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PODCAST

The Branded and Gilded Life

Connecting the not-so-obvious branding dots

Marketing is a never-ending set of experiments to understand human behavior. It"s still opaque even after billions are spent every year. Predicting human behavior is like the horizon - visible yet hard to reach ideascape.substack.com

business marketing

All Episodes

6:45

Walk through your data

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/12/05

Data is oil, right?But do we have the vehicles to drive it?Numbers are the foundation but we've not made it much easier to understand.We represent them through pie charts, bar graphs and spatial dispersion. In advanced cases we are able to create interactive points to get a better picture.Even then, we're on the outside looking in through screens.So, how can we enter the data landscape like we navigate physical environments?We understand spatial data well because of our immersion in the real

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5:46

Art is the piggy bank of the super rich

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/11/28

The art market is worth over $60 billion.90% of it comes from paintings that cost over $10 million each.Where can you park money after buying a few dozen mansions, cars and practically every article manufactured in the world?There was a great summing up in a book called Maverick by Ricardo Semmler.He said that everything you can put a price on in the world can be bought for $12 million. That's it. You don't need billions. At least that's the way I remember it.A chateau, an airplane and as many high

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6:04

Remote controls - the adblockers of the 50s

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/11/21

The first remote controls were wired. And called 'Lazy Bones'.And they gave birth to the couch potatoes of today.They were originally invented to mute the volume when the ads came on.And the early designs were like guns you pointed and shot at TV screens.Basic functions were to change channels or move volumes up and down - and there were just four buttons to begin with.The number of buttons expanded to accommodate the proliferation of cable channels. And awkward, complex user interfaces arrived.We

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5:11

Are OTPs on their way out?

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/11/14

It started out as a convenience.An added layer of security - the inclusion of a One Time Password (OTP) to process transactions online.Then it became a source of stress.Some smartphones could help you copy a number and paste it to let a transaction go throughOr apps which automatically entered the OTP. But that was confusing to some people as well.There was no standard procedure to deal with them.For users with varying degrees of expertise, it became a race to switch between the messaging app to see

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5:53

Airbags for two wheelers

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/11/07

Car drivers have been protected from crashes for a few decades now.It's standard equipment even on entry level models.Do two wheeler riders have an option?Especially when on-vehicle deployment is dangerous?A French company has come up with an ingenious solution.An air bag built into the rider's vestIt works for motorcycle riders, horse riders and skiersAnd it is now mandated equipment on the GP moto racing circuit.That's where the split second precision of deployment is critically testedRace riders

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6:26

YouTube and Mr. Beast

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/10/31

He's just been declared YouTube's Creator of the year.His videos collectively have over 4 billion views.He doesn't act or singAnd he's just 22.How is it that the YouTube universe generates statistics that would make mainstream studios salivate?He's got a bunch of buddies doing his bidding, staging what seems like dumb stuff.On average, each of his videos get over 20 million views.And they're elaborately shot and produced.The first one, which propelled him to stardom was unbelievably simpleHe counted

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6:01

Why are podcasts growing so fast?

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/10/24

If you don't follow podcasts, this may be mystifying.Why is the podcast market growing at a compounded rate of over 27% per year, on average?It's close to $11 billion in value now and is likely to be at $60 billion by 2027.That's a lot of podcasts people are listening to.Audio books never took off the same way.So how is this different?For one thing, podcasts are a reinvention of radio programs and talk shows.The range of topics and what is covered goes much deeper than any radio programs doYou can

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5:58

You'll never guess where Windows 95 still runs

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/10/17

It's long past its expiry dateMicrosoft stopped all support for it in 2000.Yet, these systems are still in use in several offices - but they aren't connected to the internetThey won't survive for long without firewall protection. But we forget that upgrades are not the only option.Replacing the entire system infrastructure is hard to do, if not impossible. Even software patches are applied only after extensive testingBeyond a point, the speed at which systems run is not an advantage. Not much of a

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6:06

India's MJunction is eBay for B2B

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/10/10

You've heard the stories about how Pierre Omidyar built a site to help his girlfriend sell candy dispensersWikipedia says it was a fabrication by the PR department to create a 'human interest' narrativeIn other words, people would not bother if they were told that Ebay, called Auction Web to begin with, sold broken laser pointers.So, have you heard of Mjunction?It's the second largest ecommerce site in India. The largest is IRCTC, India's railway ticket booking site.So what on earth does Mjunction

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6:21

The virus in the mirror

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/10/03

For some people, wearing masks is an imposition.Fining those who don't is not a solutionThis idea from a Turkish agency comes at it from a completely different angleIt's installed at bus stops across Trabzon in Turkey.Unmasked people see the reflection of a virus projected over their face.And it disappears the moment the mask is worn.The coronavirus image is now familiar across the world. And showing people affected creates greater impact than any smart line.We are at a stage where people need to

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5:30

Do you dream of climbing Mount Everest?

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/09/26

Join the queue.The road to the tallest mountain in the world is getting crowded.There's competition between local sherpas and the foreign guides who take a few people to the summit every year.And the money generated makes up 10% of the GDP of Nepal.Everest ascent has become a badge to wear pursued with zeal and single-minded commitment.Success means you can spin stories about the exploits and and hold audiences spellbound. By regaling them with stories of avalanches, frostbite and near misses It's

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6:02

The Kodak moment of World War 2

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/09/19

The camera moves over dense green foliage from the air.It's the kind of footage that sets the atmosphere for everything from travelogues to war even in films today.In a beautifully narrated documentary, Todd Dominey talks about the problem that drew Kodak into the war.In the early 40s when the US pilots flew over enemy terrain, they faced a strange problem.They were unable to pick out enemy lines in the midst of green foliage because of a cheap hack. Camouflage.It was so effective at

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6:18

The Indian doughnut

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/09/12

The resemblance is superficial.Both are round rings. As cultural icons, the Indian version is more of a South Indian staple, though that is changingThe Indian Medu Vada is culturally as distant from the American doughnut as Indians are from Americans.Eating a doughnut is basically like chomping a re-designed bun. Doughnuts need makeup. They have to be bathed in chocolate, drizzled with sugar, slathered with caramel or stuffed with things a chef can imagine to acquire a character.And they're sweet,

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6:31

Baby Boomers are the coolest

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/09/05

No Millennial coder knows COBOL.They'll laugh when you tell them that the earliest banking systems in the US were built on it, back in the 70s.We know there are mainframes chugging away somewhere in the background, unseen and unheard but they are the roots of fintech.They can't be replaced or made redundant because billions of lines of code generated over the years still run the systems.It could process millions of transactions a day back then. That's how it made its way into the heart of the

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5:47

The idea tree that keeps growing

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/08/29

You may not have heard of Ward Cunningham.He's the quiet guy who invented the wiki.Which in the Hawaiian language means 'quick'He created a new concept of collaborative editing of ideas through linked documents in 1994.Hypercard was a set of pages , ideas connected to each other before the internet with weblinks and URLs came into being. People could navigate from one page to another.As soon as a new idea was added, a fresh page would be created and anyone could write and edit the contents The pages

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5:17

The song that launched a million purple saris

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/08/22

Netflix's greatest hit, The Queen's Gambit has exponentially increased chess game app downloads in the storeThat wasn't part of the script.Though the connection between brand surges and hits has been documented, it's still hard to figure out what will work.Product placement in films has become an integral part of funding productions.When Madhuri Dixit, swayed to 'Didi tera devar deewana' in the hit film Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, it was the purple sari she wore that sold in the millions.The song still

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6:32

Air-conditioning without electricity

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/08/15

As the world warms, the market for air-conditioners is increasing exponentially.What we need is a reset in the way the problem is approached.At a point when electricity had not been invented, architects knew that high ceilings and thick walls kept the temperature at a pleasant level.In our high-rises, most ceilings do not go beyond 10-12 feet. Windows are smaller than they used to be. Pollution and mosquitoes are forcing people to keep their windows closed most of the time.We're creating an

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5:54

Nipping fake news in the bud

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/08/08

It has become one of the most divisive aspects of our time.How do you figure out what's fake news and what is real?There's a part solution to the problem developed by a team from University College London and UC Berkeley.A machine learning tool identifies new domains created to generate false information.So, instead of stopping fake news stories after they have spread, the objective is to stop them at source.Social media will need to adopt a filtering technique, so any URLs shared from these sites

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6:08

Quieter than a Rolls Royce

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/08/01

In 1958, David Ogilvy created the immortal Rolls Royce ad. "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in the new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock"At the time, automobiles were noisy, greasy and could be heard from a long way offLuxury and refinement was defined by how skillful engineers made the car interior quiet for occupants.Another famous one in 1990, showed the Volkswagen driver irritated by a persistent squeak in the car he's unable to diagnose. The electric car poses another problem

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6:21

Do you make decisions easily?

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/07/25

You've probably seen this happen several timesGone out with friends or family to a restaurant and everyone spends time looking at the menu.Suggestions fly back and forth on what's the 'best' dish available.Then, most of the people around the table order exactly what they did the previous time!So, why do we go about this elaborate routine of pretending to make decisions?In a sense, we want the ability to choose. To be told we can have what we want.Not necessarily to exercise that power but simply

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