In the summer of ’22 we were still new to Indiana and in an exploring mood. Out of nowhere one afternoon my wife said, “Let’s go check out French Lick.” She just liked the name of the town, plus the idea of taking a half-day road trip under a sweet blue sky and big puffy clouds. I said “Sure,” because I’m a basketball fan and supposed there would be a Larry Bird museum or something like it in his hometown. (Turns out there isn’t, but never mind that.)

Southern Indiana would be part of Kentucky if the Ohio River didn’t inconvenience that option. It’s hilly, and the natives have Southern accents. They say CEment and INsurance. (You know, like Larry Bird.) About halfway down the roads from Bloomington to French Lick, Google took us off the highway onto a twisty hypotenuse through deep woods and lumpy farmland, away from the hard right angle the boring main route would take at the city of Paoli (home of Indiana’s only ski slopes). This shortcut ended where the going got flat and we turned right onto a highway called 150. Then, in a short distance, we drove under a serious-looking arch that announced WEST BADEN SPRINGS. It might also have said ALMOST FRENCH LICK, because that’s what Google Maps told us. We were less than a mile away. After the arch, the edge of a town appeared straight ahead, but that scene was totally upstaged by the one on the right.

My wife and I both gasped. I said, “What the fuck is THAT?” My wife said “Wow!”

Suddenly we were … where? Spain? France? Croatia? There, under that perfect sky sat a beautiful giant resort-like structure that was obviously old, grand, well-maintained, and set among smaller structures just as old and nearly as grand, on a wide expanse of green.

A few hundred feet farther came this entrance on the right:

The only Carlsbads we knew were the town in California and the caverns in Arizona New Mexico. And all we knew about West Baden Springs was what that arch had just told us.

Of course, we couldn’t wait to get inside this thing, whatever it was. Here’s what we saw:

“Wow” doesn’t cover it. Nor do the many views of what turns out to have been—and still is—the West Baden Springs Hotel, which I’ve put in this album here. Check ’em out.

We’ve been back a bunch of times since then. And to French Lick, home of the French Lick Springs Hotel, which was once a great competitor to the West Baden Springs Hotel, and is almost as grand, just as historic, and a short and fun train ride away. Here’s the West Baden Station.

I’ll be putting up more albums of both places soon. Meanwhile, come visit, ya’ll.

A while back, my gastroenterologist insisted that I get accustomed to eating high-fiber cereal in the morning. And so I have. It does work.

He recommended Fiber One. I didn’t like it, but I put up with it until I found Trader Joe’s version, which tasted much better. Since Bloomington is more than an hour from a Trader Joe’s in Indianapolis (there are two on the north side, while we are way down to the south), I stock up when we’re up that way.

Or I used to.

In Palm Desert for Thanksgiving, I went to a Trader Joe’s there to find High Fiber Cereal missing from the shelves. When I asked a crew member (they’re called that) if they had any in the back, she came back out with the manager to tell me that High Fiber Cereal had, regrettably, been discontinued.

I did not take it well.

I then told them that I also lament earlier discontinuations of the house-brand Ancient Grains granola and its thick, labneh-like strained Greek yogurt. As I reported in the chapter about Trader Joe’s in The Intention Economy, the company takes customer requests to heart.

I also see here that Fiber One is not getting out to store shelves, thanks to what General Mills calls “supply issues.” Since most of Trader Joe’s branded goods are made by other companies (including, presumably, General Mills), perhaps High Fiber Cereal will be re-continued.

Meanwhile, here’s to a good digestive 2024.

Several thousand years ago, when I was on leave from journalism and working as a marketing dweeb, my small North Carolina firm learned about PRIZM (Potential Rating Index for Zip Markets), a techy new service that told me that my rural zip code was “Hardscrabble,” while the next one over was a suburb PRIZM called “Volvo Wagons” or something.

My current zip, in Bloomington, Indiana, features five out of PRIZM’s 68 numbered types:

• 48 Generation Web—Low Income Younger Family Mix
• 47 Striving Selfies—Lower Midscale Middle Age Mostly w/o Kids
• 15 New Homesteaders—Wealthy Middle Age Mostly w/ Kids
• 51 Campers & Camo—Lower Midscale Middle Age Family Mix
• 66 New Beginnings—Low Income Younger Family Mix

None of which describes me or my wife.

Sort of close is 05 – Country Squires: “Members of this segment fled the city life for the charms of small-town living. Many have executive jobs and live in recently built homes.” Except we didn’t flee and our home was built in  1899 or 1915. (Sources differ.) But we are building a house, so maybe that counts.

A bit closer is 20 – Empty Nests: “Most residents are over 65 years old, but they show no interest in a rest-home retirement. With their grown-up children out of the house they pursue active, and activist, lifestyles.”

But all of that stuff is just name-calling against typified populations—a form of -ism not much different than racism, sexism, or ageism. That’s why, on the receiving end, we tend not to like it, even if it brings us ‘relevant’ messages from sellers. (This happens far less than sellers think, and typically at the cost of privacy lost to surveillance.)

All of us are as different as our faces and voices. Being different than everybody—even ourselves five minutes ago—is among our most human qualities. We all grow and change constantly, whether we want to or not.

Marketing didn’t get that when PRIZM was invented in 1980, and it doesn’t get it today, for the simple reason that marketing was not built for talking to people. It was built for typifying people.

Chris Locke, David Weinberger, Rick Levine, and I all thought there was hope for marketing when we wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999, because we saw the Internet as a radically new way to connect the demand and supply sides of markets directly, and personally.

But marketing instead saw the Internet as a great way to spy on people and to typify them more than ever.  PRIZM persists, entrenched as ever. And conversations among customers and marketers happen in two very different and disconnected echo chambers, mostly using giant corporate platforms.

For a sense of how thoroughly disconnected those chambers are, see any of Tom Fishburne’s Marketoons. They’re brilliant and spot-on.

They also make clear—at least to me—that Cluetrain won’t prove right until marketing gets out of the way.

Which it won’t on its own. Our side—the customers’ side—needs to obsolesce it.

The image above was generated by the prompt in the caption under it, using what currently calls itself Microsoft Bing Image Creator from Designer, which persists Microsoft’s long tradition of aversive and unmemorable names for products.