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There’s a well-known quote that says if you want to understand how animals live, you don’t go to the zoo, you go to the jungle.
In order to “become” more desirable to others, we buy new clothes, brush our teeth, apply face cream, shave, order a new pair of glasses.
“The most difficult thing is to look in the mirror and describe yourself.”)
The work I do is a sped-up version of ethnographic, or participatory, anthropology, the difference being that instead of spending years in one place observing a tribe of people, I spend weeks and sometimes months in another country.
Countries change, after all, and so do the cultural and political mixes of those countries. Technology changes who we are as humans, which causes us to adapt and evolve accordingly.
The German American anthropologist Franz Boas is responsible for coining the word Kulturbrille, or “culture glasses,” a term that refers to the “lenses” through which we see our own countries.
Gerridae—otherwise known as water bugs, water striders or water skaters—
A source who works at Google once confessed to me that despite the almost 3 billion humans who are online,4 and the 70 percent of online shoppers who go onto Facebook daily,5 and the 300 hours of videos on YouTube (which is owned by Google) uploaded every minute,6 and the fact that 90 percent of all the world’s data has been generated over the last two years.7 Google ultimately has only limited information about consumers.
Millward Brown Vermeer recently initiated Marketing2020, one of the most comprehensive marketing leadership studies ever launched, which included in-depth interviews with more than 350 CEOs, CMOs and agency heads.
In an article published in the Harvard Business Review, the authors concluded that if data and analytics fall under the “Think” category, and content, design and production development fall under the “Do” category, then marketers who focus on consumer engagement and interaction belong to the “Feel” category.8
The German word maskenfreiheit can be translated
into “the freedom conferred by masks,”
You might say that thanks to technology, we are all at least two people, with at least two residences: a bricks-and-mortar home and a home page. Sometimes they overlap, but often they don’t.
lack of empathy that comes from communicating laptop to laptop,
Empathy, the New York Times pointed out last year, is learned two ways. One is by experiencing something distressing ourselves. Another is “by seeing, hearing or even smelling how your action has hurt someone else—
We’re never truly ourselves on social media, and when we communicate anonymously,
young teens and adolescents the Power Plug Generation, or Screenagers,
back in 2004 diners spent an average of 65 minutes at a table, a figure that rose to one hour and 55 minutes in 2014.
A new business concept generally has its origins in a cultural imbalance or exaggeration—too much of something, or too little of something—which indicates that something is either missing or blocked in the society.
Russian fashion consultant once told me that fashion stops at the Siberian border, where instead of showing off, the prerogative is survival.
country, you won’t get very far. As everyone knows, people
No matter where I went in the Russian Far East—Krasnoyarsk, Samara, Yakutsk (known, unofficially, as the coldest inhabited place on earth) or Siberia’s largest city, Novosibirsk—the apartment buildings, where 95 percent of the population live, were the same. Not just similar but exactly the same. Most were built between the First and Second World Wars.
In 1985, then-General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, cut back on nationwide vodka production and passed a law prohibiting stores from selling liquor before noon.
realized that the salt water was in some respects an everyday substitute for alcohol. Like alcohol, salt is highly addictive, and if they’re not actively drinking, alcoholics are often drawn to things—cigarettes, coffee—that give them the same rush, and that also hurt a little going down.
Control is generally a sign and a consequence of fear, and for the first time,
It was built by mothers, for mothers.
Small talk also has the secondary effect of defusing conflict or even resentment.
Without exposure to foreign cultures, or sensitivity to other races’ cultures, habits or tastes, the conversation is blunter.
The United States, after all, is synonymous with freedom and social and profession mobility. Which is why the padlocked hotel windows, climate-controlled buildings, paranoia about offending others and emphasis on rules and regulations seemed to counter the official version of the American “brand.”
With increased transparency comes higher levels of envy and unhappiness, as well as the death of any hiding spaces.
Lowes time-stamped its broiled chickens so that shoppers could tell how long they had been sitting there.
uniformity of the American shopping landscape had drained away an element of unexpectedness.
“If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine.
a Permission Zone. This is a term I use to refer to a moment, or an environment, that allows consumers to “enter” an alternate emotional state.
A Permission Zone can be linguistic, too. If you’ve ever sat in a meeting, or had a conversation with someone you don’t know well, you probably remember the first time one of you swears.
Without even realizing it, you’ve just granted the other people in the room permission to use profanity.
Somatic Marker Hypothesis
Antonio Damasio in his 1994 book Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human
That’s the difference between a somatic marker and a typical memory.
Manufacturing square cakes was only the first step. The second was to create a sense of storewide community.
studies show that the more anticipation a brand, or an event, can create, the more people enjoy it when it finally shows up.
China places an emphasis on structure and operations, and creativity is all but nonexistent. India, by comparison, is all about creativity and chaos, with almost no attention paid to structure and operations. (If the two countries merged, they would become a serious threat to Western business.)
The cereal manufacturer was dealing with two radically differently demographics that not only shared a home but also shared “emotional custody” of the family.
I had to figure out a packaging strategy to entice two generations simultaneously. To ensure I did it right, I had to perceive the world from the perspective of a much older person, a strategy I’d been using for many years, and one that began in the United Kingdom.
Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer, called the “Counterclockwise Test.”
In supermarket lingo, the “shadow line” refers to the darkness that falls over the top of a package when a supermarket shelf is too deep, or when the overhead light lands at a wrong angle.
My solution was to appeal first to the mothers-in-law by decorating two-thirds of the package (the bottom) with rich, bright, spice-inspired colors. I would also add a tactile dimension to one side of the package, to appeal to an older generation’s desire to handle products. The top third of the package, which the taller daughter-in-law would see, would be adorned with “natural” browns and greens, as well as a description of the cereal’s natural ingredients.
Each “moment” between infants and mothers lasts around 45 seconds.
. When one person gains weight, close friends tend to gain weight too.”
As soon as they opened their Happy Meals, children grabbed the enclosed toy, ate their meal, and that was that. There was no story line, no space for them to imagine, or dream.
