A brand is a promise between you and your audience.
1. Take three products you love and try to figure out their brand
2. Take three products you despise and figure out their brand
3. Then take a step back and try to figure out what promises you would be comfortable making to your target audience.
Those promises are the building blocks for your brand.
Adam Thurman from CAR website
Are your image and brand consistent? Are all of your contacts with your customers in alignment to what you believe?
When making a choice between two options, only consider what’s going to happen in the future, not which investments you’ve made in the past. The past investments are over, lost, gone forever. They are irrelevant to the future.
From Seth Godin
Three things you need:
1) the ability to abandon a plan when it doesn’t work,
2) the confidence to do the right thing even when it costs you money in the short run, and
3) enough belief in other people that you don’t try to do everything yourself.
Stand Up Comedy is a small shop in Portland that carries a lot of top notch fashion, below are their operational guidelines:
Stay within XXX budget. Have a memorizable inventory. Don’t add anything fixed to the space that doesn’t already exist in some form, only take away. Do not stock anything that can already be found locally. Make a website using a free program. Make it a living archive. Do not deviate from the standard template. Do not style products in the shop. Do not style products on the website. Do not attempt to cultivate an experience, only hope for the best. When a project is done in the shop, it becomes a shop project. Nothing should happen behind closed doors, no matter how messy or odd it may seem to a visitor. It’s all small ways of acknowledging that art becomes life becomes work becomes art. And on a more brutal note, that retail environments don’t have to be precious; neither does inventive, really special work of all kinds have to be.
Notes from the Book Outliers by Malcom Gladwell:
malcolm gladwell being semi-racist
-pg. 170
Levels of language mitigation from linguists Ute Fischer and Judith Orasanu:
1. Command
2. Obligation Statement
3. Suggestion
4. Query
5. Preference
6. Hint
-pg 195
More Racism
-pg 202
PDI - Power Distance Index
http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/intercultural/power-distance-index.html
http://andrewhongnsw.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!EEB36B88C6BA62C4!2708.entry
‘Western language has what linguists call a “transmitter orientation” - that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously.
-many Eastern countries are receiver oriented.
pg 221
-totally full of shit.
Good Quote: “No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich”
Congee - Chinese dish: rice, lettuce, dace paste
!Kung Bushman of Kalahari eat mostly mongongo nuts and work 12-19 hours a week.
“Hard work, shrewd planning and self reliance or cooperation with a small group will in time bring recompense.”
-pg 237
Malcolm Gladwell is from a generation that didn’t begin with a global perspective, hence his ideas about “people” and “cultures” are inflexible and seem more than a bit outdated. The book is a smooth read and has some good ideas, worth the time spent, but I would never buy it.
