The prize inside. I received my April edition of Harvard Business Review last week and inside was one of the coolest inserts I've ever seen in a magazine. The Harvard Business School Press Spring 2007 Collection.
Now, please try and understand Dave here. To equate my joy is to equate a woman with disposable income receiving the latest Coach catalog. The insert's content speaks to the business book lover in me...a wide array of mental mind candy for an insatiable sweet tooth! But that is not why I am writing about the Harvard Business School Press today.
It's about the insert's design. It pickles my brain and jellies my backbone. It's sooooooooo open and clean! Books are grouped and presented according to their main theme. For instance, books on global economy are listed on two pages. And in a neat little graphic at the top of the page, HBP writes, Business Without Borders. Plenty of white space ordered about by thin lines of distinction surround pictures of the books, flanked by succinct descriptions and crisp testimony. To round out my delight, HBP infuses a subtle message from start to finish, a call to action if you will.
Now, please try and understand Dave here. If business books strain to satisfy an insatiable appetite for knowledge and ideas, then reviewing marketing pieces is a full blown addiction. I mean, throwing away junk mail before reviewing it, is akin to throwing a dollar bill into the trash container. It seems as if I'm on a perpetual journey to discover messages that are presented in a clean, appealing and meaningful manner. These pieces are few and far between. A couple of years ago I received a small course catalog from the Corporate College of Cuyahoga Community College. It registered off the charts on my difference from status-quo meter. I got so excited that I found out who the editor was and wrote her a glowing e-mail review. I believe she found that very odd and unusual, but I felt a powerful need to get it off of my chest, as I do today with the Harvard Business School Press. And that has presented a problem!
Unlike the Corporate College piece, there is no contact information in the HBP's insert. For that matter, there isn't even a Web site listed. What a shame! I've recently become enamored with HOW, Print and Communication Arts. Okay, enamored is weak. Let's try obsessed and addicted. Articles list the writer, designer, illustrator, photographer and the editor's grandmother. And that's just for an article! Very cool.
Of course, I'll go some place online and hunt someone down and tell them how awesome I think The Spring 2007 Collection is. But aside from making it easier on me, don't you think the folks who participated in putting together such an inspiring piece of communication deserve a little credit? I do!
Do Not Mail Opt-Out Law would be fair to everyone.
The proposed recent "Do not mail" is an Opt-Out law. Only those not desiring advertising mail need opt-out. Anyone desiring advertising mail can do nothing - and continue to receive it. Why deny those wishing to avoid advertising mail the power to do so?
I do not consider handling unwanted advertising placed against my will on my personal property to be a civic obligation!
The US Supreme Court said in the Rowan case in 1970, ““In today's [1970] complex society we are inescapably captive audiences for many purposes, but a sufficient measure of individual autonomy must survive to permit every householder to exercise control over unwanted mail. To make the householder the exclusive and final judge of what will cross his threshold undoubtedly has the effect of impeding the flow of ideas, information, and arguments that, ideally, he should receive and consider. Today's merchandising methods, the plethora of mass mailings subsidized by low postal rates, and the growth of the sale of large mailing lists as an industry in itself have changed the mailman from a carrier of primarily private communications, as he was in a more leisurely day, and have made him an adjunct of the mass mailer who sends unsolicited and often unwanted mail into every home. It places no strain on the doctrine of judicial notice to observe that whether measured by pieces or pounds, Everyman's mail today is made up overwhelmingly of material he did not seek from persons he does not know. And all too often it is matter he finds offensive.”
Furthermore, the Supreme Court said, “the mailer's right to communicate is circumscribed only by an affirmative act of the addressee giving notice that he wishes no further mailings from that mailer.
To hold less would tend to license a form of trespass and would make hardly more sense than to say that a radio or television viewer may not twist the dial to cut off an offensive or boring communication and thus bar its entering his home. Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit; we see no basis for according the printed word or pictures a different or more preferred status because they are sent by mail.”
We need a nationwide “Do Not Mail” law to create a one-stop, convenient place for homeowners to give senders the aforementioned affirmative notice that we do not want certain kinds of mail sent to our homes.
http://www.newdream.org/emails/ta19.html
Signed,
Ramsey A Fahel
Posted by: Ramsey Fahel | April 15, 2007 at 07:24 AM