Hello and welcome to my blog!

My name is Patrick Di Chiro, and I am the founder and CEO of THUNDER FACTORY, an integrated marketing firm headquartered in San Francisco. In this blog, I examine the convergence of marketing with technology, culture, politics and the global economy. If you like what you see, please spread [...]

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Back in the day, in the pre-web, pre-digital, pre-Twitter era, they used to define publicity as "free advertising." (I say "they" because I never subscribed to that definition of publicity.)
That was, of course, wrong. Publicity is anything but free. It takes a lot of work and diligence to generate publicity, especially to do it right. And, [...]

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I have no qualms whatsoever about challenging marketing orthodoxy. In fact, I do it all the time (or, at least I try).
So, it was with that perspective that I was intrigued by a recent Ad Age guest commentary on the use of customer segmentation in marketing. The provocative headline of the piece,"The Death of Consumer [...]

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It has been an interesting couple of weeks. Allow me to share some random observations on matters of marketing, culture and politics — all of which are favorite subjects of mine:

I noticed a fascinating statistic this past week about typical users of Twitter. Seems they are a bunch of middle-agers (just like moi), usually in [...]

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I was talking recently with a good friend of mine, a brilliant marketing guy who lives in, and literally adores, Austin, TX. On that same day, Dell Computer, the leading corporation based in Austin, and long the company that made Austin a "company town," just announced steep sales and earnings drops.
This bad news was not [...]

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