Marketing theory comes down to how you think marketing works. Imagine 全家FamilyMart would open up a 5-star restaurant in downtown Shanghai. Candles on the table, waiters suited up, silver cutlery. And FamilyMart would serve their microwave meals, touting their high-quality taste. It’d be fun, they’d invite 网红wanghong to magazines, and they’d get some serious PR. […]
My New Year’s Resolution is to look for the good in people — as daft as it sounds. Because you see and feel what you look for. You can focus on bad shit and be totally right. But it’ll grow and grow until it becomes all of who you are. You can only be happy […]
‘Who: The A Method for Hiring’ by by Geoff Smart and Randy Street is a fantastic book on hiring with practical advice that saves you time, and prevents you from hiring the wrong people. Who summary Here’s a summary of the tips for my own reference (and perhaps, yours): The goal is to hire ‘A-players’, […]
An asset or resource is something you dig up (like coal), or someone you hire like a great CEO (yes, that’s why they call it ‘human resources’). When you’re a car company, you use resources like steel and rubber and leather to make engines and wheels and seats, and in the end; cars. You can […]
The internet was supposed to unite everyone in the world, but algorithms and nuance-free formats have made us more divided than ever. The U.S. election is a perfect example, with people on both sides appalled by the way people vote. Any nuance is gone from the debate: You want poor people not to go hungry? […]
People rarely mistake strategy for tactics, but one of the most common mistakes in marketing strategy (or any kind of strategy) is confusing tactics for strategy. When prompted, most people can’t really tell the difference — but knowing the distinct difference between the two makes your strategy (and following tactics) infinitely better. Creativity without strategy is […]
I’ve now been studying Chinese for almost two years — and it has taught me not just how to speak and read and listen and write, but also how to learn. For instance, I’ve found there are many ways to learn Chinese characters. You can read sentences, recite words, write characters, or write the radicals […]
So much negativity on the internet, and even Reddit has it’s subreddits that mock negativity, like awfuleverything, wewantplates, antiMLM, facepalm, menwritingwomen, idiotsincars and insanepeoplefacebook. Even interesting subs like relationships or stepparents are full of stories of how ungodly life is. It’s momentarily fun to browse these, but they do eat your brain, until negativity is […]
Today’s the first day of the new semester today at Shanghai Institute of Visual Art. I’m glad we’re back to offline teaching (despite overcoming challenges to teach online), because the quality is just higher and we — students and me — can handle more content together. We started Marketing Strategy with a class about writing, […]
Ah, many times I started writing a paragraph to someone about how strongly I remembered this single thing they said years ago, and how I made that a part of my own, and how much a difference it had made to my life. How fondly I remember my time with them as classmates, colleagues, or […]