Pajama

On Black Friday 2012, the busiest online shopping day of the year, over 10% of shoppers were using iPads to make their purchases. And the most in-demand item on Amazon? iPads.

An annual report is a comprehensive report on a company’s activities throughout the preceding year, to give shareholders and other interested people information about the company’s activities and financial performance. Most jurisdictions require companies to prepare and disclose annual reports. (Wikipedia)

Glossy, expensively printed, brochure filled with pages of boring numbers. (Graphic Designer)

I love my Pebble. We haven’t met yet. It was an internet date. I have been waiting for my Pebble e-paper watch for iOS and Android for nearly a year now. “Pebble is the first watch built for the 21st century. It’s infinitely customizable … Pebble connects to iPhone and Android smart phones … we strove to create a minimalist yet fashionable product that seamlessly blends into everyday life.” So went the pitch on Kickstarter. I was hooked.

Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are desperate to sell you something that, by definition, you can’t put in a box. Personal data storage on the internet or in the cloud. There are two types of name. Wafty, lighter than air clouds, and dynamic, vroom, vroom drives. Clouds are scifi futuristic teleportation devices, while drives are the data equivalent of horseless carriages.

It’s amusing to see how Barclay’s Cycle Hire is rapidly becoming known in London as Boris’s Bikes. This was inevitable. Barclay’s Cycle Hire is too long and too generic to ‘stick’ with Londoners.

What does the Sony brand bring to mind? For me it’s overwhelmingly the Walkman and Playstation, two category-busting products so powerful they’ve become part of the English language. For you it might be cameras (still or video), TVs, hi-fi, PCs, mobile phones, movies, music…the list is long.

Fifteen years ago I said to a major UK client that I could remake his brand to be like Apple. He said he knew which brand he’d rather his company resembled and it wasn’t Apple, it was Microsoft. News this week that Apple has surpassed Microsoft in value reminded me of that conversation.

Brands are like a currency. Trust is an essential factor in their value. When trust is impaired, the currency is debased. This has been the impact of the recent revelations regarding the contract manufacturer Foxconn. Foxconn makes devices for a number of high profile technology brands, among them Apple. Shortly before the iPad became available in the UK news came of a serious problem at the huge Foxconn works, a sealed factory-town of 400,000 workers, near Shenzhen.

Now on London’s Regent Street and in Singapore’s Vivo City you can encounter National Geographic as … a retail experience. Indeed, so surprising and inclusive is the translation that I’m tempted to reach for a more traditional category and call it a department store.

If you’re like me, you don’t let the newspapers limit your understanding of what’s going on in the world – you try to find out what’s really happening. Before the internet there were precious books that came along quite infrequently and shook things up for you. Now you can entertain a dozen unmentionable opinions before lunch, every day, and still get some work done, if you’re quick.