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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

7:49

The guy with a monopoly on women's lips!

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2024/03/31

He's known as 'Lipstick Brother' in ChinaIn a pandemic, Li Jiaqi, sold $1.9 billion in goods on the first day of Alibaba’s annual shopping festival in August 2020He tries on various makeup products on his show, ranging from brands from top companies including Sheshiedo Co lotions and Apple Air pods - though there's no make up connection there!It's not as if he has an unusual format. The sales are more than what some profitable retail chains in the US would sell in an entire year.He earned fame by

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8:24

Will Priyanka Chopra speak Mandarin?

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2024/03/24

Or Korean, for that matter. Or even Russian.The evolution of subtitles and dubbing in films is going in unpredictable directions.Streaming services are running into problems with respect to dubbing and generating subtitles in multiple languages.One runaway hit can change equations.The Squid Game on Netflix was watched worldwide by audiences who didn't know a word of Korean. But Netflix found another fascinating detail hidden in the data.People preferred the dubbed version of the film in their local

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8:15

A skeleton you can wear

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2024/03/17

It started off as a way of getting paralyzed people to walk.Now, it has evolved into military, healthcare and industrial solutions.The basic idea is to enhance human capacity for walking, carrying weights or doing repetitive tasks.The Exoskeleton will probably transform more industries in future than robotics alone.The number of applications being simultaneously worked on is staggering.Helping soldiers manage everything from long tiring treks over harsh terrain to reducing joint strains and

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7:40

Canon's genuine 'counterfeit' toner

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2024/03/10

The tweet set off a firestorm.Imagine printers not being able to recognise a company's cartridges!We have all grown used to the cat and mouse games that printer manufacturers play.Replace all the four-color cartridges even though only one of them is drained.Having to waste expensive toners because all the cartridges don't get empty at the same time.Users try and find workarounds or cheaper solutions.Companies find ways to block them. And even though there are entrepreneurs who try to establish a

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7:47

Conversations are anything but simple

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2024/03/03

Chatbots have to simulate human conversations.And we think they're free flowing, the way dialogue is delivered in movies.In real life, they are halting, awkward and filled with long pauses. Even between friends and colleagues, conversations dry up after the common subjects are exhausted or one of the people conversing loses interest.There's a lot of 'ummm..', eh.....' and clearing of throats, apart from the same thoughts going around in circles.At parties and networking events, people play

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7:56

The world doesn't know the man who changed it

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2024/02/25

His name is Nasir Ahmed and it won't ring a bell.But hang on a minute because it will all make sense.He went from Bangalore to the US in the early 60s for higher studies and for his PhD, he came up with the Discrete Cosine Transform - an algorithm that would prove to be crucial to the future of the world.It compressed images and later was applied to video compression as well.The major use at the time was for defense. The military had a massive network but it was next to impossible to send images

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7:25

Eye drops that work like spectacles

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2024/02/18

Imagine eye drops that improve eyesight.It's the decision most people confront late into their 30s or early 40sProbably the first sign is when distant objects look clear and one has to hold books a little further away to focus.Then comes the hard part. Mentally admitting that one needs reading glasses.The first time is self-conscious. The emphasis on telling people 'I only need it for reading' is repeated several times a day.Some self-deprecating jokes among close friends about finally 'growing

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6:05

User manuals vs the user experience

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2024/02/11

User manuals are dry and factual.They tell you how to use a product but never how the experience can be enjoyable.But we need user manuals because that's where user experiences begin.Take a simple thing like getting the best out of your fridge.The user manual tells you how to make ice, what different compartments are for and how to maintain the fridge.But a personal user experience of fridges tells you how to stack things up inside, how to make out if stuff in the fridge is past its prime and how to

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6:00

Do you have a favorite coffee cup?

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2024/02/04

Or teacup, for that matter?Some people prize massive mugs that hold large amounts of coffee and nurse it for hours.So, why do we slip into these habits?Why do we want to repeat the familiar?There's an aspect of selecting cups that we're hardly conscious about.The mouth comes in contact with the rim and unconsciously drives our preferences when we make a choice.The fancy ceramic designs with delicate handles and ornate graphics have a different texture when your mouth settles on it. Think about the

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7:20

No, you can't have it

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2024/01/28

There was a camera called Flip before smartphones in the early 2000sIt did just one thing well - video and made it easy for just about anyone to make and edit video. As it soared in popularity, it was bought by Cisco for almost $600 million.It proved to be a purchase fraught with problems. Cisco was geared to sell to enterprises and Flip was essentially a consumer product.Somewhere within the company, it got stuck in the red tape and Cisco decided to completely withdraw it from the market.That

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6:58

Do you really want to go back in time?

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2024/01/21

Imagine you could.Your smartphone would instantly become a glass brick, assuming it could travel through time. So, unless you had some way to stay connected to the present, there would be no coming back. Even if you went back 20 years, you would not have the smartphone or social media. Now that's an idea worth thinking about, given that we know how polarised the world has become.Go back over 100 years and you can mostly forget about cars .No telephones either - not even land lines and rotary

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6:34

Imagine paying to start your own car

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2024/01/14

First, you get keyless entry.Then, if you lose the fob, you pay a huge amount to reprogram it, even though the work involved is minimal.However, Toyota has demonstrated that car companies can figure out new sources of revenue on a car you've already paid for.There are a range of 'Connected Services' you opt for and it's only after a couple of years that you realise that it costs you money to enter your own car!The 'subscription' is $8 a month, or $80 per year.Imagine paying this, not for a

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6:30

The problem with Happily Ever After

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2024/01/07

That's how all fairy tales’ end. And the real world begins. We assume that the attainment of success or money is some point from which we can leap into a higher level of existence.Question is, we still have to find it.Life seems pretty much the same for billionaires as it does for us regular folk.Just yesterday, someone sent a WhatsApp on Jeff Bezos where he said, in a mundane detail, that he washes the dishes at home after breakfast.Is that the state of Happily Ever After?You build the largest

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7:35

The university project that became a global phenomenon

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/12/31

If you've downloaded the VLC media player on your desktop, you know how well it works.The CEO started off the project in 2003 when he was a student at Ecole Central in Paris.It ran on the university servers for a few years before it became wildly popular and outgrew the initial infrastructure.Since 2005, it has been downloaded more than 3 billion times.And it still available for free.Jean-Baptist Kempf has steered the project right from its initial development into a non-profit without a break.When

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7:12

The standout potential of LinkedIn profile pics

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/12/24

The profile pic is a signal - whether it is on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.A tiny amount of pixel space where the site allows limited exploration.A newbie is instantly recognizable - the ones who have the standard issue avatar of the site. It could also signal the rebel who does not wish to play the game. But that's often the exception rather than the rule.Around profile pics, there's a whole system of small apps which exist to allow you to change and modify the pics in accordance with

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7:18

Drop that bath towel

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/12/17

Literally.A new way of drying off after a bath is here.Unlike wrapping yourself in layers of Turkish bath towels, turn on the air.A new design appliance for bathrooms is the all-body dryer.As opposed to the hand dryers that have become reasonably popular in public bathrooms.The advantages are obvious. Go from wet to dry in a matter of minutes. After luxuriating in a hot shower, hot blasts of air blow at you from all directions to dry you off.So you don't end up creating wet puddles walking all the

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7:31

Covid breathed life into the QR code

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/12/10

The QR code was invented back in 1994.The original use was to scan components at high speeds in auto manufacturing companies.The biggest advantage of QR codes is that they hold 300 times more data than barcodesBut they became a largely fruitless link between offline and online environments.Brands used it for years to tempt users to go online by scanning a squiggly square in magazine ads after the invention of smartphones.It was supposed to be the bridge to landing pages and allow users to go

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7:26

What 99% perspiration actually looks like

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/12/03

James Dyson built over 5000 prototypes of the 'Cyclone' vacuum cleaner to get it right.He made one change at a time, so he knew exactly what was going wrong or in the right direction. Not 2 or 3 changes. One.He was told by every manufacturer that vacuum cleaners could not get any more efficient.The 'cyclone' technology had to be developed to suck up dust particles smaller than 1 micron. A Physics professor told him anything less than 20 microns was impossible.He had to buy out a partner who didn't

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7:58

The platform as a metaphor

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/11/26

There's something cinematic about platforms - no, not the software version.It's where family issues get resolved or break up forever - at least in the movies.The place where strangers arrive in a town and have a profound impact - where their life changes or the town changes.Scriptwriters need a staging point for life's inflection points - and railway platforms are more accessible than airports. Airports are distant and there can't be last minute resolutions - at least the way they can be staged on

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7:55

How Netflix accelerated F1

The Branded and Gilded Life ·

2023/11/19

Formula 1 is all about speed with a core group of worshippers.But it was a closed world. What people saw was cars driven at incredible speeds around convoluted tracks.The big names like Lewis Hamilton and Verstappen were well-known.But a sport is never about the lead players alone.It's about the thousands of smaller stories that never get a moment in the spotlight.So anyone placed below the Top 5 got scant attention from the sports media.The other thing that attracted attention were the slow motion

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