Black Friday or Cyber Monday?

I have talked with lots of multi-tasking/multi-minding moms this week on the topic of, no surprise, shopping. According to the news reports, Black Friday and Cyber Monday both did fairly well (Cyber Monday better), but the value of individual purchases is down across the board.

The angle I continue to be most interested in is the time element. Shopping takes so much time we've practically become too busy to shop, right?! While I am a dedicated online shopper b/c it saves so much time, so many of the moms I talked to got up at ungodly hours on Friday morning (after preparing Thanksgiving dinners the day before) and went in search of good deals.

How do you make time to do your holiday shopping?

Do You Multi-Mind or Mini-Task?

Many of the women and experts I interviewed for my book and much of the research that I've seen and done over recent years explored how women have bypassed multi-tasking and are multi-minding, or mentally juggling the many dimensions of our robust lives.

Have now seen coverage and books on the idea of mini-tasking, or breaking down tasks into bit-sized parts, in come cases to the extent of writing down all of those steps, to make a task more easily accomplished.
http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2009/06/22/smallb2.html

What's your approach -- mental juggling or itemizing?

In Praise of Slowness or Too Busy to Shop?

I love the concept behind Carl Honore's new book, In Praise of Slowness. See story from Huff Post here: http://tinyurl.com/ybm4cff. Given all of the data I saw to write Too Busy to Shop, lives are getting busier and women, for the most part, are embracing that busyness.

I think slowing down in parts of your life has merit -- you just have to pick your battles --or change your lifestyle, which many women won't be doing anytime soon.

What do you think?

Women of Personality

Rohit Bhargava's Women of Personality 2nd Edition ebook has officially launched and is now live at:http://www.thepersonalityproject.com/wop2. Check it out. My thanks to Rohit for including me in this inspiration effort.

In less than 24 hours, the ebook already have nearly 500 views and hundreds of tweets pointing to the effort and was featured as the Top Presentation Of The Day on Slideshare.net!

Looking forward to seeing all of you at the M2Moms Conference, www.m2moms.com, in Chicago on Oct. 21 and 22.

Harvard Business Review: Women Now Drive the World Economy

having done the research myself, in conjunction with Ketchum, and watching many other studies of the past five years, I can say that I am not surprised to see the recent headline in the Harvard Business Review that women now drive the world economy. See preview here: http://tinyurl.com/ltjzumy.

The entire article is brief and worth the read. It cites global consumer spending, missteps by companies like Dell and fact that "most companies have much to learn about selling to women." Sad, but true.

Too Busy to Shop starts with that premise and provides a framework for solutions with case examples. If you are a marketer or business, go to www.amazon.com and buy a copy of the book. If you are a female consumer, I continue to collect examples, good and bad, of what marketers are doing from your POV. Please send along your thoughts.

I look forward to hearing from you.

NYTimes Magazine: Why Women's Rights Are the Cause of Our Time

If you have not read the Aug. 23rd New York Times Sunday Magazine about Women's Rights, click this link now and read it: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-t.html#

I've worked in the marketing to women business for many years and read avidly about issues affecting women. But, after reading the series if articles in the NYT Magazine yesterday (which I read cover to cover), I was reminded of the many, serious issues facing women worldwide and of my responsibility as a woman to help other women become educated and succeed in business, as well as in life.

There are tips in the articles about how we can support important causes and organizations and, over time,I have supported many of them. I am particularly proud of Ketchum's efforts to support an organization called Room to Read, www.roomtoread.org, whose mission is to educate girls. Room to Read works with local villages in many developing countries to establish schools, libraries and do local language publishing with an emphasis on girls' education.

Please join me in considering, and then acting upon, things we can all do to help, like providing microfunding for women trying to start businesses in developing countries through www.kiva.org, sponsoring a girl or woman through www.womenforwomen.org, donating to Room to Read at www.roomtoread.org or some other action that will positively impact women globally.

WSJ: The Fans Know Best

In my book, I talk a good deal about how "too busy to shop"consumers are flocking to online/social networking sites and using those sites as a filter for credibility and a short-cut for making purchase decisions. Consumers are not going to branded sites nearly as much. In fact, in my book, I predict that visits to branded sites "will slow to a trickle" compared to these other sites.

The Wall Street Journal had a great article in today's edition called "The Fan Knows Best" by two marketing researchers that illustrates that point. The article calls out: 1. Stop Controlling Everything 2. Welcome Diversity. 3. Give Visitors Ways of Interacting and 4. if you can't be like the fan sites, at least monitor and support them.

See full text here.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204482304574222062946162306.html