1. From left to right: Tarepanda, Hello Kitty, Kogepan. From Pattern Recognition: And why, she wonders, gazing blankly at more Hello Kitty regalia than seems possible, do Japanese franchises like Hello Kitty not trigger interior landslide, panic attack, the need to invoke the duck in the face? She doesn’t know. It just doesn’t. No more than does Kogepan, the clueless-looking homonculus, whose name, she vaguely recalls, means “burnt toast”. The Kogepan goods are arrayed beyond Hello Kitty, a franchise that has never quite found Hello Kitty’s global legs. One can buy Kogepan purses, fridge magnets, pens, lighters, hair brushes, staplers, pencil boxes, knapsacks, watches, figurines. Beyond Kogepan lies the franchise of that depressive-looking boneless panda and her cubs. And none of this stuff, purest no-content marketing, triggers Cayce in the least.

    From left to right: Tarepanda, Hello Kitty, Kogepan.

    From Pattern Recognition:

    And why, she wonders, gazing blankly at more Hello Kitty regalia than seems possible, do Japanese franchises like Hello Kitty not trigger interior landslide, panic attack, the need to invoke the duck in the face?

    She doesn’t know. It just doesn’t. No more than does Kogepan, the clueless-looking homonculus, whose name, she vaguely recalls, means “burnt toast”. The Kogepan goods are arrayed beyond Hello Kitty, a franchise that has never quite found Hello Kitty’s global legs. One can buy Kogepan purses, fridge magnets, pens, lighters, hair brushes, staplers, pencil boxes, knapsacks, watches, figurines. Beyond Kogepan lies the franchise of that depressive-looking boneless panda and her cubs. And none of this stuff, purest no-content marketing, triggers Cayce in the least.

  2. Why pop-ups pop up everywhere →

    Temporary shops and restaurants were once a way for artists to subvert empty urban spaces. Now, they’re just as likely to be part of a corporate marketing strategy

    One cannot help but imagine the hand of Hubertus Bigend and Blue Ant moving behind the appropriation of pop-ups by larger corporations seeking to shore up their brands in new and interesting ways.

    From Zero History:

    “But then I remembered Hubertus, ideas of his, things he’d done. Guerrilla marketing strategies. Weird inversions of customary logic. The Japanese idea of secret brands. The deliberate construction of parallel microeconomies, where knowledge is more congruent than wealth.”