Brands Want You to Go Steady, Not Play the Field: Businessweek. “But can the increasingly sophisticated gimmicks of “brandlonging” turn fickle consumers into faithful members?..Perhaps the simplest tool of brandlonging is the loyalty card, of which the humblest is a hand-stamped, wallet-sized, dog-eared piece of card. No names and no tracking drill, these buy-10-espressos-get-the-11th-free cards both formalize and scale the ad hoc relationships that local vendors have enjoyed with their clients since the dawn of trade.”
David Brooks: “Over the centuries, humans have come up with all sorts of concepts to describe different thinking activities: memory, perception, emotion, attention, decision-making. But now, as scientists develop greater abilities to look at the brain doing its thing, they often find that the activity they observe does not fit the neat categories our culture has created, and which we rely on to understand ourselves.”
Ninan: “Private consumption in April-June this year was lower than four years earlier, i.e. in 2017-18. Other components of GDP have grown since then, namely government consumption and capital formation, while the trade deficit has shrunk. Note that the comparison is with the period immediately before the introduction of goods and services tax, which, it is generally acknowledged, disrupted large swathes of employment-intensive small and medium enterprises. It is also a fact that the nationwide lockdown towards the fag end of 2019-20 caused large-scale unemployment and reverse migration from urban to rural areas…It is not enough to focus on GDP — although that one number, reduced to a per head basis, remains the primary indicator of well-being because it is almost always positively correlated with standards of living and the indicators of health and education. Hence the distribution of income and therefore the pattern of economic growth have become a matter of even greater than usual concern, and not just because of obvious humanitarian concern about those being left behind.”
