Pi-Consulting

After years of marketing fairy-tale and “princess” fantasy products to little girls, the Walt Disney Company has decided to do something for their brothers too. Hey, it’s the boys’ turn! Disney is launching new initiatives, targeting entertainment products at the hitherto elusive market sector of boy children aged 6–14. The company is rebranding its cable and digital TV channel Toon Disney (currently available in 72 million US households) as “Disney XD”, offering programs based around action and adventure themes, videogames and skateboarding. There will also be a new boy-friendly website, DisneyXD.com, featuring music, games, videos and social networking capabilities. Disney’s sports affiliate ESPN will provide sports content. Says Rich Ross, president of Disney Channels Worldwide: “We looked at the landscape and felt that girls are being served, but boys really haven’t been”. The new plan should do much to even out the battle of the sexes. Source: WARC News

Paris is where good Americans go when they die, it used to be said. The same is true about Miami and the Latin Americans. People from all over Hispanic America speak of Miami with a wistful sigh and a flutter of the eyelids, as if it were some kind of earthly paradise. Instead of pronouncing the name “Mee-ah-mee”, Spanish-style, they call it “My Yammi”, much as Americans used to refer reverentially to “Paree”. Anyway, your blogmeister used to live overlooking Biscayne Bay and South Beach, and, with the curiosity that comes naturally to a Pi executive, studied up on what makes the place tick.

Pi knows that the most absorbing of all sciences is that of human behavior and interaction. All the really interesting places on earth are where races, colors, beliefs, languages, cuisines and tastes collide, and then collude. Rio de Janeiro is one such spot. Xenophobia rarely gets a toe-hold in countries whose populations are mostly immigrants. Such places also frequently have ports attached. Puerto Rico is another cheerful ‘melting pot’, given its kaleidoscopic – and mostly benign – racial and linguistic mix. New York used to be like that, and ought to be today, but somehow isn’t. Someone once acerbically described NYC as “White people in brown shoes exchanging sidelong looks with brown people in white shoes”. The different groups there seem to slide sullenly past each other like oil and water in a Petri dish, even within ethnicities. This may in fact have something to do with socio-economic stratification, or perhaps the concentration of lots of people in a small and very expensive piece of turf. (The imbecilically-named “War on Terror” sure didn’t help, enlarging latent mutual suspicions exponentially). Anyway, by comparison with NYC Miami is big and spread out, and everyone rubs along pretty much okay. (By the way, has anyone ever noticed the unusually high concentration of “Star Trek” fans in New York City? My theory is that Trekkies respond to, but fail to perceive, that venerable TV show’s real underlying themes, ie. [i] the very American concept of obedience to authority and [ii] the ultimate impossibility of any real accommodation with aliens, however liberal your persuasions).

So what about Miami? Definitely another ‘melting pot’ market. You’ll hear Spanish in ten different dialects, (some mutually incomprehensible), plus Portuguese, French (and its Creole derivatives — all the taxi drivers are from Haiti), even Russian. Oh, and English, though it’s not always immediately recognizable as such. Miami is one of the few places where you will encounter Americans making a serious effort to speak a foreign language, whether it be Spanish or, of course, English.

Miami as a city is a jigsaw of different cultures, languages, tastes, diets and shopping habits. Older retirees from the North-Eastern US and sun-seeking newcomers from all over the States rub shoulders with conservative Cubans, dance-mad Dominicans, nostalgic Nicaraguans, and folk from every other corner of the Americas. Burger King vies for your lunch-money with Pollo Tropical (spicy chicken, yellow rice, fried bananas and salsa) and innumerable Cuban and Caribbean-style eateries, serving rice, beans, ‘yuca’, fried plantains and roast pork. Oh, try the “Vaca Frita”, why don’t you? It means “Fried Cow”.

When the writer moved to Miami, he was told how lucky he was to be living here. “What makes Miami such a terrific place”, said my witty NYC-bred informant, “is that it’s so close to the USA”. Indeed, the city has been chosen as Latin American HQ by big hi-tech and service companies, media conglomerates, ad agencies and dozens of manufacturers. (Despite this trend, some Chicago- and Minnesota-based corporations frankly shuddered at the thought of having to mix with all those flaky, unpredictable and tempestuous Latins. Realizing that you can’t easily run a Latin American business from the shores of the Great Lakes, such outfits tended to opt for an HQ in Fort Lauderdale, forty miles up the coast from Miami, on the basis that “At least that’s still the real United States”).

Anyway, the melting-pot thing really works. Miamians turn out in market research surveys to consider themselves 70% friendlier than the rest of the USA. Oh, and nearly two-thirds luckier: Miami Latinos outscore the nation by +63% on weekly purchase of lottery tickets. ¡Mucha suerte, damas y caballeros!

“You want time off? Sure, kid, but what are you telling me for? Just go, tell me about it when you get back to work”. Some employers, including IBM and Netflix, are telling their workers they can take as much vacation time as they want, whenever, so long as they get their work done. It sounds like a dream, but many employees offered this deal are keenly aware of their ultimate accountability, and typically take less time off than they would formally be entitled to. Another result, though, is people saying “This is a great place to work”. The fact that they are trusted makes for greater commitment. A Netflix HR chief puts it this way: “When you have a workforce of fully-formed professionals, you have a connection between… the work and how long it takes to do it. So you don’t need the clock-in-clock-out mentality”. At IBM, that’s an advantage, considering that 40% of the workforce have no dedicated office, toiling at home or on-site. So who would be watching them anyway? Source: New York Times, Pi

UK census figures from thirty years ago show that, back then, only half of British mothers with dependent children were in the workforce. That figure has now grown to two-thirds, making “working mother syndrome” the norm, no longer the exception. 55% are working while bringing up children under five, up from 25% in their mothers’ day. Given the wholesale need for day-care in order to keep this many mums in the workforce, government has had to step in in a big way, giving new meaning to the phrase “Nanny State”. Further out, look for shifts towards more part-time work and “flexi-jobs”, with the menfolk filling in more at times when their partners rally have to be away at work. Sources, The Sunday Times, Pi.