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On the Not a Penguin blog of my company De Merkelijkheid we just released a nice post about what we can learn from IKEA’s brand strategy. I am curious about what you think about it.

Being your customer should be a remarkable experience

IKEA’s products and service have led to some kind of ‘cult’ status around their brand. A visit to IKEA is an experience everybody can relate to; from the schadenfreude we all feel when watching people pull 5 Billy-bookcases from the shelves to the ease with which your new furniture was delivered to your home. Both also allow you to tell stories for weeks. And it is the ability to relate and share that allows customers to refer you to their friends, colleagues and other contacts, which is often one of the most important sources for new customers.

Read it here!

James shared a nice short story today:

Two monks are walking by the river. A prostitute is trying to cross. One of the monks carries her across and then sets her down. The two monks keep on walking. The monk who didn’t carry her gets more and more agitated. Finally he asks: “Why did you do that? You know we are not supposed to even touch women like that!”

And the monk who carried her said: “I left her by the river. Why are you still carrying her?”

As there are more and more people getting access to gaming devices in the world, making the overall number of gamer increase, the penetration of gaming is also still increasing in western society. The report mentioned on the Venturebeat only focuses on mobile, social and online games and excludes stand-alones. So the total number is even higher.

The study, Trends in Digital Gaming: Free-to-Play, Social, and Mobile Games, claims 135 million people play at least one hour per month compared to 56 million in 2008. Seventeen percent of all gamers have downloaded a title on their smartphones, up from 7 percent in 2008. About 80 percent play free-to-play (F2P) games on the PC or log into Facebook to spend time on the farm or frontier.

Read the full article

I shall be looking into the complete gamer demographic and perhaps distil some meaning out of the huge heap of info. Will share this with you of course!

Quick post on a subject I’m following quite intently; Zynga’s IPO. While I already wrote that I think the social gaming companies are overvalued based on my experience in the gaming market; now some Wall Street analysts sheds his light on it.

A similar social gaming company, Nexon, went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange with a pre-trading market capitalization of $7 billion, although it closed the day down about 3 percent off its IPO price. The Asian online gaming giant raised $1.2 billion and it made net income of $260.1 million, up 14 percent, on revenue of $853.5 million, up 26.5 percent, for the nine months ended Sept. 30. By contrast, Zynga made a paltry $30.7 million on revenue of $828.9 million for the nine months ended Sept. 30.

Read the full article on VentureBeat

I keep struggling in sticking to what I set out to do; blog on a daily basis. Even for work (my company De Merkelijkheid) we can’t seem to manage even once a week. Still thinking it’s neccesary so will start working on it soon enough

And I’m not just talking about the Nike slogan, even though it’s probably one of the best and most fitting slogans out there. I’m talking about the fact that if we, and myself in particular, would stop whining and do something about [it] anything could happen. Just Do It! Or through the quote that inspired this realization:

Blame no one.
Expect nothing.
Do something.
- Bill Parcells

Slashfilm.com’s Kees van Dijkhuizen made a nice montage of clips from Guy Ritchie’s movies. It’s like a trailer for a director.

[the films of] Guy Ritchie from Kees van Dijkhuizen jr. on Vimeo.

Or go directly to the post on slashfilm