Word: gimmicking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...gimmick was instantly successful and surprisingly profitable. More than 100 diners showed up with the flyers over a three-week period. They were given menus without prices, but wound up paying an average of $33 for their meals, about $7.50 more than the usual cost. "We were betting on people's good taste and their sense of fair play," says Rowitch. He is going to mail another 6,000 flyers in the coming weeks...
They started seven years ago as a clever promotion, a harmless gimmick designed to boost business for airlines. But now frequent-flyer programs have triggered a dangerous dogfight in a vulnerable industry. As the major carriers scramble to offer the best giveaway plans, almost everyone who flies frequently for business or pleasure is busy trying to calculate how many miles of travel it will take to earn a free trip across the country or even around the world...
...Selling of the President 1968, Joe McGinnis sketched a scene of Richard Nixon backstage at the Mike Douglas Show in 1967. "It's a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected," Nixon said to Roger Ailes, the program's producer. Ailes, then 28, shot back, "Television is not a gimmick." The following year, Ailes was hired to help create the "new" Nixon. In 1984 he helped prepare Ronald Reagan for his second debate with Walter Mondale, giving him the effective quip "I'm not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth...
...brokerage houses, pension fund managers and other institutional investors. One variation is called index arbitrage, in which traders try to make swift, sure profits by taking advantage of temporary discrepancies between the prices of stock-index futures and the actual stocks that make up the index. A related gimmick is portfolio insurance, in which money managers sell stock-index futures during a market decline to guard themselves against losses. Heavy use of these strategies can produce violent price swings in the stock market...
...declared, and did, "to say we can balance the budget only by cutting and needs-testing expenditures and entitlements and by raising taxes." Only a long shot with little to lose, of course, can easily indulge in such bravery (and can ill afford not to). But it was no gimmick: Babbitt has for months been the most courageous candidate in trying to persuade average Americans that hard-nosed policies are the price they must pay to assure prosperity for their children...