Truth in advertising isn't a new thing...

Just have a read of this liquor ad from 1886

Air travel and branding

When I travelled to Wellington last week, I had a few observations about air travel and branding.

• Air travel is a designed experience - mostly because of safety and regulatory issues. Service people deliver mostly scripted lines, and it has somewhat of an air of liturgy about it.
  
  
• The purely functional design of airplanes and runways is iconic and, even though not designed as art (or maybe it is?) it comes across as art. To me anyway!
  

And yet there are a whole lot of things about air travel that meet the needs of the airline or the airport, but aren't customer-centred.

In an extensive ecosystem like air travel, how can one player make the difference? The article below sheds some light:

Climb Aboard The Plane Of The Future - Forbes.com

The difference a word makes

Rod Drury's in the UK, and he's shared some valuable insights into doing business there (and in the EU).

Particularly interesting was:

# It stuck me that in the few days I’ve been here, I’ve never heard the word Export. In the UK all talk is participating in the global economy. I think that shows how far we are away from our markets, and our international business maturity. Perhaps because of English history they are concerned that exporting would appear to be cultural imperialism.

In the middle of Export Year, when kiwi exporters are struggling more than ever, do we need to change our thinking about what we're doing? Does the word "export" create more of a psychological barrier than it needs to? I know it does for me. As an entrepreneur whose product is intangible (words) it took me a while to realise that when the government wanted to encourage "exporters", they were talking to me.

And yet, when I heard Ken Stevens speak at the New Thinking Week about starting global, it resonated deeply with me. In fact I did start global, because I started my business on the internet.

There's a global economy to be participated in. Come on New Zealand, let's jump in!

I hate technology

Insurance for the hip and trendy

I've often come across insurance brokers who are trying to make insurance more interesting. I don't blame them, it's pretty boring, and it has the added burden of not adding any value - it's the product you don't want to use.

So it's interesting to see a press release about "the first NZ life insurance offerings that specifically target the Internet-savvy ‘Generation C' "!

More here, and I've also blogged about it on our Looksy.org Generation C blog.

Jackson and Spielberg team up

Jackson teams up with Spielberg for Tintin film

Wow. It'll either be magnificent or really, really bad because too many cooks, etc. But it sounds like fun. What was that phrase that Captain Haddock always used to say? Ah yes - Blistering Barnacles!

Who would be Tintin? Val Kilmer? Alan Wyck? Or someone more famous...

El Greco

El Greco
Originally uploaded by Wilhelm Augustus Hohenzollern.

I've been El Greco-'d! Thanks to the Face Transformer tool. Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang who Twittered about it!

(Getting El Greco-ed is certainly one way to lose weight!)