The Branded and Gilded Life

It went against the moral fiber.

Only a couple of agency guys feverishly cracking a product brief for a client could have concocted this back in 1973. It went on to become an essential after-dinner tipple in hallowed circles.

But it wasn't always this way.

In 2007, Diageo announced that it had sold its billionth bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream liqueur. But the start or the journey was nowhere as smooth as the way it went down throats.

Would anyone have thought of adding cream to Irish whiskey, for example? And when the vile concoction did not work, they added sugar, and of all things, chocolate to make it palatable.

Then, with no backup plan, they presented it to the client.

As it went around the room, some of those present winced at the taste. There was the sharp accentuation of the whiskey that came through between the smoothness of the cream and the hint of chocolate.

It is a fascinating stop-start-stop journey.

Of a client willing to bet a considerable amount of money on manufacturing and marketing what was clearly an unfamiliar entrant to the liqueur market.

But it paid off in ways that neither the client nor the agency could ever have predicted, when it shot to instant fame and fortune in Australia, where it was love at first sip.

And shops would put up signs saying, 'It'll be here in a week" and people knew exactly what was being referred to.

Within a few years, they had a huge number of competitors. But by then, this Irish cream was galloping into the record books.

Don’t judge doesn’t work

That old proverb may work as a metaphor, but not in actual practice

We all judge books and movies by their covers.

How else are you supposed to make a decision? By reading the reviews or scanning a chapter? Or taking a look at the sales figures and deciding that if it is a bestseller, it must be good.

As it stands, it's hard to rise to the top in the world today in any channel, whether it is social media or a bookshelf in a store.

Kindle has completely changed the experience because you see the cover and then 'Look Inside' to see if the cover promise holds true within the first few pages.

Movie titles are an even trickier proposition. How will decide to spend the next couple of hours on a movie, if the title and blurb describing the film are not attractive enough?

Netflix has found that if people don't settle down to a film within the first couple of minutes after a login, they'll probably wander away to do something else.

So, it has found other ways to keep viewers engaged. The trailer, or a sequence from the film plays as soon as they click the 'Home' button.

Book displays, however, can't be as dynamic and engaging.

So the cover has got to do all the work. And a book is a much higher commitment, for most people. At least a few hours spread over weeks, if not more.

That's why covers are so important.

The reality is that we judge everything, books, movies and music by the covers that appear before us.

Do you dream of being a digital nomad?

Remote work has caught on since the pandemic began.

People speak of staying in picturesque locations and having a better quality of life.

A few of them have taken the plunge and explored not just another city or country. But how do you decide which is the best city to operate from? The same time zone? A great climate around the year? Political stability? High dollar value conversions?

How exactly can you find out all this without putting in the time and research.

That's where Nomadlist found its business model.

It calls itself a community of digital nomads. And they have over 30,000 members already, from what the site claims.

When you first land up at the site, it looks like a holiday destination - but the conditions it flags off are different.

Each city is rated on the cost of living, how good the internet connectivity is, the 'fun' factor and safety.

That's a good set of basic parameters to build on.

It looks like they use the existing nomads in the community to profile the cities.

And it is a long scroll to the bottom.

The business model is coming into view. Offering remote hires for companies is already part of the page design.

So is the opportunity for cities to boost their profile and promote themselves as destinations for digital nomads.

These guys are among the first I've seen - and it seems like another unicorn in the making.

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.

The other day, I placed an order for some pickles and a couple of other small eatables at an online store.

I don't want to name them because they did follow process and refunded the money for a stockout item.

Zomato and Swiggy have understood the problem and fixed it.

They know that restaurants can run out of the dishes when there's a sudden influx of people ordering the same thing.

Then, there are two options. A refund can be initiated, or the restaurant can call the customer, inform them and ask if they want to replace the dish ordered with another.

Most of the time, the customer will agree.

Back to the order I had placed.

After 5 days, the items were dispatched and simultaneously, a refund initiated for the pickles that were out of stock.

Now, if they had called before dispatching the order and provided an alternative, things would have been fine. I would have commended them on their thoughtfulness.

But this was not acceptable - because of the lack of communication.

The internal system is efficient because the money paid is returned.

However, the lack of communication is a deal breaker.

I'm unlikely to place an order with them again because they've neglected the most important link in the chain.

Keep customers informed when there's a change.

What is your dealbreaker for an online shopping process?

When Facebook's money machine stopped minting

When Facebook went down for six hours, it wasn't users alone who were impacted.

Facebook's outage stopped all scheduled advertising as well.

The calculation, according to AdWeek: Facebook’s ad engine would normally run, on average, $13 million worth of ads per hour or $200,000 per minute, according to figures from its second quarterly earnings. That’s a big hole.

After Facebook came back again, media managers began to notice another thing.

Accelerated delivery of advertising.

More ads were pushed into newsfeeds following the outage and they also noticed that conversions seemed to have dropped.

Now, each of these issues are hard to estimate when there is a continuous spend in place and estimating how it would impact the long term. But for the industry behemoth, disappearing for six hours is a crater - small, but significant.

If advertisers saw lower conversions, they would reduce spends or spread it out over a longer period. No one wants to be at the losing end.

And the objectives are at cross purposes.

Facebook would like to deliver higher conversions, but not at lower costs.

And advertisers want to keep cutting spends.

So, Facebook and advertisers are optimising in opposite directions!

An outage forces clients to hit the Pause button.

Even if the conversion drops momentarily, they hold back and that leads to Facebook losing even more money over time.

For Facebook, this is more worrying than the outage - because it slows down the acceleration of the money machine.

And getting it back to the same levels as before needs more than just a technical fix.

Returned without thanks

Online shopping has given rise to a new kind of behavior.

People returning things has gone through the roof.

It is one thing to walk into a physical showroom, try out anything from dresses or shoes and walk out with what you want.

But online shopping had to allow some version of this in order to succeed. If people had to take the risk of buying things without knowing they could return them, they would probably have held back.

Now, things have moved in the opposite direction.

Few think twice about returning stuff they don't want.

And that's a massive logistics headache.

The systems are built for dispatch to multiple locations from hubs. But this involves getting things back and the same system can't be used. It’s called reverse logistics and the companies involved dread the complexity in handling this.

The returned items can't be sold back through normal channels, since they won't be in the original packaging, or could be damaged or soiled.

Below a certain value, ecommerce companies are deciding it isn't worth it and simply refund the amount so that customers keep buying. Unless they make it a habit, in which case they are blacklisted.

One of the unexpected fallouts of the ecommerce boom. No one could have seen this coming.

Cash on delivery was one of the prime reasons why ecommerce flourished in India in the early stages.

But this is a new problem that has no easy solutions because the returns are random, the path back to the company is not fixed and what needs to be done with the returned goods is also not fixed.

Thanks. But no thanks!

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.

You're not supposed to know about them either.

But it shows that after all the trouble you take to secure your phone, your messages can be easily read.

What exactly does Syniverse do?

It routes the billions of messages sent out every day between the telecom companies. 

Practically every telecom company in the world is a customer.

And here's the enormity of the problem.

The company was hacked back in 2016. The hackers made inroads deep into the company's network and watched without their presence being detected.

For nearly 5 years.

That puts a completely different spin on things because it means that it's not enough for the phone or even the telecom network to put all security protocols in place because a trusted source in the middle has been hacked.

From the point of view of the hackers, it's a genius move.

They found the soft underbelly they could crawl into and keep tabs on just about anything they wanted to.

This is a major issue because it means that security issues are cropping up in a chain where neither the telecom provider or its customers had no clue that the messages are exposed.

It's a bit like a showroom having all kinds of security in place but the vendor delivering the goods makes off with the money.

And frankly, one wonders how far this whole chain can be protected. And whether there's any point at all.

Like hospital gowns that provide a modest cover in front. But the backend is another story!

What to look for in earphones

Before the pandemic, there was a small set of people who were hooked to music and podcasts on headphones and earphones.

But ever since video calls and online classes became the norm, the numbers floating around the house exploded.

In India, brands like Boat and Noise have experienced a sudden surge in popularity - to the extent that they're now signing up celebrities to endorse them.

Always a sign that people aren't interested so much in the technical details as much as the people who promote them.

The Sound Guys are coming at it from another angle and the arguments are persuasive. 

Apart from the sound quality, they suggest that you pay particular attention to the way the in-ear earphones fit your ears.

Why is this important?

The better the fit, the less leakage and you don't need to raise the volume beyond safe limits.

And when you're listening to conversations or music or podcasts, the volume level is insanely important. Especially when it amounts to several hours of listening every day.

It's like a direct feed right into your ears and if you can hear perfectly with a snug fit at low volumes, your ears should be protected for a lot longer.

They suggest that you experiment with a good seal that fits your ears perfectly. It may have to do with brand or with the in-ear options you have to try to find what works best for you.

Next time, don't look for the bass quality alone - the snug fit will matter a lot more in the long run.

Is it easier to motivate educated people?

Or is it easier to educate doers?

That's the question asked in a tweet, and it got a lot of people fired up.

Let's accept that there are people who simply get out there and do things.

Tanya Elizabeth Ken is a doer. She worked with a group of girls from a slum when she was 10 years old. Later, the group created an app, Baton, to keep track of volunteer projects that had moved ahead but were stuck in limbo.

Most volunteers stayed with a project for 3-6 months. Then, a couple of years later, another set of volunteers start work on the same problem because there is no way for them to know that another group had already made progress. Baton connected similar projects.

Like a relay race, the app enabled successive NGO teams to advance projects to the next level. Take the learnings from one and add them for the next team to advance solutions.

Simple idea but it had not occurred to anyone until then.

In 2019, it won the Technovation prize in a global competition.

And coming back to where this post started, doers don't wait for motivation or the right time or even the right set of circumstances.

There are several educated, well-qualified people who dream of doing things. But getting down to doing is another thing altogether.

Tanya Ken did not need any prodding. She started off early. The education helped but she was more interested in converting her idea into a project that would help her and all the teams that followed.

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.

They came to the Santa Monica pier from different directions.

One of them is a guitarist who has been playing for over 20 years and has a sizeable subscriber base on YouTube - nearly 250,000.

He sets up a mic and invites people to sing while he plays the guitar.

Most beach goers have nothing more on their minds than to snack, chit-chat and while away a lazy afternoon.

Then, a cautious Indian girl strolls by with a friend, and he invites her to sing.

They go back and forth on the songs she knows and what he can accompany her on.

Finally, they settle on a Daniel Ceasar song, and she begins hesitantly at first, and then gets into the flow.

And it turns out that she's effortlessly good.

The collaboration works even though they don't know each other at all and come from different worlds. But that doesn't stop them from connecting and creating some great music together.

She's learned classical Indian music for over 10 years. And he, of course is great on the guitar.

They'll go their own ways, and it is clear that the young singer, Monica, is not a career musician, even though she's a natural.

Her Instagram handle, which she doesn't immediately recall still has attracted over 9000 followers.

And we'll leave it there, just like the video, which now has over 1.5 million views and growing. A moment in time when two talented people came together and created a ripple on the beach one weekend evening.

And most other visitors remained blissfully unaware of the viral video taking shape.

AI and ML are old hat. Welcome to the Metaverse

(Update: This post was written 2 years ago. Obviously, things change, and I got it gloriously wrong. Zuckerberg lost billions. I lost face)

There's a change of guard every few years.

The old chestnuts don't work as well anymore because everyone's using the same jargon.

Then you begin to hear the whispers of something new. Which becomes a flood and in time, what everyone is building into their product!

Not so long ago, AI was the gate that opened venture capital in every business. Loads of big data churned into some marvelous new insights and products that could build the next billion-dollar business.

In practically every global software business, there is an AI component. If you ask the promoters, they will whip out one nugget after another to tell you how they identified a key need, churned data and then put in place a process that simply made it incredibly easy to take the business to whole new level.

So, what exactly is the Metaverse? Facebook describes it one way, but Epic games has another approach.

At this stage Facebook has had to play on the backfoot because they are weathering several storms of agitated legal and social scrutiny from lawmakers and other pressure groups.

The basic description of the Metaverse is the next stage of the internet where it moves from screens to objects of everyday use and the interactions that will result.

There's a long set of essays written about the Metaverse, if you are interested in trying to understand where this is going - or whether you want to go the way Epic believes is the right one.

Reminds me of the time the web moved from 1.0 to 2.0. But that was gone before you knew it.

What your location data is worth

Remember how Google Maps emails you a nice little infographic about the places you visit every month?

This was before the pandemic, of course and it was interesting to the extent that you looked at it and said - 'Oh ok', and probably forgot all about it.

But once the data is online, it is never forgotten.

And there are companies who harvest data, not from the phone alone but the apps you have installed.

There was a company called Foursquare who allowed 'check-ins' to restaurants, cinemas or other locations and conferred titles like 'Mayor of X Starbucks' for example.

It seemed like a harmless but essentially weird thing.

But all that data of movements to places adds up to a profile of your life.

If you visit religious places regularly, the fact that religion is important to you will come through clearly.

Or if a person is in the habit of having a drink every evening at a favorite restaurant, the location data will show the regularity of visits to the place. That data is of interest to companies targeting drinkers.

Extend these examples and you see how easy it is to build profiles of people's interests without them filling a single form, or even posting anything in social media.

Most people have nothing to hide. But when their preferences can be extracted in tangential ways, marketing to them is just the tip of the iceberg.

The location industry is apparently worth $12 billion. That could be a conservative estimate.

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.

James Gleick gave a great example of why efficiency should not be optimised beyond a point in his book, Chaos.

The example he used was of major airports, where flights took off and landed every 15 seconds or so. Alternating between a landing and a takeoff, efficiency parameters were pushed to the limit.

But if an airplane developed a snag on the ground while taxiing towards take off, it threw everything out of gear.

Finding another crew to replace the existing one, transferring passengers to a different flight and managing the schedules of all the other flight affected leads to chaos - and major losses for each of the affected airlines.

We're hearing of similar issues with supply chains across the world. Unloading at ports is taking weeks. Containers are in short supply. Drivers aren't available at refineries in Britain to refuel petrol stations, leading to major shortages.

Covid is one of the culprits, for sure. With people stuck at home during lockdowns, it isn't clear what will go down and when.

We got so obsessed with productivity, everything was pushed to the breaking point.

Christmas shopping in the US is under threat and all the big chains are scrambling to ensure supplies in the critical phase.

But the fact is, new unknowns suddenly make an appearance, creating ripples right across the chain and affecting end points.

Millions of cars could not be manufactured because of a shortage of chips.

We thought Covid only affects people, but it has also made economies sick.

And for that, there's no vaccine in the works.

Does automation cut quality while cutting costs?

Mass production leads to lower prices, for sure.

It also makes products affordable for a large set of people.

At the same time, it is evident that something is lost in the process.

The average mass-produced scissors are good enough.

But for people who want the finesse of perfectly matched and balanced scissors, it costs a lot more.

Earnest Wright in Sheffield makes scissors that cost around 350 pounds. Seems like an enormous price to pay but they have a set of customers who won't use anything else.

Watch a video of the process to see how much goes into the making.

Everything boils down to the final 'putting-together' of the two blades. It's painstakingly worked to the point where the scissor slices through cloth like a surgeon's scalpel.

There are just two people at the factory who can hone the final process and both of them are in their 70s.

They make only a few pairs every day and that craftsmanship is what people swear by.

But the level of detail and the apprenticeship demands years of experience. It isn't easy or even particularly interesting work.

Automation, on the other hand, removes people from the process altogether. But it also removes all elements of individual craft.

Most people would not even realise what they're missing. But for those who know the difference and can afford it, it becomes a treasured possession.

Long-lasting quality is a part of the mystique. What's even rarer is the human element of dedication, pushing each piece to a pinnacle while automation spits out passable new pieces every second.

The MacArthur prize recognises that change is hard

It does not have the glamour of the Nobel.

People don't work towards getting a MacArthur prize because they can't.

No one can nominate a potential prize winner.

Since 1978, the foundation has handed over $6.8 billion in grants to winners.

They include people doing pioneering work to remove racial discrimination. Or writing about cultural themes not part of the mainstream. Artists and activists as well.

The objective is to find people doing things to improve lives in communities in their own special way without looking for financial reward.

John MacArthur, the man in whose name the prize is instituted made his fortune in the insurance business. In life, he was the hard-charging businessman who was ruthless and hard to deal with.

But the foundation he left behind focuses on the pockets of change that add up to the larger picture. 

It's one of those riddles of human nature where the legacy of the man is at odds with the person he was in real life.

There is no fixed number of awards to be given out every year. But the people responsible go into the field after reading or hearing of the work that potential prize winners do.

It comes as a shock to every one of them. $625,000 is paid out over a period of five years.

The idea is that they should get on with what they do best without having to worry about money for their personal needs.

Out of personal selfishness came the award that rewards selflessness!

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.

Why did a tire company become the world's standard for haute cuisine?

Michelin assumed, correctly, that if more people traveled to eat out, they would replace their tires more often and increase the company's business over time.

They started out by awarding stars to restaurants back in 1900 and that became so popular, they had to appoint a series of 'inspectors' to assess food quality and see if standards were being maintained.

One would assume that gorging on great food all day long would be one of the most sought-after jobs in the world.

But most inspectors don't last beyond 5 years. The punishing schedule, the inevitable weight gain and the constant stress of assessing restaurants is not for the faint-hearted.

There are several articles about the Michelin star chefs, but practically none about the inspectors. That is probably by design.

The company did not want inspectors to be treated differently by the management, so as to get favourable reviews.

Michelin inspectors are solidly grounded in the science and the art of food. They have to pass rigorous tests to qualify.

And the initial assessments are done along with a senior inspector. But they aren't rich and could not afford to eat at these restaurants regularly, if they weren't on the job.

Their capacity to eat and distinguish between the balance of flavours, presentations and consistency is key.

A tire company setting the standards that chefs worldwide aspire to is an aberration. The recognition can make and break restaurants but another thought comes to mind.

We need to be told what our taste buds should feel! 

Should business reporting be serious?

Every business has conventions.

To a large extent, they are also an extension of tried and tested ways of the category.

If you met a banker who cracked jokes every couple of minutes, you may enjoy the banter but somewhere at the back of your mind, a question arises. Does this guy take things seriously and should I be parking my money here?

In a recent post, I had touched upon how the news readers from a few generations ago were the strong silent types, who would only crack smiles with a greeting at the beginning and while signing off.

But with hundreds of news and business channels fighting for attention, how do channels differentiate?

Good analysis and articulation are essential but then, you switch channels because you're looking for more than just presentation skills.

And programs from John Oliver - This Week Tonight as well as John Stewart's The Daily Show now presented by Trevor Noah may be slotted as comedic takes on news but the viewership is massive.

That's probably promoting a rethink at business channels, apart from taking a stand on certain issues and leaning to the right or the left.

It does not bode well for the 'neutral' mode that business reporting is supposed to stay in.

Take a look at this Australian business reporter talking about the recent GameStop controversy.

It is by no means all charts and graphs but actually has elements of drama and innuendo.

Looks like the ratings game is forcing the hand of business channels and transforming the way business is reported.

Walk down a street from 1914

You'll experience the joy of a visual stroll down memory lane.

What's amazing about this set of black and white photographs is how the photographer captured them.

In Brooklyn, he shot a series to depict the street the way a person walking down the street would see it.

It's as if he knew that it would be a permanent record for posterity.

Back then, street photography had not been invented.

These photographs have been captured 50 meters apart. And the work involved in getting them would certainly have been stupendous.

Nothing was in auto mode.

He would have had to set up the tripod and expose the frame for the right amount of time to get it right.

And while some people would have been curious, most would not bother.

The shop signs, the clothes, the merchandising and the atmosphere make an unforgettable impression.

There is already a billboard up at a vantage point for Mobiloils.

In every era, advertising makes an appearance and establishes a beachhead.

Plastic had not been invented, so all the street signs are in metal and clamped to lamp posts or erected outside buildings.

Horse drawn carriages are parked along with some of the early automobiles - the transition phase.

Apart from shops selling cutlery, there's even an elevated train track.

But traffic jams were still a few decades away, thankfully.

It's a series where you can spend a lot of time poring over the little details.

Take a walk with your mouse!

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.

There are great books available on the internet.

But it's like the difference between reading a recipe and getting down to cooking.

Unless you make a speech in front of a real audience, you'll never know what it actually means.

What the authors tell you will all ring true, but only after you make the actual attempt.

And no, speaking to your reflection in the mirror does not count.

Does everyone need to learn to speak in public?

I would say yes.

It's about learning to put across your point of view in public on a subject or a field you are familiar with.

And when I faced an audience for the first time back in college, I understood the terror.

The extreme nervousness that comes washes across you when there's a sea of faces looking up at you expectantly.

You're torn between two extreme emotions - wanting to be somewhere else altogether and savoring the attention.

One of the first exercises we had was not to speak at all but simply establish eye-contact with the audience. Look directly at people.

It sounds simple but if you've seen the number of speakers who look straight ahead or up at the ceiling, you'll know that they're not connecting to the audience at all.

Good speakers are like actors - they know how to emphasise a point, tell a joke, vary the pitch and the pace of the talk.

Vinay Pushapakaran teaches solo entrepreneurs to do business and is an accomplished public speaker as well.

And he knows how these two tracks are connected at the hip.

You can read a book but there's nothing like practical experience to build capabilities.

Will you feel safe flying without security checks?

We grumble about it all the time.

In the 70s and 80s, flying was a breeze. You could land up at airports about 45 minutes before the flight took off, walk up to counters, check in baggage and be sitting in your seat a few minutes later.

Then, the security protocols became the norm, with hijacking and terrorism strikes in some countries.

Now, no one bats an eyelid having to report 3 hours in advance for an international flight.

We've factored it in and the chances are, we'll feel unsafe if we don't go through those checks.

Wearing masks, at least in public in places where it is not politically charged has again become common practice.

The world looked strangely at Japan before the pandemic where masks were fairly common.

Now, there's a study from MIT which claims that people driving autonomous cars slack off.

Driving demands complete concentration and we know that even at low speeds, we have to watch out for unpredictable idiots.

So, it is strange that people are willing to hand over their safety to an algorithm, even though they're told that they need to override the system in an emergency.

Question is, will we be qualified to do so in future? 

As the tech gets better, our driving skills will deteriorate. A whole class of people will treat private vehicles like public transport!

And that isn't a comforting thought.

The reality TV experiment that fizzled

It's make-believe and like WWF. Where people know the fights are staged but like the format anyway.

But Reddit has real-life TV RPAN (Reddit Public Access Network) and users stream directly from their mobile phones (Update - the experiment has shut down) It was the closest thing to real-life TV that any channel or social medium has attempted.

Streams varied from people playing the guitar or the piano, and the top feed got as many as 20-25000 viewers watching live.

A young girl, a prodigy sat at the piano and effortlessly played for over an hour. She had legions of fans who tune in regularly to watch.

These sessions had the feel of sitting around a living room and enjoying the music.

The comments and awards floated up all the time from viewers who are impressed but she took a break only occasionally and flexed her fingers which had been flying over the keyboard minutes earlier.

There were sessions by blacksmiths making hammers in their foundry. Or 'Jhenga' players who stack up the pieces expertly. And potters demonstrating their skill.

Wonderful walks through city neighborhoods. I've watched a couple of them where the camera went into small residential localities, and you could soak in the atmosphere simply by watching.

And cats. How could there not be cats on the internet, effortlessly being cute?

Nothing is scripted. This is life as it happens. Without artful lighting and sometimes, one can even see cardboard boxes in the background or untidy shelves.

Think about it as TV where little happens - but it has a ready audience that laps it up.

Sadly, not anymore, since the network has been discontinued.

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.

During serial binge watches, we hit it all the time.

Titles set the foundations of motion graphics, but we're impatient to dive into the movie and we ignore the artistry.

They come in the way and no matter how exquisite, they're the appetizers to be dispensed with.

In the darkness of a movie theater, they set the mood for the film.

Early on film makers knew that apart from providing information about the film plot and the production crew, title design helped to ease audiences into the flow.

The example of West Side Story with the titles scrawled in chalk on a wooden texture make the point perfectly.

There's a rough-hewn beauty to the way the camera zooms into each of the credits. Unusually, it starts off with the film director's name and the stars come at the end of the sequence.

It is set in a lower middle-class neighborhood and the world of gang warfare that seems to have sliced through every single generation.

In today's world of layered combinations, the sequence may seem absurdly simple.

But watch the title sequence of the film 'The Untouchables'. A percussion track plays with extended shadows across lines of light.

It's only when the final reveal happens that we see the light was coming from a 3D projection of the letters in the title.

On a big screen, it was riveting.

Today's audience sees the titles on everything from mobile screen to laptops and TVs. And that dilutes the thought. Another defining aspect of the early movies is now gone.

Open Sesame - when a stock value went ballistic

Back in 1978, a distributor bought 3500 shares in Mewar Oil and General Mills Ltd which amounted to 2.8% of the value of the company at the time.

And then, it went into safekeeping or wherever it is that people keep shares.

This was the 'material' phase where every share document had to be physically maintained.

The demat phase was a major transition and several people have made fortunes from long-forgotten share certificates.

But this one was tricky.

Decades later, Mewar Oil Company changed its name to PI Industries, became a listed company and was doing brilliantly, financially.

The original shareholder, checking on the documents he had forgotten, unearthed these shares in 2015.

He applied to convert the shares into a demat form but the agency handling the account asked him to contact the company directly.

It turned out that these shares had been sold and transferred without their knowledge and they no longer owned shares in the new entity.

According to the original shareholders, their share based on the transfer would work out to Rs. 1448 crores, a stupendous return on investment.

But there's many a slip between the cup and the lip.

Everything stays in a state of suspended animation as the company tries to negotiate, the shareholder does not budge, and the statutory entities ponder the question.

Now, it remains to be seen who will blink first and who has the most to lose.

Tailgate the fast movers in stock markets

What options do small investors have?

Read up on articles about investing, create a portfolio that builds up a tidy nest egg  over decades?

Or follow what movers and shakers in the market do? Take a look at how the major mutual funds invest and do that same thing at one-millionth of the scale.

The risks you take in investing are entirely up to you.

No one is going to stand in your way. But no one is going to come to your rescue either when things go wrong.

There was complete chaos in the stock market because a new set of players from Robinhood swung into action and upset the calculations of investors who had made a bet on Game Stop. They collectively took the price to stratospheric heights and left some large firms badly bruised.

Now, TikTokers are following another strategy.

They are betting on the investment strategy of the US Members of Congress. Tailgating them and buying into everything that they invest in.

It's smart because the reasoning is that the guys in government know what's happening and may even be early to the market.

The logic is sound but is it simply another 'strategy' for those who go by what the whales do?

Possibly. The small investors have no way of doing the research or understanding complex balance sheets. So they do the next best thing.

Invest like those who can.

Who thought outsiders who swipe to watch videos will upset the applecart of cozy arrangements and agreements?

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.

Cameras everywhere.

From traffic lights to apartment complexes to warehouses.

Recording movement 24/7. The eyes in the sky as well as on the ground.

Kids being monitored remotely, and exams conducted with cameras vigilantly recording every move and click of the mouse. Or surgeries monitored for insurance purposes.

It wasn't meant to be this way.

There are several origin stories about how it began.

Apparently, a group of scientists at Stanford grew tired of walking to the coffee machine and finding it empty.

One of them hooked up a camera and the other wrote a script to transmit the image to other members of the team periodically to check the level of coffee available.

From these humble origins, we've expanded what cameras can see, record and transmit anywhere in the world.

There are an estimated billion cameras now in use and that could be conservative. In addition, the cabling, the recording equipment and the motion detection cameras have slowly made their way up the value chain.

These markets barely existed about 2 decades ago.

The most surveilled cities in the world present an interesting picture.

Has it led to cities becoming safer? Or do people think they will eternally be watched and put it at the back of their minds and get on with life?

Right now, we don't know.

But the world's longest running webcam experiment goes back to 1927. One drop of bitumen drops every 8-9 years.

Talk about slow TV!

The foot soldiers of ecommerce

They hang around restaurants waiting to pick up food orders.

The red and orange t-shirts of the companies stand out.

Weaving through traffic, going the wrong way through roads, they land up at homes in double quick time.

The home delivery army has grown exponentially. For two of the largest players in India, Zomato and Swiggy, there are nearly 500,000 delivery personnel in the field.

A decade ago, the market didn't exist.

New processes have been put in place for recruitment, training and handling difficult customers.

At Amazon, work pace is set by algorithms. By calculating the distance workers can travel every minute, the number of things that have to be picked by machines and the tasks to be done by workers - it has been optimised down to the second.

The same thing has happened to ride sharing. The business model has to go against the tide. When there is heavy demand, there is heavy traffic as well. And that's exactly the time people turn to the apps.

To make things easy for customers, ecommerce, ride share and home delivery companies have to handle the complexity that stems from rising demand.

One of the hardest things to handle is the reducing time frame between orders and delivery.

As people get used to faster delivery in one category, they get impatient with delays in others.

That's impacting traffic on roads and driving up warehouse rents around cities. The hubs are here to ease distribution pressures.

And we'll have to watch how far the ripples spread as more orders roll in.

The evolution of the cloud messenger

Back in the 5th Century CE, when one of the greatest Indian authors Kalidasa composed the brilliant Meghaduta, or 'Cloud messenger', he meant the fluffy, white, shape-changing formations spreading lazily across the sky.

Pining for his beloved who lives far, far away, he asks a cloud to deliver a message of longing.

Today, he can compose a lyrical email. Or create a meme. Or even an emoji. Press 'send'. And messengers residing in 'clouds' will instantly swing into action.

Then, Kalidasa could not have estimated how long the message would take to travel the distance. Days or weeks. Or even if anything was lost in translation.

Today, he will instantly get a 'delivery report', a 'read report' and probably expect a response within the hour.

And if a reply isn't forthcoming, he will seriously worry about the state of the relationship.

The analogies of the past mean completely different things in a new age.

There's nothing poetic about what clouds mean today.

A search engine will fetch the latest offerings from Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

Poets waxing lyrical about the same subject would be consigned to page 100, or even lower down the pecking order.

The canopies in the sky, the unfurling of the seasons, or even the wonderful skyscapes are no longer relevant.

Yes, life has got much faster, streamlined and efficient.

The clouds in the sky aren't zipping by in a perpetual hurry. But the ones that dominate our existence are in a state of frenzy.

The poem Kalidasa wrote centuries ago is still revered. Unlike the billions of messages today that are forgotten just as soon as they are read.

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.

Did the movie's theme song play in your mind when you read the first line?

It should have because it's one of the most recalled tracks from movies.

Ennio Morricone had collaborated with Sergio Leone on several films. He came up with the title's opening to capture the coyote's high-pitched wail and then blended it into a track that goes in unpredictable directions.

In most themes, there is a set of opening bars that set the trend for the rest of the tune. But this one breaks the mould.

Even if you knew nothing about music, you would still be captivated by the way it plays out.

The album was on the top of charts for more than a year and it defined the genre of the 'Spaghetti Western' because it was films made about cowboys by Italians. 

Here's some interesting trivia about the genre from Wikipedia: 

The majority of the films in the Spaghetti Western genre were actually international co-productions between Italy and Spain, and sometimes France, West Germany, Britain, Portugal, Greece, Israel, Yugoslavia, or the United States. Over six hundred European Westerns were made between 1960 and 1978.

These movies were originally released in Italian or with Italian dubbing, but as most of the films featured multilingual casts and sound was post-synched, most "western all 'italiana" do not have an official dominant language.

But this theme music defined the genre.

And built a brand that has endured for decades

Digital is lousy at preserving history.

No one mourns the passing of the 1.4 MB floppy disk.

It stored a small amount of data and was quite complex to use.

But it contained a good slice of early software explorations - and all of that has disappeared.

Papyrus scrolls from over 5000 years ago still survive.

And here we are, just a few decades into the digital and internet revolution and the early phase is a dim memory.

In massive data centers, magnetic tape, not optical disks are the preferred storage option because they have a life of around 30 years.

So, in a hundred years from now, everything we're using today will probably be extinct. 

Flash was the first to bring 2D animation and film into mainstream digital. 

And Apple imperiously shut the door on it. When it dismissed Flash from its platform, all the other tech companies followed suit - and so did the later versions of browsers.

A recent article in CNBC mentions how the internet archive can no longer play the news around 9/11 that was stored in Flash. Practically none of the modern browsers allow Flash, even with a plug-in.

Granted, there may have been security issues. But it was one of the building blocks - and that is no longer accessible.

We're too busy with our latest shiny obsessions to notice.

And somewhere in the future, even the glass slabs we use 24/7 now may become a distant memory.

Truckers are today's Marlboro men

It's a hard life and someone's got to do it.

Truckers have it tough. They can be away from home for weeks. 

Their steeds have 8-12 wheels, not legs.

Even with power steering and GPS, it's a life that grates and grinds along the unending rides.

Truck De India, A Hitchhiker's Guide to Hindustan is a great read.

The young author snags rides along with several truckers and gets to know them up close.

They are surprisingly open about the twists and turns that define their existence.

And generous to a city slicker whose entire life has been completely different from their own.

He just talks to them as they drive across highways, forests, ghat sections, naxal territories and corrupt officials.

There's an informal information exchange between drivers relying on each other to navigate certain stretches, apart from the instruments.

But it seems to be the same story across the world. In developed countries, the trucks are swankier and better equipped.

The long and lonely drives, however, don't change. And it's one of those professions with two completely different headlines.

How autonomous vehicles will dispense with the need for drivers.

The other headline - a perennial shortage of qualified drivers.

In India, there are thousands of drivers getting trained to drive in countries like Japan and Canada.

It's a job the locals don't want. And it provides immigrants a foothold into another life.

But it isn't easy. There's a reason the West was called wild!

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.