During my 5 years back in Canada, I have been faithful to one beer brand – King Pilsener. King was a microbrewery in Nobleton (next to King City, north of Toronto) that had a very simple idea: Buy the best equipment and ingredients from the Czech Republic, and make a pilsener as good as or better than Czechvar, Pilsner […]
When I moved back to Canada in 2010, I had a new commuting challenge: to regularly travel 220 return kilometres, from west Toronto to Waterloo, ON. For my wife and two kids, I needed comfortable seating and trunk space too. Since I would be parking on the street in my more urban-than-suburban neighbourhood, I didn’t want to get […]
We’ve moved into our new home with 2 showers, and I did the thing everybody on HGTV gets excited about. Each shower area has a rain shower and a hand shower – 4 shower heads in total. I bought 3 shower heads in North America. I ordered the one below from Speakman. Speakman is an […]
Sports bars can save you money. Here’s the calculation: Most normal people who like sports probably really only watch about 5 full games of football / soccer / hockey a month. Those same people have a super expensive cable package to watch those games at home – between $80 and $120. Compare that to: Go […]
I like Weetabix. It was introduced to me in my youth, when my British-raised Cypriot-Dutch cousins would have it on the breakfast table in Cyprus. To a very young Canadian, it was a British cereal. Plain, unassuming, a bit mechanical, and texturally fascinating as the milk mutated the very fabric of the cereal within 10 […]
I’ve often been impressed by Amazon’s automated recommendations. I think I’ve actually bought a lot of stuff they’ve told me I might be interested in, based on my buying and browsing history. This recommendation confused me though:
Last month Arsenal sent me a renewal reminder for my silver membership (lets me buy individual tickets quite easily). I thought “that’s quite clever, and I do feel like part of the team.” Although I must say Cesc’s hand is getting quite close to slow-dance level. My wife, whose last name is Woods, was less […]
More interesting than “ERROR”. Firefox tries to exude personality even in its user interface. When I was looking after Brand Offering (winking at my former colleagues) for the world’s number one mobile company, I used to urge caution when people tried to make parts of the user experience too “interesting.” For example, there was one […]
As a big fan of the Montreal Canadiens in the 1970’s and 1980’s, I used to collect hockey cards. The company that manufactured them was called O-Pee-Chee, and I loved the photography, having all the players’ stats on the back at my disposal, and I especially remember noticing the visual cues that signalled one year’s […]
Thanks to Paul, the webmaster of the immensely popular activist site www.love6music.com for placing my article about BBC 6 Music on the front page last week. It provided quite a few hits for my humble brand-blog. My post tried to explain what was going on through former P&G / Pepsi Marketer Tim Davie’s brand brain, explained […]