Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want Review

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This is the latest in a series of several books (notably The Experience Economy: Work is Theater and Every Business a Stage and Markets of One: Creating Customer-Unique Value through Mass Customization) in which James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine focus on what Peter Drucker once identified as one of the greatest challenges any business faces: How to get and then keep profitable customers? Their thesis in this latest volume is that marketers need to address the problem of managing "the perceptions of real or fake held by the consumer's of [an] enterprise's output - because people increasingly make purchase decisions based on how real or fake they perceive offerings. These perceptions flow directly from how well any particular offering conforms to a customer's self-image."
In this volume, Gilmore and Pine examine "the authenticity of economic offerings, not the authenticity of individuals in personal relationships, something people also greatly desire but the subject of many other tomes." They cite two exemplars in particular - Disney and Starbucks - because no company "has more affected our collective view of what is real and what is not" than has Disney. As for Starbucks, no other company "more explicitly manages its perception of authenticity, making direct appeals to authenticity in every way" Gilmore and Pine define this new discipline.
Here are some of the specific issues they address with rigor and eloquence:
1. The appeal of "real"
2. The drivers of the new consumer sensibility
3. Three axioms of authenticity
4. Five genres of authenticity
5. Two "time-honored standards" of authenticity
6. Ten elements of authenticity
7. How to be what you say you are
8. How to continue to be "true to self"
9. The nature, extent, and interaction of five key "real/fake polarities"
10. How to sustain the authenticity of what is offered
Decision-makers in any organization (regardless of its size or nature) are provided a comprehensive, cohesive, and cost-effective program by which to address and resolve these and other issues. Of course, even if Gilmore and Pine were in residence, actively involved in the design and implementation of such a program, assistance, it cannot succeed unless the given offering is and remains inherently authentic, That is, it fully meets (if not exceeds) the given consumer's perceptions of the benefits claimed for it.

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Major League Losers: The Real Cost Of Sports And Who's Paying For It Review

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(More customer reviews)By ANDREW CLINEMark S. Rosentraub, Major League Losers: The Real Cost of Sports And Who's Paying For It: Basic Books, 1997, $27.50, 513 pages.
Within the past generation, the pro sports team owner has become one of the top threats to state and local taxpayers. He has achieved this position by hiring hack economists to conduct trumped-up economic studies purporting to show that new sports arenas will bring large financial returns to the general public.
In his new book, Major League Losers, economist Mark S. Rosentraub shows very persuasively how pro sports arenas do not generate the economic returns to the general public that the owners claim, and therefore public subsidies are not justified.
Major League Losers is more than an economics book, and Rosentraub more than an economics professor. The book is written not for the policy wonk or academic, but rather for the sports fan and the taxpayer. Rosentraub covers the issue from the perspective of a concerned citizen and avid sports fan who just happens to be an economist rather than an economist looking to win tenure.
Rosentraub, a professor at Indiana University at Indianapolis and an Indiana Pacers season ticket holder, begins his book by laying down a little background so the reader will not jump straight into a bunch of economic mumbo jumbo.
In the first chapter Rosentraub outlines in simple terms how a city's economy works and how professional sports fit into that economy. In the second chapter he gets into a bit of psychology by explaining why sports occupy so exalted a position that they can garner public subsidies when other, far more important industries cannot.
The next chapter covers the theory of supply and demand, or why all cities that want pro sports teams cannot have them. In this chapter Rosentraub serves up a history of the big sports leagues, showing how each formed and evolved and how each was designed as a cartel that would maximize owner profits by minimizing competition.
Chapters four and five get into the nitty-gritty of economic analysis. In them Rosentraub explains just how little pro sports actually means to a city's overall economy. Professional sports, the author shows, never make up more than one half of one percent of all jobs in any community in which they exist. Nor do they account for two-thirds of one percent of the total payroll of any community in which they exist.
Also, when it comes to generating job growth, pro sports produce jobs only in a very tiny area localized usually within the stadium's own zip code. There is no large ripple effect throughout the community. In fact, pro sports can sap jobs from outlying areas because people who would have spent their money on movies and restaurants in the suburbs will instead spend that money at the sports stadium, reducing business for suburban entertainment and food venues.
In chapters six through ten, Rosentraub uses the specific examples of Indianapolis, Cleveland, St. Louis, Toronto, Montreal, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh to show how little return taxpayers receive when they opt to spend tax money on pro sports stadiums.
Chapter eleven focuses on the fight between suburbs and center cities that occurs whenever communities try to land or keep pro sports teams within their boundaries.
In the last chapter, Rosentraub offers a quick prescription for how to avoid the subsidized disasters that have befallen so many communities that have caved in to the demands of sports team owners.
Major League Losers could have been a much shorter book. The educated reader will skim through much of the fluff to get to the meat of the economic discussion. But this fluff may prove important in explaining the situation to those serious sports fans who otherwise may tolerate subsidies to teams as a means of obtaining their favorite entertainment. The book clearly and simply achieves the author's objectives. It is a must read for all hard-core sports fans as well as all taxpayers.
Andrew Cline is director of publications at the John Locke Foundation, a nonprofit think tank in Raleigh, N.C.

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