For past few months, I have visited almost half a dozen cities in four countries on three continents. And I have seen some new symbols of globalization. Unlike the past, when Coca Cola, Levi’s and McDonald’s were icons of globalization, today the brands are very different. They aren’t entirely American, but instead very global.
Today, I am more likely to find H&M, Zara and Diesel in different cities. Weird? But not as weird as the iPad ads on a bus stop in Berlin, in a metro station in Helsinki. Samsung televisions and now Galaxy phones, Ulysses Nardin (watches) and Montblanc boutiques (writing instruments), Hugo Boss (clothes) are new symbols of globalization.
The new brands are a reflection of two major trends – US doesn’t have the brand hegemony as it competes with all comers from around the planet. The reason why we are seeing more international brands is because the planet is more connected to the Internet, which allows brand messaging to spread much faster than in the past. The consumer is global and more open to new concepts.
For instance, the hacker-founder culture popularized by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (and the movie The Social Network) has resulted in more founders in many countries wearing the hoodies-t-shirts-denim uniform. And one more I have seen pretty much universally — Linksys SSID on WiFi networks.
Anyway of all the brands I love seeing everywhere — Illy, the Italian coffee brand. Why? because it makes sure that I don’t drink Starbucks coffee. Anyway glad to be home!
A few years ago, we started doing info graphics by actually doing a lot of research on data and then working with a great group of guys to create art and visualization. One of them was good enough to be linked from Apple’s website. Old magazine hands called these infographics, charticles. Wired and the old Red Herring were particularly good at this stuff. (No surprise, because my former editor and goddess of the charticle, Joanna Pearlstein works(worked) for both those publications.) USA Today, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, too had been creating these graphics for a long time, except they didn’t use them as a way to generate web-buzz.
Mint, a financial management company did a great job of using infographics to draw attention to their blog and by extension to their service. Their success encouraged other companies to do adopt similar tactics. On the other end of the spectrum, newer publications including blogs like ours created a lot of buzz and traffic for us and others such as Fast Company and Good Magazine. What they did – they told a story. They were packed with a lot of information and numbers. Most importantly, they added to the reader experience.
It is my belief that in modern times, no success goes unpunished. Infographics, too, were “punished” for their success. Today, not a day goes by when I get an email from someone offering me some kind of infographic – online buzz for Oscar nominees, for example. Or a graphic outlining (Good) S**t @Garyvee Says from Hubspot! Now I like Gary and Hubspot seems to be a decent enough company, but does that need to be an infographic?
What has really happened is that social media experts discovered that people like to share infographics and many folks like to embed them in their tumblers and blogs. This gives “the product being pitched” an online buzz. In other words, it has become a game to game the social web. Maybe it is time for everyone to rethink and reconsider infographics and what they are good for.
I wrote this piece in long hand on the first day of my visit to India — Om
The high pitched call sounded familiar. It was sound of my childhood. I just couldn’t place it. I didn’t know what it was, but it was logged somewhere in the crevices of my memory. And then almost suddenly, it came back to me. It was the cry of an eagle, rather common one, that had build a nest across from our home in Delhi. It was the same nest, though I am quite certain not the same eagle that occupied it more than four decades ago. I was a mere tot, running and holding my shorts with one hand.
It was on top of a dilapidated water tank, that sat on the roof of a mansion fallen into disrepair. The mansion was home to a rich family that made its fortune selling gold and jewelry. At that time, the idea of a high rise meant two floors and even those were a rare sight. The sky in Delhi then was mostly blue – vibrant blue actually. The days were always warm and nights were often chilly. There were so few distractions that the arrival of the eagle who made a nest was greeted with amazement and shrieks of joy.
Even then I was a nosy kid — and almost always would run up to the roof to look at the nest and the eagle. When you are young, even a common eagle looks majestic and something to obsess about. I still hear my grandmother admonishing me, asking me to not take food outside. She was worried that the eagle would swoop and grab food from my hand. I never listened to her. The eagle never swooped. And its high-pitched cry slowly because part of daily life.
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A whole life has flown by. But like the eagle I return to the nest. Never the same eagle, but always the same creature. I am different and yet I am not. It all seems so familiar and yet it is not. I am sleeping the same bed I slept as a kid and as a teenager. The house has similar smells — incense mixed with kitchen smells and phenol-based cleaning liquid that disinfected the floors. My mother who doesn’t throw away anything is using the same utensils I had used as a kid. The scars of time and millions of washes are visible in the dishes. I have a tough time making sense of it all. I don’t know whether it is past or present. Or maybe it is just jet lag which doesn’t seem to go away.
Gone is the wide road in front of my house, replaced by a row of cars, double parked on both sides, leaving room for only a single vehicle to pass through at anytime. The idea of taking a walk after dinner — something I always did with my grandfather – is like running an obstacle course. In many ways it is a metaphor for India itself. Cars, modernity and progress jostling for space with people, tradition and past. The dust in the air is a sign of a city constantly trying to remake itself. It is Delhi’s destiny. They say Delhi has many lives and we might be witnessing the birth of its latest reincarnation.
The backstreet where I played cricket, made friends and wreaked havoc on the windows of our neighbors is a dark, dank alley, barely fit to walk, forget about playing a game of cricket. There are no kids who are getting to know each other. Most of the people I grew up with are gone. a generation has died and their descendants have moved to the suburbs, looking for more open spaces. My parents refuse to let go of the past – they don’t know any other way.
——–
Memories are nothing but mile markers to the past. You use points of references as a way to navigate back and forward through life. I keep looking for these references. Old buildings are gone, razed over to be replaced by newer ones. The malls have replaced open spaces. Local vendors are gone. I am moving from one place to another in an air-conditioned cocoon, desperately searching for anything to connect me to the past. I can’t find them and that makes me angry. I hate feeling like an alien — I know it is all there.
Delhi has moved on. So when I hear that eagle cry in the morning, I wake up with a that familiar warm feeling — home!
I am a big fan of Amazon’s Kindle devices, especially the really cheap $79 version which comes with a WiFi connection. I have been carrying this along with me as I travel across the planet. I have become increasingly frustrated with the device because I am unable to connect to the Internet.
Most airport lounges and public locations want you to sign-in through a browser page. On Kindle’s browser, that is like cleaning your nails with a butcher’s knife. I have tried and tried and failed. It is frustrating to say the least.
And that is the crucial difference between them and Apple. Apple as a company anticipates these problems because it makes hardware to delight its customers. That is what they do – apps, music, videos and books come second. Amazon on the other hand is making hardware to sell other products – books and digital content – and as such optimizes its experience around selling. That is their corporate DNA. doesn’t know how to anticipate such irritants. I hope Jeff Bezos and his troops think harder about these little things as they continue to roll out more hardware.
P.T. Barnum once famously said that there is no bad publicity. Of course, if you are, say a guy who is going bankrupt, or marrying and divorcing blondes or hosting an outrageous reality television show where you are firing people, like say Donald Trump, you probably like the idea of bad publicity. But if you are an entrepreneur running a technology company, let me tell you, there can definitely too much publicity. Infact, overexposure in media is actually bad for you. Let me elaborate.
In my long tenure as a technology writer, I have seen many patterns. The worst of them, from a startup perspective, is overexposure. During the dot-com mania of the 1990s, there were a few people who were constantly in the press — Naveen Jain (Infospace) and Jeff Dachis (Razorfish), to take just two examples. (See 60 minutes: DotCom Kids) They were always available for a quick “quip.”
Most of these quips were pretty worthless. The more these experts talked to the media, the less they had to say. After a few months of seeing their quotes, I had developed a certain kind of blindness to these entrepreneurs and what they had to say. I mean, if you read something again and again in half-a-dozen magazines and a handful of online publications, you kind of stop paying attention. Today’s technology media landscape is worse – there are just too many publications, both new and old, all looking for comments.
I totally understand that startups need attention. In order to get it, they hire media relations professionals who try and get their comments into every possible story, regardless of its impact on the overall strategy of the company. That’s their job. In fact they get paid by the media mentions! But it is the wrong approach — and extremely short-term thinking.
Why? Talk too often, and the media will soon think: He has nothing new to say — didn’t I hear him talk about this recently? Too much media exposure means that the focus of media attention starts to shift from the product (and the company) to the person, and that is never a good thing.
Now look at Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook. She doesn’t make a statement every day and doesn’t comment on everything. Whenever she speaks to the media, it is about Facebook’s operations, revenues, goals and company’s strategy. It is a good strategy to emulate. Say you are Brian Chesky (of AirBnB), it makes perfect sense for you to talk about the emergence of people-to-people economy and positioning AirBnB from that context. It makes AirBnB seem part of a much bigger movement. Staying focused on the bigger picture and your product is what it means to be “on message” without being boring or obvious.
So unless you are the equivalent of Donald Trump, keep in mind, too much publicity is bad for you.
