The electric vehicle revolution will come from China, not the US
by Jack Barkenbus
A Chinese hybrid-electric SUV made by BYD. Jengtingchen/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
The electric vehicle revolution is coming, but it won’t be driven by the U.S. Instead, China will be at the forefront.
My research on EVs, dating back a decade, convinces me that this global transformation in mobility, from petroleum-fueled vehicles to electric ones, will come sooner than later. The shift is already happening in China, which is the world’s largest automobile market, with 23 million cars sold in 2018. As Western countries approach peak car ownership, there are still hundreds of millions of Chinese families that don’t own a car at all – much less two or more.
Many of them are buying electric cars. By 2015, electric vehicle sales in China had surpassed U.S. levels. In 2018, Chinese sales topped 1.1 million cars, more than 55% of all electric vehicles sold in the world, and more than three times as many as Chinese customers had bought two years earlier. U.S. electric vehicle sales that year were just 358,000.
A key element of an electric vehicle’s price is the cost of its batteries – and China already makes more than half of the world’s electric vehicle batteries. Battery prices continue to fall; industry analysts now suggest that within five years it will be cheaper to buy an electric car than a gas- or diesel-powered one.
Forecasts predict the Chinese producing as much as 70% of the world’s electric vehicle batteries by 2021, even as the demand for electric car batteries grows.
Huge government backing
China has a fledgling, but ambitious, automobile industry. It has never been able to match the efficiency and quality of established automakers at making gas-powered vehicles, but electric vehicles are easier to build, giving Chinese firms a new opportunity to compete.
The Chinese government, therefore, has chosen to highlight electric vehicles as one of 10 commercial sectors central to its “Made in China” effort to boost advanced industrial technology. Government efforts include using billions of dollars to subsidize manufacturing of electric vehicles and batteries, and encouraging businesses and consumers to buy them.
The government is also aware that electric vehicles could help solve some of China’s most pressing energy and environmental concerns: Massive air pollution chokes its major cities, national security officials are worried about how much oil the country imports and China is now the nation contributing most to global climate change emissions.
New companies
Scores of Chinese auto-making companies have formed to profit from these subsidies. A major player is BYD, which stands for “Build Your Dreams,” headquartered in Shenzhen. More than a decade ago, billionaire investor Warren Buffett bought about a quarter of the company for US$232 million – a share that is now worth more than $1.5 billion.
The company’s initial plans to export vehicles to the U.S. proved premature and fizzled. BYD instead started to focus mainly on the Chinese auto market, as well as building electric buses for the global market, which it now dominates.
If BYD’s electric car plans falter, though, there are plenty of other Chinese firms ready to pick up the slack.
BYD’s 2019 Yuan 360EV is an all-electric SUV available in China. BYD
Further support
In addition to the government subsidies to ensure BYD and its competitors have lots of customers, new government regulations are kicking in. The Chinese government now requires all automakers who sell in China, whether domestic or foreign firms, to make a certain percentage of their sales electric, through a complex crediting formula. The mandate will get stricter over time, perhaps requiring each company to make at least 7% of their sales electric by 2025.
Major foreign car companies have large investments in China and can hardly afford to abandon the market. Volkswagen, for example, now sells 40% of its output in China, which is a main reason the company is pushing hard to develop electric vehicles.
China’s domestic automakers have largely not yet engaged in the export market. Electric vehicle industry analyst Jose Pontes says there are three reasons for their reluctance: First, the Chinese market is big enough to absorb their current production. Second, many car companies in China are utterly unknown in the West, so customers would be wary of buying from a strange brand. And third, their cars do not yet comply with strict safety regulations in the U.S. and Europe.
However, all of those obstacles can be overcome with time and money. It’s possible Chinese electric car companies could enter the low- to middle-income market in the West, as Volkswagen did 60 years ago.
If – or when – that happens, inexpensive, efficient electric cars may spread through the West from China, surpassing Tesla and other American and European electric vehicle efforts. Only Western government attempts to protect domestic automakers with tariffs and other trade barriers could derail this development.
About The Author:
Jack Barkenbus is a Visiting Scholar in the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy & Environment at Vanderbilt University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
A young couple posing for an Instagram photo. Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock.com
Instagram users have taken to issuing “weekiversary posts,” where they diligently mark the duration of their romances. An article in The New York Times explained how weekiversary posts have the unintended – or very much intended – consequence of shaming people who are not in love.
The article also noted that this phenomenon makes some doubt the intensity of their own relationship. They wonder why their partners are not similarly starry-eyed and gushing online. Some even admitted that this phenomenon prompted them to stay in relationships longer than they should have: they go on celebrating their weekiversaries, just to keep up appearances.
In truth, this could apply to any of the social media platforms, where people increasingly feel the need to act their lives in real time in a public format, documenting every event and incident, no matter how remarkable or mundane.
As a philosopher researching the topic of privacy, I found myself thinking about the brave new culture of digital sharing.
What does it say about love, that many are compelled to live their romances aloud, in detailed fashion?
Why display your love?
On one hand, there is nothing new here. Most of us seek the approval of others – even before our own, sometimes. Others’ approval, or their envy, makes our joy sweeter.
Philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau recognized something like this when he distinguished between “amour de soi” and “amour propre” – two different forms of self love. The former is love that is instinctual and not self-reflective. Rousseau sees it in presocial man, who is unconcerned with what other people think of him. Largely, he loves himself unconditionally, without judgment.
Society, which complicates our lives irredeemably, introduces amour propre. This is self-love mediated through the eyes and opinions of others. Amour propre, in Rousseau’s view, is deeply flawed. It is hollow, flimsy, if not downright fraudulent. The opinions and judgment of others change rapidly and do not make for a firm foundation for honest, enduring, confident self-love and any emotions related to or rooted in it.
This suggests an unflattering view of weekiversary posts. Are they just one’s way of satiating the need for amour propre – meeting the approval, and stoking the envy of online witnesses? Are they for one’s lover at all? Or, are they for public affirmation?
Curating our life stories
Is there a more positive way to make sense of weekiversary posts?
Social media is a way to give a narrative structure to our lives. Johnny Silvercloud/Flickr.com, CC BY-SA
Philosopher Paul Ricoeur argued that humans have an inherent need to view their lives in a narrative fashion. This is a prime way in which a person makes sense of his or her world.
Specifically, one aims to project a narrative structure onto life, and give it a beginning, a climax and, hopefully, a fitting conclusion. The individual also wishes to situate his life story within a greater narrative, be it social, historical or cosmic.
Social media, I believe, gives us newfound powers to curate the story of our lives, and if need be, change characters, dominant plot lines or background themes, how and when we like. In documenting everyday events and occurrences, we could even elevate them and lend them a degree of significance.
So, it might seem perfectly natural that people would like to narrate their budding romances.
I am now long and happily married, but I remember how first love is both exhilarating and confusing. It’s a mess of emotions to work out and understand. Among the many mixed messages issued by family, society and the media, it is often difficult to know how best to navigate romance and determine if you are doing things right – or if you have found “the one.”
In fact, I sought to get a handle on it all by writing down my many thoughts. This helped give me clarity. It objectified my thoughts – I literally projected them on paper before me, and could better understand which were more resonant, powerful and pressing.
Love and insecurity
Social media, on the other hand, is not designed for introspection or soul-searching: Posts must be relatively short, eye-catching and declarative. Twitter emissions only tolerate 280 characters.
Ambiguity has no place there. Social media isn’t the place to hash through a host of conflicting emotions. You are either in love, or you are not – and if you are in love, why declare it if it isn’t blissful?
As Facebook discovered, negative posts tend to lose followers – and many people want to keep up their viewership. The legal scholar Bernard Harcourt argues that social media sharing evokes the great American tradition of entrepreneurship. From this perspective, in issuing weekiversary posts, individuals are creating an identity and a story – they are generating a brand that they can market widely.
It’s hard to see how this phenomenon contributes to or makes for lasting and fulfilling relationships. If, for example, as Ricoeur says, social media effusions are an attempt to elevate the mundane, the simple, the everyday, and lend it special meaning, it begs the question: Why might one feel the need to do this repeatedly, persistently?
I would argue that it betrays an air of insecurity. After all, at some point, all the affirmation one needs should come from your lover.
True love
There is an understandable need for young lovers to pronounce their joy in public. But love, when it matures, does not live publicly.
Love is a largely private emotion. michael rababy/Flickr.com, CC BY-NC-ND
Loving couples are not necessarily easy to pick out in public. I think of my parents, and my in-laws, married for nearly 50 years. They can sit with each other in comfortable silence for long periods of time. They can also communicate with each other without saying a word.
Love is largely a private relationship, and demands intimacy. Only in intimacy does the inherent ambiguity or complexity of love emerge. Only in intimacy are you and your partner fully seen and known, with all your shortcomings or contradictions – and they are forgiven.
It is in these intimate moments that lovers learn to tolerate ambiguity, negotiate differences and endure.
About The Author:
Firmin DeBrabander is Professor of Philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art
This article is republished from our content partners at The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
An app that nudges people to eat their veggies only works when it's introduced with a human touch
by Susan H Evans, University of Southern California and Peter Clarke, University of Southern California.
Eating right is good for families. Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock.com
Paula, a 59-year-old mother of two in Southern California, is getting out of a cooking rut with VeggieBook, a free mobile app we created that users can view in English or Spanish. It gives her customized recipes and food tips.
A menu of options on the VeggieBook app in English. Susan Evans and Peter Clarke, CC BY-SA
Thanks to this new approach to cooking, her family is beginning to eat meals that include vegetables. Also, Paula’s teenage daughter is helping out more in the kitchen and the family is eating together a few days a week. We were also pleased to hear that, for a change, they aren’t watching TV or using their smartphones at the table.
Jess, 54, lives in the Midwest. Like Paula, she has a husband and two teenagers and relies on a community food pantry for much of her food. Even though she downloaded our app too, she seldom uses vegetables and rarely fixes them in new or interesting ways.
Why did one of these women embrace our app but not the other?
Different experiences
Eating more fruits and vegetables has many health benefits. It helps reduce the risk of prevalent and chronic illnesses like diabetes, cancer and heart disease. Food banks began to distribute fresh produce in the mid 1990s marking a change from years of just giving shelf-stable items. They now offer hundreds of millions of pounds of produce through tens of thousands of food pantries every year.
A menu of options on the VeggieBook app in Spanish. Susan Evans and Peter Clarke, CC BY-SA
But it often goes to waste because low-income people, like many Americans across the economic spectrum, are not eating a nutritious diet. When they don’t know what to do with free vegetables, they throw them out.
We are communications scholars who have researched and advised food banks and pantries, and their low-income clients for decades. We designed VeggieBook to help people like Paula and Jess prepare vegetables in a greater variety of appealing ways and to plan healthier family meals. We wrote recipes for it and tested and re-tested all of its content and interactive features. Only after such experimentation did we give our software programmer instructions to move forward.
Both of these low-income women, whom we are identifying only by their first names to protect their privacy, get a lot of the food they eat from food pantries. Paula and Jess both downloaded VeggieBook onto their smartphones when they visited their local food pantry to pick up some groceries.
When we looked for clues about what might explain the difference, we learned that in Paula’s case she didn’t just download it. The food pantry staff, middle-aged women like Paula, taught her how to use the app and took the time to walk her through many of its features. They also gave her some fresh vegetables to experiment with that evening, in addition to the usual allotment of foods like pasta and cereal she normally would take home.
Jess had a different experience. After a young male volunteer downloaded the app onto her phone, he rushed to the next person in line. There was no training and no practicing and Jess didn’t get any fresh vegetables to cook at home.
We see a cautionary lesson here: The way digital health tools are promoted may be just as important as how good those tools are.
Eat more of these. monticello/Shutterstock.com
More than just downloading
To see whether VeggieBook works, we conducted a scientific field test with nearly 200 households.
The number of vegetable-based meals in homes where we provided the app jumped 38 percent within three or four weeks, compared with a control group that didn’t get the app. Two out of three app users said they had gained new kitchen skills like making a soup or a stir-fry.
And we learned that the app’s photos, recipes and tips had sparked family discussions about food and meal planning that had seldom occurred before. Ten weeks later, the group using the app was eating more vegetables than the control group.
A VeggieBook broccoli burritos recipe. Susan Evans and Peter Clarke, CC BY-SA
Results like these lead us to believe that VeggieBook can work as intended. But we are also seeing that results vary widely and signs of success seem to depend on how our app is introduced.
Based on experiments that we have conducted in five states, we have determined that food pantries and other community organizations that encourage the app’s use need guidance and additional staff time for this personalized, mobile tech to help people start eating better food.
New kitchen skills
In our view, face-to-face and hands-on training matters just as much as the quality of our software and interface – maybe even more.
We saw that during our field experiments, whenever we handed people who had downloaded the app a few vegetables like carrots and broccoli, for example, they got to try out VeggieBook right away. Time and again, we saw them become more intense and sustained users of the app in following weeks, than the people who downloaded it but didn’t get any fresh produce to chop and prep.
Who introduces VeggieBook can make a difference too. We found that when training is led by people who are from similar backgrounds as the pantry clients and are on-site week to week, the app works best.
Another issue is what happens after the downloading and the training, should there be any. It helps if there’s someone that the app’s users can follow-up with by phone or text or in person, sharing their kitchen triumphs or frustrations.
And even though it’s an app, we’ve experimented with letting users print their own customized booklets of recipes and food management ideas at their local food pantry. We have learned that about a third of the app’s users prefer to cook using this paper version.
Some like to share the app’s recipes, as well as food tips and tricks, with relatives and friends in print. Others would rather share using email or text. It helps to offer both options.
Training users with one of their kids is ideal. In our large field study, moms learned our app with a 9- to 14-year-old child. But we also have introduced the app during nutrition classes for teenagers, and we’ve seen that work too.
As one mom at a pantry told us about her daughter’s evolving interest in food and cooking: “It was shocking to see her make it, eat it and love it!”
About The Authors:
Susan H Evans, Research Scientist, University of Southern California and Peter Clarke, Professor, University of Southern California
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Gen Z entrepreneurs view higher education as vital to their startups
by Eric J. Barron, Pennsylvania State University
Young entrepreneurs are increasingly turning to universities to help launch their businesses. GUGAI/www.shutterstock.com
Today’s college students – dubbed Generation Z – are beginning to make their mark on the workplace with a distinctly unconventional and often irreverent approach to problem-solving. In my day-to-day interactions with our students, I find that this group doesn’t only ask “Why?” they ask “How can I fix that?” And their curiosity, independence, energy and assertiveness are transforming the entrepreneurial space.
These post-millennials are less like the bumbling geeks from the cast of the HBO comedy “Silicon Valley” and more in the spirit of a focused problem-solver like a young MacGyver, who would rather invent and innovate as a means to learning and discovery.
What’s energizing to a university president like me is watching this transformation take place as more and more undergraduates are partnering with public institutions and fueling the next wave of ingenuity.
Entrepreneurship 101
A 2011 survey by Gallup found 77 percent of students in grades 5 through 12 said they want to be their own boss and 45 percent planned to start their own business. Today, many of those students are now in college.
For example, when I first met Hunter Swisher as an undergraduate plant pathology student at Penn State, he was busy turning scientific turfgrass research that he learned about in class into a commercial product and startup company.
The turf of the White Course at Penn State is tended to by Phospholutions. Penn State, Author provided
Swisher saw commercial potential in his professor’s research and worked closely with him to transfer that knowledge into a possible viable product. Swisher connected with the university’s startup incubator and vast alumni network, put in the work, and became a CEO of his own small business before he walked across the stage at commencement in 2016. Today, his company Phospholutions has five employees and counting and their treatment is being used on more than 50 golf courses in 10 states, including at the legendary Oakmont and Marion golf courses.
Swisher is not alone in pursuing his entrepreneurial dreams while still in college. He is just one of many entrepreneurs starting their own companies by leveraging resources at their colleges and universities.
Penn State, Indiana University, University of North Carolina, Georgia Tech, University of Michigan, Ohio State and other leading public institutions all have thriving entrepreneurial centers that are available to all students, as well as community members and businesses. Penn State alone has opened 21 entrepreneurial spaces across Pennsylvania, and in just two years, we’ve engaged with more than 4,500 students.
Moving scientific discoveries into a breakthrough business opportunity is powering economic growth and creating jobs. Consider that nationally – in 2017 alone – the Association of University Technology Managers reported:
$68.2 billion in research expenditures
1,080 startups formed
24,998 invention disclosures
15,335 new U.S. patent applications filed
7,849 licenses and options executed
755 new products created
Undergraduate students at public universities are fueling this trend
Traditionally, higher education has focused their investment on faculty entrepreneurs, hoping to find a breakthrough like the next Gatorade (University of Florida) or Lyrica (Northwestern University). Since universities don’t own the rights to undergraduate intellectual property, there has been less incentive to support these efforts.
Until now.
While we universities are taking a risk on students without a guaranteed immediate return on investment, we think the potential outcomes – for example in alumni support and building our local economies – are worth it.
With their minds set on this entrepreneurial future, a common narrative has emerged that students are skipping college to start their own businesses. In reality, 8 in 10 students believe college is important to achieving their career goals. Sixty-three percent of those same students – all between the ages of 16 and 19 – said they want to learn about entrepreneurship in college, including how to start a business.
Land-grant and public institutions are contributing the practical education that can contribute to economic growth and development. Indeed, generally speaking talent-driven innovation was identified as the most important factor by the Deloitte-U.S. Council on Competitiveness.
Through skills training and engaged entrepreneurial experiences, students are realizing the profound impact they can have by solving a problem as well as overcoming obstacles, failures and flops – all under the umbrella of university guidance and resource support.
Innovation is inspiring and a wise investment
Research and education have always opened doors that benefit the nation we serve. Today, public colleges and universities are well-positioned to transform our economy and infuse it with innovation and energy. As chair of the Association of Public & Land-grant Universities (APLU) newly formed Commission on Economic and Community Engagement (CECE), I’m working with universities and our government partners to identify key areas crucial to maximizing the impact of public research universities.
By the end of this year, tens of millions of Generation Zers will enter the workforce. The challenge for higher education will be how to help the world of business to better harness the many talents, energy and inquisitiveness that Generation Zers bring to the table. The many partnerships that universities have formed with entrepreneurial students serve as an important first step toward this goal.
About The Author:
Eric J. Barron is President of Pennsylvania State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
How will Google's innovation continue beyond its 20th year?
by Gary Marchionini
The past and present of Google – what’s next? Sirirat/Shutterstock.com
As millions of people came online in the late 1990s they needed help figuring out what each webpage was about, and how to find what they were looking for. Web indexes and search engines sprang up. When Google was founded in September 1998, it had to compete with the information retrieval algorithms and techniques – nicknamed “secret sauce” – used by Lycos, Yahoo and other companies.
Technically speaking, Google added two innovations: highly efficient processes for crawling webpages to index their text, and a new way of ranking a page’s relevance based on the number and quality of pages that linked to it. In addition, its interface was refreshingly clean: In an internet then pervaded by pages with lists of lists, Google offered a spare alternative, with just a box to type search terms and a “Search” button.
Even more startling was Google’s confidence in its abilities. The company offered a second button, whimsically labeled “I’m feeling lucky,” which would take users directly to the webpage that was the top result – skipping the step of listing possible search results for a user to choose from. It also sought to be a different kind of technology company, early on adopting a straightforward corporate motto: “Don’t be evil.” Two decades into Google’s history, the power of search is still paramount: Entire businesses and professions are built around crafting internet content that will rise to the top of its search results.
The earliest version of the Google search engine, as stored by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Screenshot by The Conversation of Archive.org cache of google.stanford.edu, CC BY-ND
But there are signs of trouble. The company’s role in providing misleading information to U.S. voters is under scrutiny. More than 3,100 Google employees signed a public letter protesting the use of their work in warfare technologies – and about a dozen of them resigned in protest. Even more recently, 1,600 Googlers signed a petition to stop their employer from opening a government-restricted search service in China. Additionally, President Donald Trump has questioned whether its rankings for news stories are fair. What might the next 20 years of Google bring?
Rapid growth
Google is used to being under scrutiny. In late July 2004 in Sheffield, England, I recall the buzz the company created at the 27th Annual Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval Research Conference. There were betting pools about when Google would offer its stock for public purchase, and at what price. The Google employees were easy to spot, only using their laptops while sitting with their backs to a wall, so nobody could see what they were reading or typing.
The company founded by two Stanford graduate students in 1998, which went public on Aug. 19, 2004, at US$85 a share, still gets the vast majority of its annual revenue from selling search-related advertising.
Yet Google has grown too, in part thanks to a policy giving employees the freedom to work one day a week on side projects that catch their fancy. Now reorganized into an umbrella company called Alphabet, the company has expanded into industries as diverse as smartphone operating systems, mapping apps and self-driving vehicles.
Google’s ad revenue from 2001 to 2017 (in billion U.S. dollars). Statista
Diversification
Many of the company’s efforts to diversify build on strengths it has developed providing search, such as cloud computing systems that take advantage of Google engineers’ experience managing massive data centers and huge amounts of traffic from – and to – sites all around the world.
The company’s massive index of information in many languages is what enabled Google to build a machine-translation system between any of 100 languages. That will help Google remain globally valuable even as Baidu dominates Chinese-language searches.
Google’s future depends on continuing to create and leverage indexes on features beyond the words on webpages. Combining the ability to identify a user performing the search with its knowledge of that person’s search history and their current location, Google can already provide finely tuned personalized results. A new company effort is already planning to use health devices people wear, implant or carry on their bodies to provide useful nutrition and fitness tips.
Google is no doubt planning to add to its special sauce indexes of social media posts, data from sensors in the environment – including cameras, microphones and all sorts of connected “internet of things” devices.
Future challenges
Google is already applying its expertise to its line of smart speakers and personal assistants, offering its well-regarded search results through voice recognition and spoken responses. One day typing text onto a screen may seem as quaint as rotary phones.
A next category of features might be called anticipatory search, providing information or suggesting action without a user even specifying a query. For instance, some cars already go beyond alerting the driver to low fuel levels, locating and providing directions to nearby gas stations. One day a personal fitness tracker might note that a user’s resting heart rate is 15 percent higher this week than the average over the past six months. From there, it might offer up research or doctors’ advice about cardiovascular health.
Google may even ramp up its efforts to distinguish people from machines – such as “captcha” challenges and multi-factor authentication processes. From there, it may work to eliminate the increasing efforts from both humans and computers – such as Russian government agents and Twitter bots – to secretly influence search results for malicious purposes.
These features may sound exciting and useful, but they also carry important ethical concerns, about who can access people’s personal data, and for what purposes. It will be interesting to see whether the concerns Google employees are currently expressing about political uses of their work will extend to personal privacy, and whether – and how – any objections might influence searches in the future.
About The Author:
Gary Marchionini is a Professor of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Estrella Damm: how Spanish beer took on Heineken to brand itself as the cosmopolitan choice
by Patrick Lonergan
Estrella Damm
The great film director Stanley Kubrick once wrote about the way in which the line between art and commerce was increasingly blurred: “Some of the most spectacular examples of film art are in the best TV commercials,” he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1987.
And the art of branding in today’s saturated market – or so conventional wisdom suggests – is to create value for your brand by linking them with meaningful experiences and using that to manage consumers’ emotions towards the brand.
Our cultural knowledge of brands is woven into the very fabric of our everyday lives and shapes the choices we make. So, for example, the principle behind Ralph Lauren’s famous quip that “we don’t sell jeans, we sell self-confidence” can be applied to most successful brands.
Arguably, we subconsciously associate Levis with making us look “cool”, while Nike inspires and empowers us to be “greater” – see, for example, its “Find Your Greatness” campaign. Disney, meanwhile, gives us escapism and fantasy while Apple promises greater community and connection through its technology.
By investing in these cultural messages over time, brands can strengthen perception of them by consumers as inseparable from these meaningful qualities with which they have become associated. As branding academics and practitioners alike understand, brands flourish or perish on the strength of this relationship.
Beer is life
Storytelling has always been an important way for brands to establish and maintain this meaningful relationship with consumers. These brand narratives are not about finding logical solutions to complex problems – or indeed about telling potential consumers about how useful or high quality their products are – not directly, anyway. Rather, they are about ingraining or reinforcing the symbolic and cultural value of the brand through their story which aims to create or strengthen a meaningful connection between the brand and consumer.
The aim is that their customers begin to feel that the brand is inseparable from aspects of their identity.
Typical of this idea is the 16-minute short film La Vida Neustra (Our Life), promoting the oldest brand in Spain and Catalonia, the Barcelona-based beer, Estrella Damm. The film stars Game of Thrones actor Peter Dinklage and has been viewed more than 15m times.
We see protagonist Anton move from Barcelona to Amsterdam for an amazing job opportunity. He leaves behind beautiful girlfriend Cora and his equally handsome best friend Rafa. A year of unrest and indecision later, Anton returns to Barcelona to sign over his boat to Rafa. Of course, he discovers he is still in love with Cora – but of course she and Rafa are now an item.
Dinklage plays a narrator of sorts, Chad Johnson – a character in the style of Dickens’s ghost of Christmas past, guiding Anton through past memories towards a revelation typical of consumer capitalism; he already had a great life but continued to believe far away hills were greener. Johnson tells him: “But you wanted more.” In the end, Anton “lets go of the anchor”, hands over the key of the boat (the anchor a metaphor to past lives and relationships) to Rafa and Cora and embraces his new life in Amsterdam.
Clash of stars
Beneath the somewhat frivolous plot, there is something far more interesting going on from a branding perspective. Canadian anthropologist Grant McCracken argued in 1986 that brands become meaningful by investing in culture – signs and symbols that consumers identify as culturally meaningful. The Estrella film marks a concerted effort by the gold star of the Spanish brand from Barcelona to antagonise its fierce rival and market leader in Amsterdam, the red star of Heineken.
The opening scene of the film depicts the quintessential image of Amsterdam with its beautiful canals and unmistakable Dutch architecture.
Sense of place: the opening of Estrella’s Amsterdam film. Estrella Damm
When I first saw this ad with a couple of friends, they said they didn’t know Estrella was Dutch. I said I didn’t think it was either. The beer’s name, Estrella Damm, sounds as if there’s a connection with Amsterdam –but in fact the beer was first brewed in 1876 by August Küntzmann Damm, a recent arrival to Barcelona from the Alsace region of France.
Sense of belonging
The film starts with quintessential images of the canals and townhouses of Amsterdam and jumps to the instantly recognisable cityscape of Barcelona and then moves back and forth between the two cities. It ends with Anton blissfully cycling through Amsterdam and hanging out with his new friends having fully embraced his new life and let go of the “anchor” to this past.
Yet throughout this turbulent time, the only constant, in the wake of disloyal friends, fleeting romances and traded possessions has been Estrella and its symbolic ties to his home city Barcelona.
Landmark: former Heineken brewery in Amsterdam. Mtcv via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-ND
The film marks a potentially risky but rewarding strategy by Estrella and potentially other brands to invest in a sense of place that arguably, “belongs” to their rival competitors. As the narrative suggests, despite being in the home of “the Heineken Experience”, Estrella is the beer of choice and acts as a more effective medium with which we can celebrate and give thanks for life, love and beer.
About The Author:
Patrick Lonergan is a Lecturer in Marketing and Communications at Nottingham Trent University.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
KitKat lost its trade mark case: what you need to know
by Megan Rae Blakely
KitKat lost its decade-long case to protect its four finger biscuit shape. Nestlé
Picture your favourite chocolate treat. The brand, the packaging – and sometimes the shape of it – will no doubt come to mind. This is the idea behind trade marks: that consumers can easily identify products or services they want to buy from a company they recognise. If a brand can demonstrate this recognition, it is known as being “sufficiently distinctive” in the market.
Trade marks not only protect consumers with quality and consistency, they also provide a significant business advantage. Other companies can’t use these marks because that would confuse customers and possibly cause reputational or financial damage to the original brand.
Due to the potentially indefinite duration of protection, trade marks can confer significant brand value, so many popular brands have become involved in lengthy court cases when competitors challenge a mark’s validity. As the EU is a global leader in world chocolate production – and consumption – this is no trifling matter for confectionery companies.
The KitKat crisis
In July 2018 the more than decade-long legal battle to protect the “four-fingered” shape of Nestlé’s KitKat bar concluded with KitKat losing its appeal against Kvikk Lunsj (owned by Cadbury, now Mondelez) a Norwegian four-fingered chocolate biscuit. KitKat’s EU shape trade mark is annulled, meaning the Kit Kat shape is no longer a valid trade mark across the EU. It is now only valid in member states where Nestlé has made a successful application as a national trade mark.
Mondelez’ similar four-fingered Kvikk Lunsj which challenged KitKat in court over its shape. Mondelez
Some may be surprised to learn that chocolate is a highly litigious subject. A case for Lindt’s gold-foiled chocolate bunnies failed on distinctiveness, and Poundland’s “copycat” Toblerone bar, Twin Peaks, was settled out of court.
Outside of chocolate, litigation has also arisen from less digestible shapes such as London black cabs and LEGO blocks, in both cases where trade marks on shape were unsuccessfully defended.
Dispute over shapes is complex in trade mark law. It can be a more straightforward prospect to protect a word as a trade mark – and the KitKat name itself is. Marks like KitKat are inherently distinctive, meaning they’re made up, so only have meaning in relation to that brand. But in the case of shapes, distinctiveness may need to be acquired through commercial use and the average consumer associating the shape with the brand. So with the KitKat shape, the court considered whether the use was proved to acquire distinctiveness.
Generally, longevity in a mark is helpful with proving aspects of distinctiveness, but both companies have used the shape in their confections for a long time. KitKat began using the shape in 1935, and Kvikk Lunsj two years later in 1937 (although Nestlé only applied for trade mark registration of the shape in the EU in 2002).
A shape may come to mind when identifying the product, but KitKat runs into problems here because the shape is not visible when you pick it up in its wrapper. Since an average consumer must be able to recognise the brand by a clear and precise trade mark, this can present a higher hurdle for the shape.
An application may be refused or challenged for many reasons, but one creative challenge to the KitKat shape came in the UK courts in 2015, when Cadbury argued that the KitKat shape was all to do with a technical or design issue rather than an identifying brand feature – that is, it was designed to allow consumers to easily break one bar into four smaller parts. So if the four-fingered shape was actually fulfilling a function, it couldn’t be a trade mark.
The EU angle
Ultimately, the most recent European Court of Justice (ECJ) decision came down to sufficient distinctiveness. Companies can apply for a domestic trade mark at their national intellectual property office, but how would sufficient distinctiveness be proved when applying for an EU-wide trade mark? An applicant must show that the mark is commonly recognised throughout the European Union, under the EU Directive 2015/2435.
London black cabs were not deemed sufficiently distinctive in court for a trade mark. Shutterstock
The EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) granted the KitKat shape mark in 2002 on the basis that KitKat had achieved recognition in ten of the then 15 EU countries. But this newest ECJ decision found that, if the EU coverage is insubstantial or omits a single member state, then the mark hasn’t been proved to have acquired distinctiveness.
The future
The ECJ decision in many ways is a pragmatic solution, given the challenge of achieving consumer recognition in 28 individual countries. But current trade mark registrations granted on a similar basis as KitKat may also leave existing EU trade marks open to challenge.
This may be good news for chocolate lovers looking for variety in their “technically functional” treats, as there will be more opportunity for competitors to enter the market – although Nestlé still has national trade marks in some countries. It is also likely that, given the stakes, Nestlé will refile for their EU KitKat shape trade mark using new criteria that proves EU-wide distinctiveness in line with the framework of this latest decision.
Like KitKat, Lindt’s gold foil chocolate bunny was not considered sufficiently distinctive by the courts. Lindt
The trade mark annulment will surely impact the EUIPO’s consideration of applications for trade mark registration and of trade mark oppositions, as this decision holds that proving distinctive character in a substantial part of the territory is not enough.
Shapes, in particular, are a challenge to protect under trade mark law, and recent decisions demonstrate how difficult it can be for a shape to acquire the necessary level of recognition and brand association. New applicants for trade mark protection should perhaps seriously consider creating a mark that is inherently distinctive, rather than a mark that needs to acquire protection through use, like KitKat.
About The Author:
Megan Rae Blakely is a Lecturer in law at Lancaster University.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
How the mindset of designers can make us better leaders
by Moura Quayle
The author, second from left, is seen in this photo in a designed leadership dialogue session. The techniques of designers can help make us better leaders. (UBC School of Public Policy and Global Affairs)
When I decided to write a book on how design has informed my leadership experiences, I spent time and energy searching for a better word for my title.
After all, there are thousands of “leadership” books filling up business and self-help shelves or on the “others read this book” lists on our favourite online bookseller. But I was unsuccessful in finding another word for leadership.
But designed leadership is about how the mindset, tools and techniques of designers can make us better leaders, and so that’s the title I gave my book.
Designed leaders paint their way forward. Rhonda K/Upsplash
Leaders with a design mindset have a clear and transparent thinking or problem-solving process that works well with any number of people — family members, a community, an organization or a business. They “paint” the way forward with colourful, wide brushes to ensure a diverse range of perspectives.
I have only really ever learned in studios — places of learning-by-doing that are project-focused and highly integrative.
Studios are magic because they invite experimentation and creativity, although design is by definition a rigorous balance of the critical/analytical and the creative/generative.
The trick is knowing which aspect of our thinking processes to listen to at the right time. Is it time to converge on an idea or action? Or is it time to diverge to create more options? Whatever the action, designers have to lead.
Ask. Try. Do.
Designed leadership uses design and thinking processes. I am agnostic as to “what” design and thinking process others use. I use strategic design: ASK. TRY. DO.
When I joined the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business after four years as a deputy minister in the B.C. government in the Ministry of Advanced Education, I was challenged to introduce design methods for business innovation to business students.
I knew I needed a simple “hook” to remind students quickly of a useable process. I came up with ASK. TRY. DO. It works.
(Author provided)
Ask is about research and asking questions.
Try is about generating ideas and quickly testing them.
Do is … well, do is about doing, monitoring and evaluating.
Here’s a simple example. Leadership is often about making the best possible decisions. Say your family wants to plan a weekend adventure. Like many aspects of leadership, this decision process is collaborative and involves the whole family.
You would probably want to ask a lot of questions: What are the facts? The five W’s work well here: Why? What? When? Who? Where? It’s also probably useful to establish some criteria — what does a successful weekend look like?
Now move on to try generating ideas and testing them. This part may be the most fun as the family can call upon its creativity to generate a lot of ideas — a time for taking risks and then testing some of the ideas against your criteria for success: Safety, fun, uniqueness and cost.
And finally, do — decide on budget, time line, roles and responsibilities. And then monitor, after the weekend adventure, how the family enjoyed it. What did you learn?
All of these steps can be applied to business decisions as well by successful adherents of designed leadership.
Designing something better
I see the concept of “design thinking” that’s now relatively common as being a set of tools under the umbrella of strategic design.
Strategic design is more than design thinking. It utilizes design research, design thinking and design delivery. It drives our thinking toward transformation, to action and change, to designing something better.
There’s no recipe for this. In fact, like design, designed leadership takes different twists and turns often modified by changes in context, scale, mood and even whim.
I realized that using strategic design in leadership roles is a way of looking at the principled pragmatism of getting things done.
Design is a process driving towards a solution — a product, a service, or sometimes something intangible. When done well, the results have both utility and the elegance of complex requirements resolved.
But when solutions are held accountable to diverse interests and standards, silos of expertise often cause structural and cognitive barriers. A new set of skills and knowledge is required. Rarely do experts weave together human nature, business pragmatism and political influences to update and upgrade systems, products or organizations.
Linking values to actions
From one perspective, my work is at the increasingly hybrid convergence of diverse public, private, special and self-interests in a digital age.
A vital link between strategic design and leadership is the idea of using principles to link values to actions. More specifically, principles guide decisions and provide common points of reference for performance, accountability and improvement.
In Designed Leadership, I note 10 principles that I learned, and relearned, and relearned, which allow me to work with amazing people from different cultures, education, expertise and levels of experience to get things done.
These principles are derived from theories that are the platform of built environment design that is my background: Landscape architecture and urban design.
I thought about the various ways that we make decisions and test ideas in the built environment — and then imagined how useful they could be to the strategic design of organizations or services. Here they are:
1) Make values explicit.
2) Know place and experience.
3) Value diversity.
4) Emphasize edges and boundaries.
5) Bridge gaps and make connections.
6) Evaluate for fit, scale and context.
7) Learn from natural systems.
8) Apply the Jane Jacobs test, meaning, among other things, applying permeable thinking and mixed methodologies in your strategic design ideas.
9) Attend to patterns.
10) Never finish but always complete.
As background to the principles, I emphasize different kinds of values: Core values (like accountability, effectiveness and respect), process values (like complexity, resilience and diversity) and foundation values (like long-term, cost-effective, efficient). These values form the basis for the principles and for the practice of designed leadership.
In my book, there are also chapters on thinking visually and spatially, places to practise designed leadership, learning and education and some case studies.
But I look forward to correcting, improving and updating the book. Because designed leadership is always a work in progress; indeed, that is also its strength and what keeps our organizations dynamic and young.
Moura Quayle is Director, pro tem at the UBC School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and also, Professor in the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Outfitting the world's best athletes for the Winter Olympics
by Susan L. Sokolowski
At the first Winter Olympics, in Chamonix, France, in 1924, athletes competed in uniforms made from natural material resources like wool, cotton and leather; some had sport-specific modifications to aid in performance (like impact protection or warmth) or appearance (like a coat or skirt that would flare when spinning). They did include colors and badges to signify the countries their wearers represented, but overall their dress could have largely passed for everyday clothes. Since then, athletes’ uniforms have changed substantially.
Back 94 years ago, figure skaters like Sonja Henie of Norway wore coats, hats, sweaters and skirts that dazzled and swirled.
Norwegian figure skater Sonja Henie, age 11 in 1924, wore a fanciful coat and hat, with gloves. The Olympians
The Canadian hockey team wore leather gloves and pads; wool socks, sweaters and leggings.
Helmets anyone? Canadian Olympic Committee
Norwegian Jacob Tullin Thams, the first-ever gold medalist ski jumper, wore loose trousers tucked into socks, and a sweater over a shirt and tie.
Heading to the office after the competition? Olympic.org
Curlers from team Great Britain wore wool knickers, sweaters and jackets, with shirts, ties, gloves and caps.
Out for a stroll on the ice. Olympic.org
Team USA speed skaters wore semi-fitted leggings and tops, with stocking hats.
Hey, that’s where my long underwear went! Olympic.org
British bobsledders wore wool cable knit sweaters, trousers and caps, with a shirt and tie.
Hold on tight! Olympic.org
Engineering uniforms
Today’s Winter Olympics uniforms are engineered specifically for sport performance and look quite different from everyday clothes. And they’re definitely safer.
Throughout my career as a sports product innovator and now a professor of a new graduate program in sports product design, I have seen that the work involved to create these high-performance products is enormously complex. Sport companies will assemble teams of experts in design, pattern engineering, development, materials science, aerodynamics, data science, biomechanics and physiology to bring new ideas to fruition. Along the design process, they will also consider the rules set forth by the governing body of the specific sport, the patent landscape and branding.
Walking through the process
As an example, let’s consider the development of a new uniform for ski jumping. The goal is to create a speed skin for a person sliding down a track, leaping into the air and covering as much distance as possible while aloft. Jumpers aim to go fast, high and far – while staying warm, protected against possible crashes and having the freedom of motion to fly.
To get the process started, the innovation team will collect feedback about earlier versions of the uniforms their company previously produced. They may even look at competitor products. They’ll talk with coaches, groups and individual athletes to get detailed input about what worked well and what needed improvement.
They’ll acutely focus on the key materials that the speed skin will be made from. Material scientists will scour high-tech trade shows and research labs to identify new technologies that can enhance aerodynamics, thermoregulation and weight reduction. They may even create a new material that could be patented.
Unlike the shirt-and-tie outfit worn to win gold in 1924, modern ski jumping skins are made from synthetic polymers and are fine-tuned from the fiber to finish level. It turns out that ski jumping outfits are a lot like wet suits, made from spongy materials that help insulate and allow for the application of team logos, branding and graphics. Sometimes these specialized materials will be adopted for use in other sport products that have similar performance goals, while some manufacturers will protect their intellectual property and never commercialize them for mass distribution.
Custom fit
It’s also important to minimize wind resistance to maximize speed. Super-G skiers, who wear similar uniforms to ski jumpers, can reach speeds of more than 90 miles an hour.
Pattern engineers will draft detailed blueprints to make sure the specified materials drape smoothly around the athlete’s body, while making sure dimensions for men and women, different heights and physiques are considered. 3-D body scans may even be taken to understand the variations in shape. The team must also consider International Ski Federation rules, where there are requirements for tightness of fit and limits on how wind resistant suits can be, to prevent athletes from being unfairly aerodynamic.
Finalizing the design
Once the product design has been approved, the innovation team will develop multiple prototypes that they can test in a wind tunnel on a mannequin and on the slopes with ski jumpers. They’ll examine how well the materials and pattern shapes interface and seek approvals from national and international Olympic committees, as well as sports governing bodies (like the International Ski Federation). Sometimes athletes can be disqualified if their uniforms do not meet competition rules.
Once everything is perfected, the suits will be manufactured and shipped to athletes in time for the Olympic trials, and then the Winter Games. Every four years, the process will start over again, to make sure the next generation of Olympians are outfitted in the best uniforms possible to win gold.
Susan L. Sokolowski is Director & Associate Professor: Sports Product Design at the University of Oregon
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Fashion's potential to influence politics and culture
by Henry Navarro Delgado
Political dressing is fashionable right now, but is it fashion?
Celebrities and stars turned up dressed in black at the 75th Golden Globes Award ceremony. Instantly the media was in frenzy over what they dubbed “political fashion statements on the red carpet.” This is just the most recent droplet of a rainy season of purportedly political fashion.
It all started with the pantsuit parties in solidarity with U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016. It then progressed with white supremacists uniformed in polos and khaki during their infamous Charlottesville demonstrations last year.
As the effects of Brexit, a Donald Trump White House and the rise of so-called alt-right activism in Europe and North America ripple through the cultural waters, political dressing is trending. Protesters of all stripes — feminists, white supremacists, antifa, nationalists and social justice advocates — are outfitting themselves to match their political mindsets.
Pantsuit Power flash mob in NYC, Oct. 2, 2016. Video directed by Celia Rowlson-Hall and Mia Lidofsky. Produced by Jillian Schlesinger and Liz Sargent.
This type of political dressing is not the dress code of politicians. This is individuals and groups using everyday dress to express their political outlook. The problem is that often participants and commentators, reporters and scholars, quickly rush to label it fashion. But is political dressing fashion?
What is fashion?
The political dimension of clothing is intuitively understood from the moment individuals are born. Because essentially, human society equals dressed society. What one wears, how one wears it and when one wears it constitutes expressions of degrees of social freedoms and influences.
Dress expression ranges the full political gamut from conformity to rebellion. Simply put, dress style that challenges — or is perceived as challenging, or offering an alternative to the status quo — spontaneously acquires political meaning.
Hence the social power of dress and the political impact of seeing many people dressed in an agreed-upon mode. During the counter-demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., last summer, antifa protesters opposing white supremacists wore “black bloc” — an all-black uniform of sorts, meant to show a unified hard stance against anti-Black racist discourse.
Simultaneously, “black bloc” dress indicated a willingness to resort to violence if necessary, much like the Black Panthers did in the 1960s and 70s. The Panthers took advantage of a loophole in the second amendment of the U.S. constitution that made it lawful to wear unconcealed firearms in public.
Members of the Black Panther Party argue with a California state policeman at the Capitol in Sacramento after he disarmed them in May 1967. The armed Panthers entered the Capitol protesting a bill before the state legislature would restrict carrying firearms in public. Men in berets at centre are Panther leaders Eldridge Cleaver, left in sunglasses, and Bobby Seale. The policeman holds a weapon taken from the Panthers. (AP Photo/CPArchivePhoto)
Political dressing is a concerted effort by a group of individuals to call attention to a social issue. They do so by dressing in a codified style. The recipe of political dressing has all the ingredients of fashion, but not in the right proportions.
Fashion — as it is defined — occurs when a society at large agrees to a style, aesthetic or cultural sensibility for a period of time. Fashion’s sizeable social scope and requisite expiration date is what makes it so useful as a marker of time.
One sees it used in film, literature or social science research. Thus, fashion means timed changes in taste at a social scale. Fashion occurs in any realm of human pursuits including arts, music, technology, even scholarly discourse and of course, dress.
The source of confusion
We could blame the political dressing vs. fashion confusion on the ubiquitous and pervasive public presence of the contemporary fashion industry. From the 18th century onwards, a large sector of industry has been occupied with manufacturing what dresses us: This includes garments, accessories, beauty services and products. This industry, along with advertisers, coalesced into an all-encompassing fashion industry.
It’s not surprising then, that in today’s globalized world, most people automatically identify clothes with fashion. After all, they are one of the most visible outputs of the fashion industry. Of course, the fashion industry would do nothing to clarify this; it is in their best interest to be perceived as the source of fashion.
That same fashion industry employs a global army of trend forecasters to fine-comb historical records and a multiplicity of current cultural sources and happenings. They use this data to identify what colours, styles and products people would want next season.
More concerning, though, is that fashion scholars are contributing to the public confusion about political dress as fashion. They are interchangeably using the terms dress, style and fashion without regards for their fundamental semantic difference. There is a cultural explanation for this too. Fashion is an emerging scholarly discipline, which makes it very fashionable right now. Slap the word fashion to the title of an academic article or book and readership is likely to follow.
Is political dressing is fashion trend? The #tiedtogether movement used white bandanas to indicate the ‘common bonds of humanity’ Courtesy of The Business of Fashion
The trend of political dressing
Could it be that like fashion studies, political dressing is a fashion trend? Based on the number of collections that included political statements during the 2017 fashion weeks, the answer would be a rotund yes. Several collections during the last season of fashion weeks employed political statements.
Political runway antics included pink pussy hats at Missoni. There were white bandanas as a symbol of inclusion in Tommy Hilfiger, Thakoon, Prabal Gurung, Phillip Lim, Dior and Diane von Furstenberg.
Meanwhile, black berets à la guerrilla or Black Panther uniforms were shown at Dior. As well, all sorts of slogans printed or embroidered in a diversity of garments popped up at Ashish Gupta, Public School and Christian Siriano, punctuated by graphic underwear in LRS’s collection.
This, however, isn’t necessarily good news. The fashion industry has a solid record of co-opting political and countercultural movements, marginalized groups and non-Western cultures, then making a good profit out of it.
There would be nothing wrong with making money this way, except that the aftermath of co-option by the fashion industry is cultural irrelevance. Just like other goods, fashion must be consumed before its expiration date.
The good news is that political dressing may be fashionable, but it isn’t fashion. Not even the global fashion industry can prevent individuals from using their dressed bodies as a tool for political discourse.
So go ahead, pick your preferred political graphic T-shirt or wear the colours of your party of choice. Just remember that isn’t fashion, unless most everybody else decides to dress the same for a while. In which case, your options are: Embrace your fashionable status or change either your outfit or political affiliation.
Henry Navarro Delgado is an Assistant Professor of Fashion at Ryerson University
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Amazon's new headquarters: here's what it will take to be the winning city
by Jim Coleman
Amazon’s original headquarters in Seattle. Shutterstock.
Cities across the US are locked in fierce competition to host Amazon’s second headquarters – known as HQ2. This is a big race: a shortlist of 20 cities seems to think this particular corporate investment can go a long way to solving some of their ongoing economic problems.
The process of inward investment – whereby large firms establish operations in a new location, either at home or abroad – has been seen for a long time as a way of creating positive economic change. They can create many new jobs in areas which are crying out for them, but they also bring new entrepreneurial activity, improved management skills, international know-how and a wider boost to other local businesses.
But these decisions can cause big problems. As is typical, Amazon has effectively set off a competition between a number of major US cities for its investment, which means they will all now be trying to outbid each other in terms of the “offer” they can make. This will include their existing assets such as land, infrastructure, transport connectivity and, most importantly, people – ideally with the right blend of skills and aptitudes that Amazon needs.
The big downside of this form of competition is that cities will start offering inducements of a fiscal nature – usually in the form of tax breaks – in order to capture the big prize.
A big prize
Amazon is now one of the biggest businesses in the world, having very successfully tapped into our growing desire for the convenience of online shopping and deliveries to our doorstep. The business is evolving and expanding, and the company now needs a second major HQ operation, in addition to their existing global control centre in Seattle.
With the promise of up to 50,000 new jobs and US$5 billion in construction investment, it is no surprise that over 230 US cities threw their hats into the ring for this major prize. Bids were invited, and then a shortlist of 20 possible host cities drawn up. This list includes major metropolises such as Atlanta, Boston and Los Angeles, as well as smaller cities such as Indianapolis, Miami, Austin and Columbus, Ohio.
Major inward investments do indeed have the capacity for major economic uplift. But it’s not just the volume of jobs that might be created locally which is important – it’s how this new investment becomes truly embedded into the local and wider regional economy. There are many examples of big business investing in an area, only to up sticks a decade later and move on to the next best location – often overseas - to take advantage of lower operating costs.
The long game
Each bidding city needs to be very clear about what it is prepared to offer Amazon. If this includes tax incentives, then there also needs to be an obvious, long-term payoff, in terms of local economic impact. The winning city must have a firm strategy in place for receiving Amazon, and this needs to cover a few significant factors. For instance, the city needs to have a clear idea of how many new jobs will really be created, how good they are and over what time period they will appear.
Amazon, like many big e-commerce businesses, will be quick to take advantage of the efficiency savings driven by automation and artificial intelligence. This may eventually reduce the total number of jobs available in its new facility.
Ideally, the city that wins will be able to create a business environment that encourages Amazon to locate more and better quality jobs away from Seattle and not just have lower-order, back office functions in its new operation.
Similarly, inward investment can have a major impact economically by strengthening local supply chains – those local businesses that can provide specialised goods and services to the new arrival. These supply chains need to operate effectively and be supported with managerial, infrastructural and skills enhancement, so that they become a critical part of Amazon’s business model. That way, the firm will not want to move away later on, because it cannot take its unique local supply chain operation with it. Better to stay put and keep investing in the host location.
The race to win the new Amazon HQ should not be a quick sprint to the finish. It’s more like a marathon that needs careful, long-term planning if the full benefits are to be achieved for the winning city.
Jim Coleman is Professor of Professional Practice at the University of Westminster
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Virtual reality chatroom app could boost VR industry
by David Evans Bailey
During the first month of 2018, an app called VRChat shot from 4,000 installs to more than two million.
As the name suggests, VRChat is an internet chat application. It can be played either on screen or with an immersive headset. The increase in potential users wearing virtual reality headsets could herald a big change for the industry as a whole.
The next big thing
As with any new technology, investors are always looking for the next big thing. So far, progress for VR has been good but not great by investment standards. What is needed is the same kind of phenomenon that drove the rise of the smartphone.
To be clear, installing the software doesn’t mean that two million people are using it every day. The number of daily users is in the thousands, but nevertheless it is significant.
To get the best from the technology, users need to buy VR headsets, either an Oculus Rift, HTC Vive or similar, and a computer capable of running this hardware. That in itself can be a significant investment.
According to a MIT technology review, 400,000 Oculus Rifts and 500,000 HTC Vives were sold in 2016. A two million or more user base would imply that these figures could be doubled in the first months of 2018 alone.
If VRChat was to continue on its upward trajectory, one might expect sales of VR hardware to come on the back of this one application. Of course, once you have the VR hardware then you will start using it for more than just VRChat.
What to make of VRChat
When you enter the first chatroom, you are given an avatar, which you can change. There are many chatrooms and you can walk around inside them. You can make your avatar talk and make gestures or expressions – and even clever things like flips using the hand controllers.
Engaging in audible conversations with other users is of course the main point. Mirrors are provided in some areas so that you can see yourself as an avatar. Overall the feeling is rather like being in a vast network of strange rooms with strangers, a bit like visiting the mall in cyberspace.
A personal foray into the domain left me with mixed feelings. I own an HTC Vive and have the full panoply of the immersive experience available to me. On a personal level I was unimpressed, but then chat is not really my thing. I found the movement nauseating because one cannot teleport easily around the space.
A basic issue with VR is moving in space without actually moving your body. If you engage a fluid steady movement around a space, this often generates the feeling of nausea because the body is standing still. It is not unlike seasickness. So, in most apps, developers tend to put in a teleport facility on the hand controller so that you can jump from one place to another, which is more pleasant.
Apart from that, the standard avatars available are fun but limited, but it seems people bring their own. Also, engaging in chat with strangers in a virtual space is almost the same as walking into a bar and starting up a random conversation. This doesn’t come naturally.
That being said, the graphics and environs are of a good standard, as one might expect. Chatophiles, however, will probably have a very different view, and VRChat is most likely to be attractive to them.
Pushing VR into mainstream
VRChat is not the only chat program designed for immersion. AltspaceVR was launched in 2015 with the aim of taking advantage of the new technologies. It had some initial success but almost failed due to lack of funding.
It was bought by Microsoft in 2017 but has not, so far, attained the same heights as VRChat. Why this app is more popular than another is hard to say, just as the popularity of Snapchat or any other internet phenomenon is almost impossible to predict in advance.
Perhaps this is the real virtue of the online community, in that normal business models don’t necessarily apply. After all, nobody would have expected a woman putting on a Wookie mask to generate over 10 million views.
A video of a woman who puts on a Wookie mask and can’t stop laughing has gone viral.
VRChat will either continue to rise or peak. However, Second Life, launched in 2003 and is still generating millions of dollars in revenue both for the owners, Linden Life, and other content providers.
Based on the experience of that model, VRChat is here to stay. Although its contribution to the VR industry is not yet known, it is only a matter of time before this app or something like it pushes VR into the mainstream.
David Evans Bailey is aPh.D. Researcher in Virtual Reality
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
The transformation of the Super Bowl ad experience
by Mark Bartholomew
In an era of increasing media fragmentation, you could describe the Super Bowl as the only annual media event where a substantial portion of the U.S. population gathers at the same time to watch the same thing: Over 100 million people tune in, and a good portion say the ads are the main reason they’re watching in the first place.
For these reasons, the Super Bowl is the granddaddy of all ad buys.
But in recent years, the tradition of millions of people simultaneously sharing the same commercial experience has become more complicated.
As I discuss in my new book, advertisers are leveraging new technologies to track our personal habits and target us with individualized advertising. In other words, they want to make sure the ads we see are aligned with our existing tastes and preferences. It’s based on research showing that a “personalized” ad is more likely to stick in our heads and trigger a sale.
This sort of thing happens when we receive direct mail based on the type of car we own. It happens in the supermarket checkout lane when our shopper’s loyalty card tells advertisers our purchase histories.
It’s happening during the Super Bowl, too. And it may even change the way we see Super Bowl ads in the future.
Companies build personal digital profiles
Journalists tend to make a sport out of Super Bowl advertising. Like the stock market, the prices of ads get analyzed. Like movie previews, teasers of ads for the big game are distributed and discussed before they air. And just like the game’s biggest plays, the ads get dissected afterward, with advertising experts breaking down which ones worked and which ones didn’t.
Others recognize the collective nature of this event by characterizing Super Bowl ads as important reflections of the national spirit. Apple’s famous “1984” ad channeled the Cold War. Other ads notoriously captured the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Last year, various commercials were praised and critiqued for their implicit rebukes of the nascent Trump administration.
But a Super Bowl ad doesn’t just end when its 30 seconds on TV are up; it creeps into our lives in ways you might not realize.
By one estimate, 78 percent of Super Bowl viewers will engage with social media while watching the game. When they do so, they will supply valuable data for hungry marketers. When individual audience members share an ad or make a comment about one on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram – either during the game or after – those posts are tracked and cataloged. They become part of our digital profiles, auctioned off to the highest advertising bidder.
Those who are more interested in the party or the game – but are nonetheless using social media – are still providing information that’s valuable to advertisers.
Even an innocuous Super Bowl party selfie can be mined for advertising gold. For example, Coca-Cola recently used an image recognition engine to identify people who posted pictures in which they appeared happy or excited with cans or bottles of their competitors. Coca-Cola then targeted these people with ads for their products on 40 mobile sites and apps.
So if you’re holding a can of Miller Lite or a bag of Doritos, Budweiser and Pringles might take note.
Image recognition engines can determine the preferred brands of users through the photos they post on social media. Mike Mozart, CC BY
Mining our brains to tailor the ad experience
Perhaps the most startling form of market research going on is the commercial surveillance taking place inside our heads.
Because there’s so much money riding on each Super Bowl ad – more than $5 million for each 30-second spot – advertisers want to make sure they resonate. It’s difficult to measure advertising effectiveness, so marketers have turned to brain science for an answer.
For over a decade, neuroscientists have been scanning the brains of select Super Bowl viewers to see how they react to the commercials that air. Their studies purport to reveal the narratives and images that best capture the public’s attention in a way that postgame surveys of Super Bowl audiences cannot. This information can then be leveraged to develop more effective Super Bowl ads in the future.
Now, however, neuroscience is being used in the service of ad customization. A test conducted during last year’s Super Bowl scanned subjects’ brain activity and tested their responses to different kinds of ads. Researchers adjusted the order of the ads shown during the game to fit each person’s revealed preferences. (The test required viewers to see the game on a 40-minute delay.)
Just as the neuroscientists had hoped, strategically altering the ordering of the ads to fit these preferences increased audience attention.
The ultimate goal of studies like this is to target viewers with personalized television commercials. Cable providers and television networks are bullish on using new technologies to deliver something called “addressable television,” the process of sending specific TV commercials to individual households.
Personalized TV has already been used to target married women with children with ads for an amusement park and international fliers with ads for online travel. But addressable television need not be limited to showcasing particular products. Commercials could be customized to feature either a happy ending or a sad one, depending on who’s watching.
If television becomes yet another site of individual targeting – like social media and online browsing – something will be lost. The Super Bowl, the event that seemingly brings the country together once a year, may become yet another media experience that cloisters us in our own digital bubbles.
About the author:
Mark Bartholomew is a Professor of Law at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Instagram is changing the way we experience art, and that's a good thing
by Adam Suess and Kylie Budge
An Instagram post from Gerhard Richter’s exhibition at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art. Instagram/@gracie_yu
With 800 million users and growing, it was perhaps inevitable that Instagram would shake up the art world. The social photo platform has been accused by the media of fanning a narcissistic selfie culture. But in galleries, research is showing that the negative aspects are far outweighed by the positive. Instagram is changing the way we experience and share our visits to exhibitions, and how we perceive art.
In fact, arts institutions are now actively courting Instagram users. The Museum of Ice Cream in the US is considered one of the most Instagrammed exhibitions, with over 125,000 hashtagged posts. The show included such Insta-friendly displays as giant cherries, suspended bananas, and a rainbow sprinkle pool, inviting the visitor into a colourful space of neatly guided photo opportunities.
Closer to home, the current Triennial at the National Gallery of Victoria features several large, Insta-friendly installations. Visitors are invited to lie on Alexandra Kehayoglou’s carpet work, Santa Cruz River (which depicts a river in Argentina that is at the centre of a contentious damming proposal), and take their photo in a mirror on the ceiling.
Artist Yayoi Kusama, also at the Triennial, uses light, space, colour and patterns and attracts a strong Instagram fanbase to her exhibitions. Kusama’s obliteration room, currently being exhibited in Queensland, is another popular, Instagrammed experience, which invites visitors to stick colourful dots all over a white room. A similar work at the NGV covers the interior of a house with flowers.
Perils and possibilities
Increased visitor photography at galleries and museums has proved controversial at times. Recently a visitor to Los Angeles pop-up art gallery The 14th Factory destroyed $200,000 worth of crown sculptures. The sculptures rested on top of a series of plinths, and while attempting a selfie the visitor fell, knocking the plinths down in a domino style chain reaction.
In another instance visitors damaged an 800-year-old coffin at the Prittlewell Priory Museum in the UK. The visitors had lifted a child over a protective barrier into the coffin in pursuit of the perfect photo. Their actions caused the ancient artefact to be knocked off its stand resulting in a large piece of the coffin breaking off.
Many exhibitions still place restrictions on photography, and most galleries still prohibit selfie sticks. Reasons often cited for these restrictions include copyright considerations, concerns over the visitor experience, and potential for damage to works caused by manoeuvring selfie sticks and flash lighting (although it is debatable whether flashes do damage art).
Banning photography on the basis that it interferes with the visitor’s experience could be seen as cultural elitism; expressing a view that art can only be appreciated in an orthodox manner. It also ignores the potential of Instagram to bring a new dimension to artists, curators, exhibition designers and visitors.
Recent research at Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art Gerhard Richter exhibition showed that visitors use Instagram as part of their aesthetic experience. A number of participants posted Richter’s art works on Instagram creatively immersing themselves in the image, wearing clothes matching the art, and copying Richter’s signature blurred style.
Another study at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences’ Recollect: Shoes exhibition in Sydney found that audiences used Instagram primarily to engage with exhibition content; not by taking selfies. Visitors mostly photographed the intricate details of the shoes’ design.
This finding was echoed in a larger study that focused on Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Far from the narcissistic selfie-obsessive behaviour that much media coverage insists is occurring, Instagram offers visitors authority and agency in sharing their experience.
This connects audiences with museum content in a way that they can control and is meaningful to them. New research shows how this activity is also tied to place - the museum, and the city beyond it.
Using Instagram in public spaces like museums and galleries is complex. It’s tied to broader research that shows how social media use in public spaces is challenging a range of social norms.
As researchers working in this emerging area, we see much value in curators and exhibition designers making use of Instagram to inform how they plan exhibitions. It could help build new audiences and strengthen connections with existing visitors. While removing all visitor photography restrictions is not possible, it is our view that visitor expectations and experiences have now changed. The future of cultural institutions needs to include Instagram.
Adam Suess is a PhD candidate in Education at Griffith University and Kylie Budge is a Senior Research Fellow in the Urban Living & Society at Western Sydney University.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds became the most played PC game on the digital distribution platform Steam, with its battle-royale, scavenge and survive 100 player gameplay shaking up the first-person shooter genre.
Nintendo’s new console, the Switch, blew us away with the latest games in the Zelda and Mario franchises.
And the cathartic nazi-Killing of Wolfenstein II was particularly timely, given the recent resurgence of white supremacy in the political sphere.
Gaming also proved hugely popular with Amazon Australia customers in the first week after its launch on December 5, accounting for six of the the top 10 purchases.
So what are the biggest releases of 2018 shaping up to be?
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite
Harry Potter Wizards Unite. from https://nianticlabs.com/press/2017/wizardsunite/
Off the back of the phenomenal success of Pokemon Go, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite seeks to combine location-based play, augmented reality and our pining nostalgia for the Harry Potter universe into another global game.
It’s likely to recreate the same viral, flavour-of-the-week success as Pokemon Go, with players eager to see what changes in gameplay augmented reality platform Niantic has introduced in its bid to convert fleeting players into lifelong fans.
Despite the calamitous reactions to its plummeting player numbers, Pokemon Go is estimated to still be making between AUD$1.9 - $3.2 million dollars per day from micro-transactions.
Red Dead Redemption 2
Red Dead Redemption 2. from Rockstar Games
The prequel to 2010’s Red Dead Redemption will almost certainly be one of the largest games of 2018, with a marketing budget likely to rival a Marvel Movie.
The first RDR combined the cinematic experience of the Western movie genre with a rich, immersive and dynamic environment, and was celebrated as having one of the best single player campaign stories of all time.
Red Dead Redemption 2’s stunning trailer hints at how the game has stayed close to the rich world of the 2010 title, so players should expect something reassuringly familiar.
Don’t pre-order it yet though, as maker Rockstar Games has been widely criticised for the focus on micro-transactions in its Grand Theft Auto series, and a transition to a “games as a service” business model. It’s possible that the focus of RDR2 will be the same kind of aggressively profitable online multiplayer model, and not the immersive story and world building that RDR is celebrated for.
Read more: ‘Loot boxes’ and pay-to-win features in digital games look a lot like gambling
Far Cry 5
Far Cry 5: Official Announcement Trailer.
The latest instalment in the celebrated first-person, open world Far Cry series takes the game away from remote islands or African savannah to the apparently far more dangerous rural America.
Far Cry 5 is also the first in the series to allow players to create their own character. You can choose the gender and race of your avatar, and the entire campaign can be played in cooperative play.
All the games in the Far Cry series have been extremely well reviewed, and it’s likely this fifth instalment will continue to propel the open world, role-play genre forward.
Mount and Blade: Bannerlord
Mount and Blade Bannerlord. From Taleworlds
From the tiny Turkish developer TaleWorlds, the Mount and Blade series combines one of the best medieval combat simulators with open world role-play. Players start alone, but via quests, trade, battles and political strategy, they can eventually command huge armies from horseback.
Despite not releasing a new title since 2011, Mount and Blade has built up a huge fan base thanks to the game’s active “modding” community, who build new functions not originally included in the game. Unusually, TaleWorlds even worked with one modding team to release Mount and Blade: Viking Conquest as a paid “mod” (short for modification).
Read more: Curious Kids: Why do adults think video games are bad?
Bannerlord is the newest game in the series. It promises updated graphics, an expanded siege mode and more missions in the game’s story mode, where players can aspire to ascend to the throne of one of the game’s major kingdoms.
Don’t pre-order it yet though, TaleWorlds still has not confirmed the release date for the game (originally expected in 2017) and the small studio has shared very few details about it.
The Last of Us Part 2
The Last of Us Part II Reveal Trailer.
The Last of Us was released in 2013 to nearly universal critical acclaim. The post-apocalyptic survival game was praised for basically everything – its story, characters, combat, immersive world and aesthetic.
The 2018 sequel is hotly anticipated.
Although very little is known about the game so far, The Last of Us Part 2 sees the return of an adult Ellie, who the player protected as a child in the first game. The teaser trailer hints that the new game has retained the same graphic – and controversial – depictions of violence as the original.
The Last Of Us was unusually effective at balancing the violence alongside a deep – but criticised – story of relationships and companionship. If you haven’t played the earlier title, it definitely stands up against many more recent releases.
Marcus Carter is a Lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
The secret behind the success of the new 'Star Wars' films
by Subimal Chatterjee
In the 40 years since the original “Star Wars” film premiered, the franchise has been a pop culture powerhouse.
“The Last Jedi” – the latest edition in the series – looks to continue the trend, with huge box office returns expected.
It also looks poised to join “The Force Awakens” (93 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) and “Rogue One” (85 percent) as “Star Wars” films that are both commercially and critically successful.
Not all “Star Wars” films have hit that sweet spot. It’s sometimes easy to forget the prequel trilogy – “The Phantom Menace” (1999), “Attack of the Clones” (2002) and “Revenge of the Sith” (2005) – wasn’t met with the same enthusiastic response from critics and fans, and hasn’t been looked upon kindly since.
What made the prequel trilogy such a (relative) dud? Why are the more recent films being so much better received?
If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it
Research I helped conduct on what makes for a good extension (sequel or prequel) may provide some insight.
My colleagues and I tracked audience reactions to sequels and prequels over the course of nearly a hundred franchises, from “Psycho” to “X-Men.”
Our results show that the successful franchises make smaller, gradual updates – rather than sweeping changes – in each successive film. And it fits well with what we know about audience behavior: They seek a balance between the familiar and the new; while they aren’t looking for a carbon copy of the originals, they’re hoping to relive some of the most vivid, nostalgic moments from the first films.
With these findings in mind, let’s reexamine prequel series of “Star Wars.” When “The Phantom Menace,” the first of the prequels, was released in 1999, it had been 16 years since audiences had seen a new “Star Wars” film. (The original trilogy had just finished up a successful theatrical re-release.)
But fans hoping to relive the magic of the originals were in for a surprise.
The beloved trio of Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), Harrison Ford (Han Solo) and Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) gave way to new faces: Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman. Instead of relying on real sets, miniatures and models to pull off the breathtaking special effects in the originals, director George Lucas opted mostly for computer-generated and digital effects. There were also changes to the rules of the “Star Wars” world. The Force was no longer being described as an all-encompassing life force that bound everyone together; it was now being explained as the result of special biological cells called “midichlorians.” (And I won’t even go into the widely loathed Jar Jar Binks.)
Out with the new, in with the old
In contrast the newest film, “The Last Jedi,” includes many of the original cast members. Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher return to portray Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, respectively. And it features the popular “hero’s journey” plot device of the original films, in which an ordinary person’s life is unexpectedly upended, and he is thrust into the role of the hero.
We see this phenomenon in other film series and even product lines. Though the lead actor will occasionally change, the James Bond series never strays from its action-film formula. Apple has a similar approach when releasing new iPhones; before taking the leap to a radically new version, it will release an incremental “S” version of the previous model as a bridge.
That isn’t to say the new “Star Wars” films aren’t making any changes: There are more female protagonists, in addition to a host of new characters. But this isn’t exactly shattering fans’ expectations.
Our research also found that the deeper into a franchise you get, the more major changes audiences are willing to accept. The next “Star Wars” trilogy will expand the boundaries of the “Star Wars” world, exploring planets and featuring characters not yet seen on film.
With this move, the studio is willing to bet that audiences are finally ready to accept some major changes in the franchise – something they weren’t quite ready for yet when the prequels were released.
However, in order to ensure the Force remains strong over the franchise’s lifetime, these future films would be wise to continue including at least a handful of nods to the original trilogy.
Subimal Chatterjee is Professor of Marketing at Binghamton University, State University of New York.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Clarks and Star Wars™ join forces to announce a collaborative shoe collection for women and girls, championing female power and authenticity in character and style
“STRONGER THAN SHE KNOWS” – KYLO REN
The newest installment in the Star Wars™ franchise has brought a positive female role model to the forefront for fans and families around the world. True to herself, Rey is uncompromising and represents strength and power without limitations or apologies. This season, we introduce a unique Star Wars™ | Clarks collaboration for women and girls, designed to celebrate the force of female power, just in time for the release of one of this year’s most anticipated films, Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
Rey’s strength became a deep source of inspiration for the collaboration and is a vital embodiment of the brand’s ethos – a platform for free thinking people who are true to themselves, comfortable in their own skin and inspired by authenticity.
Force of Nature is a collection pioneering new materials, construction and technologies for extreme comfort. It empowers its wearer with an advanced footbed structure, created to achieve optimum comfort, push flexibility and champion durability. The close-fit, high-top design keeps the ankle protected, and the soft fleece lining and innovative lacing system ensures the foot stays warm and dry, providing extra protection against the elements.
The Star Wars I Clarks collection is available to buy in select stores and online from 1st December 2017.
