China: yes they can

I was reading an article in Advertising Age yesterday - "Oh, to Be a Millennial in China" - and it struck a real chord with me.

The can-do confidence of China's urban young people is palpable. They
talk in terms of 'when' not 'if', and their aspirations have no bounds.
Their first car is a 4 x 4 not a Fiat 500. They wear designer clothes
from day 1. And they're highly mobile. Because China is a land of
opportunity, rather than stick around in one place and get bored,
they'll move on; change career, change City, change country, if it
suits.

That was certainly the IPA's experience on our visit to Shanghai with
IPA members as participants in the UK Expo programme earlier this year.

Definitely a force to be reckoned with; eager to assimilate new
knowledge and exceed it.

Gap plugs the gap

I was reading a piece from Advertising Age earlier today about the proposed new GAP logo.

It seems that Marka Hansen, Gap North America president, has acknowledged that the proposed switch was a mistake.

The real story behind the logo - created by New York agency Laird & Partners - is that "given the passionate outpouring from customers that followed, we've decided to engage in the dialogue, take their feedback on board and work together as we move ahead and evolve to the next phase of Gap." In other words, they havelistened to the negative feedback from designers, bloggers and ordinary consumers among their 720,000 Facebook fans, They were allegedly already planning a crowdsourcing project to assess perception of the new logo. Of course, social media provides informal crowdsourcing on tap and actually may have saved Gap not only the cost of setting up such a project formally but making any logo changes at this stage.