The cultural exaggerations I spend my business life trying to find operate both inside societies and between generations. Societies swing back and forth in more or less predictable ways.

I’ve come to realize, too, that my capacity to link a single observation with another across multiple countries in the course of building or rescuing a brand amounts to a strange skill of sorts.

avoid what mythologist and writer Joseph Campbell once described as the greatest human transgression: namely, the sin of inadvertence—of not being alert, or altogether awake, to the world around us.

forensic investigator of small data, or emotional DNA—a hunter, almost, of desire—a

what are instincts if not experiences and observations accumulated over time that enable a person to make fast conclusions without knowing precisely how?

“culture glasses,” a term that refers to the “lenses” through which we see our own countries.

contrasts between people’s day-to-day lives and their unacknowledged or unmet desires,

What desires lie in the gap between perception and reality, between reality and fantasy, between people’s conscious and unconscious fantasies? What are the imbalances inside the culture? What is there too much of, or too little? What desires aren’t being fed?

great brands have two advantages: (1) they evoke respect for their technological performance, durability, and effectiveness; and (2) they evoke love because, well, . . . we love them.