Don't Believe The Hype - Seth's Blog

This is a (sorta) regular blog post dedicated to blogging the blogs of one of the most successful bloggers in the blogsphere.
Sethie Godiney is the diminutive sidekick to Seth Godin, an internet marketing guru, by my own unimaginative and lazy summation.My big brother's just posted a great piece about how irrational people are when they make purchases. Everyone 'knows' it's ok to, say, eat salmon at a wedding regardless of what the effects of salmon farming might be on the environment. People make purchases based on the flimsiest of try outs (kicking a car's tyres is one example he gives) and the experts know this. I'm guilty of this - once I just instructed an IFA (Independent Financial Advisor) to get me a deal whereby I could keep my old flat and rent it out and buy a new one (in which I rented the 2nd bedroom out) so he set me up with what was the UK equivalent of the Sub-Prime mortgage, the collapse of which in part started the current recession. I agreed on the basis of him running some meaningless numbers past me. I found out later he'd told the mortgage lenders that my income was about double what it actually was. Nothing particularly bad happened in the end (though the rental lost money and I'm having to sell that flat now) and a lesson learned, but better to learn from someone else's.
Essentially, he says, people are irrational, and there's a great example of this around the swine flu 'epidemic' and his cynical but sensible thoughts on marketing a swine flu vaccine..