Through ‘Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China’, Leta Hong Fincher shares an important message and she deserves credit for this, but I have several problems with the book itself. Firstly — and I say this while I understand that gathering quantitative research data about China is difficult — this book takes cherry-picking […]
Increasing Hershey’s share in wedding candy market on top of a brand image facelift Hershey’s wanted to increase its share in the wedding candy market in China (a huge market). Both online and offline sales, plus PR where an integral part of the campaign. KISSES ON THE BUND Couples where to showcase their love and […]
Greybox is a coffee chain with fifty locations, trying to beat coffee giants in China such as Starbucks (3000 stores) Luckin (500 stores) and Costa (500). Each of these chains says they’ve got the best beans and machines, but only Greybox goes so far that they make extreme HR investments. So why not treat baristas […]
The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are review
“All knowledge is a recognition of the mutual relationships between sense experience and/or things and events.” This is a dense book, packed with insights. Some of them so wise that they make you look at life in a different way. But others feel just plainly wrong or overly simplistic (“You are IT”) — or are […]
So what is branding? And what does it have to do with livestock? And what did king Solomon say about it?
Branding started a long time ago. We know that pots, two thousand years ago had their marker’s mark on it. That then, in time, became a mark of quality. If anyone wanted a good pot (see example), they had to go to MNOVIVS, obviously. The whole village knew that. The word branding originated much later, […]
This story on understanding comes in the unexpected shape a science-fiction novel — although anyone who has read Orson Scott Card’s books before would not be so surprised. It’s very different from its prequel, Ender’s Game: Speaker for the Dead is about understanding others, be it different individuals, families or even alien races — and […]
My mom often told me about me handing out candy on my birthday in kindergarten: hands and plate stretched far out, and my head turned around because I was afraid to look at people. Being the center of attention frightens me. It’s an irrational fear, but a fear nonetheless. The fear isn’t gone, but what […]
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 […]
There is a difference between probability and possibility, between rationality and reason, empathy and sympathy, between dogma and ideal, strategy and tactics, resolution and aspiration, differentiation and distinctiveness, supplement and replacement, money and wealth, and efficiency and effectiveness. To some, even the difference between whiskey or whisky matters — as with butter and margarine, or […]
