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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

5:42

The Fightback - Part 2

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/07/18

We've started receiving robocalls in IndiaInsurance companies telling you your premium is due.Or from airlines when the flights are delayed.And at election time from political parties asking for your voteA recording delivers the message, not a real personSpam calls are different. They are call centre personnel trying to make a sale.The robocaller menace is real in the US because it still makes good money for telemarketers and costs next to nothing.Policies, Do Not Call listings and fines do not work

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6:19

The Fightback - Part 1

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/07/11

Parking tickets are a problem in the USNew York alone apparently collects over a billion dollars a year in parking fees, for all kinds of violations.Back in 2015, Josh Browder was issued over 30 parking tickets in the first year he started driving.Like most teenagers, paying off a parking ticket left almost nothing for him to spend on anything elseSince each fine was a $100 or more, he went through the laws and looked for ways in which he could get the ticket reversed.That taught him quite a bit

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6:46

Is fame on your bucket list?

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/07/04

Fame is fickle. That's because people need new stars to worship.Each generation has its set of politicians, film, and sports stars.At the next level, there are singers and celebrities.The business stars who may drive stock markets up and down but are anonymous outside of TV The Carnatic music singers who shine during the annual festival The YouTubers with millions of 'followers'Take the 'guests' on news shows.Or the judges at reality shows.They may all aspire to be famous, but end up with varying

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6:40

Snapchat - oldies just don't 'get it'!

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/06/27

Apart from the camera icon itself, how many apps open to a camera frame?None? QR code scanners, maybe?For an adult, the first response is that they opened the camera by mistake.There's a sense of being stuck in a space they don't understandMaybe it wasn't intentional.That's exactly what Snapchat has achieved.Over 200 million people use it everyday.And its a sliding scale of users who practically disappear by age 50Using pictures to talk to friends does not make sense to them.And having the pictures

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5:55

Do you have 'good news'?

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/06/20

Married couples know exactly what the loaded question means.It's code for 'Are you pregnant yet?'In a country where births are now conducted by the time prescribed by astrologers, this is where it all begins.The time of birth can be controlled down to the exact minute, and C-sections are the choice.No ambiguity. We've gone from accepting natural birth cycles to making it part of an elaborate workaround. Once the time of birth is fixed, the rest of the horoscope can unfurl to the future predicted.At

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6:21

Milk from mushrooms

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/06/13

This post will sound like a 'trip' on magic mushrooms but the facts are even more surprising.Vegans have been on the look out for milk substitutes for years.None of the options come close to mimicking the taste and mouthfeel of milk-based food like butter and cheese.Whey and casein are the proteins that make milk what it is.And two obsessive vegans, Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi decided they would create milk proteins without any cows back in 2014. At a company called Perfect Day FoodsAnd they

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5:36

Crime time conversations

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/06/06

Can you imagine thrillers where no guns are fired?No action sequences with vehicle crashes?Only conversations.You get to know what happened based on the questioningA set of 4-5 police officers take turns to ask questions.It's psychological warfareEach episode has a different suspect being questionedThe setting is always the same. The questioners and the accused in one roomThe observers in the other.The camera shifts, pauses and goes deep.It's called Criminal and commissioned by Netflix in UK,

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5:40

The Secret Sauce obsession

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/05/30

The formula for Coca Cola is it's secret sauce.It has never been disclosed. It is the single most important thing that preserves Coke's legacyBut this directly conflicts with the results of blind taste tests.Assuming there was a big difference, shouldn't you be able to tell two brands apart?If Coke and Pepsi were poured into identical glasses out of your sight and then served, there's a 50% chance you'll be right.And a 50% chance you'll be wrong as well.So, why does this obsession with a secret

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5:57

Mad Max Fury Road - the template for future car design?

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/05/23

Remember the vehicles that were dreamed up for the film?Well, the platform is readyWith electric cars, the engine disappears. So does the steering system and a lot more.So, the car can be imagined from the battery flatbed and four wheels, all with independent motors driving them.As Fast Company recently wrote, car design has become a skateboard on top of which you build anything.You literally have a rectangle with four wheels as the canvas.That's just one step away from imagining a car which is 3D

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6:30

The mango leaf toothbrush

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/05/16

Do you like your bristles soft, medium or hard?That's the most choice kids have these days.We had much more back in the summer holidays spent in Kerala.Wake up in the morning and make our own toothbrushes.A new one every morning. It allowed us to pick and chooseWe'd walk around the compound to find several mango leaves lying under the treeSome of them would be spotted and orange with strange patternsBut we didn't care. They tasted better than the plain green ones.Then it would have to be folded

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5:39

The data disconnect. Transforming sales data.

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/05/09

Sales guys are a species. The guys who keep businesses going.Sales training is about building relationships with clients and the rush that comes from achieving targets.So, does data have any role to play apart from recording the number of calls within the CRM and tracking progress?Apparently it does.A company called Gong did an experiment. It used AI to analyse over 25000 sales calls.The conversations were anonymised to ensure that the people involved were not identified.These were sales calls

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5:26

The Data Disconnect. Solvable?

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/05/02

When it comes to sales data, it's usually about the quantities sold and the locations where the purchase happened.Financial data is about how much was deposited, withdrawn or transferred from a given account.Practically all our data systems are built around transactions, making things easy to track or account for.But there's very little around choice and how we arrive at it.That evidence is still circumstantialSocial media and search will try to co-relate the time you saw an ad or communication and

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6:25

Can hearing aid embarrassment be cured?

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/04/25

Hearing aids are advertised as being invisible.But the problems don't stop there. There's the social stigma that people with hearing loss have to deal with.Which seems strange because vision loss is perfectly acceptable.And so are spectaclesBaldness and the gradual loss of hearing with age are seen differently.The problem extends to costs as well. Good hearing aids cost as much as a top flagship mobile phone.And that puts them out of reach of most of the world's population.Saad Bhamla from Georgia

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6:11

How do you compete with Tinder?

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/04/18

Swipe left. Or right. And get a match in minutes.This one feature has helped Tinder grow exponentially in online datingMaking it ridiculously easy to decide on a whim if you liked a person at first glance.That tapped into a deeply held belief. Love, or at least like at first sight.It's what built momentum for Tinder. Giving it as many as 7.5 million swipes a day in India.The UX made you believe that potential choices were almost unlimitedSo, what would give a new entrant room to grow?They couldn't

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6:16

A billionaire chats with a YouTube creator

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/04/11

Recently, MKBHD (Marques Brownlee) interviewed Mark Zuckerberg on YouTube.YouTube's Creator of the Decade and the man who unleashed social media on the world had a chat.And what was the conversation about?What's next in tech. Obviously.The striking point? Both of them spoke about creating reality through technology.Zuckerberg thought that while screens have vastly improved over the years, what's missing is presence.So, if you're talking to someone else, you had to feel that they were right next to

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6:17

Attention is a weapon

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/04/04

In a distracted world, power shifts to the ones who are not.While the rest run around multitasking and being busy, they practice stillness.They do what most of us can't.Dig deep and make connections between concepts at a fundamental level.Read the fine print and point out where the problems will ariseThey shut out the trivialAnd pursue what is consequentialThey live in an alternative reality where distractions don't intrude. As a result, they distil the future from a fuzzy presentAlgorithms do what

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5:23

You can't live on luck alone

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/03/28

………. Two short stories. Of great highs and great lows.In Season 5, Sushil Kumar from Bihar won the Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) bumper prize.Lady Luck shepherded him through phone calls, and then into the Top 10, and finally through 15 questions that won him Rs. 5 crores, ($1 million in 2011)After that, she thought he would manage.But he managed to burn through the entire jackpot in less than 4 years. Every single money decision he made was terrible.Now on to the other short story.Gary Dahl, out

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6:32

Some people never forget

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/03/21

Most of us can recognise about 20% of the people we meet later.Go out of our circle of friends and family to acquaintances and we struggle to recall people we've met even a few months earlier.There's also this strange context based facial recognition.We see the lift man in his uniform every day but see him on the street and we have to jog our memory.Just 1% of the world's people have a unique talent.They never forget a face.Even seen from the back or a profile.Decades later.And they do it

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6:02

What does 'discovering yourself' mean?

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/03/14

Who am I? What do I want from life?These are questions that catch us off guard.The movies on this theme are about trips without a plan.Going wherever life takes you. And coming back to what you've always known.Somehow, you are supposed to find the answers in the interim.It seemed pointless - the kind of thing that people do when they're rich and parents are indulgent.Today, I was listening to another similar experience being narrated.When a few things clicked into place.The person talking about

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6:16

A lineup of mentors

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2021/03/07

Do teachers teach you? Or do you learn from them?There's a difference.Experience is a mentor.Luck is a mentorKnowledge is a mentor.Anything or anyone who changes your world view is a mentor.Once you realise that, you'll find a whole lineup.And the question to ask is not who can be my mentorBut what I want to learn.A meme can be a mentor.A quote on a website can change your point of viewWe all know that before-after moment.It happens without any warning.You have a realisation and then, you can't go

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