Tokyo is big. I know this. And yet the first powerful gut reaction to it was – it’s a lovely, quiet, gentle town. It felt fundamentally, palpably good. In a way I had not felt about any other city of this size.

Yes there are loads of people. But they don’t seem to get in anyone’s way. Foot traffic flowed easily – taking in …

The websites of the four public universities in Perth, Western Australia provided only two clear-cut customer experiences.

One appealed to a visionary ideal of tertiary education; providing a strong, personally emotive and aspirational platform for the prospective student.

The remaining three were primarily focused on the universities themselves, their achievements, their aspirations; with no emotive hooks for the prospective student.

Murdoch University

Murdoch University’s website was a surprisingly …

Two current/recent ads on the Hallmark channel were notable for their focus on providing useful information for the viewer, as opposed to the usual telling the viewer how great some product is.

Hallmark channel ID – living your best life. Affirmations and reminders. Biggest Loser Asia – weight loss insights and tips.

Summarised from Working for Happiness by Alex Frankel.

Over two years, journalist Alex Frenkel worked a diverse range of jobs to explore the connection between corporate culture and happiness at work – UPS, Starbucks, Gap, Enterprise and an Apple Store. He discovered three secrets to a happy workplace:

Go for flow

Autonomy to manage one’s own tasks and timelines.
Measure on what was done (outcomes); not micro-managing the how.
Enable pride …

And since I have been unwell and have no completed thoughts to share, here be links to the Volkswagen piano stairs thing that a few people have mentioned to me recently.

Volkswagen Piano Stairs on Brandfreak

And the Fun Theory site itself.

Enjoy!

When it comes to choosing to work with big or small suppliers (say a global advertising agency versus a local web developer), businesses tend to swing in cycles.

Say a business is looking to set up their website. They may choose to go with a large global agency for the sake of “safety” and stability.

Over time they come to realise that the large agency has policies and practices …

I drew the following diagram from a description in Marty Neumeier’s book The Designful Company:

In any given endeavour, a business can choose the following approaches:

Good and different.
Different but not good.
Not good and not different.
Good but not different.

Neumeier contends that many businesses tend to choose the same over the different – in other words, 3 and 4 from the list and diagram above. They …

Spotted in Wired magazine recently:

A particularly nice congruent ad I thought. Plus a great tagline that immediately repositions the competition and states a clearly understandable value proposition. Plus featuring one of their customers as the heroes of the ad. Very straightforward, no-nonsense, no overt marketing spin.

Now for the acid test: are there any Allybank customers …

Kraft Foods Australia has recently named their latest Vegemite product the “iSnack 2.0″

When I first saw this I thought it was a prank. But sadly no, it is for real.

The following thoughts came to mind: wrong, lame, does not conjure about anything to do with food, trying too hard to be hip and cool (and completely missing the mark), a shallow …

“The quality of a society is more important than your place in that society. … it is better to be a small fish in a clean pond than a big fish in a polluted lake.”

From Eric Weiner’s book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search For The Happiest Places In The World. ISBN 978-0-446-69889-4.

As business builders, is it more important that we create a clean pond rather …