In Amsterdam’s busiest shopping street is a big wooden door that opens into a corridor which leads into a church. Few shoppers notice the door, let alone pass it. But the transition is wonderful: you go from a crowded street, a cacophony, into the silence of a church, and leave the shopping street behind, if […]
Language is about people, and marketing is a language @ Inbound Marketing Forum in Shanghai
So today I gave this talk at the Inbound Marketing Forum in Shanghai — and I started off by saying I’m from this small town in the Netherlands and I don’t really understand many things in marketing. Like, how I don’t understand why my Dutch telecom provider is so keen to interact with me on […]
Marriage is a tree
Love isn’t like a flower, that withers every season. Love grows like a tree, branches upwards and roots downwards. One side ecstasy and fantasy, the other exposing our wounds and missing details. It grows both ways, it needs both opposite directions. And just like a tree, it leaves a ring for each year that passes. […]
Strategy is specific, specifics are semantics
There is a difference between probability and possibility, between rationality and reason, empathy and sympathy, between dogma and ideal, strategy and tactics, differentiation and distinctiveness, and efficiency and effectiveness. To some, even the difference between whiskey or whisky matters — as with butter and margarine, or Great Britain and the United Kingdom. And when we […]
How to Be Both review
Here’s a book I really want to love, as it’s lighthearted tale about how art connects time and space and its people. Even the form is highly original, telling about two motherless figures, six hundred years apart — one a troubled teenager, the other an Italian fresco painter. These perspectives draw you in. The book is marketed […]
Old Captain Bar
‘Old Captain Bar’ (老船长) at 168 Gaoyang Lu in Hongkou is my kind of sad place. It has shiny brewing tanks in its interior, five eager staff in turquoise jackets and a singer doing hits from the 90’s and 00’s, but not too loud, so you can still talk. The television shows figure skating – […]
Language is about people and advertising is about language
It helps my job to see advertising as a language. Even if it’s not literally a dialogue, you are communicating to someone’s mind, tapping into what they already know, feel or do. If any message wants to stand a chance to be understood or felt, it must relate to someone. And the process to get […]
GoEast Mandarin
GoEast Language Center is one of Shanghai’s premium Mandarin language schools, with highly effective Mandarin teaching. But their communication lacked behind the quality of their teaching — and looked the same as all language schools in Shanghai. Early 2019, a new identity was designed and a new website was developed, which was faster in mainland […]
The bowl with the cat printed on it
We closed our suitcases and did one final check in the house in which we had lived for a long year, to switch off the lights, lock the door and take the plane to Shanghai. And then we found one bowl with a cat printed on it, left in the sink. “Just throw it away”, […]