CRUNCH - All things crunched.

The olympics may have been over and China may have been beaten to the number 2 by the US who have more golds, silver and bronze than China. While most of the world recalls the Olympics as China vs US, there seems to be another battle for gold. The stage is the publishing industry and the athletes are the 'tiger mom' vs 'western mom'. Welcome to mother vs mother the quest towards defining the the ideal mother. Only a few in this world may have more than one mother to refer when they direct their thoughts backwards but universally everyone is familiar with the concept of motherhood...so who is the ideal mother, this topic has fueled several raging debates and hair raising discussions. over the years, the publishers, authors, columnists, bloggers and even mother have preferred certain categorizations. these classifications are meant to restore legitimacy to each approach, but happens when the options stack up in a contest. Imagine an online store with options like Asian...

“…the habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.” Literature is the original “inter-net,” woven of a web of allusions, references, and citations that link different works together into an endless rabbit hole of discovery. Case in point: Last week’s wonderful field guide to creativity, Dancing About Architecture , mentioned in passing an intriguing old book originally published by James Webb Young in 1939 — A Technique for Producing Ideas ( public library ), which I promptly hunted down and which will be the best $5 you spend this year, or the most justified trip to your public library. Young — an ad man by trade but, as we’ll see, a voraciously curious and cross-disciplinary thinker at heart — lays out with striking lucidity and clarity the five essential steps for a productive creative process, touching on a number of elements corroborated by modern science and thinki...

A popular advertising festival heralded as the holy grail of creative communication is undergoing a quiet transition. Once considered to be the hall of fame for ideas that were sparklingly new, the current work seems to be a crop of curious tinkering that centres around motivations than provocations. What triggers this shift, is the industry's anxiety with what works. of the several anecdotes and critical bullet points that punctuate  the current language of delivering relevant product messages, the focus seems to be on the small stuff or in other words the breaking of the idea. Ideas this year  represents a framework: a blurring of whats creative vs whats contagious and whats effective. We are in a time when pitched are being evaluated on all of the above three parameters, where work is bought and sold on its ability to stay relevant and good work ticks the boxes of these expected deliveries. Good work today is a delicate balance of something new that drives sharabilit...

all communication is designed to move people and the hero's journey or the monomyth is the critical path of any communication strategy. the bit that moves the user from a current point to the desired location. various forces are at play ... factors that resist the arc of communication movement. this is the bit that stands between the provided stimulus and the expected response. factor number one is the context, the broader space where the brand lives - in lives of the people, in the roles it plays and the promises it keeps the second bit is about the people an area where brand thinkers have invested far too much energy and resources into understanding people. the better brand teams have this one step further and are making attempts to understand the people of the people. the ones who matter to our audience the third piece is the insight - not there are several schools of insight mining, insight writing and insight delivering. there are those who state it as an observation, t...

THERE are possibly 2 inertias the human mind could hit.  1. the need for movement or progress or change and the  2. the lack of inspiration  or direction or pursuit    Whilst the first is an internal process of creating restlessness with the existing the second is purely a function of the environment. There is the individual and the surrounding and many have argued how both are inseparable. Change is a process that unfolds over time; we live change forward but can only see it backwards. The fantasy of a silver bullet (disambiguation) makes real change untenable. Overall, change does not come merely because it is wished for, however righteous or noble the cause, and whatever the intensity of one’s feeling or disgust with the existing. Change needs to be visualised as an entire system, a mechanism geared to deliver a new outcome,  unfolding over time, gathering strength and momentum from actions deliberate and accidental, navigating hurdles and ha...

Is the concept of abundance rooted in insecurity ... A lot of behavioral experts talk about, why the human mind gets attracted to early warning signals or negative images. Over the years, TV and news in particular has successfully used this learning to feed disasters, crime, killing and similar images to nourish that part of the human mind. Truth is, this model works, not just on TV but also in Movies. An interesting analogy of this model can be found in the modern housewife, not just any ordinary but the super rich housewife, the kinds who have to do nothing all day and have everything to lose in every moment. They are married to the notion of abundance, this makes them fragile and susceptible in the real world. A lot of this fear is shielded by designer brands. Luxury brands work as shields, it conceals insecurities and galvanizes those in search of identity. The kitty party is the manifestation of this collective incompetence. Here insecurity is complimented by counter question...

Rarely, does a game of cricket represent a spectacle of current affairs. The fan cant ask more, than a stage, set ablaze when 2 neighbors enter the same arena to decide the many contentious issues (those outside cricket) in the past.  An indo-pak game is many ways a metaphor that settles unresolved issues. Cricket here transcends beyond the game and players assume superhero status. 22 players stand up for the several million people on both sides of a highly disputed border to settle scores. Even at a neutral venue the intensity is emphasized by the contrasting nature of the opposing forces.One raw and sinewy and  the other potbellied by glory and success. One hungry and deprived while the other loathed in cricketing plentiful and over-sufficiency. Sport is meant to test the individual in more ways than physical. A contest of this nature, particularly in the case of these 2 countries, were won by individual brilliance in the past. Mental strength swayed the outcome of these ...