Tokyo

Japan was always the plan, it was only a matter of when. 🙂 We planned well in advance, but even then, thanks to it being Sakura season, a lot of hotels were sold out. The visa took less than a week to get processed. Bangalore has a direct flight to Tokyo. So all you have to do is, to quote Amrita Rao, ‘JAL lijiye’. Interestingly, the pilot took off immediately after we landed, confusing all of us! We finally landed again after about 20 minutes. Tokyo was our first stop. We began, and ended, our 11-day Japan trip in Tokyo. This is our list of where to stay, what to see, and where and what to eat.

D shot while I snored.
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#Bibliofiles : 2022 favourites

As I was telling D one day, books are probably the only constant in my life. The earliest ones I have is from the 80s – Amar Chitra Katha. The books I read and the person I am have a correlation, though it’s difficult to establish the direction of causation. And so, continuing from 2019, 2020, and 2021, we have this year’s list. The shortlisting gets tougher as the years go by, so I will add my other favourites on the theme in [these]! From the 56 books I read this year…

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Isle of Skye

What’s a visit to Scotland without a trip to the Highlands! Thanks to the Rabbie’s Tours itinerary, we were able to cover a decent bit of ground in 3 days.

Stay

Our base technically was Portree, where we stayed for two nights at the Pier Hotel, run by a very homely Effie and family. The place is right next to the water, and less than 5 minutes walk from the town square. The building, Effie told us while making us breakfast, was more than 200 years old. But for a small stay, it’ll do just fine.

The one on the top left was our room. That meant a good view of the water.
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Designing my desires

A world of transactional efficiency

It was a little over 4 years ago that I first brought up the increasingly transactional nature of our interactions and even existence in general. I was reminded of it while listening to Amit Varma’s podcast with Nirupama Rao. Interestingly, they brought up contexts similar to what I had used – mails and rails. I had used birthday greetings going from long mails/cards to a ‘Like’ on someone else wishing the person a birthday. Travel was the other context, and I liked Amit’s example of train journeys being a unique experience. In contrast to say, the flight from point A to B.

Last year, around the same time, I had framed it as An Efficient Existence, and used the example of Taylor Pearson’s 4 minute songs – the timeframe he had mentioned for songs in the context of  certain rules that creators need to follow if they want their work to be consumed and appreciated. I had brought up an earlier era of Floyd, Springsteen, Fleetwood Mac etc whose songs didn’t follow that template. Demand or supply, what happened first, I asked. Does it have to do with the abundance of choice now, and the demands of instant gratification? While templated packages for all sorts of consumption are increasingly the norm, people also want to finish and move on to the next thing on their list. Transactions. (Generalising), there seems to be very less desire to have an immersive experience. Outside the screen, that is. As the Spotify ads show (unintentionally and literally) we’re usually in a bubble, oblivious to our surroundings.

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A digital multiverse

It was towards the end of 2020 that I came across Roblox and wrote Metaverse : Get a second life. Since that post, Mathew Ball has written the definitive primer on the Metaverse1, and if you’re interested in the subject, it’s a must-read. The word “metaverse”, ICYMI, was coined by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash, and the book is being referenced in many recent conversations. In fact, Stephenson has been quizzed for years, each time we seem to take a step in this direction, and his comments continue to be prescient, insightful and hugely creative. This one, from 2017, in Vanity Fair, is a favourite, and contains, among other succinct gems

The purpose of VR is to take you to a completely made-up place, and the purpose of AR is to change your experience of the place that you’re in.

Neal Stephenson
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Subjective Objectification

D and I watched Crime Stories: India Detectives on Netflix a few days after it was released. The episode that saddened both of us was “Dying for Protection”, which was based on the murder of a sex worker. Not surprisingly, it turned out to be the subject of discussion on a Saturday late evening, which these days are spent on the balcony, in the company of spirits, watching the sun and the world part ways. Yes, that is privilege.

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A System 3 path to brand building

I wouldn’t claim that Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow is an easy read, but if you persist, you can get a lot of insights on cognitive and behavioural biases, the heuristics we pick up and use, and the experiencing and remembering selves. I definitely started “watching” myself a lot more! But the main theme of the book is the difference between our two modes of thinking – Systems 1 and 2. System 1 is fast, automatic, and always in use, mostly unconsciously. System 2 is slow, methodical, logical and conscious. This also means that System 1 links new inputs to existing patterns to make sense of it rather than create a new understanding.

I have tried to apply this in my line of work – marketing, specifically communication. The application is fairly simple in say, ecommerce because the messaging/design can (and is) tweaked to play to the heuristics and biases the human mind has. Investments are a totally different beast altogether given there is rarely any instant gratification and definitely no gimmicks and giveaways. It also doesn’t help that our attention span as users is decreasing fast! Nudges ain’t easy. In that context, I have wondered if the two systems are too binary, and whether there is a middle path.

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Default in our stars

The thought first occurred to me a couple of years ago, when I realised that thanks to outsourcing and automation, we would struggle today to do many things that were once life skills. We also lost a little more than that – learning.

Sometimes directly, and sometimes, through the interactions with the world, they facilitated a learning experience that taught one how to navigate the world and the different kinds of folks that made up its systems. 

Regression Planning

It was continued with a bit more specificity in a subsequent post.

Instagram, Facebook, Tinder, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon – everything is a feed of recommendations, whether it be social interactions, music, content or shopping! Once upon a time, these were conscious choices we made. These choices, new discoveries, their outcomes, the feedback loop, and the memories we store of them, all worked towards developing intuition. 

Intelligence, intuition and instincts. The journeys in the first two are what have gotten the third hardwired into our biology and chemistry. When we cut off the pipeline to the first two, what happens to the third, and where does it leave our species?

AI: Artificial Instincts
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Brands, Activism & Morality

A while back, someone had joked on Twitter that by 2025, babies will be born outraged. But in 2020, the joke, at least in Indian advertising, is that when the Tanishq brand manager begins to think of a campaign, #BoycottTanishq starts trending. When I was writing the article on brands and empathy for Business Insider, I realised it would need a lot of effort for brands to go beyond signalling.

However, with inequities becoming even more of a pressing topic, and the expectation from brands to be active participants in society – activism to action, is there an inevitable movement that we will see? And hence, this post on brands through the prism of activism and morality, from the perspectives of a consumer and a brand marketer, and the safety of an armchair.

“We are living in an era of woke capitalism in which companies pretend to care about social justice to sell products to people who pretend to hate capitalism.”

Clay Routledge
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What makes a full stack marketer?

On Twitter, GG asked a question that I felt compelled to answer because I have used this on LinkedIn for a while.

I did borrow the phrase from tech, but sounding cool didn’t quite cover it. 🙂

To begin with, why do I use it? First, the people I want to connect with on LinkedIn are from the consumer tech, digital marketing and brand domains. This usage would be familiar to them, and would help frame my experience and expertise. The experience straddles the offline and digital space, and has media, FMCG, e-commerce and fintech brands. The second part is to do with the skill sets that I think qualifies one for that description. This is my attempt to elaborate on the latter. The “frontend” and “backend” of marketing. It covers demand generation, lead generation, and conversion but I have refrained from classifying it because it is context-dependent.

Disclaimer: These are my perspectives of things I have worked on. I do this with the understanding that “as our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance” Continue reading →

Atrophy, or not.

An excellent coincidence that I finished reading James P Carse’ “Finite and Infinite Games” the same day I wrote this post. The book helped me frame thoughts to my satisfaction. 

There was an age when accumulating possessions – from apparel brands to places visited to career designations to property ownership and anything that signals prosperity – was the game I played. Or games, because a milestone was a victory in that finite game, and I quickly moved on to another. Trophies that the world dictated.  Continue reading →

Ishaara

Thanks to the traffic nightmare that Bangalore is, it is becoming increasingly difficult to dine out unless you set out from home immediately after lunch. On a relative note, Sunday noon is a safe enough time to venture out. We had seen Ishaara on a recent visit to Phoenix Marketcity, and chose a gloomy, overcast […]