Date: Friday, April 11th
Host: Annette's house
Topic: Culture Codes
A little topic preview while we gather materials to prep with & pin down what our question is for this overall topic:
Annette had read a book recently about culture codes, and then she and I just free-formed related tangents over a yummy Himalayan dinner on this topic. So, maybe finding some author talks on YouTube from that book or a specific chapter to read from it could be helpful to frame our focus a little, because the examples Annette shared from the book were really cool and got my wheels turning. The main one she shared had to do with some coffee company from the US thinking they’d make a bunch of easy money in Japan by tapping into an untapped coffee market there a while back, but then when they tried it went over like a lead balloon because it turned out the Japanese did not have the cozy associations with coffee drinking, coffee socializing, coffee smells, family coffee related nostalgic experiences, etc.that much of the rest of the world has in their family/friend/work systems. So then they had to take a more long-game plan for their business model and kind of manufacture those experiences in for their target Japanese audience; that part was kind of gross and capitalistic manipulative, but still interesting to mull over, especially related to any of the ways any of us become parts of who we are in relation to products or economic cultural coding.