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Acer Iconia 6886

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2011.11.22

In my Marketing class, we've been asked to evaluate a product from humble PC manufacturer Acer.

The model is a laptop with a large touchscreen in stead of a keyboard:

Acer Iconia 6886

It's certainly innovative, and I suspect it'd attract a fair bit of attention in advertisements and in the store. But it seems to be an oddball product doesn't really have a market segment. All of the positioning statements ring false. So we're going to say, essentially: fine, market the thing but we'll make it an attention-getter rather than try to fob it off as a major product. Advertise heavily in store fliers, buy some endcaps and support those with a sales contest and hope that the resulting halo effect produces sales among the vendor's more practical products.

Sadly, I've not come to expect actual feedback on the work I'm doing in this course. Given the weakness of the course instruction and the overall lackluster performance of the school I've decided that this will be my last experiment with courses at Ryerson. We'll see.

rand()m quote

It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

—John Steinbeck, Cannery Row