Death - It's a Part of Life

Yesterday my mother passed away peacefully at Southampton University Hospital after battling brain cancer for the last year and a half. I couldn't be more happier for her now that she is at peace and released from the struggle to draw breath. I want to thank all of you who have been so kind and supportive. You know who you are.

Stuff I know, Stuff I don't know

I don't know what these are called but they are my new favourite not-too-sweet-kanoms and the lady who sells them is well, pure and lovely (unlike me). Anybody know their Thai name please? They are 'si som' just like the farang when they've been out in the sun too much chai mai krub ;)

They have biodegradable wrapping, are inexpensive, yummy, sold by an even yummier lady in this instance, and I've never had them in all the years I've been coming to Thailand since 1993 as a 23 year old immersed in very very dangerous ideas of simulacra (yes plural I'm afraid)

Here's something that I know I wrote over here in the comments where it was all kicking off for a few hours like in the old days when Richard had more time to write his quite brilliant stuff.

There are probably two communications books that were prophetic. McLuhan's Understanding Media which is still breathtaking given it was first published in 1964 and of course The Cluetrain manifesto which we all really wanted to be true 10 years ago, but had to hold our breath for a while before it manifested itself as brilliantly prescient.

That doesn't mean both are flawless, but the sheer volume of predictive accuracy gives them a slightly mystical halo which they both solidly deserve.

However, the notion of markets as conversations is completely contextual (everything is contextual) and was (still is....) a brilliant summary of the anthropological traits that drive much/most of commerce and life.

But let's be clear. Markets are transactional micro and macro models of human interaction, and here's the point that the Cluertrain authors were brilliant enough to articulate; conversations too are transactional. It’s a two way street to be absolutely perfick as the Darling Buds of May once showed us.

Furthermore even though we talk about the ability to just be human and refrain from carpet bombing each other with marketing jargon through what is evidently (to me), a completely new dialectic (based on ancient principles), the hard truth is that many of us often don't know how to engage in a conversation because to be really good at it requires incredible patience, lots of concentration and a paradoxical lightness of touch so as to make it fun, informative, comforting or constructive. That’s just for starters. The list is endless as are contexts.

We talk about ‘The conversation” as if it's not rocket science but here's an heretical view I hold. We think humans are terrific at communication. We think that the evidence shows quite clearly that throughout the entire animal kingdom, the human species is the finest and most sophisticated of species for communication because we get those featherlight nuanced nods of humour about prophylactics and hey, we've got the internet too, which if continuous partial attention is anything to go by could well be something akin to extra sensory perception. But let me park that ticking time bomb to one side for another day/blog.

The reality is that the human species is borderline cretinous at communication. A quick look at the 20th century and its two global wars (everybody fighting everybody) plus say Gaza and Zimbabwe for good measure should be sufficient evidence of our astonishing ability to, say the wrong things, misunderstand what was said, take offense, read intent that doesn't exist, put pride before pragmatism, or pragmatism before pride when necessary.

Point is we've always been rubbish at communication, and the internet seemingly adds a depth of understanding that was never there before. Or is it just me that would quit smoking or TV in order to keep my internet connection?

But to suggest that a conversation is easy...... Fuck me.....

Try striking up a conversation about the most pressing problems of our time with the next person you meet.

As I said. Everything is contextual.

I don't know the slightest thing about this operating system but a lot of computers in Asia are running it and I'm needing one to triangulate the Microsoft and Apple ones I'm on.

I don't know what Absolut Rasp tastes like (but I can imagine - alcoholic fruit crush?).

I know how to do this but please don't tell my mum.

I don't know this guy's name but I do know he made the floor go spastic in the most beautiful way I've only ever witnessed just a small handful of rare times in my life (OK, maybe two small handfuls), and that I was surrounded by the most incredibly beautiful (mainly Thai) women, while it all kicked off to some rather carnal hardcore beats (ladies you made my jaw drop that night).

Big shout to you my friend. You pump large.

And I do know that I just spent a couple of weeks or so thinking about the sort of people I took a picture of below (in 2006 on an i-mobile phone camera (how I loved you)), who watch every Baht they spend (how I love you more), and it was good.

I do know that the stuff I don't know is inversely proportional to the stuff I think I know (my inner Rumsfeld speaking) which is microscopic really.

That's about it for the time being.Thank you.

Chunking Express

This is a long and sweeping post covering Asia and Creativity and Survival. There's no way I am even close to being completely right and there will be gaps, mistakes and contradictions and could easily go on for much longer, but I think I've connected enough of the dots to write this down rather than endlessly repeat what I've been asked about through umpteen Skype/Coffee Shop/Phone conversations around the world even though it was a pleasure to do it one more time for my good man Mark in the early hours of Saturday morning (It was closer to 3 AM Mark, I lost track of time!)

I'm a committed environmentalist, green marketeer, sustainable energy man and yesterday, as promised, offered free B2B marketing consultancy to a Chairwoman I met on Friday night at a swanky hotel bar, who is trying to raise funds on AIM for biomass fuel resource development in China. So cut me some slack on buying this unecessary phone because it is now the stimulus for a long overdue post that I started with Quantity not Quality back here.


OK, so the phone is pictured above. I first saw one owned by the manager of a stall in a Xidan shopping mall that does those funky T Shirts with twisted slogans I love so much. She was kind enough to answer my questions about where to get one, although they were no longer available, and finally Gustavo emailed to let me know he'd spotted them at Silk Street Market.

I have no real desperate need for a secondary phone except as a backup, but here's the skinny. Its shaped in the style of those first 1985 models called the Motorola DynaTAC, only a lot smaller and it is in my opinion, the definitive ironic style accessory. But lets talk facts. It comes with some more stuff than the original despite being a fraction of the original size:

Extra Memory Card
Stylus operated PDA
Bluetooth
FM Radio
Two Batteries
Media Player
Camera
Sound Recorder
Video

and....... most importantly; a SOLAR PANEL on the rear for charging the battery, meaning I leave it in the sunshine and she's good to go. Oh yeah, and it carries two SIM cards so I can have a double life which is perfect because even though I turned down those alarmingly low paid but discrete approaches by people who insisted on being implicit and not explicit about what branch of government they worked for all those years ago, this phone has a telescopic detachable zoom lens so I can observe Al Qaida operatives long before they spot me, and way after they were called the Mujahedeen and funded by "The American Dream" to win the cold war that was also won by outspending the Soviets on Nukes instead of funding guerrilla fighters who wanted to protect their religion and culture. I digress but check the telescopic lens out.


Freaking neat huh?... Back to the point. Asia, and China specifically is staggeringly good at duplication, imitation, reproduction, cloning and replication. I don't mean that pejoratively at all, except that in general it appears very few give a fuck about the environment, but it's not like any fool can do it either. For a start, it takes an entrepreneurial mindset, lots of financial resource, the expertise to duplicate the latest technology, reorganise an existing manufacturing process, disrupt the in-process inventory model (which is a LOT of work), reconfigure supply side distribution management and believe it or not, try and do some marketing.

So even though Asia is brimming with the sort of creative output that humans all round the world are good at when given the right environment, the reality of the region and China specifically is that it does the industrially unprecedented, through scale and volumetrics, plus a monoculture that pretty much insists on a uniformity of mindset and collective action rather than the pluralism and creative tension of the Western model kicked off by ideas from Empedocles and Democritus. China is still closer to the pre-Socratic Eleatics in thinking and while I generally embrace all cultural idiosyncrasies I believe China should think very very seriously about how to embrace pluralism and how to work it together with collective endeavour outside of the neoliberal capitalist model for reasons I'll round up on once I've dusted off creativity.

Now there plenty of exceptions outside of China, of brilliant creative marketing executions. There are however insufficient Pan-Asian successful branding case studies to conclude that out of a few billion people in the Far East, only a handful have figured out how to build on their strengths rather than embrace the reality of not being innovation leaders. Lets list them. Singapore Airlines (had it, lost it), Sony (erratic), Honda (W+K London) erm Samsung/Epson/Panasonic/Asus et al (yawn) and shall we say that'll be the Daewoo? Because when I worked in London at HHCL, no creative could ever deliver a pun as an idea. Oh and by the way Hello Kitty is Asia's third strongest brand.

So back to the product because that is where Asia knows how to rock-it from a manufacturing, pricing and distribution angle. The phone above is a 3rd millenium mashup and I love its solar panel credentials (it's no toy feature) but there is nothing in it that was invented outside of an occidental environment. Hat tip to Charlie Gower for his post that highlighted it was the Japanese at Sharp in 2001 who put a camera into the first popular cellphone. Digital photography though is rooted outside of the country that implemented it first successfully.

Charlie Gower is also one of the most creative idea driven people I know and memorably suggested at The Endurance in Soho, that mobile phones cameras need a small detachable light connected by wire, for taking decent night time shots. He's right too. Lighting is in the top three things for a good picture with composition and subject matter. A serious Asian brand will never do it first because it hasn't been done elsewhere. Sony. You make the best camera phones. What are you waiting for?

And there my friends is part of the challenge.

Whether its manufacturing or marketing by the time it comes to that old chestnut called creativity the absolutely last thing on a serious Asian brand's mind is taking a risk. Monoculture is all about being risk averse.

The marketing psychology over here is all too often 'If everyone is doing the same shit, then its more than likely to be working'. If I go out on a limb I'm risking the whole shebang for some marketing glory. Why on earth would I want to do that? The agencies are quite happy to go along with the illusion of creativity because the remuneration for getting a regular kicking from their clients is worth it. Senior management just shuffle the spreadsheet finance numbers and it's those lower down the food chain that are bullied the most anyway.

Now I could go into the reality that there isn't much need to stuff Asian ads with the usual superlatives of shiny white teeth and happy sterile family stereotypes. In real GDP growth economies here in Asia of say 7% and above all we have to do is bash people over the head with a monologue and make money. Repetition, increased sound volume, general aspirational lifestyle imagery and a million wasted hours talking bullshit about brand values, propositions, transactional analysis (just kidding), rational versus emotional, link testing, likability versus memorability and the rest of that old marketing bullshit that invariably settles on the word passion because of course the client and agency believe the brand is ALL about PASSION. Of course they do! It pays their fucking mortgages for Christ's sake.

How do we move on? If Asia and China specifically wants to move on to having the glorious aroma of a brand that performs above and beyond product specifications, there is plenty of fertile territory that deeper analysis of the DNA and marketing context offers. So often the really sticky stuff that is insanely interesting about Asian brands are the humble roots of the people who started them, the scalability, the risk taking, the commitment and the reasons they put on their spreadsheet marketeer heads on each morning. For their families and for their dreams. The power of dreams as we all know is quite something which is probably where I should begin to wrap up because the reality is that while I know great brands can be built here in Asia that can go global and attract a lot of customer love we are all facing a much larger problem than flogging the latest tech gadget. The economic model we are using is broken. It operates by extracting resources from the ground, converting it into products and then disposing of them at an exponentially faster rate because that is why technology controls us and not the other way round.

The imperative marketing challenge for Asia and China particular if you are listening because it all rests with you until the Indian demographics kick in is to charge more for less.

More ideas less stuff.

More cost less consumption

How do you do that?

You build proper brands that stand for something your families would be proud of and that means embracing the word creativity and innovation with a view to doing nothing less than rewiring our economies and the corporations so that we have something to pass on to the next generations.

Its really rather simple, and very very complex at the same time.

There's also a lot of thinking some of us are doing about why digital is more sensible for explosive growth populations and why analogue is probably a more intelligent use of resource for the rich folk.

Living with yourself

Wherever you are in the world you may have scratched your head once or twice and tried to figure out what infinity means. Then when you'd given up on this you may even have reflected that we live in a world of finite resources. Fossil fuels are a great example. They are the reverse of infinite. That's finite to you and me. Once our selfish and greedy generation have used them up (like the fossil crack whores we are) there will none left for our kids. (Cue handing over responsibility to the scientists who make iPods we can put into blenders to show how clever we are, and will ultimately invent some mythical power that the kids can then forgive our first-come, first-served mentality)

We tend to fight wars over them, set geopolitical policy around them, have a century of the cheapest energy ever, and believe it or not make all things plastic out of oil before we throw them away in the contented illusion that what is OUT OF SIGHT IS OUT OF MIND. Other than that we like to fill up our gas guzzling SUV's from pipes at petrol stations and get scared if someone does it with a cigarette in their hand, because that would mess up our Christmas plans. Ah yes Christmas, where we go on another consumer spending bender topped off with orgies of indulgence before nipping into the vomitorium to make way for some more mince pies, Chrimbo pudding, presents and more cake while studiously avoiding any mention of the birth of Jesus Christ who I can assure you took frugality very seriously. Its time to make frugal a word to worship again. It may just save our skins.

So how can we do this while encouraging people to spend, spend, spend while achieving those growth growth growth (ugh) targets that make the world so tickety boo? Easy if you really think about it but it will take a rewiring of our economies, some sort of managed population decline and building businesses around recycling, sustainability, community and wait for this making money out of value not money out of stuff as Russell pointed out over here.

Anyway, just in case this is popping your amygdala out of its neocortex because your marketing and advertising acumen pays the mortage and the thought of saving the world really gives you a migraine then relax, because one of the worlds best thinkers on the subject John Grant has just published his book The Green Marketing Manifesto. You should stop sodding about and buy it immediately. As John puts it so eloquently in his book. If environmental issues are a moral question, then not doing the right thing is immoral. I say this is more important than reading the newspaper and casting judgement on others. Change the world. Change yourself.