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...seems overly simplistic, but much corporate strategy revolves around trying to grow a brand beyond its core market. (Think low-end Mercedes.) But it's not doable, says the author, who refers to this aspiration as the "fidelity mirage." It's a trap that companies frequently fall into. "Contrary to what many businesses want to believe, achieving both high fidelity and high convenience seems to be impossible," he writes. "It looks tempting. Some companies believe they can get there, and life will be beautiful. But as it turns out, any company or product that attempts to capture both is likely...
...fell to earth trying to bridge market segments. Since the 1970s, Coach had been known as a luxury brand with a status more like Louis Vuitton's or Hermès'. But from 2004 to early 2008, the company opened 94 new stores and dozens of outlet shops. By the end of 2007, same-store sales were dipping for the first time in years. Says the author: "Convenience acts like antimatter to aura and identity." Likewise, Motorola took its sleek, fashionable $400 Razr cell phone and flooded the market with it at a lower price. "It destroyed the Razr brand," says...
...Iran's recently revealed uranium-enrichment plant under construction outside Qum. The plant, which Tehran insists will be used for civilian purposes, has heightened fears that Iran is hiding facilities that would give it greater capacity to potentially build nuclear weapons. Skeptics say delaying the inspection until the end of the month would give Iran time to cover up its activities. "One has to be somewhat suspicious," Washington's IAEA representative said Oct. 5 on Capitol Hill...
...there is a payoff for sticking with all of them. With the book's end in sight, Byatt snatches the Wellwoods and their circle, who have been living in a kind of Midsummer Night's Dream - admittedly a delusional version, shot through with subplots involving abuse and incest - out of their fairy costumes and deposits them in the vermin-infested trenches and blood-soaked hospitals of World War I. In conveying the vicious indifference with which their lives are shattered, Byatt's penetrating, unsentimental style hits its mark. None of Olive's fairy tales could have foretold...
...times the period details elbow out Byatt's story (parts of the novel read like notes for a cultural history), those details are never less than fascinating. Some English soldiers, we learn, named trenches for beloved works of literature - children's books, no less. But by the end of The Children's Book, it's hard to imagine the young men who christened Peter Pan Trench as harboring any illusions about not growing up or sharing Peter's view that "to die will be an awfully big adventure...