The company was founded in 1949 by Kihachiro Onitsuka who believed the country’s youth needed direction during the reconstruction efforts of post-WWII Japan. Though founded as Onitsuka, it became ASICS in 1977.

On another note, I love how ASICS brought back the Onitsuka brand name a few years back when it launched – with the help of Strawberry Frog – a casual shoe line with deep roots in Japanese pop culture, Onitsuka Tiger.

I’ve seen a couple household consumer brands that have launched social websites that are doing quite well. The difference is that their sites have a purpose that also reflect the brand’s attributes. They give something back to the consumer. It’s not a social network to be a social network.

Scott Common Sense Community. The paper products maker launched this site as a way for people to learn and share money-saving tips. It’s especially helpful in a down economy apparently: according to quantcast, the site generated as much as 97,000 unique visitors in one day, and is holding steady at 57,000 today.

Kashi.com. Rather than create a separate site, this healthy cereal maker simply added a wealth of social features to its site. Created with ample help from the Barbarian Group, Kashi’s site is a place where people can achieve a healthier lifestyle, one step at a time. Different challenges, like ‘Go running everyday’ invite users to join together to achieve the goal. The thinking being, if you’ve a support structure, you work harder to stick to the challenge.

NYT: Drones Are U.S. Weapons of Choice in Fighting Qaeda

What if we are going through a giant “RESET” and there will be no return to normal, just a new post-depression era.

Perhaps we are undergoing a shift, one that’s so massive, it will be impossible to get back to what happened in the past and from the so called ashes of our past, perhaps a new more viable future will emerge with dozens of new business models emerging.

That’s a great way to put it: a giant reset button.We live in an era where it’s  easy to start all over largely due to the universal access to communication and information.

Take New Orleans for example. It’s now experimenting with sustainable housing via the Make It Right Foundation. The foundation has attracted architects from all over the world and has received hundreds of submissions that is slowly turning the downtrodden Ninth Ward into a forum for sustainable architecture.

Wiped clean by a great flood, one of the country’s poorest neighborhoods has become a hopeful look into what the future may hold. Now that the market has crashed, maybe this line of thinking – or rethinking, rather – will roll over into the way we view the all our cities. And on that note, PSFK has a great post summing up a few ideas on what may happen: PSFK: An Intelligent Redesign of America’s Communities?

Then there’s the business of NASA launching the Discovery shuttle this week. It will deliver two more solar panels to the International Space Station. When the work is complete, the space station will be the second brightest star-like object in the sky as viewed from Earth.

Made me think about what’s next. If you look at the Space Station as of now, it kind of looks similar to the Wright Brothers’ airplane. Will we soon have massive stations up there, a la 2001: A Space Odyssey? Why don’t we already have them, as Arthur C. Clarke surmised?

I think yes, we just need a bit more time. The reason being, no longer is it just Russia and the US who are players in space exploration — it’s the whole world. India and China have space programs, not to mention the EU. We’re all in this together. Maybe will get one of those stations that wraps around Earth like a ring of Saturn. I think we deserve one..

There’s a nifty little piece of marketing on the sides of Budweiser cans called, Lager Lessons. It took me back to the little cartoons and rebuses found on candy– like finding the Indian on the Tootsie Pop, or a Bazooka Joe cartoon. But I digress. In one of Bud’s “Lessons,” it introduces an official drinking glass. Belgium is notorious for creating drinking glasses tailored to each glass, and this to me is the announcement of Bud joining InBev’s family. I wonder if Budweiser is the dad and Stella Artois is the wife? Or maybe they’re siblings in a Bart and Lisa Simpson kind of dynamic. I have too much time on my hands.

Comedy duo Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim have graced us with a parody of the madness that is the branded TV show one often finds on cable. The two created a fake TV show called “Jim & Derrick” that is heavily sponsored by the fictional adult beverage Turbo Fuel Energy Drink and the equally fictional Vista Fresh Mobile. Geared toward 18-30 men obviously, this reveals the blankness of how marketers think: since this crowd isn’t paying attention to ads, we’ll force the brands into the entertainment. The show is light on content, high on post-production, and full of name dropping.

Jim & Derrick

I stumbled upon this little gem of a strange product at the Brooklyn Heights Deli, and I’m curious to know if many are familiar with it. It is most certainly one very bold product. With the tagline, “Gravy Master BROWNS what microwave’s don’t!” Gravy Master it seems will not stop until it is America’s favorite gravy enhancer.

A gravy lover myself, a search for the product yielded a something even bolder about its marketing: Gravy Master owns the highly coveted http://gravy.com url. The site calls Gravy Master turkey insurance, which I can’t agree with more. It seems like Thanksgivings are always plagued with transluscent gravies that are just meat juices.. who wants half-assed gravy when it can be really really thick and overpower anything that touches it– kind of like maple syrup, but for lavish dinners instead.

I’ll let this strange gravy sketch starring Tairy Green, a.k.a. Zach Galifianakis, take it away from here:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

And without further ado, here is a strange product.

The idea of having a beer with breakfast actually doesn’t sound so bad when you really think about it. But what about putting breakfast INSIDE beer? That’s what was at the heart of this exciting nonalcoholic cereal beverage, Zing. If you take a look at the ingredients, you see it was made not only with wheat, water and hops, but also– and you can’t see this due to the picture, corn grits…

I don’t know much else about the product other than what’s on the can- but perhaps it’s the mystery of Zing that makes it so special. One thing is for certain: nonalcoholic beer was – for some reason – all the rage in the late Eighties, but the design of the can lends itself more to the Seventies, or even the Sixties. Second, who were they marketing this ‘nonalcoholic cereal beverage’ to, exactly? Bargoing hobbyists that start every morning (the right way)? This reminds me of those dingy dive bars that open up at 7AM everyday. I always thought that would be an interesting bartending gig- but maybe not…

(Tip to dee dawg)

And that’s why blogger morale is so very very important.

Realizing this fact, a company called Shaggymac has created a handy microfiber cloth of the same name that doubles as a sleek screen protector when you’re keyboard is not in use.

But I see it more as a keyboard cover that gives your modern writing instrument as much rep as a grand piano, complete with velvet cloth covering it’s keys when not in use. In a way, maybe one day bloggers will be looked up to the way Mozart is now. Unlikely. But at least this tiny cloth keeps that dream alive.

Hollywood’s continued fascination with torture comes to a head with the release of this commercial from satellite provider Direct TV.

It’s currently known as either “strawberry frosted” or “sprinkled.” Get it together, Dunkin!

(beautiful amateur product shot by *Sakura*)

Emma, an email marketing suite, differs from other marketers. Emma cares as much about style as it does about email campaigns and this fact is expressed through the naturally stylish, probably down-to-earth, and definitely hot, female in their ads.

While Emma makes sense since it’s geared toward the industry, Jorg & Olaf is geared toward consumers. The company sells authentic citybikes from Amsterdam for guys and girls. Its e-store uses a male and female model to express not only the brand’s identity but its product offerings as well.

I’m sure there are many more examples of this phenomenon. I wonder if it was born out of the recent success of United’s Ted Airlines.

From the above ad we find that Coleco and Atari were two players in the home gaming market with two very different strategies.

While Atari decided to launch the Atari 5200, an improvement over the 2600, Coleco sold attachments and add-ons, using the Colecovision as the core. One attachment transforms the Colecovision into an attempt at a personal computer called the Adam.

It was believed that the $725 Adam module would take a “bite” out of Apple, but it was actually a total piece of crap. Just look at this list of production problems. My favorite is, “Since Coleco made the unusual decision of using the printer to supply power to the entire Adam system, if the printer malfunctioned, none of the system worked.”