One of the hardest things to understand in marketing is the difference between differentiation (how different you are) and distinctiveness (how recognizable you are) — and which one is most important. It’s also where marketing’s biggest irony lies. There are plenty of guru’s like Simon Sinek who say people don’t buy what you sell, but […]
Here’s a Dutch word. Heem. Similar to home, referring to the town or country you grew up in. Your dad’s music, the books your mom used to read to you. The trees under which you played, the streets and bridges you cycled on, your native language — the place you come to hide, the place […]
To teach marketing, and at the same time work in marketing, is something I’ve struggled with. In my marketing classes at SIVA (上海视觉艺术学院), everything I tell is simple, structured, and proven: Step A, B, C — a tidy, bullet-point reality. But when I look at what I do at my full-time job at GoEast, I’m […]
18 months and 200 class hours ago I remember other students carrying HSK4 and HSK5 books, and I never imagined that I could once be at that level as well. But here’s to HSK4上 finished! I think the trick for me (as someone who was always bad with languages and started learning Mandarin with low […]
Here’s just a reminder that media are entirely funded by clicks, and that outrage and fear are most profitable. Many outlets simply list all the horrible things happening in the world or horrible things that could happen. And any time we calm down, the media will need to get more extreme: more dividing, more fearful. […]
Like everyone I’m overexposed to screens, so to practise Chinese characters on paper is surprisingly relaxing — absorbing in writing the right strokes to form radicals and components. Colorbooks for grown-ups have a similar stress relieving purpose. I don’t believe you can learn Hanzi with your eyes alone, as they come with such crual similarities […]
Here are the last four months of teaching branding at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art summarized into two verbs. SPECIFY: The market isn’t homogenous. Which clusters of people do you see of people that are similar to each other, and meaningfully different to people in other clusters? Don’t segment based on age: people aged the same aren’t […]
This is the sort of trick question that typically raises the dogma of “3 to 6 percent of revenue”. But all that does is make you approach your marketing backward, by starting your strategy with the budget. A strategy is a response to a challenge, so why start with the budget? Instead, plot a business […]
(Published on Shanghai’s non-profit HerCentury) I’ve been checking old places I went to on Google Street View, trying to remember names of classmates, looking up old cartoon movies we watched, and Lego sets we owned & other toys. I grew up in such wealth of love and space for creativity, even though we were just […]
Imagine being the doctor of a professional football team. You studied at a medical school for years, and now you sit on the bench — match after match — while nothing happens. Of course, because professional football players rank among the world’s fittest people. You watch every game from the sidelines, but you’re bored out […]