Social Hallucinations

Just Bake and Enjoy

I love the smell of fresh baked bread. It created the atmosphere of cosiness and it is so homely. Personally I think that there is no better therapy than smell of freshly baked bread. There is something essential in it, something that touches you deeply and brings you to being simple human again. I have now my fancy bread baking machine to save time and avoid too much dishwashing, but still waking up in the morning and entering the kitchen filled with smell of warm bread, make me smile widely and feel that the day is going to be wonderful.

Today, people look for the feelings of authenticity, they want to get back to the roots. They seek for natural products, they want to get closer to nature and in a way traditional life. It gets home bread baking to be trendy. I've observed lately a lot of recipes for bread appeared in food magazines. It can be kind of our get away from technology dominated, stressed out life and ready-prepared plastic food into something more natural.

But still baking bread isn't easy. It is a long process, a little mess and lots of dishwashing. Actually it doesn't fit too much into busy lifestyles. Today in supermarket I've found the perfect solution and genius idea - Just Bake. It meets the need for fresh break baked at home and solve all problems around it. Just Bake can be described with three words:

It means WATER - SHAKE - BAKE.

Just Bake gives you the fresh bread without hassle. The ecological ingredients are packed in a carton, which is used for baking as well. You open the box, add water, shake and bake. Isn't it great! I love the simplicity of idea and how it makes life easier and nicer.

The idea was born, funny enough, in the head of baker. He thought himself that baking at home was too demanding. He found out that you could use the carton as you use for juice to bake the bread. Successful innovation, indeed! I bought a box and I am going to try it in weekend.

Tags: innovation, bread, Denmark, just bake

How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

74%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Tags: blogs

Being Green vs. Acting Green

World is talking a lot about GREEN wave, saving the planet and our environment. CO2 emission is on every politician lips. It is trendy to be GREEN - we wear green socks, green trousers and drive in huge SUV's, let water drip and forget to turn off the lights. I am a huge fan of green and I'm not fond of  humans' arrogance towards environment. We act so often like vandals who destroy public property. We have just borrowed the earth from the future generations and it would be nice if our grandchildren could enjoy fresh air and water.
However I believe we can't change our attitude and behavior with the pompous political statements, increased costs for fuel, cars or energy.  This doesn't get us any closer the problems we are facing. For me this is first and foremost the personal matter - the question of personal culture and respect for others.
When I was at university, I shared an apartment for a very short time with a girl who rarely opened window in her room, she used lots of cosmetics, didn't care about trash segregation and never remembered to turn  the lights off but she took quite often part in protests, chained herself to trees and fought for the environment.

Yes, she tried. But it didn't changed the fact that she participated actively in destroying environment.
It is important we develop in ourselves and our children the good habit of taking care for our planet. It doesn't take too much energy, small things can make a difference if billions of people will do them. It is about developing the behavior patterns that are easy to copy and can spread virally.

Beautiful "GREEN" spot. Great film, fantastic effects and clear message.

There is another one from Smirnoff. It is excellent execution, beautiful pictures, stunning effects, but makes you wonder how Smirnoff is linked with environment. You will surely get green out of sickness when you poisoned your body with too much purified vodka. However worth to watch for visual experience.

Tags: environment, green, advertising, smirnoff

S.E.P.

"An S.E.P. ," he said, "is something that we can't see, or don't see, our brain doesn't let us see, because we think it's somebody else's problem. That's what S.E.P. means. Somebody Else's Problem. The brain just edits it out; it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won't see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye."

 (Douglas Adams, Life, Universe and Everything)

Doesn't it sound familiar? I stumble every day on S.E.P.'s. They lie all over around. We need the new "reality check" glasses prescription, so we can see all the S.E.P.'s piled on our way and take the serious actions to take care for them. Your job will not get easier or more bearable by producing more and more S.E.P.'s, as they don't vanish by themselves.

Photo by me

Tags: S.E.P., problems, ignorance

The Need for Revolution

Lately I was keeping it low with blogging. They say silence is golden. Yes, it is, but don't exaggerate with all that golden bling bling. Silence is good from time to time as it encourages observation. The observation is good before you draw any conclusions about surrounding world.

I followed the discussion about blogging vs. Twitter going on for a couple of weeks.The interesting about the whole discussion is the urge we have for making revolutions. We can't just use both blog and twitter as complimentary tools in communication. No, we desperately want to replace them. We strive for making revolution, for introducing new things and putting our fingerprints on them.

We are talking about visions, future, and ideas thinking in linear ways.  Surely, the world is changing, the new things happen all the time, but they aren't linear. We tend to believe we moved from A to B, from Blogging to Twittering and then we expect we move from B to C - who knows maybe it could be the silence stadium.

The fact is that our life is a pulse. Pulse is not linear. It is like pendulum we go from A to B and return to A. It is like in the trivial saying: the history repeats itself. We always return to the same or similar places convinced that with every movement we have discovered something new, that we've changed reality. Yes, there are changes but they have rather evolutionary character - evolution fills the gaps where there is an opening.

The new social media and the new technologies aren't anything revolutionary new. They are just the result of technological development we have been experiencing though the last decades. The core behind social media isn't anything new. The social media, communities, tools whether they are old-fashioned (photo albums, phones, letters, neighbours gatherings in the backyard, etc.) or modern (blogs, Twitter, Flickr, etc) are grown up upon the same human need - need for being with other. The modern social media forms are just more powerful. The human needs are empowered as never before. The traditional photo album wasn't accessible to so many, as the photo album on Flickr.

Exchanging the old media or tools with the new ones will not generate a change. We should move away from linear thinking and begin to feel the endless pulse of human life. We need to learn to combine and cooperate. We need to navigate within complexity.

"Throughout the universe, then, order exists within disorder and disorder within order (...) Just as in the timeless image of yin and yang, we are dealing with complementaries that only look like polarities. Neither one is primary; both are absolutely necessary." (M. J. Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science)

Blogging and Twitter are just two different tools that are suppose to help us to communicate, transmit our meanings, build networks, find like-minded peers, etc. The complement each other. None of them is better than other. They just fulfill different needs for people in different states of mind. After all SMS didn't replaced telephone conversation.

Photo by sylvar

Tags: blog, twitter, evolution, communication, pulse

Man's Best Friend

Dogs are wonderful and still miss my old childhood friend Ramzes. I'd love to have a dog but with the busy city life it is a shame to have a dog jailed alone in apartament. I was longing for a dog for quite a time, when I've met Woofy. He is such a cute doggie and I can't resist him. He makes me smile and he is very helpful. Just look at him, isn't Woofy lovable? :-)



Visit Woofy website to find out more about him.




Tags: woofy, design

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Quote to Remember

Seth Godin said once:

"It's not to sell something to person A. Instead, at least right now, it's to get person A to encourage person B to buy/do something. That's often viewed as a nice after effect, a bonus or an extra. I think, though, that it might be the entire point of the exercise."

Marketing is just about a simple question: is your product / service so cool, so exciting, so remarkable, and so fantastic that people will want to tell everyone they know about it?
Seth's view on the key point of marketing takes us from audiences to communities, moves focus from reach to the tipping point. It makes marketing a conversation with consumers, that is based on trust and respect. The conversational marketing should be the natural reaction on the increasing ad avoidance, increasing number of consumers who find traditional advertising annoying and the technology developments that empower consumers. Especially when we know that  for 68% the most credible source of information about companies is "a person like me" (only 20% in 2003), according to Edelman's 2006 Global Trust Barometer.

It is about changing focus from selling to creating cascades of conversations among  influential people who will influence other influential people who will influence other influential people, and so on.


Tags: Seth Godin, Marketing, Advertising, WOM

Message in a Bottle

I've spend the afternoon and evening watching focus groups - hours of listening to people rationalizing everything and showing their common sense. Then I've seen this. It was great come back to the world of emotions. WoW! What a great movie. It is a sequel to Coke Happiness Factory. This is story about passion and determination behind Coke delivery. It is all about making people happy. I like the Lord of the Rings twist. Excellent peace of work. It will make you smile.

Tags: coca-cola, happiness factory

Weekend Ad

Very cool ad from Nike. Unexpected ending :-)


Tags: advertising, nike

Conscious Luxury

Consumer Research Center of The Conference Board has done the global survey about luxury consumers.

For majority 'luxury is having enough time to do whatever you want and being able to afford it.' Time is followed by experiences, comfort, beauty and quality.
The survey results indicates that there is the shift in people's meaning on what luxury is. More people seem to think about luxury not in terms of materials things, but more in terms of experiences and state of mind. It is the natural result of changing world and distribution of means in the Western societies. Parallel with uber-luxury, fabulous lives ala Beckham or Paris Hilton,  luxury became more mass than ever - more people can afford the luxury bags, clothes and cars. There are also more mass brands that are clever to add luxury touch to their products via clever marketing moves. The definition of  luxury isn't the same as it used to be, it doesn't have the same role of being the dividing line between classes. Luxury products consumption used to be the way to achieve prestige and higher social status. 

Today, more people discover the meaningless of consumption, its negative consequences for our society and planet and the decreasing value of luxury products - they guarantee no longer the desired position on the society ladder. Therefore we chose to move from being conspicuous consumers into conscious consumers. Conscious consumer who consumer less in the name of  luxury. It doesn't mean we will spend less, we will buy less products, but those will be of very high quality and of course high price. It will be still material things we will use to find our identity and mark our position, but those things will be disguised in emotions, statements and opinions.

Tags: luxury, consumption, trends