Is Madonna a trendsetter or a trendspreader?

Yesterday Madonna was performing in Moscow, at stadium Luzhniki and whatever media are broadcasting I didn’t witness any fervent orthodox demonstration, it might due to the huge number of soldiers and policemen devoted to the security.
The music and the show were great, even though the Kabbalah inspiration is far more visible than her previous tour, damaging the show. I expected great motion design on the background screens but they displayed a lot of too-explicit anti-war clichés (Bush’s diatribes, poor Africans…) while the warwear defile was, according to me, more pertinent and much more performance-focused.
Well in fact in this post I’d like to deal with two weak signals, not so weak actually, which can help in fashion prospective. The secret is Madonna doesn’t do the fashion but follows it, much earlier than mainstream I must admit, but anyway the both trends I am to develop could be witnessed before.
Confessions Tour starts with a horse-playing theme. However the polo was yet the new golf: Citizen K and Diesel both sponsor the Open de France de Polo and Ralph Lauren has turned hype since they had made the logo bigger, so equitation uniform should hit the street soon.
Second trend is about wearing only the sleeves of a t-shirt and having the body of t-shirt behind the neck. Madonna didn’t dress this way, only some dancers of her crew. Nevertheless now that perfect abdominals only request reading a book, more and more men wanting ROI from sport club membership show off their body. Now you know how to do it trendily.

JCDecaux goes to CIS

The French outdoor advertising company is to enter Ukrainian, Russian and Uzbek market. Another French outdoor advertising company, whose aim seems to be resizing every Russian building up with bling-bling billboards and making them visible from Moon, is Defi.

Sachet Marketing

I’m still bewildered to see that most Russians can’t help walking by without a second-hand plastic bag to carry umbrella, books and other stuffs that don't get into a regular bag. Speaking of plastic bags and seeing that trendwatching has recently popped up a new briefing, let me introduce the concept of Sachet Marketing, which fits Russia (actually the BRIC and emerging countries). Sachet Marketing is about designing products for less wealthy consumers that match their needs without damaging overall quality. From Renault’s Logan to 3G-free stylish Nokia.

Team Building

On past Saturday it was team building day with all the staff of PPE. I woke up early – even earlier than on workday – to reach to the bus that picked us up and brought us to a large field located in the Tver region where team building happened. Team building was operated by Team Systems and they did good work to team-build about 200 coworkers.

Among the ideas to manage such a figure of people, one should keeps in mind:
- To create team of people that don’t know each other: distribute people according to their birth month
- Tell a story to keep everyone’s attention. Our story was about building the PPE city. We should have bought items to create city components, therefore we should have found gold before. Gold happened to be in a treasure we had to look for. And to find the treasure we had to collect clues before. The whole quest took almost the whole daytime.
- To get clues, we were by team of 12-15 people managed by a Team System’s organizer, having to perform tests that request team spirit and engagement to get completed.
- A unique master of ceremony, e.g. interlocutor, all day long, from the welcome to the after-party; and many organizers to fix up don’t-miss-to-occur troubles
- No borrowing lecture about corporate values [the main goal of such a team building], but game-like introduction: only the keys labeled with corporate values (leadership = yes, extended bank holydays = no) will open the gold case