Some interesting stories from this week, thanks to ClearEye

1.  Can you make and sell a $2,000 fishing reel in this economy?

You can if you’re the New Hampshire-based business owned and operated by Stanley and Stephen Bogdan.  And by the way marketers and global microbrand social networkers, these guys don’t own a single computer and they do no advertising.  Forbes

2.  What do customers really want?

Traditional survey techniques don’t reveal a consumer’s true desires, says Eric Almquist, a partner at Bain & Co., in a four-minute multimedia show. He prefers “Maximum Difference Scaling,” which he says “helps to sharpen the distinctions between features that are merely nice to have and those that customers say they’ve got to have.”  HBR

3.  The End of Excess: Is This Crisis Good for America?

Writing in this week’s edition of TIME, Kurt Andersen argues that the economic downturn may actually prove to be good for American culture, marking the end of a period of unsustainable excess in the way Americans handle their money.  Time

4. Twitter and Facebook and golf, oh my!

Pinehurst Resort, home of the famous No. 2 golf course, is tweeting.  Why?  Duh.  Because they can.  And listen up twits (is that the right word?), you’d better not stop tweeting.  Because as the English author, critic, and lexicographer Samuel Johnson wrote, “Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.”

5. Get your airplane magazine at your local Barnes & Noble.

I’m not kidding.  Delta’s Sky magazine is being relaunched in the wake of the merger of Delta and Northwest Airlines. In addition to being available on the planes (when you’ve run out of absolutely everything else to read), Sky will also be sold on newsstands for $3.99. Why are they doing this?  I guess because they can.

6.  Microsoft invests in the obvious.

Microsoft’s new ad campaign appears to be designed to inform (or remind) consumers that PCs are less expensive than Apple’s Macs.  Why is Microsoft doing this?  You get the idea.  :)   ManageCamp Blog