Duality And Everything In Between

Quick Read: We seem to have a thing for things that are dual in nature. Be it a town, a person or perhaps even a brand.

Baarle –  a town at the border of the Netherlands and Belgium, is perhaps the world’s strangest international border.

Why?

Because the town is an enclave that consists of pockets of the Netherlands nested inside Belgium, nestled inside the Netherlands.

The result?

The international border cuts through Baarle indiscriminately, crossing streets, dividing roads and slicing through buildings forming Baarle-Nassau and Baarle-Hertog – two municipalities that are in Netherlands and Belgium respectively.

Naturally many peculiarities arise.

For e.g., many homes are cut in half by the border, so as a matter of convention each household’s nationality is determined by the location of its front door. Which also decides where taxes are paid. So some houses apparently swap the location of their front doors between countries to benefit from the most favourable taxes!

Baarle House

(Pic: Source )

And if the border runs through the front door, the two parts then belong in different countries, and this is indicated by two street numbers on the building.

So duality has become the central character of Baarle where everything is two fold: two churches, two town halls, two post offices, two fire stations and even two police forces and so on.

And it is this charm of duality that makes Baarle quite popular with tourists around the year.

baarle-nassau-hertog

(Pic Source. HT Credit)

Caitlyn Jenner

Recently an unknown 65-year-old woman has become an internet senstion overnight. She was revleaed to the world through the cover page of Vanity Fair and a Twitter account that amassed 1 million followers in four hours – faster than the account launched by the US president, Barack Obama! Four days later she was up to 2.37 million followers, with another 1.5 million followers on Instagram! (source)

Why?

Perhaps it is the enigma of a duality the Vanity Fair’s cover story revealed.

Caitlyn Jenner

(Pic sources: Bruce Jenner | Caitlyn Jenner)

During the 70s, the Olympic hero William Bruce Jenner had the unofficial title of “world’s greatest athlete” and nearly 40 years later, in 2015, Bruce became the world’s most high-profile transgender woman named Caitlyn Jenner.

She has now become a hugely powerful cultural figure almost overnight and could soon become an important voice in the transgender rights movement. Apparently even Obama tweeted in response saying “It takes courage to share your story”.

Duality, it seems, has a certain enigma to it! Ask Buzz Bissinger – the Pulitzer winning journalist who crafted Caitlyn’s reveal for Vanity Fair over a period of 3+ months leading to this watershed of a cover story.

Duality & Brands

The human brain is said to possess this intrinsic nature of actively labeling everything it encounters into neatly defined buckets. That’s probably why anything that has a strong duality ends up becoming such a tease to our minds and perceptions.

No wonder then, there are brands that thrive on duality. (The classic Coffy Bite and more recent Cadbury Oreo are some well known Indian exmples)

In fact, this allure of duality seems so high for Twix – a Mars’ chocolate bar brand –  that the brand thrives on teasing out a duality that never actually exists.

twix Dual2

(Source: Twix.com)

See a reel of its “Left Twix vs Right Twix – Pick a side” ads here.

Can you think of any other brands that leverage ‘duality’?

(Featured Image: Twix)

3D Printing, Value Chain and Lawyers

Quick Read: 3D Printing as a technology can can have revolutionary implications on all the 3 key stages of a value chain –  Manufacturing, Distribution and Retail. And not to forget lawyers!

Let’s Start With Manufacturing

Today Lego finds itself going to war with the 3D Printing technology. Why?

Because, what has happened over the last decade to music, newsprint, film and photography now seems to be threatining the world of shapes and objects. As this Washinton Post says..

Soon hobbyists…. will be able to craft their own (lego) bricks, thanks to 3D printers that make fabricating those plastic parts as convenient as going to Toys R Us. With such technology, entire structures can now be reverse-engineered, reduced into a pile of components and snapped together in minutes. 

Lego’s sophisticated molding process that currently enables it to produce 55 billion Lego pieces a year is probably not under an immediate threat from the 3D printers. But once the technical challenges like being able to meet the established tolerance levels for finish, texture and fit of various materials and being able to operate at scale are solved, which –  many experts believe is just a matter of time – Lego might be at a major  risk.

lego_ironman(Lego Ironman, Source)

So the recent remarks from Lego’s CFO John Goodwin who said “3-D printing is a fascinating development and certainly opens up a lot of new avenues” gain significance as a first ever major acknowledgment by Lego about the impending storm.

This has even led to some analysts predicting that the future for Lego could be as an Intellectual Property publisher of the digital models of their blocks, not unlike the modern record company which doesn’t actually create physical tracks anymore but just owns the IP rights of their music.

Moving Over To Distribution

Distribution (and inventory management) are known to be Amazon‘s expertise. But faster shipping can come at a price. For e.g, in Q1 2013, Amazon’s shipping costs were 4.7 percent of revenue (source). So it has reportedly been testing the grounds for newer, cheaper and faster delivery methods like drones.

But here is – what could potentially be – the billion dollar question. 

What if the whole value chain starting from maintaining inventories of raw materials, industrial scale manufacturing, packaging, palletising, shipping, bulk breaking, transporting, warehousing to distributing were to become redundant? What if we manufacture goods just in time near the final destination?  

As this article says, that’s where 3D printing comes in –  by producing goods in exactly the ordered configuration precisely when they’re needed, 3D printing is ideal for filling gaps in the supply chain (which reduces uncertainty), keeping inventory low more generally (which saves companies money on shelving) and reducing waste (which occurs when the goods aren’t sold).

Called as Just In Time manufacturing, UPS has already started to venture into this business model in a small but significant way. And the initial results are reported to be more than encouraging.

3D Printer UPS Store(3D Printer at a UPS Store, Source)

So when the largest shipment/logistics company in the world begins such seemingly ‘odd’ experiment around On demand 3D printing, it can only indicate one thing.

Even the distribution behemoths are swearing by the mantra – if you can’t beat them join them. 

And Finally Speaking Of Retail

This year’s SXSW – the annual music, film, and interactive festival being held in Austin as we speak now (from March 7 – 11) has been generating a good amount of buzz.

Oreo‘s Trending Vending Machine is an example.

Envisaged by Mondelez as a fun experiment with Twitter, the concept is a mash up between the vending machine experience and social media based real time marketing. Named, Trending Vending Machine, it has been offering the SXSW attendees Oreos with 3D printed flavours picked from trending tweets and delivered to the attendees in 2 minutes (source). This marketing effort includes the hashtag #eatthetweet.

While this certainly makes for a pretty good engagement driving initiative by Mondelez where the world of social media hashtags meets cookie cutter biscuits – literally, the underlying story here could be that of the emergent possibilities of 3D printing in the retail sector where:

  • Inventories for the retailer are non-existent and limitless at the same time!
  • Shopper engagement becomes the norm, in fact the key enabler for the whole set up
  • And finally personalisation becomes a category code, and not just a fancy differentiation strategy

In fact, going by this logic, 3 D printers could even upend the very concept of retail sector as we know it today!

After all, why would anyone even bother to walk down an aisle when all they need to do is perhaps just download a design, chose a nearest 3D printer and click PRINT?

Or shall we call it MAKE?

Some food for thought on a related note: Thanks to 3D Printing, professions like Intellectual Property and Law can be in good demand for a long long time to come!

(Featured Image: 3D Printed edible Lollies at CES 2014, Source)