Russell Davies

dummy

the amount of stuff we're happy to be stupid about is incredible

without borders

Border's on Oxford Street recently re-organised their shelves; do they have a covert anti-business agenda?

skate kitchen

skate culture will appropriate anything; even middle-class kitchen fetishism

authenticity

the kids talk authenticity (from The Face)

lovely imperfection

from the Mal Maison Hotel in Manchster; a great example of a company or brand acknowledging it's imperfections and talking to you engagingly and directly about them

riot pasta

An Italian restaurant in Central London during the 2001 riots. Shows how quickly the receieved wisdom of globalisation has been absorbed and normalised

merry christmas

Something I noticed in Tokyo just before Christmas; I was in a department store and there was the usual musical background. In this case an electronic version of the tinkling bells of a musical box, playing all sorts of Christmas songs, the Japanese seem very big on Christmas. Then I noticed what one of the tunes actually was - Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence. I wondered what that was all about. Has someone just scanned a database looking for Christmas songs? Does no-one know of the films context? Or are they not worried about it. I can imagine it was a hit in Japan as Sakamoto was the composer. Maybe it's based on a traditional Japanese tune. It certainly sounded very appropriate, a perfect blend of Christmassyness and Orientalness. Hmmm.

biting the hand

Shows the value of a brand which is prepared to stand for something; even prepared to bite the hand that feeds it. Nicely written too.

clever CIA

"A CIA operative who is assigned to read Soviet newspapers during the Cold War notices that a perennially losing soccer team in a small town suddenly starts winning all its matches. Curious, he asks for detailed photos of the area. Close scrutiny reveals a secret nuclear-weapons plant: the steady infusion of workers, it turns out, has been boosting the team's talent pool. While it would be comforting to think that today's intelligence community is similarly on the ball, that's not the point being made by Bradley Hoyt in his article "Early Warning: The Art of Inference" in the January/February 2002 issue of Competitive Intelligence Magazine. Hoyt's message is for business leaders, and it is this: seismic change often creeps in on little cat's feet, and the best way to spot it is to constantly scan for anomalies. Strategists, he insists, must learn both how to look (spotting change is a largely visual process) and where to look (early indications of change come not from within our companies or our industries but from the world at large -- your local Hallmark store is a good place to start)"

clever

Right here's all you need to know about brainstorming. Death Star is clearly a great name. And it clearly wasn't brainstormed by Darth. He wouldn't have done that. The Death Star was a conviction brand, a lighthouse brand. The Empire was not a consensus organisation. It did not look for a lot of stake-holder input.