A Global Look at the Daily Grind

A new study by BBDO Worldwide yields a treasure trove of data about how everyday routines vary across the world

By Douglas MacMillan with Diane Brady

You brush your teeth, take a shower, and have a cup of coffee each morning. But have you ever wondered if people in other parts of the world are locked in the same routines? New York-based advertiser BBDO Worldwide set out to answer questions like these in its 2007 survey, “The Ritual Builders.” The study gathered responses from 5,000 people in 25 countries to questions based on five categories of the daily routine: “preparing for battle” (the morning ritual), “feasting” (self-explanatory), “sexing up” (primping), “returning to camp” (going home), and “preparing for the future” (the ritual before bed).

There's loads of info for businesses. By understanding people's rituals, labeled in the survey as “a defined series of actions that helps us transform from one emotional state to another,” companies may better understand how to build their products or services into a consistent part of consumers' everyday life. Most everyone uses soap, for example, but a shower gel aimed at Polish consumers might emphasize relaxing qualities, since 84% of them shower at night. A more invigorating message might work better with the 92% of Mexicans who shower or bathe in the morning.

This BusinessWeek slideshow looks at the survey's most interesting findings, comparing global averages to U.S. averages, as well as the countries occupying the extremes.

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Must see movies for Entrepreneurs!

There are some movies that seem to convey how an Entrepreneur is "born" or discovered.   Here's a short list of movies currently out on DVD's you can watch, learn and most of all.. get inspired!!

One set are documentaries of actual dotcom busts: Kosmo and Govworks.com  and the others are a list of fictional and some based on real events that have great Startup/Entrepreneur spirit worth watching.

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Bolivia's "Road of Death"

North Yungas Road is hands-down the most dangerous in the world for motorists. If the previous road is just impassable, this one clearly endangers your life. It runs in the Bolivian Andes, 70 km from La Paz to Coroico, and plunges down almost 3,600 meters in an orgy of extremely narrow hairpin curves and 800-meter abyss near-misses. A fatal accident happens there every couple of weeks, 100-200 people perish there every year. In 1995 the Inter-American Development Bank named the La Paz-to-Coroico route "the world's most dangerous road."

Among the route there are many visible reminders of accidents, wreckages of lorries and trucks lie scattered around at the bottom... (read BBC article)

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Bloggers Bring in the Big Bucks

How a personal obsession can turn into a popular favorite and maybe even a full-time job

by John Tozzi

Eric Nakagawa, a software developer in Hawaii, posted a single photo of a fat, smiling cat he found on the Internet, with the caption, "I can has cheezburger?" in January, 2007, at a Web site he created. It was supposed to be a joke. Soon after he posted a few more images in the same vein: cute cats with funny captions written in a silly, invented hybrid of Internet shorthand and baby-talk. Then he turned the site into a blog, so that visitors could comment on the postings. What happened after that would have been hard for anyone to predict.

"We just thought, O.K., they're funny,"Nakagawa says. "Suddenly we started getting hits. I was like, where are these coming from?"

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