Starbucks is set for further expansion in Europe - and Arla is a key partner. The Esbjerg-based company will manufacture, market and distribute Starbucks’ ready-to-drink coffee beverages for the European market. Arla subsidiary Cocio Chokolademælk has already increased plant capacity and is ready to begin production. I know quite a few Americans who will be happy to have their Starbucks back.

New York has long been a popular destination for Danes. And now, it looks like the New York Times is trying to return the favor. A few weeks ago, on the heels of the COP15 climate summit, the Op-Ed columnist Thomas Friedman posted a story about Denmark’s many green initiatives and how the country is working hard to become a low-carbon economy. It positioned Denmark well - despite the summit’s inadequate results.

And that’s not all. Just last week, the same paper published a feature on “The 31 Places to Go in 2010″. And guess who came in at number five? Yep, Copenhagen. That’s right, Copenhagen is described as “one of the world’s greenest — and maybe coolest — cities”. Maybe it was all that Oprah-gushing?

Do you send a million text messages a day? Or do find yourself spending all your free time in the Twitterverse? If so, you might be putting your ability to spell in serious danger – at least according to some critics. OMG, you say!

Short Message Service Language, aka textese or chatspeak, might actually be the fastest growing dialect in the world, but is it leading us to pathological sloppiness? Some are even calling it the death of the English language. Really? 

Well, turns out shortening English into cryptic phonetic bits doesn’t impact our ability to spell ‘real’ English. Recent research shows that if you’re a good speller of the Queen’s English, you’re also a good textese speller. In fact, those who used more elaborate codes while texting where actually better spellers of normal English. Srsly. And, as good logic would have it, if you are a poor speller in ‘real’ English, you’re more likely to make errors in textese. So bware!

Previous DHL Relay Race experience tells us that we don’t run quite as fast as we write, but we never give up trying.

So you can find us in Fælledparken again this year, in better shape than ever! One of us has been training hard high up in the Norwegian mountains, two of us have run the Copenhagen Marathon, and the rest of us have been conserving all our energy for this year’s DHL run.

If you’re running on Wednesday 2 September 2009 – or if you’re going along to cheer for your colleagues – come and meet us in Blok 48 (find us on the map).

Happy racing!

Check out the action from last year’s race…

We always ask our customers what unique selling point their product has. What can it do better, faster, simpler, cheaper or more efficiently than the competition. But sometimes the answer is, “We don’t really have have one. All the products on the market are pretty much the same.”

I recently came across this quote from Joel Raphaelson about parity products and thought I’d share it:

“In the past, just about every advertiser has assumed that in order to sell his goods he has to convince consumers that his product is superior to his competitor’s.
This may not be necessary. It may be sufficient to convince consumers that your product is postively good. If the consumer feels certain that your product is good and feels uncertain about your competitor’s, he will buy yours.
If you and your competitors all make excellent products, don’t try to imply that yours is better. Just say what’s good about your product - and do it a clearer, more honest, more informative job of saying it.”

After surviving the inevitable phone and internet issues during the move, everything is now up and running and it’s business as usual for the Eye for Image team. Our new office is on Pistolstræde - just a stone’s throw from Strøget and Kongens Nytorv. A few of us are having some trouble staying away from the shops, but the office is great and, since we’re all scattered around Copenhagen, the central location is a big plus. 

We’re all really looking forward to summer in the heart of Copenhagen - stop by for a visit sometime!

On Saturday 4 April, when the Danish Prime Minister was officially appointed the next NATO Secretary General, I sat watching the Danish TV presenter get more and more excited. When she finally heard though her earpiece that Anders Fogh Rasmussen had got the job, she was so ecstatic she just about bounced up and down in her chair. It may have been the highlight of her onscreen career, but having grown up from about as far away from NATO territory as you can get, the moment was lost on me.

A recent opinion poll by Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten found that 60 percent of Danes think Fogh’s appointment will be good for Denmark. But what will Fogh’s appointment really mean for Denmark, if anything? Do people even care about NATO or know much about it? The current NATO Secretary General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, is hardly a household name. And if put to the test, can you pinpoint NATO headquarters on a map?

This speaks volumes about NATO as a brand. And probably explains why last year, NATO hired a former Coca-Cola executive to improve the way the alliance is seen around the world. So any positive spin-offs from Fogh’s appointment might have to wait until NATO gets it street cred in order. Meanwhile, as the next Secretary General, Fogh’s had to deal with Denmark’s biggest branding gaff ever, the Mohammed crisis, which doesn’t look like it will go away. That for now, looks like one of his biggest challenges in his new role.

JetBlue has just launched what has got to be one of the cleverest ad campaigns of the recession. Its “Welcome Bigwigs” campaign targets all those former c-level execs that are no longer enjoying fancy hotels and private jets. The low cost airline has cheekily found a way to poke fun at the people whose lavish lifestyles were financed by the very recklessness that brought them down.   

Few companies have been able to humorously address the current economic situation. There’s of course a good reason for that – it’s not funny. But we can all get a laugh out of the super rich needing to downscale and “jetpool” with the rest of us.

JetBlue’s emphasis on frugality is directed to all “Hedge Fund Managers, Big Investment Bankers, Moguls, Tycoons” and others who “might be rethinking that next trip on a private jet … ” and the in-flight entertainment includes only a few of the “business news channels that can be complete bummers.”

Oh, and their free “potato chips are not a government bailout and there are no strings attached.”

The print ad is below, but click here for the website.

There are lots of webpages out there that list funny text on packaging and product usage instructions. Like this one that concentrates on packaging which states the obvious. But it’s always nice to find your own. Here’s something from a pack of noodles:

Application:
1. Put noodles into boiling water.
2. After 2-3 minutes, (at first, cook it by strong fire for two minutes and then cook it by moderate fire little) please stir it by chopsticks.
3. The lustrous, bright, soft and nutrient noodles should be poured by cold water after it is recovered from water.
4. The making method is unique and needs short time for cooking the noodles can be cooked. souted and scalded. It can be cooked into delicious noodles according your taste.

Something’s been eating away at my language nerves lately, and I thought it was time to create an exclusive forum to discuss it.

Notice anything strange about the above sentence? Well, it doesn’t really make sense. The nature of a blog is to include everyone – so the last thing it should be is an “exclusive forum”. And frankly, there are lots of other things that shouldn’t be “exclusive” but have somehow become just that.

I’ve recently overheard or read the following:

“Our new, exclusive range of comfortable shoes…” (about a very popular shoe brand)
“I love that this bottle has such an exclusive design!” (about a bottle that 50% of Danish offices have in their fridges)
“We make exclusive Thai cuisine” (but anyone can walk in and buy some)

Come on! Anyone can afford your stuff – you’re not Gucci, you’re not excluding anyone at all and saying you are makes your marketing look phony! I want to know exactly what they mean with “exclusive” – and I want them to explain it with words I can understand.

My hunch is that the trouble lies in the translation from the Danish “eksklusiv” to the English “exclusive”. And it’s not about the exact dictionary meaning. It’s more about the way the usage of a word can evolve quite differently in two different cultures. It seems that in Denmark, exclusive is more positive, whereas in the US, it’s often kind of…undemocratic.

It’s not that it’s wrong in all cases. Because as you’ll notice in the list of the top 7 definitions from Dictionary.com, exclusive can in fact mean fashionable, stylish, and high-end.

But exclusivity is tricky: while some of the definitions are positive, others are quite mean, really. An exclusive group is usually not welcoming to newcomers. Whereas an exclusive offer is something we all get excited about because it makes us feel special.

So my point is this. It’s not that you can’t ever use “exclusive” to describe a good thing. It’s just that you have to use it sparingly and correctly. Because once all services and products become exclusive, none of them are.

This post was written by Anastasya, but posted under Dan’s name for technical reasons. Just so you know.