Marketing epiphanies
In the current New Yorker, Tad Friend has a wonderful profile of Tony Wheeler, the man who started the Lonely Planet guidebooks. Turns out he's just as interesting as you might expect.
Friend seems most interested in Wheeler's desire to explore. The piece also investigates how you keep that underdog attitude at huge corporate entity. (They were disappointed that the Oman guidebook sold just 32,000 copies since 2000!?! I can't imagine 32,000 people visiting Oman at all, or for that matter 32,000 people buying any single work of literature without creating a gigantic press stir.)
But he also touches on a topic that fascinates me: the delicate balance between tourism and discovery, salesmanship and character. My favorite line of the article is buried in parentheses:
Join the discussion at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/johnclaytonoutreach/
Friend seems most interested in Wheeler's desire to explore. The piece also investigates how you keep that underdog attitude at huge corporate entity. (They were disappointed that the Oman guidebook sold just 32,000 copies since 2000!?! I can't imagine 32,000 people visiting Oman at all, or for that matter 32,000 people buying any single work of literature without creating a gigantic press stir.)
But he also touches on a topic that fascinates me: the delicate balance between tourism and discovery, salesmanship and character. My favorite line of the article is buried in parentheses:
As early as the eighteen-seventies, John Muir denounced the tourists who were ruining Yosemite as “scum.”
Join the discussion at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/johnclaytonoutreach/
