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One real highlight of the piece was a great dose of reality concerning China.
"...even at its present growth rate, China’s GDP will take a quarter of a century to catch up with America’s; and the internal tensions that China’s rapidly changing economy has caused may well lead it to stumble before then."
With the upcoming Olympics, it will be clear that China is presenting itself as the leader on the global stage, while the real facts suggest it still has some way to go.
Posted by Ed Cotton
It has some great articles including a piece on the future of China's cities. The scale of here is quite incredible- McKinsey's Global Institute predicts that if country trends continue China's cities by 2025 will break down into the following sizes;
Mega- 10 million +
120
Big- 5-10 million
111
Midsize-0.5 mllion-1.5 million
311
Small-.5-1.1.5 million
228
Big Town- Less than 500k
156
The increase in the urban population will be 325 million, including 230 million migrants. Obviously, this will it not be without problems as land is taken to build these things, but the idea that one country will have over 100 cities with a population of over 10 million each is quite staggering.
Posted by Ed Cotton
It was planned to be the world's largest and it now sits under-used (planned to house 1,500 stores and currently has just 12), the victim of a dream that failed to materialize.
Many speculators had big plans for China and wanted to capitalize on the supposed massive growth of the new middle class. Sadly, this growth didn't happen fast enough to propel this new mall to greatness.
It's perhaps a lesson that shows just how easy it is to get carried away with projections of potential and suggests that China's amazing growth can continue for ever.
"On a recent Friday afternoon, an amusement-park employee, slouched in a forsaken ticket booth, tried to kill time by making origami. Another worker slept, with perfect impunity, on a table. In front of the haunted house attraction, one attendant was doing hand-stands while two others looked blankly on.
There was nothing else to do,
because the South China Mall, which opened with great fanfare in 2005,
is not just the world’s largest. With fewer than a dozen stores
scattered through a space designed to house 1,500, it is also the
world’s emptiest – a dusty, decrepit complex of buildings marked by
peeling paint, dead light bulbs, and dismembered mannequins.
“They
set out to be the biggest, and hoped that being the biggest would be
the attracting factor,” says David Hand, a retail analyst at Jones Lang
LaSalle in Beijing, who has followed the project. “It hasn’t delivered.”
The world has plenty of empty malls; there’s even an American website, deadmalls.com, where connoisseurs of desolation post photos and reminiscences of the once-great, now-gutted places where they spent the Saturday afternoons of their youth. What sets the South China Mall apart from the rest, besides its mind-numbing size, is that it never went into decline. The tenants didn’t jump ship; they never even came on board. The mall entered the world pre-ruined, as if its developers had deliberately created an attraction for people with a taste for abandonment and decay. It is a spectacular real-estate failure – but it is also, as I saw when I spent two days exploring the site in May, a strangely beautiful monument to the big dreams that China inspires."
It's a strange coincidence that the story appears in a Dubai based publication- a country that has pushed development to the limits in the hope of becoming THE new tourist destination.
This story came from the amazing BLDGB blog, who has its own post on this incredible story.Posted by Ed Cotton
Via McChronicles.
Posted by Ed Cotton
In the later part of the C20th, two forces emerged that changed branding.
The first was the drive by marketing experts and ad agencies to suggest that brands needed emotional differentiation in a world where all brands were functionally similar.
Secondly, businesses discovered that a quick way to improve shareholder value was to strip out as much of the costs as possible.
We are now starting to feel the consequences of both these actions. We are starting to see a "brand vacuum" emerge, a fault line between what brands say they do and what they actually do. The rapid rise of the Internet is making it hard for brands to manage and control this ever widening chasm.
Recently, the notion of marketing experts that brands are at parity and that it’s therefore impossible to provide rational brand differentiation is being severely tested.
If the global factory, producing all our goods, China, can’t be trusted for safety, what does that say about the quality of the brands produced there?