In The Culture Map, Erin Meyers provides a clear and easy-to-read introduction to cross-cultural differences, focusing on the needs of global business and the leading and management of people across countries. Read more »

Is it just me or does anyone else think that Singapore Airlines latest advertising doesn’t “feel” right? While it’s beautifully shot, it feels more like a trailer for a Disney fairy tale than a commercial for air travel (you can watch the ad here). Brand esSense is optimised when there is consistency across all touch points and senses, and in this commercial, titled “Making every journey personal” I don’t think there is any consistency.

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Designers understand the greater power of recognition over recall, which is why interfaces for complex systems use familiar iconography and layouts (think of the design of graphical user interfaces on computers from the early days into the present). Why do market researchers so often ignore this rule and rely on participants to remember the things they do, the brands they know and their opinions about obscure topics that they rarely think about?

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In Post Truth, Matthew d’Ancona lays out the ways in which modern politics, and life, show the increasing importance of emotional resonance over the inconvenient details of facts and realities.  After recent events around the world, no one should doubt that emotional resonance has the power to beat facts and arguments in the realm of politics, but are there lessons for businesses and brands? Read more »

Measuring human motivations and emotions is difficult. Three reasons for this are that

• Verbal questions tend to rationalize responses
• Emotional language terms can be very difficult to translate
• Different cultures have different values

More broadly, emotions are highly contextual and latest theories of emotion, see them as mental constructions in the same way that perceptions are mental constructions based on external cues. Emotions and perceptions are both processed in the same parts of the brain and help us to interpret and adapt to the environment around us, directing us towards our goals (see Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book for more on this). Read more »

In a recent cross-cultural survey, TapestryWorks talked to more than 1,200 women across four countries and, in this article, we focus on Thai women and their feelings about beauty. Read more »

Earlier this year, TapestryWorks collaborated with ABN Impact in Jakarta, to uncover the emotional journey of women’s beauty routines (read more here). As part of this work and client event, we also looked at women’s reactions to examples of advertising from beauty brands including Garnier, Wardah, L’Oreal and Sari Ayu, covering a range of International and local brands.

As with the diary work, we used StoryWorks Visual Think cards to capture the emotions associated with each advert and also the talent appearing in each execution using ABN Impact’s ‘Jakarta Beauty’ online community members. Read more »

“Forget artificial intelligence – in the brave new world of big data, it’s artificial idiocy we should be looking out for.” (Tom Chatfield)

Rather than focusing on artificial idiocy, let’s think about how we can be naturally intelligent in our use of any size of data to be better marketers. While data is a powerful tool to provide evidence for better decision-making, too often it misses the human empathy, cultural perspective and creative thinking that make us wiser. Read more »

There are several myths I have heard about Indonesian beauty, mostly from outside Indonesia (and often from outside Asia). The first myth is that Indonesia is not an important market for beauty products, and that women are less engaged with beauty than in other countries. The second myth is that confidence is a key goal of female beauty, a myth that is perpetrated around the world and not just in Indonesia. And the third myth is that creating a successful beauty brand in Indonesia is all about being halal. Read more »

When Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872, surprise was one of six basic emotions that he highlighted along with fear, anger, happiness, sadness and disgust. Read more »