Life
Learning from the Burning Man
0Saturday, 1st November, 2008
Earlier this week I heard Tatyana Mamut from Ideo sharing her perspective on the Burning Man. Thanx to my friends in California I knew quite a bit about the Burning Man but Tatyana touched upon two very interesting aspects:
- There are no commercial transcations – only gifting takes place. And usually if you gift something with X value – the receiver is likely to return the favour by giving back a better gift. I thought it was an interesting concept as it could very well be applied in the Marketing World.
- Burning Man participants accepting the rights (not roles) & responsibilities (not rules) of participation. I found it very interesting because in Marketing/Advertising we seldom put forward rights that our consumers or customers have and the responsibilities that they need to shoulder. Imagine a world where our consumers are demanding but equally responsible for looking after the health & growth of our brands.
I don’t really relate to the Burning Man but the two principles mentioned above appealed to me a lot. I certainly look forward to using them in the programs that I design in the months to come. So thank you Tatyana.
Technological Obsolescence
2Tuesday, 28th October, 2008
Its been a while since I posted something. Last 10 days were hectic and didn’t find time to put down my thoughts. Yesterday I flew from Hong Kong to Los Angeles – long flight and the new movie options were not exciting at all. So I decided to watch Mission Impossible. What caught my attention was Tom Cruise using Usenet & primitive version of email. It looked so dated that I almost wondered whether I ever used those tools.
Technological Obsolescence is taking place at the speed of light. Last 10 years have seen Mobile Handsets changing a lot – emails getting associated with gmail – people using phrases like ‘just skype me’ for messaging or calls. It will be interesting to see how quickly iPhone, Facebook, Joost, Skype, Gmail become obsolete – any guesses?