By Ryan Jones •
September 30, 2009
When you need to urgently need to blow your nose in Germany and don’t have a tissue on hand, you might ask a friend “Hast du ein Tempo?” (Do you have a Tempo?)
Tempo, it turns out, is a brand of tissue, not the German word for tissue.
Substituting a brand name for a general product description is relatively common across a number of languages. How many times have you heard someone say “Just Google that” or “Can I have a COKE please”? Over the years, powerful brands have impacted our culture and slipped into our language. For a brand, this is the ultimate compliment and a big awareness driver. In fact, Coke and Google (the 2 examples above) are now the #1 and #2 brands respectively on Interbrands latest list of powerful brands. Tempo continues to be a very powerful brand in Germany.
By Ryan Jones •
September 3, 2009
Corporations are huge and they dominate our business landscape. Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations and only 49 are countries.
Corporate critics like Douglas Rushkoff would add that not only is our world dominated by corporations, but as individuals, we have all internalized the worst corporate values, becoming disconnected, profit-driven and absolutely “me” focused in everything we do.
That’s a pretty bleak picture. After reading Rushkoff’s book (and even writing a long review about it) I thought about the legions of people (like me) working in companies. Sure, there are a lot of narcissistic corporate drone types that fit the description above…but there are also a lot of other folks willing to shake things up. Lets call them purpose driven corporatists.
By Ryan Jones •
August 14, 2009
A few years ago while back home in the US, I hopped in the car with the family to quickly run some errands. Now, you need to understand that I have been in Europe for over 10 years and was not ready for what would happen next—a shopping experience without ever actually touching the ground.
