talk

I’ve always had a good gut. When I was 5, I thought it would be a wonderful idea for a chain restaurant that JUST served fries. When I was 13, I couldn’t understand why places like Walmart or Target didn’t have fashionable teen clothes. Why everything “cool” was super expensive. Why gum, couldn’t help whiten or clean teeth. Now all of that has changed and I see that, I wasn’t crazy, I was just ahead of my time. There are a couple of more ideas that I have that I would like to put on the table. The business development of such enterprises is a bit beyond my area of expertise, yet as I would truly love to see these ideas come to life, I’m sharing. After all I can’t do them all and I would love to see them happen. If you’re reading this and know how to make these ideas happen feel free to ring us up for ways we can help.

1st: PureFeet: A business model that combines holistic foot spa treatments with podiatry, with a podiatrist on site to take a look and prescribe treatments as needed. continue reading “Billion Dollar Ideas.”

How and when did brands get so small? It seems that despite the greater availability of tools and engaging media to connect brands with consumers, the impact of brands on society has greatly diminished. Why are the trillions of dollars currently spent on marketing only getting us “Paris Hilton” brands instead of timeless “Liz Taylors?” It seems that this past decade’s media revolution has empowered consumers while making brands more insecure.

Brands that want to be leaders must learn how to lead. They must facilitate what we call “branded movements” – or powerful collaborative statements with non-traditional groups such as grassroots organizations and influencers resulting in powerful brand communities. How do branded movements begin?

Brands should first adopt a more assertive attitude with regards to the roles they can play in society. They should not be afraid to ask themselves how they can change the world. This type of weighty question will naturally guide your brand to true values and give clarity, edge and purpose to your branding strategy. Plus, doing so will also bring you closer with a stronger base of consumers that are already asking themselves that very question of the brands they embrace.

A growing number of examples of branded movements is feeding consumers’ appetite for brand meaning, including General Electric’s “Eco-magination,” Lance Armstrong’s “Live Strong,” Dove’s “Real Beauty”, and Bono’s Red Campaign. At the core of these initiatives is a brand becoming human, inspiring through values, and then building communities through stories and interactions through imaginative use of creative and media.

“Branded movements,” work because they give everyone involved a sense of purpose around the brand and its values. They are also powerful because they allow to brand to touch upon society’s big shifts as well as the themes impacting the day-to-day decisions of individuals and families. The brand becomes both symbolic and relatable, inspirational and accessible. It is then, by being truly a part of consumers’ lives that our shrinking brands can become big again.

Many fashionistas talk about the stimulating and soothing effect of shopping when one is not feeling too fancy. The ladies in “Sex in the City” have become the ultimate symbols of this state of mind. But what happens when the carefree shopper is hit with a not so light case of dwindling disposable income and credit, as is currently the case across America. How should retail brands respond when people start putting the breaks on how much they are spending for clothes? It seems the fashion and retail categories need some retail therapy of their very own.

While a recession is not good for anyone, the limitations it engenders can motivate brands to become more focused on what they provide their consumers. By weathering the storm with a smile, a touch of class, and a lot of ingenuity, retail brands can fuel an evolution that will take them to new heights once recessionary waters subside. So retail brand managers: stay positive that better times will return, and in the meantime, work to find more creative and nuanced ways to connect with shoppers.

One of the most important lessons to remember when selling during a recession is that this unique confluence of economic variables presents a good time to remind your consumers about your unique value proposition. By doing so, you dispel the uncertainties of a recession, with the certainty of choosing the right brand for them.

continue reading “Retail Therapy for Recessionary Times”

The artists that are shaping our culture today can no longer be limited to the art gallery and the museum. Today’s artists are broadcasting their work all over the world on screens large and small. They are fluidly migrating back and forth from the art and commercial worlds. Brands like BMW, Adidas, Scion, Louis Vuitton have created clear points of view that they now own as movements. This comes as art has become mainstream and as consumers and the art establishment encourage mixing and matching. It’s fair to say that commercialism and new technologies have shaken up the art world. But this was not always so.

During most of the latter part of the twentieth century, figure art and craftmanship lost its perceived value as the art-buying elites took their acquisition cues from the prevalent mood among critics and artists such as Duchamp. “Traditional” artists, then, went into the more lucrative, less subjective worlds of commercial Art where an image needed to tell a clear story.

continue reading “Business Art is happening now”

Three news items in the space of a few days recently caught my attention. The first was the announcement that the annual World Biofuels Markets Congress will take place this year in Brussels in mid-March. That was followed by extensive coverage of the first biofuel-powered commercial flight courtesy of Virgin Airlines. And shortly after that came news that the UN World Food Programme may have to scale back assistance to poor countries because of a 40 percent rise in world food prices in the last year.

There is a common thread to all three items, and it has to do with food.

The international market price for wheat, corn, soybeans and other food products have all at least doubled in recent years, and in some cases as much as tripled. There have always been fluctuations in global commodity prices due to climate, economics and geopolitics – but this time around there is an important change that is permanent and needs to be addressed urgently by the international community.

The two leading contributors to the current round of increased food prices are fossil fuel and biofuel. Historically high oil prices have dramatically raised the cost of running farm machinery, transporting grain and all other produce, and increased the cost of manufacturing fertilizer. The new factor, however, is biofuel.

The early promise was that only marginal land not currently serving as forest cover or being used for growing food crops would be used to grow biofuel. That myth has been shattered in many ways in many parts of the world, but the US government has typically stepped in with a particularly heavy hand to make matters worse. In the last few years, the US has used subsidies to divert enough domestic corn for bioethanol production that it now constitutes about four percent of the entire global production of coarse grains.

Will the next step be a cartel of biofuel-producing countries? Founding members could be the US and its subsidized farm land, Malaysia and Brazil with their rainforests felled to grow fuel, and Caribbean nations that are putting sugar cane to new use.

Ok, it is not all bad. We do need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuel. And indeed there is a great deal of marginal land that could be used for biofuel. But the process can not be completely market driven when it means that people starve as a direct result. The international community needs to take a serious look at how to manage the whole issue of biofuel production so that it represents a net gain for the planet and not another missed opportunity for clearheaded collective leadership.

Links

Lester Brown - Why Ethanol Production Will Drive World Food Prices Even Higher in 2008

Foreign Affairs / C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Sanauer – How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor

World Biofuels Markets – Annual Congress 12-14 March 2008

Here’s an amazing site: pandora.com

Type a song or artist into their search bar and click the “create” button, you now have your own radio station that will play music from the artist/song you picked and others based on similarities in acoustics, instrumentation, melody, rhythm, etc. — It’s a great way to discover new artists that you’ll enjoy.

These days the latest Olympic scandal is a print ad for a courier company, official sponsor of the Spanish Basketball team, where Spain’s Olympic basketball team players appear stretching the skin on either side of their eyes for an Asian slant with sheepish grins on their faces. That add seems to say “look out Chinese people, here we come!”
The two full-page ads have been running since August in the Spanish sports newspaper Marca. Nobody in Spain noticed anything “inappropriate” until a British newspaper showcased it yesterday.

“Spain’s Olympic basketball teams have risked upsetting their Chinese hosts by posing for a pre-Games advert making slit-eyed gestures.” Wrote Sid Lowe for The Gaurdien. “The failure to recognise the potential consequences is striking in the light of the problems Spain has had with issues of race…”

I am sure the Creatives behind the campaign had no intentions of offend anyone with this ad, nor could they distinguish any offense in it.
It’s an interesting cultural contrast, which is worth examining. continue reading “The Un-PC basketball team”

Raul Higuera’s work is hauntingly beautiful, and definitely worth checking out. The self taught Colombian Fashion photographer presents images that are both dramatic and enchanting as they are fashionable.

check it out at: http://www.raulhiguera.com/

I-phone : You-cardboard

You think the future of mobile phones is the all in one i-phone? Well seems there’s a California company that thinks a painlessly disposable, super lo-cost cell-phone made of cardboard is the future. While with the I-phone you’re tied to AT&T, with the cardboard phone you’re –sort of- free, or at least you don’t have to pay one of those horrendous penalties if you decide to change companies. Minutes are charged from a pre-paid card, no matter what network is behind your calls. This is great news for tourists, or people who want to keep track of their cell-phone expenses on a business trip. But unfortunately in the US if you want a fancy phone you have to have it locked to a network. You can bet the idea of an unlocked i-phone makes AT&T tremble!

The European Wireless freedom:

What does a “locked” phone mean exactly? It means you are locked into a given system, and often times it feels like you made a deal with the devil. Europe has lived a free wireless life from the beginning, since the wise European Union forced all the network systems to unify from the start. So over there you can buy a cell-phone while in a network and move the device with you if you change your carrier. Really!!

For the US consumer the advantage has been that the cost of the phone itself has been greatly reduced, subsidized by the wireless carrier. So as soon as you get bored with one model you can move to another for a reasonable amount not even close to the real value of the device. That’s if you keep it in the same network. If not the Penalty Monster gets you and that, for some, it’s something that goes against all good old rules of capitalism.

California rules:
But wait there’s hope! A few days ago a preliminary California ruling stated that Sprint Nextel must pay consumers in California $18.2 million from a class-action lawsuit that challenged these “early termination fees,” and that the company must stop trying to collect the $54.7 million they are seeking from other customers who haven’t paid they early termination charges.

There’s a big possibility this ruling may extend to other states. Maybe very soon we’ll move into a network free wireless world in the US too. If that’s the case, it will very likely be the cheap cardboard cell-phones that turn out to be the big winners.