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It surely wins: Kit Kat’s supremacy in Japan

Go to the corner store. You’ll find some Kit Kat bars populating the middle shelves below the Watermelon Bubblicious and above the Sour Punch Straws. Maybe you’ll chance on a box of King Size, or if the stars are aligned: Big Kat and White Chocolate. Ok, your work here is done. Now go to Japan….

The NFL and the color pink

If you’ve watched any professional football in October you might have noticed large swaths of a color that usually doesn’t make it onto the gridiron – pink. See, October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The NFL and the American Cancer Society teamed up on a campaign called A Crucial Catch to raise money for breast…

There’s nothing wrong with making your brand a little more human

There’s got to be some lessons in the fall from grace of heroes like Lance Armstrong. One is that we seem to like our heroes imperfect. You could argue that the higher you go the bigger the fall, but somehow it doesn’t seem to work that way when you are a little bigger than life….

Foreign National: why the best Americana comes from overseas

It pisses me off to no end that American heritage brands are doing much cooler stuff overseas. Filson has Red Label in Japan, Carhartt has Work In Progress in Europe. Red Wing and Converse have imprints in Japan that are doing much nicer stuff than their American motherships. Now, it’s a familiar story for foreign…

Are you for real?

I have car insurance. I bought it from a man who we’ll call ‘Bill’ in Oakland, because my uncle said he was a swell guy. Recently I needed Bill’s phone number so I looked him up online. I was greeted with his striking good looks and some strange achievements: Crystal Excellence Agency Golden Triangle Agency…

Conspiracy theory: J.D. Power and Associates is way more powerful than we think

I got a really interesting piece of junk mail. No, I didn’t win a chance to win a million dollars. I’m not pre-qualified for a limited-time offer. I wasn’t even entered for a chance to set sail for luxury on a Celebrity cruise. I received a piece of junkmail addressed to me by myself. It’s…

Am I tasting dirt?

Oenophiles are people who know a lot about wine. They can recognize flavors like gooseberry, lychee, and dirt. They rely on their discerning palates to judge wines. But that’s not always the whole story. Sometimes they lead themselves to believe that a wine is extra delicious just because it has a foreign or unusual name….

Facebook ads: Print edition

Every day, at varying times with varying degrees of friendliness, someone in a blue uniform comes into our office to deliver a stack of papers, which we invariably put directly into the recycling bin. When I’m trying to forget how wasteful this whole system is, I pretend like I am feeding a hungry recycling bin…

We’re all driving the same car. Sort of.

  It takes a great deal of effort to design and build a car. The Japanese get it done in about three years and the Americans in seven. So one way manufacturers reduce the amount of labor is by selling the same car twice, albeit slightly altered. This practice is called “badge engineering” and no,…

Sara Lee wants more meat

Sara Lee is trading in her bag of flour for a bottle of barbecue sauce. The company — once known for its homely breads and microwaveable cheesecakes — announced today that it is changing its name to Hillshire Brands Co., part of a larger move toward its Hillshire Farms brand of hotdogs, sausages and packaged…

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