was alone for many, many years in her role as ethical business-woman. (Business-woman period, for that matter.) Her later books were a call to action for us all to take a stand, to “take it personally”, and to make our voices heard and our actions count.

I found myself quite emotionally low last night. I feel I personally owe her a debt of gratitude, even though I’ve never met her in person.

But I think about what her advice might be - I think (I hope) it would be “keep fighting the fight and make whatever difference you can, in work and life”. Hopefully I can do that sentiment justice…

To paraphrase Augie March: Anita, thanks for the memes. Your life is an inspiration.

P.S. both images on this post were taken from the home page of AnitaRoddick.com, Anita’s personal website. Check it out and help Anita’s legacy live on…

Update: Philippa over at ActNow posted a great opinion piece on Anita. “However, the loss of this figure should not bring us to look hopelessly at the sky but requires consumer’s attention to be cast on other businesses and their actual intentions towards their stakeholders.”

Hugh Macleod: The trick to marketing. Exactly…

Choice magazine has a great review of ethical investment (also known as socially responsible investment) funds in Australia.

My long-time fave, Australian Ethical is the only one that has stayed out of all of the so-called “sin stocks” of alcohol, tobacco, weapons (euphemistically labeled “defence” in Choice’s comparison) and uranium.

If you’re considering ethical investment as an option, perhaps for your superannuation, the review is well worth a look.

On a related note, Choice recently announced their sustainability policy. Hits a lot of the right notes…

Seth Godin makes a couple of interesting points about data visualisation for presentations. Seems simple enough, but so often missed…

Seth Godin:

Maybe the reason it seems that price is all your customers care about is…

…that you haven’t given them anything else to care about.