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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

6:14

The wizardry of train wheels

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/06/18

We've travelled on trains so often, we hardly think of the conceptual leap it took to make it a transportation option worldwide.Car and cycle wheels are round and we don't think much of the turning radius required to make turns.But wheels on a train run on parallel tracks.So, how do they handle turns?Cars and bikes can sweep across the road but trains are restrictedWon't one of the wheels move off-track? That would be disastrous.Pay attention to the inner extension of the wheels on both sides.Train

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6:33

Whitewashing crime money

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/06/11

Plot points in the popular serials are quite instructive.You realise everyone has to balance books, including criminals.The difference is that taxmen go after legitimate businesses to collect their dues while police dig into criminal enterprises.In the series Animal Kingdom on Netflix, the lady running the show has an elaborate set of businesses through which money is 'washed.'And from the detailing, it's highly complex.Taking over businesses where cash is king - like laundromats, car washes and

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6:41

When should you stop trying to succeed?

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/06/04

Never? Or when you've decided the effort is not worth it?Can both be true?The sunk cost fallacy is about persisting with something simply because you're invested in it. Either in terms of time or money.The sunk cost fallacy becomes perseverance when it succeeds. Two concepts that are the polar opposite of each other transition perfectly from one to the other.Evidence can be produced to support both concepts. And those arguing for and against will be right as well. It depends entirely on what you

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6:10

The EMI life

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/05/28

There's a slice of life permanently devoted to paying back.For the car, the house, the TV, the fridge and more.And rents are the ones that drill big holes in monthly budgets.Sweden has one of the biggest government rent control programs running since World War 2.The objective was that the middle class and people earning less should not be priced out of the best neighborhoods. And with all the sincerity in implementation, there's a 9 year waiting list to get into a government contract that lasts for

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6:44

First, he stole hundreds of millions. Then, he...

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/05/21

And to top it off, the company he stole from offered him a job.As head of security, no less.It was a heist like no other. Crypto valued at over $600 million was siphoned from one of the exchanges.This is where things get interesting.Unlike robberies in the real world, where there are 'fences' to help launder the ill-gotten riches, crypto is harder to launder.When the money is transferred out, the exchange can see where it's gone. Much harder to make the money vanish.The next day after the money went

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6:30

Windows 95 was a massive UX project

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/05/14

Before Windows 95 was launched, the earlier versions - Windows 2 & 3 already had a base of over 50 million users.Back in the early 90s, that was huge.And the worry was that a complete change would help some users but make it worse for millions.Finding what people would wrestle with was the problem.Today, we look at files and folders and they seem so basic, it's hard to believe that people needed to be told how to navigate to one or the other.The two pane view confused people because they could not

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6:58

Of musical earworms

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/05/07

Be careful about what you listen to first thing in the morningWe all experience this from time to timeYou hear a tune playing and then, it loops in your head all day.It may even be something you don't particularly like.But you're stuck with it.Certain riffs that have an ability to burrow deep. And that's the focus of a new commercial from Spotify.Two guys walk down a college classroom corridor.One asks the other guy's opinion about a song from the playlist. He plays the song.They walk past a

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6:30

A waterfall of billions

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/04/30

MacKenzie Scott was married to Jeff Bezos.And her divorce gave her a windfall of billions of dollars.She's handing it out liberally to charities and organisations doing stellar public work. Most of the time, they struggle to raise funds. So, this is clearly a gift of gigantic proportions.An article in Bloomberg analysed the sectors to which she has provided money.Years from now, we'll see the long-term effects.It's like an experiment to determine if money will make a difference to lesser privileged

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6:51

How wide is your smile?

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/04/23

It's not a trick question.Or maybe it should be phrased another way.Smiles can be an integral part of power play.But they're rarely, if ever, spoken about in that contextIt's hard to wear a tough expression in response to a smile.And they're often the preamble to conversations. Setting up the stage, as it were for a dialogue.In social situations, from networking to parties, the ones willing to talk convey 'approachability' quite easily, signaled by a smile. Breaking the barrier of resistance.The

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6:29

Kodak went belly up. But Fuji film scripted another...

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/04/16

Fuji film was a distant second to Kodak in the consumer market.But then, the market flipped. Smartphones took over from cameras and removed the need for film altogether. And it went downhill for market leaders from there.Kodak slipped away into bankruptcy and the theory was that the company lost market share when people stopped buying cameras and film which led to the decline.However, the real story is far more nuanced.Fuji has stayed out of trouble and done exceedingly wellHow?Here are the broad

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7:20

Can risk-taking be taught?

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/04/09

The theory, for sure. Not the practice.Time and again, we've seen people take outsize risks without a second thought.And others who wait for the perfect opportunity to come along and it never does.There are those who take on physical risks - speeding, climbing mountains, dropping off bridges in a bungee jump. Or the affluent ones by skydiving.Mental risk-taking is another thing altogether.Entrepreneurs are drawn to the idea of bringing about big changes - and the lure is so strong, they almost can't

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6:54

The mirage of merit

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/04/02

At Ivy league universities and global company workplaces, they're the golden wall.And access means crossing over to a higher level of existence.At least, that's the myth.The Atlantic magazine feature describes how the meritocracy we have built leads to an endless competitive cycle.The day a child is born, the hunt for a school starts in India. It's probably several times the pressure that parents in the US have to deal with.The school tag, the activity tag, the extra-curricular tag, the college tag

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5:46

Time for the amphibious car?

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/03/26

There has been more flooding in several parts of the world this year.Shots of cars being stranded or carried away in terrifying surges have been shared across social media.When a driver comes across a patch of flooded road, the natural inclination is to turn back.There's no saying what will happen if the car stalls.Even a thin film of water can reduce the grip and make navigation through water difficult.Now, Tesla does not have 'Boat mode'. At least not yet.A clip shot from inside the car is either

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6:13

What if you don't have to remember passwords anymore?

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/03/19

That's the premise Magic is working on.It's not a password or a passphrase generator.But aims to make life easy for both developers and users.If remembering passwords is difficult for users, imagine the overload for developers who may have to login to hundreds of sites, over time. There's no way to memorise this, so the fallback is to go in for authentication through a trusted source.Either locally through the browser or rely on massive entities like Google and Facebook.The problem is not

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6:35

The latest ink pens go back a couple of thousand years

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/03/12

Quills made from bird feathers were some of the earliest writing instruments.We graduated to fountain pens, which then gave way to disposable ball points.A project on Kickstarter has raised way more money that requested.And the strange thing is that it replicates the ancient way of writing with modern day machining techniques.The instruments of inspiration go beyond the simple act of transferring thoughts to paper. We've gone all the way from tactile to virtual keyboards and then, some of us have

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5:46

Will cricket be driven more by data than passion?

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/03/05

There's a point at which a game becomes a golden goose.Then, the transformation happens because there's just too much at stake.Everything from keeping audiences involved and TV rights that seem to touch stratospheres in every cycle.The sheer passion with which cricket is still played in street corners and hot dusty grounds seems a whole world away from the global spectacle.But money has a way of getting in the way.What happened to baseball is now happening in cricket - as the article puts it, the

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6:04

A masterclass in bad UX

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/02/26

When UX is done well, we barely notice.When it is horrible, we not only notice - but we also get angry, frustrated and rant about it on social media.What if you could experiment with bad UX?Think of the worst ways to design an interface, so people have trouble getting anything done.That's the experiment some programmers in Reddit tried out.They asked for people to think of terrible ways in which the volume slider could be designed.It started a firestorm of entries, and some are truly inventive.Like

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6:52

The time-travel self portrait

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/02/19

What if you could combine your current self with one from your childhood?Or teen years.Would it look like a father-son or a mother daughter picture?Ard Gelinck does interesting things with celebrity portraits.He merges their current look with a time difference of decades.The effect is mesmerising.While we see ourselves in the mirror each and every day, the gradual aging is never perceived - like a morph that happens in extreme slow motion.Anyone with access to Photoshop or any image editing software

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6:41

Life has a soundtrack

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/02/12

It's as if they're made for each other.Driving and music.I find it monotonous to gaze out of windows in complete silence.The music needs to be there. Its presence adding seasoning to the waxing and waning conversations within.Back in college, we used to drive to a friend's estate which was over a couple of hours away.The lush greenery on the route was dramatic with variations of green and patches of bright vivid colours breaking through the canopies overhead.But the music comes rushing back as

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5:41

A short story of a stealthy scammer

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/02/05

We've heard the tales about simple scamsAbout millions to be routed through banks with minimal effort.But scamming has evolved And here's one that shows you how deeply scammers think through their craft.There's a fair amount of technical detail involved.And I'm simplifying it as I understand - you're welcome to read the blog post link below to enjoy it at a programming level. Because turning the tables on scammers is always fun to read.So, a guy is moving house and puts up his bed for sale on the

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