Business and management articles | Cooler Insights

January 10, 2010 • Blog • 2 comments

At the kind invitation of HP/Microsoft through Waggener Edstrom, I attended a panel discussion and ideation exercise titled “Future Is: The Online Community Talks About the Future of Things”. Held at the Giraffe Restaurant at the Istana Park across the road from Plaza Singapura, it was attended largely by bloggers, tech entrepreneurs, and students with a new media interest.

Featuring purveyors of tech like Daniel Tsou of Tech65, Willis Wee of Penn Olson, Nicholas Aaron Khoo of C-Net Asia’s Geekonomics, fashion blogger/editor Mina Sunico and Brian Ling of Design Sojourn, the session was a good refresher for me on what’s new and what’s hot in the world of technology.

Imagination versus Pragmatism

January 8, 2010 • Blog • no comments

Dubai was all about the dream without the reality, and landed itself with a huge debt. (courtesy of Bobesh)

There are two school of thoughts in marketing. The first belongs to the world of imagination while the second is centred on pragmatism. Do these spheres of marketing always have to sit on opposite poles?

Let us look at this in some detail.

Adopting Multiple Marketing Perspectives

January 6, 2010 • Blog • no comments

eye see you, originally uploaded by jwlphotography.

To succeed in the art and science of marketing, one cannot simply stick to one central approach and hope to wing it come what may. What’s needed instead are a mix of both long-term, medium-term and short-term views. The adoption of these perspectives should vary depending on one’s vantage point.

For a start, one should have a clear long-term vision of the goal and desired end point. What are the overall objectives of one’s marketing efforts? Heightened customer satisfaction? Improved profits? Greater sales turnover? Or stronger brand positioning? Deep in the trenches of marketing skirmishes and battles, one should never forget what the end goal is.

Next, one should look at the medium-term strategies that are needed to accomplish that. What would be the few projects spanning several months to year that should be considered? These could be the development of new products, refurbishing of shop-fronts, training of staff in new areas, organisation of events, or upgrading of service levels.

Transitions in Life

December 29, 2009 • Blog • 2 comments

Transitions are like the rainbow which appears after the storm (courtesy of pleem1983)

Everybody goes through transitions every now and then. Some are overjoyed by the experience. Others become truly terrified. These transformative phases molds and metamorphoses one, changing one either in a positive or a negative manner.

Transitions are the rites of passage which marks the end of one stage and the beginning of another. They are the indistinct stages of limbo, where one grapples with issues of identity and self-worth, while gearing up for a new role in life. Like the refining fire of a goldsmith, they can be hot and bothersome. However, they do lead towards a fresh understanding of what one’s goals and values are, making one see better in the long road of life.

The Four Rs of Winning Businesses

December 25, 2009 • Blog • no comments

Competing in a crowded marketplace requires the 4 Rs (Shinjuku courtesy of William Bullimore)

What are the most important ingredients in any successful business?

Is it the ability to stimulate Recognition deep, far and wide, penetrating into every household (or organisation) in the land?

Why Avatar is so Awesome

December 22, 2009 • • 2 comments

Courtesy of OfficialAvatarMovie

By now, probably half of the world’s cinema going geeks would have watched Avatar, James Cameron’s latest mega blockbuster featuring blue-skinned 3 m tall aliens battling robot riding humans in a tropical moon. With a huge budget of close to US$500 million, Avatar is one of the most expensive Hollywood productions to date, and initial box office results look promising despite the relentless wintry snowstorms in the Western world. There are many excellent movie reviews available on the web, so I wouldn’t bore you with yet another critique of its hits and misses.

Let us look instead at some of the ingredients which Avatar has applied that led to its successful opening and made it such a huge global rave.

6 Ways to Strike Gold at Sovereign Hill

December 1, 2009 • • 1 comment

One of the great things about the award winning outdoor museum Sovereign Hill at Ballarat is the amount of activities that one can participate in. You can either dig for gold, pan for gold in the river, ogle bars of gold in sheltered comfort, experience how miners lived, or frolick amongst “denizens” of a former gold-mining town in the 19th century. While not all that glitters is real gold – for obvious security reasons – one can be fairly assured of having a glowing and goldilicious good time here!

Our first stop at the Gold Museum brings us face to face with the 4.4 kg, $250,000 Goldasaurus, a huge nugget of pure gold.

The City Built on Gold

November 27, 2009 • Blog • 1 comment

Located northwest of Melbourne city, Ballarat was famous for being a mining town, and the site generated the greatest amount of gold during the Victorian Gold Rush of the 1850s. The city occupies an area of 740 square kilometres and houses an estimated population of over 88,000, and has a mixture of Victorian-era architecture interspersed by modern day buildings. Considered one of the state’s premier tourism destination, Ballarat attracts some 1.8 million day trip visitors and about 13% of Victoria’s annual 1.1 million overseas visitors.

Taking a walk along the streets and roads of Ballarat, one can’t help feeling that it has retained much of that old world small town charm of a bygone era, while still modernising itself. The streetscape is vastly different from Melbourne as you may have guessed, and while vestiges of gold-generated opulence can be seen in its buildings, most are classically elegant rather than overtly ostentatious.

The Ballarat train station built in 1862 is the first place to check out. One can see that the name Victorian Railways befits the regal look of this building. The V-Line train from Melbourne stops here.

Shockingly Good Advertisements?

November 10, 2009 • • 4 comments

As I was walking along Swanston Street this afternoon, a couple of advertisements caught my attention. Both came from the Worksafe Victoria, a government agency tasked to improve workplace health and safety in the state of Victoria. They were both very eye-catching and immediately got the message through.

Here’s the first from a tram stop shelter:

Sovereign Hill Shines

November 9, 2009 • • 143 comments

Perched atop a hill in the gold mining city of Ballarat in Victoria, Sovereign Hill is an award winning outdoor museum cum heritage attraction which first opened in November 1970. Recreating the essence of a 19th century mining town, the open-air museum occupies a sprawling 25 hectare site that is linked to one of the richest alluvial gold rush in the world. Adding to its authenticity are staff members dressed in Victorian-era clothes who are friendly in an unpretentious manner.

Unlike commercially oriented theme parks plastered with sponsor brands, Sovereign Hill charms with realistic portrayal of life in the 19th century devoid of 20th and 21st century logos. Many of the shops also adopt traditional ways of making and retailing heritage goods and services, from blacksmiths to bars and bakeries. What’s especially surprising were the multiple layers of experience which one encounters as a visitor, which whisks one magically away to a different time and place.

Our day began with a bang as a costumed musket-eer shows us how traditional guns were fired.

The Crystal Ball of Technology