Chapter 7

Sleeping without a Bedspread

Charred Paper, Toy Cars and Pixie Dust Help Decipher the Meaning of “Quality” in China

Almost without exception, Westerners who travel to third world countries return home with the same impression. They report that in spite of having fewer resources and material possessions, residents of places like Guatemala or Peru or the Philippines seem to be dramatically “happier”—kinder, friendlier, more giving and hospitable—than people who live in the West. To me, this reveals just how irrelevant the Western concept of “happiness” is to anyone living outside the first world. If you ask people who are born with very little whether or not they are happy, most will reply they are neither “happy” nor “sad.” They are simply living their lives. Their priorities are, in no particular order, working, putting food on the table and taking care of their families.

Writers and philosophers from Buddha to Herodotus to Aristotle have been writing and thinking about happiness for centuries. Yet it’s worth remembering that, rather than an inherent characteristic or aspiration of being alive, the Western happiness industry is, according to the Harvard Business Review, “an artifact of modern history.”1 The idea of happiness as an expectation didn’t begin to flower until 250 years ago, in the years following the Enlightenment. Before that, even in the West, life generally verged on the austere. It was only in the mid-nineteenth century that the pursuit of happiness gradually evolved into a legitimate goal, and unhappiness became a blight to be avoided.

The happiness movement gained strength throughout the nineteenth century, as jobs moved outside of the home and, according to Harvard Business Review, “Wives and mothers were urged to maintain a cheerful atmosphere in order to reward their hardworking husbands and produce successful children.”2 Happiness has evolved today into a singularly Western, and especially American, phenomenon—even a mandate. After all, it was an American sound engineer who created the television laugh track and an American company, McDonald’s, that came out with the Happy Meal.

Ironically, our insistence on being happy all the time almost guarantees unhappiness, if only by creating the fear that you’re not measuring up to other people’s levels of contentment, wealth or well-being. The Internet, of course, hasn’t helped. Earlier I wrote that the level of transparency in a country has a direct and negative correlation to a nation’s level of happiness. Nor can a country’s wealth or stability be said to contribute to its overall contentment. The World Happiness Report, an annual study published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, measures a nation’s overall earnings, living standards, employment, physical and mental health and cultural stability. In 2014, Switzerland, Iceland and Norway were the top-three “happiest countries.”3 This same year, a Gallup Poll came at the subject from another angle, by asking adults in 143 countries if they’d had “positive experiences on the day before the survey.” These ranged from laughing, smiling, feeling well rested, being treated with respect and even doing something interesting. No Scandinavian countries made the top 20, and nor did America. Instead, the poll was dominated by Latin and Central American countries including Paraguay, Nicaragua, Panama, Ecuador and Guatemala.4 At the bottom of the list, reporting the lowest “positive experiences,” were Middle Easterners and Africans. The Gallup pollsters made it a point to say that “low positive emotions” didn’t necessarily correlate with “high negative emotions.” Russians, for example, report some of the lowest positive emotions in the world, as well as some of the lowest negative emotions. Why? According to one source, “Gallup has previously reported that people in this region simply don’t report many emotions at all—positive or negative.”5

My definition of happiness? The number of specific days a person remembers over the last year, which often coincides with the number of times he or she passed through a Transition Zone—went on vacation, had a baby, took a child to college for the first time, rode a bicycle, went hang-gliding for the first time. Rather than being measured linearly, happiness should be perceived as a congeries of “moments.”

What about other Western concepts like “freedom,” or living an environmentally “green” lifestyle? Let’s take China as an example. Most Chinese people are aware they live under the grip of a state-controlled media. According to NPR, government restrictions are sometimes invisible, with websites often failing to load or “technical error” messages appearing on the screen; thus, many Chinese don’t even realize the Internet is being censored.6 As for those who do, an almost ten-year-old poll conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project and a group of Chinese academics revealed that “almost 85 percent of those surveyed say they think the government should be responsible for controlling the Internet.”7 A majority of Chinese citizens subscribe to the Confucian belief that a government is mandated to exert its authority by showing parental care for its citizens. Citizens, in turn, owe it to their government to respect and obey rules and mores. Yes, in a perfect universe, everyone would have a microphone, an opinion and an audience, but is it worth it if their actions or behavior damage social norms or stability for the whole collective?

As challenging (and rewarding) as it sometimes is to travel the world uncovering desires and coming up with a new brand or product solutions, it is harder still asking people if they are happy, especially in a nation like China that is gradually adapting Western values and definitions in much the same way I found that “green” and “organic” had made their way into India. Until the late 1990s, China teemed with bicycles and bike riders. Bikes weren’t a “green” response to China’s pollution levels—which were already troublesome back then, though not nearly as bad as they are today—nor was bike riding linked to virtue or to “competitive altruism,” the term used to describe the status humans glean from their superior social consciousness. Circa 1995, most Chinese simply couldn’t afford a car. Bikes were the only way to get around, and the car was a status symbol linked to a distant Western definition of happiness. Today, you see many fewer bikes in China, and the Chinese automobile industry is the biggest in the world. I am merely speculating, but I would argue that once the Chinese were able to access the same films, music and television series the rest of the world watched—albeit 24 to 48 hours later, and on pirated websites—and once they saw what they were “missing,” they became less “happy.”

That’s why it was both a test and an opportunity when a major Chinese automobile manufacturer asked if I could help them “brand” the concept of a Chinese automobile, both locally and internationally. What was the ingredient that European car brands had that “Made in China” cars lacked? If Chinese cars shared almost exactly the same features and options as European-branded cars, why did Western cars outsell them, even in China, by a three-to-one ratio?

Embedded in this question was a problem I’d come up against before when working in China: an overemphasis on rational thinking and a disregard for the emotional ingredients that go into brand building. The reasoning among Chinese companies goes something like this: a product is a brand. A brand is a logo. If a logo is prominent, then consumers, sales and profits will follow. An almost comical illustration of this logic took place in 2001, when 72 hours after the first Apple Store opened its doors in the United States, the first-ever “Apple Stores” made their appearance in China. Chinese Apple store employees wore robin’s-egg-blue, logo-embossed T-shirts that precisely mimicked the ones worn by Apple’s American employees. There was only one problem: Chinese Apple Stores had no affiliation with Apple and sold dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and other household appliances rather than computers. Again, this is a core problem I come up against whenever I work in China, where the functional, or Blue Script, matters far more than the emotional, or Green Script, and companies and products pay the price.

Every successful brand stands for something more than itself, and that thing is emotional. A great brand promises hope, the contagion of coolness, or desirability, or love, or romance, or acceptance, or luxury, or youth, or sophistication, or high-quality technology. By way of illustration, imagine if you could choose between two cars that are precisely the same in all ways—the same color, the same engine, the same design, the same quality—except for one minor detail: the first was made in Denmark and the second was manufactured in Greece. Which one would you pick? I’m guessing most people would select the Danish model, associating it with Danish values like craftsmanship and close attention to detail. Next, imagine that you were asked to choose between two bottles of the same expensive perfume. The label of the first read Paris, Rome and Beverly Hills. The label of the second read Albany, New York, Manchester, England, and Bong Bong, Australia. Which bottle would best encapsulate the emotional values you hoped the fragrance might convey?

Cities and countries are no different from any other brand, and before I took on the automotive project I had to face the fact that China had a serious national branding problem, even among its own natives.

As an illustration of two successfully branded destinations, let’s look at London and Paris. To non-natives, London evokes various words and feelings, among them Big Ben. Rain. Winston Churchill. The Beatles. Buckingham Palace. Twiggy. Tea and Scones. The Clash. Prince William and Kate Middleton. The Rolling Stones. Harry Potter. Cricket. Similarly, Paris evokes Romance. Love. Wine. Cheese. Baguettes. The Eiffel Tower. The Louvre. The Seine. Edith Piaf. Jean-Paul Sartre. Regardless of what everyday life is actually like there, from a branding perspective, both London and Paris are Too Big to Fail.

This is seldom the case when I’m called in to brand a country or city—otherwise, why would you even need a marketing consultant? A country’s “brand” is an aggregate of its wars, music, sports, climate, leadership, location, tacit traditions and national character—its entire social, political and cultural history—which blur and intersect over time. In the case of London, Big Ben and rain cannot be teased apart any more than love and food can be separated in Paris. Reputationally speaking, if there is anything to learn from a country that is Too Big to Fail, it’s what I call the Power of Less—which, in today’s overcrowded Information Age, matters more than ever.

Like any other powerful brand, the best-branded countries and cities of the world can be distilled into one or two words. When we think of Richard Branson, we think rebellious; Oprah Winfrey, compassion; and Apple evokes Innovation. Countries are no different. Those that lack a one- or two-word association, or that are young, or in flux, or at war, or in social or economic crisis, or whose reputations were never clear to begin with, face a big challenge: How do they begin to establish a brand? The question was one I confronted almost twenty years ago, when I first visited Dubai.

Though it had been growing slowly since oil was discovered there in the 1960s, Dubai in 1997 more closely resembled a dream, or concept, of a city, than it did an actual city. There were maybe three or four tall buildings, no shops, no highways, no beaches, no skyscrapers. Arguably, Dubai as people know it today began with a concept dreamed up by Majid Al Futtaim, who, inspired by a ski resort he’d seen in Japan in the mid-1990s, decided to construct his own indoor ski slope, Ski Dubai, in the middle of the Arabian Desert. Featuring an indoor mountain with five slopes and a quarter-mile-long run, Ski Dubai was an immediate success and taught Mr. Majid and other local developers that a bold, innovative approach can transform—or in this case, create out of thin air—a country’s reputation. Ski Dubai set off an unspoken competition among Dubai’s builders and entrepreneurs: Who could break the most rules the fastest?

Today, Dubai is a global business hub and a wildly popular tourist attraction. The city has around 600 buildings, skyscrapers, malls and hotels, with a population of around 2 million. Ninety-six percent of Dubai residents are foreign-born, and Dubai kharfours, or supermarkets, feature foods and beverages customized for 16 or so different nationalities (there are over 100 different varieties of rice alone). Most of Dubai’s foreign-born residents work in the city’s financial and construction industries, attracted by the absence of corporate income taxes and a 2002 land reform law that allows foreigners to buy local real estate.

Like Las Vegas, Dubai is the twenty-first-century version of a Pop-Up City, a city renowned for its seeming mission to be the first, the tallest, the fastest, the biggest, the most ornate and outrageous city in the world. Dubai has the tallest skyscraper in the world, the Burj Khalifa, and “the world’s most luxurious hotel” in the Burj Al Arab Jumeirah, a seven-star hotel that sits on its own man-made island overlooking the Arabian Gulf (seven stars, maybe needless to say, is a rating, and a star system, that exists nowhere else in the world). Dubai has the world’s largest mall, flower garden and Formula One stadium. Dubai’s Emirates airline is the first airline to offer on-board suites, showers and minibars, and its Business and First Class lounges connect directly to waiting airplanes. To combat the desert climate, Dubai was the first country to install cooling systems on its beaches and inside its swimming pools. Here and there across Dubai are vending machines that deliver bars made out of solid gold. Does anyone actually buy a gold bar from a vending machine? It’s unlikely, but it’s the thought, and the brand, that counts.

A few years ago, I was in Dubai giving a speech about “country branding” to a big group of tourism and marketing officials. At one point, I pointed out that the world’s most powerful country brands could be broken down to one or two words. Afterward, over dinner, one of the female guests asked me what Dubai’s “one word” brand was. The question flustered me. Country branding takes years, decades, sometimes even a century, to establish, I told her, and despite its accelerated growth, Dubai was still very young. When she persisted, I finally gave in. The word I came up with was the result of visiting and working in a city that in 17 or so years had evolved from a sandy oasis to Oz. The word, for better or for worse, was plastic.

Recall that our brains form a somatic marker when two things that have nothing in common come together, positively or negatively. If it takes a country years to establish a brand, Dubai shows that with the strategic use of somatic markers—a ski resort in the desert, a seven-star hotel, vending machines that spit out gold bars—successful country branding can be done in a much shorter period of time.

Let’s take another example. For decades Australia was known by a handful of words and images: Kangaroos. Koala bears. Boomerangs. Aborigines. There was nothing wrong with these things, except that kangaroos, koala bears, boomerangs and aborigines were only indirectly related to one another, linked by their exotic “other”-ness.

The resurrection of Australia as a worldwide tourist attraction probably began in the mid-1980s with the release of the film Crocodile Dundee. The movie had as its protagonist a bushman who told time using the position of the sun (well, kind of) and who, with dry, imperturbable machismo, faced down two knife-wielding New York muggers by producing a bush-machete with the words “That’s not a knife—that’s a knife.” A subsequent marketing strategy was, and is, linked to the fact that the Australian summer solstice takes place in late December, meaning that summer arrives in Australia just as winter appears in most Western countries. In response, Australia rolled out a handful of marketing strategies that culminate around the winter holidays. Around Christmastime, Australian broadcasters shoot video footage of bronzed men and bikini-wearing women adorned in Santa Claus hats along Sydney’s Bondi Beach, a stretch of ocean popular with surfers, skateboarders and volleyball players. The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is slow, and Australian broadcasters offer this footage for free to news outlets worldwide. Except for a few cities in Samoa and New Zealand, Australia is also the first continent to greet the New Year. Sydney is a photogenic city, and its annual fireworks display frames both the Sydney Bridge and the Sydney Opera House, footage that is also offered free of charge to news stations worldwide.

If it takes years for a city’s or a country’s brand identity to crystallize, it can also take a long time for a country to overcome a negative somatic marker. Vietnam, for instance, is renowned for its beaches, parks, museums, shopping and physical beauty, yet several generations of Americans can’t help but link Vietnam with a disputed, protracted war. Colombia, in South America, is one of the world’s most beautiful—and peaceful—countries, but it is still trying to shake its global reputation as a country synonymous with kidnapping, murder and drug violence. Why, I sometimes wonder, doesn’t the Colombia tourism board take advantage of one of its most positive associations—coffee—and partner with Starbucks to create an in-store campaign devoted to Colombian coffee beans? Alternately, as I wrote earlier, Medellín is home to the longest escalator in the world, built into the side of a mountain. Why doesn’t Colombia market its escalator in the same way Dubai trumpets its indoor ski slope?

Again, the power of film should never be underestimated. New Zealand, a largely unbranded country, saw its tourism industry increase by 50 percent after the 2001 release of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring.8 Today, New Zealand’s customs service stamps “Welcome to Middle Earth” on the passports of incoming tourists, and the government also issues postal stamps with the names of Tolkien characters on them. Some nations, like Taiwan, negotiate directly with Hollywood, hoping to find story lines that can help transform their image, in the same way the 2010 remake of The Karate Kid, partially filmed in China, helped to overturn the popular image of a polluted manufacturing center into that of a magical, mysterious, historically fascinating country.

Still, few people associate contemporary China with the Xia, Tang or Song dynasties, the Silk Road or Confucianism. What comes to mind instead is more likely than not a series of negative somatic markers, including the unsmiling face of Chairman Mao, communism, the Tiananmen Square protests and state-run censorship of the press, the Internet, religion and reproductive rights. Widespread publicity about the working conditions at Foxconn’s manufacturing facilities—which manufacture the West’s best-known products from Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Cisco, Vizio, Microsoft and others—hasn’t helped things. By now most Westerners are aware that their most beloved gadgets—iPhones, iPads, Kindles, Wiis, PlayStations, Xboxes and others—are built by poorly paid, ill-treated Chinese workers in working conditions so substandard that Foxconn erected suicide nets after 14 employees jumped to their deaths in 2014. “Made in China,” then, is a three-word fragment it would be difficult to transform. I wouldn’t be able to do it with one job, but I would do what I could.

On my first visit to Shanghai, when I checked into my hotel room on an upper floor of the Park Hyatt, the floor-to-ceiling windows were enclosed by smooth drapes the color of wax, or chalk. Seconds later, I realized that what covered my window weren’t drapes at all, but smog so dense and restrictive that nothing at all was visible from my 88th-floor window. The bathroom tap water had a chemical taste, and when I went outdoors, the air had a faint tang of metal.

China is responsible for more pollutants than any other country in the world, with two-thirds of China’s biggest cities falling short of minimal environmental standards.9 Among the first words every Chinese child learns is wuran, or pollution. The word means “dirty contamination,” though the Chinese state media prefers wumai, or “haze,” with its implication that the conditions are short-lived and occasional. Regardless of what word you use, wuran is real, its effects physical, psychological and constant. Wuran sticks to the back of your throat. It invades your larynx, turns the inside of your nose black and makes your eyes tear up and itch. On Shanghai’s most overcast days, residents press rags, cloths and handkerchiefs against their noses and mouths whenever they go outside. Nearly a quarter of all Chinese infants are born with pre-existing allergies, and a former Chinese health minister reported once that anywhere between 350,000 to 500,000 Chinese people a year die prematurely from air pollution.10 According to the New York Times, “Only 1 percent of the country’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union.”11

On the worst wuran days, a red flag hangs ominously at the front of local schools, and students stay indoors. So pervasive is the concern with airborne pollutants that the British School of Beijing and other international schools have built airtight domes equipped with hospital-grade air filtration systems around their campuses.12 Some runners participating in the 2014 Beijing Marathon dropped out of the race early, with “some saying it felt like running through bonfire smoke.”13 Not surprisingly, the biggest product trends in China are water filtration devices, air-quality phone apps, face masks, anti-nausea pills and high-end air-conditioning systems. The biggest pollutant is coal, which China burns more of than the United States, Europe and Japan combined, and whose sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions reach as far away as Japan and North and South Korea. The second culprit, according to the New York Times, is the increasing number of cars, heavy traffic conditions and low-grade gasoline.14

China, as I wrote earlier, is the largest car market in the world, with an annual production that exceeds that of America and Japan combined. Overseas car brands are obliged by Chinese law to partner with domestic Chinese automakers for local production, and most Chinese-made cars are the result of joint ventures with international brands. In 2010, a Chinese automaker, Geely, bought Volvo—today, many Volvo models are manufactured in China—and four years after that, the state-owned Dongfeng Motor invested more than a billion dollars in Peugeot-Citroën.

Herewith the problem. Global automakers and brands, including Hyundai and Buick, compose two-thirds of China’s car sales. This leaves branded China-made automobiles with a local market share of only one-third. Even the Chinese believe that local car brands are inferior to American and European brands, which is why, as a rule, Chinese automobile manufacturers earn most of their revenues by exporting cars to other developing countries, where low prices matter more than brand or legacy. For Chinese car buyers, Western brands stand for two things: aspiration and trust. By way of analogy, an Apple iPhone costs around $600, of which roughly one-third goes back to China, making the iPhone more or less a Chinese product, despite the fact that Apple has its headquarters in Northern California. The iPhone is a source of national pride for the Chinese, while at the same time, the company’s American roots add an exotic appeal that would be lacking if the iPhone’s provenance was exclusively Chinese. A Western-branded product guarantees that a phone, or a car, isn’t just real, but that it also works.

By contrast, the Chinese are historically skeptical about Chinese-made products, from cars to infant formula, especially premium-priced ones. The pollution infecting everyday food, in particular infant formula, means that Chinese tourists visiting Australia line up in supermarkets to bring back home international formula options—a phenomena that has become such a problem that many Australian supermarkets restrict the number of cans consumers can buy at one time. Thus, whenever the Chinese can purchase an extra seal of trustworthiness—a European or American logo—it increases their confidence that what they bought is high quality. Unlike, say, an iPhone, “Made in China” automobiles didn’t exude any aspirational qualities. What was the point of being a successful Chinese businessman if you ended up driving a Chinese car? China is a proud country. Chinese residents needed to show the world who they were, and few things shore up a person’s identity more eloquently than the car he drives.

Before thinking about improving the quality of Chinese cars, I had to begin Subtexting what “quality” meant for the Chinese. This was a difficult question to answer in a country that deemphasizes emotion, and whose natives are more or less stony-faced. In situations like these, I find it better to observe people from an undercover perspective, a skill set I developed when a team of Australian customs officers from Sydney let me shadow them for a week. What I learned over those seven days was what not to look for. The staff taught me not to be focused on or distracted by what people did, but to keep close watch on what they didn’t do. Customs eventually let me join the five-member security team tasked with opening and closing thousands of purses, backpacks and carry-ons, in order to correlate people’s behavior and the contents of their suitcases. In time, they told me, I would be able to predict what passengers had inside their bags before they even opened them. And before I knew it, I could.

On an earlier trip to China while working for a retail client, I asked executives whether they would let me spend 48 hours inside their CCT camera security room, a pipeline of sorts into the DNA of Chinese body language. How do Chinese consumers behave when they’re alone? How do they act when they’re considering buying something? Finally, how do they act when they are stealing?

Inside the CCT booth in Beijing, I spent two days monitoring both in-store purchases and thefts. People would pick things off shelves and tuck them under their coats, pockets or handbags. More intriguing still were their tics in the moments leading up to the theft. Invariably they would scratch the sides of their arms. Cut to ten years later, when I asked a cross-section of Chinese men to sit inside their dream cars. As they took seats inside the car, I noticed they scratched their hands up and down, back and forth, on their pants, before placing their hands on the wheel. During this time, not one showed any emotion, or even smiled. Their cultural training dictated that their facial expression remained blank and indecipherable.

Later, when I interviewed them outside the car, they unconsciously repeated this same behavior. To me, the scratching was an old childhood tic, an absent, unstudied gesture the men used to comfort and reassure themselves in a time of stress. The men knew they were doing something wrong. They were in a car that wasn’t theirs. They were revealing their childhood dreams. They wanted to make sure no one else noticed. In China, I would later learn, almost every other bodily gesture or expression has been tamed, trained and controlled out of existence, except, perhaps, for this one. I took note of it, and then it was time to venture inside Chinese apartment buildings.

More than half the Chinese population lives in, or close to, an urban area. Across Beijing, Shanghai and many other cities, you’ll find many thousands of functional, anonymous high-rise apartment buildings. As a rule, Chinese apartments are built to last 25 to 30 years, versus 70–75 years in the United States.15 They are poorly constructed, with negligent safety standards, tiny rooms and minimal personality. The walls are white and blank, and the flooring is plastic. Almost every piece of furniture is wrapped in plastic, which couldn’t help but remind me of my work in Saudi Arabia—except that in China, there were no Eiffel Towers or London Bridges, just one object after another—lamps, tables, chairs—enshrouded in the tightest possible coating of plastic.

When you do the work I do, you quickly learn that the more “personal” an item is, the more it reveals the truth about someone. Among the most personal things we own and use are those we put inside our bodies, or place inside our mouths, or that our bodies absorb—food, drinks, pills, toothbrushes and even the weather. On the basis of this equation, a banana is more “personal” than, say, a pair of shoes, in the same way a frozen TV dinner is more personal than a coat, a hat or a pair of gloves. In this case, the most critical clue about Chinese behavior—and how the Chinese assessed the quality of a product, or service—began with the sight of a lone toothbrush.

Generally speaking, when toothbrushes stand in a holder, or a cup, or jar, their owners tend to be less sexually active than not. If and when their owners are romantic, their sex lives tend to be highly structured and less hospitable to spontaneity or innovation, a scenario that over the years I’ve come to call “Appointment Sex.” In Russia, only three out of ten toothbrushes were standing, and I found a similar ratio across France and Italy. It’s worth adding that the owners of toothbrushes whose heads face down are more sexually active, more impulsive and altogether less constrained to schedules. Yet in the first seven or eight Chinese apartments I visited, the toothbrushes were standing, either in cups or holders. Three weeks later, as I set out my photos on a bulletin board, I totaled up the figures. Nine out of ten Chinese households appeared to be under the leash of “Appointment Sex.”

It wasn’t just Chinese toothbrushes that caught my attention, but the bristles, too. Their wear and tear indicated normal everyday use, but with a difference: the normal indentation that ran down the midpoint of the bristles, dividing them equally, was missing. Did Chinese toothbrushes as a rule lack indentations? No, having visited local drugstores and markets, I knew Chinese toothbrushes resembled toothbrushes sold everywhere else in the world. Were the toothbrushes for display rather than for everyday use? No: the worn handles indicated that the toothbrushes were used regularly.

Tooth-brushing rituals are the same across the world. Over the years, I’ve noticed interesting, oddball global behaviors around this subject, independent of culture, religion or age—including the fact that based on my own polling, 4 percent of the world’s people brush their teeth in the shower. Shower brushers, I’ve noticed, too, tend to be more creative than most, and generate most of their ideas while under the nozzle or in contact with water. Still, the length of time we take to brush our teeth, and the pressure we exert as we grip our toothbrush handles and press the heads against our gums and teeth, vary from country to country. What, then, had happened to the indentation on the bristles? Several Chinese consumers let me watch as they brushed their teeth, and the answer showed up immediately. Across the West, people press the bristles of their toothbrushes hard again their teeth. It’s as if they believe that the more pressure they apply, the more likely they are to end up with whiter teeth and brighter smiles. In Shanghai, it was a different story. The Chinese parted their lips, applied toothpaste onto the bristles, and held the toothbrush in place before their teeth. Then they brushed. Not with the bristles, as Westerners did, but by rapidly fluttering their hands and arms up and down. The toothbrush itself barely moved.

If nothing else, this gave me my first fragment of small data about sensory perception in China. Reminding myself that the toothbrush itself was a Chinese invention dating back to 1498, I took the liberty of noting this clue as one likely embedded in China’s DNA. It was a good foundation on which to begin creating a hypothesis.

On to the shower, where the first thing I glimpsed was a soap bar. So? In contrast to body wash, a popular trend throughout the 1990s, a soap bar acts as a buffer between our hands and our bodies that, in turn, may also point to reduced levels of sensuality. Not by itself, of course; people have been using soap bars and having feverish sex for centuries. But coupled with the standing toothbrushes, it added to a theme I was observing, focused around the concepts of momentum and speed. Once I made my way into Chinese bedrooms, I knew I was on the right track.

Any amateur detective will tell you that it’s more difficult to notice the absence of something than its presence. Still, just as every Chinese shower had a soap bar, not a single bed wore a bedspread. Sheets, yes, a light blanket, yes, pillows, yes, but bedspreads, no. There were virtually no exceptions to this rule, either. By itself, the absence of a bedspread wasn’t terribly unusual, but considering the high levels of protection across China against everyday wuran—fabrics pressed against people’s mouths and noses, stand-alone bubbles around schools and sports centers—the absence of bedspreads surprised me. Put another way, if a bed is akin to a human hand, where was its protective glove? Human skin, after all, comprises three layers. The epidermis, or visible layer, flushes our skin with color while continually generating new cells. Beneath the epidermis is a thicker layer, the dermis, which produces sweat and oil, and also connects to our blood vessels. The third layer of our skin is a shelf of subcutaneous fat, which modulates skin temperature and links the dermis to muscles and bones. Like the skin on the human hand, a bed is also an arrangement of layers, with the bedcover on top of the mattress, followed by sheets, blankets and occasionally a quilt or duvet. These things all have a role to play in the process—the slow seduction—of falling asleep, or preparing for romance or sex. Nor was this a general cultural discrepancy; from research I’d done in Japan and Thailand, I knew that bedspreads were commonplace elsewhere in Asia.

Chinese toothbrushes. Tooth-brushing habits. Soap bars. No bedcovers. Together, they pointed me toward the same conclusion, or rather the same words: Direct. Quick. Now. This was confirmed two or three nights later when one of my host families invited me to a local restaurant, in the town of Manzhhouli in the inner part of Mongolia, near the Russian border. The restaurant had a reputation for excellent food and service, though you would never have known it from its cold, naked lighting. My host family and I took our seats around a table in whose center was a revolving stand—a Lazy Susan of sorts—and when one of us ordered a dish the waiter set it down on the stand.

It was a memorable meal. The family ordered quickly, and the food appeared nearly at once. They spun the wheel as if playing a game of roulette. Everyone ate as if competing for a prize that would be awarded to the first person who finished. There were no pauses, breaks, respites or conversations lasting longer than a minute. Less than 45 minutes passed from the time we sat down to the time we stood up to leave.

It seemed that the Chinese had a radically different definition of the meaning of sensual. Elsewhere in the world, sensual was synonymous with softness, luxury, slowness and anticipation. Was there any time, or place, when the Chinese weren’t in a hurry? Then there was the matter of Chinese cars themselves. They were less like cars than apartment annexes. Inside most were functional elements that mirrored a household interior, from garbage bags, to mini-kettles allowing drivers to boil water for tea while in transit using a 12-volt power system, to—in one case—a mini-refrigerator. Chinese families regularly brought food along with them, too, which they ate while driving or riding in the backseat.

I decided to carry out an informal experiment. Over the next few days, I visited three or four local museums, including one devoted to jade, one of China’s most valuable and revered stones. Visit any museum in the world, and you’ll quickly realize how slowly museumgoers walk as they meander through galleries and exhibits. (Arguably, we walk with a reverence that complements the quality, prestige and reputation of the art surrounding us.) Once, in Paris’s Monet Museum, I clocked the velocity and speed of museumgoers over a 72-hour period. Visitors moved at around three miles per hour; that is to say, at an average speed. But at Beijing’s local jade museum, the approximate speed of museumgoers was four, almost five miles an hour. Japan is a brisk, no-tarrying culture, too, but the Chinese walk even more quickly than the Japanese do.

To the concept of speed, I now had to add another word: transition. Even when a transition was involved—eating a meal in a restaurant, going to a museum, tooth brushing or taking a shower—the Chinese never slowed down. Their cars were mini living rooms and mini kitchens. Even the experience of moviegoing seemed to be on a fast-moving timer. Some cinemas have curtains that part tantalizingly slowly as the overhead lights dim to reveal the movie screen. Not Chinese cinemas. In the nearly half-a-dozen Beijing movie theaters I visited, the curtain flew open like a flasher on a subway.

There was only one kind of occasion where the Chinese paused, and that was during one of their most important holidays.

I was in Beijing when a family I was interviewing invited me to attend the national ceremony known as Qingming Jie. Qingming Jie, otherwise known as the “Tomb-Sweeping Festival,” takes place every spring, two weeks after the solar equinox. On Qingming Jie, the living devote the day to the memory of their ancestors. They fix or beautify cemetery stones and stroll around graveyards and columbariums, snacking on qingtuan, or green dumplings, while savoring the warmth and colors of springtime. Some fly kites in the shapes of animals from well-known Chinese operas, and others burn incense or pop firecrackers. Most pray and offer food, tea and wine and also burn replicas of small cars, iPhones, iPads and Louis Vuitton handbags made from joss paper, bound packs of common paper that resemble legal tender. Chinese people believe that even after they have died, the deceased may still need these things in the afterlife. As kites shaped like pigs and goats and snakes fluttered overhead, papery phones, purses and cars were consigned to the flames.

As I observed people arriving and making their way toward the graveyard, both their body language and their behavior changed. The pace of my host family slowed down. Family members spoke to one another carefully, and with greater emphasis. Was it simply the gravity and ceremony of Qingming Jie?

With their permission, I began videotaping my host family both at Qingming Jie and afterward. Back in my hotel room, I Small Mined the footage. I tracked and measured people’s walking speeds, beginning from when they left their cars to when they passed through the graveyard entrance, at which point they slowed down even more. My host family in particular intrigued me. Even after leaving the graveyard and making their way back toward their car, they didn’t resume their usual walking speed. For the rest of the day, they walked, drove, cooked and spoke to one another more slowly.

China has many similar festivals, including Beijing’s Five Gods of Wealth Temple Fair, where the Chinese flock to worship gods symbolizing prosperity, burn incense, pray for luck and buy sheets of intricately designed paper decorated with the Chinese characters for good fortune and happiness; and the Lantern Festival, where red lanterns, many in the shapes of animals, are raised high in the air to symbolize the shedding of past identities and the adoption of new ones. These national festivals, it seemed, were the only times the Chinese slowed down. Other than that it was all speed, all the time.

Velocity, it turned out, was one of the keys to understanding China. Speed represented an imbalance, an exaggeration. To me this implied several things, chief among them that the opportunities for transformation in China were rare, almost nonexistent.

By “transformation” I mean those moments that oblige us to “become” something or someone else, or that influence and affect our behavior based on what we’re touching, or holding, or seeing, in the same way that Qingming Jie obliged Chinese families to decrease their walking speed and even speech. From Qingming Jie, I took away another clue as to what lay close to the Chinese national character. The joss money they burned represented what they held most dear: material goods. Which meant, as I knew already, that Western values were slowly making their way into the country.

The concept of transformation in the early twenty-first century intrigues me, in part because smartphones and computers are chipping away at our opportunities for escape. The fewer opportunities for transformation we have in our lives, the more we crave it. A car is a transformation zone. So is a coffee shop. So is a ferry that takes you from the mainland to an island, or going to a movie, or taking a long bike ride. Drinking, taking drugs and even meditation are all transformation zones. Yet in a digital era, the opportunities for transformation are diminishing. Thanks to our phones we are never altogether present and never completely alone. When we go by ourselves to a coffee shop, we are, in fact, accompanied by a digital device. Do we ever shut down our computers or smartphones anymore, other than to reboot them? What’s the point, we ask ourselves, since we’ll just be turning them back on in the morning? Thanks to our phones, most of us “go to work” when we open our eyes every morning, only to stop “working” when we go to sleep. The only time we power off our laptops is when we’re in transit. We are in the same season, and emotional climate, all the time, one that’s neither work nor leisure, neither at our desk nor officially off-duty.

From experience, I knew that the Chinese shared the same dearth of transformations as the Japanese. For decades, the Japanese have struggled with issues created by density. Tokyo trains are crowded, the sidewalks are congested, and even at home, space and privacy barely exist. Where, then, do Japanese people find space, and where had I first glimpsed the Chinese predilection for speed? In two places: Disneyland in Tokyo and Paris, where I found myself consulting for France’s Disneyland Resort Paris in the early 2000s.

Opened in 1992 in a suburb of Paris, Euro Disney was an immediate target for controversy and criticism. Some French critics found it a symbol of American cultural imperialism and consumerism, with one even calling it a “Cultural Chernobyl.”16 Euro Disney faced labor strikes, then a recession and, with turnout lower than expected, financial difficulties. The “magic” for which Disney was known worldwide seemed to be missing, which is when the management team contacted me to see if I could help reverse the park’s downward spiral.

After interviewing a selection of Euro Disney park-goers, I soon discovered that the “missing magic” could in fact be distilled to an absence of transformation. I couldn’t help but notice that this apparent flatness was coincident with a decrease in churchgoing across Europe. When I visited Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany, France and Italy, I came away convinced that what religion had historically given believers—faith, transformation—was no longer enough. In Europe at least, parishioners made their way through church portals at around the same pace they strolled through a market or store. The fact of being in a sacred place no longer slowed people down, which meant that religion was no longer creating the necessary degree of embodied cognition, or space, for worship, or contemplation, or reverence.

This insight—that a decline in churchgoing creates the need for other outlets to address the need for transformation—was what moved me to re-infuse superstition into the Euro Disney experience.

My inspiration was, of all people, Tinker Bell, the winged fairy from J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, and the superstition we brought back was Pixie Dust. We handed out small bags of colored powder to Disneyland cast members who, in turn, handed them to visitors who were then asked to close their eyes, make a wish and scatter the Pixie Dust into the pond beside Sleeping Beauty Castle. As a ritual, it required only a fast scattering of yellow and red and blue powder into a body of water. Still, the effect was powerful. Not only did thousands of Euro Disney visitors begin tossing Pixie Dust into the pond, but I soon noticed the differences in how visitors of different nationalities did so. For example, after gripping the Pixie Dust, Americans tossed it into the pond with their eyes half open and half closed. Japanese tourists took only a minimal amount, tossing it into the lake with formal elegance. Of all the nationalities I observed, Chinese adults and children grabbed the largest handfuls possible of Pixie Dust, which they then hurled into the pond as quickly as possible. It was, I remember thinking, as though they were desperate for a transformation to take place, to enter an otherworldly zone that took them well out of themselves.

Earlier I wrote that one of the strategies I used when turning around Lowes supermarkets was to give customers permission to act like children again. We all have multiple ages inside of us. The first is our actual physical, chronological age. Then there’s our inner age, the age we feel emotionally inside. I call this “emotional age” our Twin Self. It’s a phenomenon I make it a habit to remember whenever I’m running a board meeting. The conference room may be filled with businesspeople in their 50s and 60s, and to avoid feeling like a kid who someone managed to sneak into the corporate offices, I focus on what I take to be their approximate inner age—for most people, this age is anywhere from 18 to 26—at which point whatever fear or trepidation I might have felt disappears.

Who among us, at 50 years of age, “feels” 50? Almost no one. A good rule of thumb in brand building is to communicate, always, to a consumer’s Twin Self—and more than anything else, I realize that this was among the strategies that could help solve the Chinese car challenge.

What determines someone’s inner age? In my experience, our inner age is directly connected to the first time we felt liberated and on our own. It could be when we left for college, or moved into our first apartment, or bought our first car. I opened up my own advertising agency when I was 12 years old, and not surprisingly, most of the time, I still see the world from the perspective of a 12-year-old. A 47-year-old man I know once told me his inner age was 40. When I asked him to explain, he told me that only when he met and married his wife, and the two of them moved into their dream house (right around his fortieth birthday), did he feel truly liberated. Have you noticed how businesspeople sometimes carry around a backpack? It’s a sign of their Twin Self rejecting the typical props of the business world, and clinging to what it felt like to be young.

I’ve used the Twin Self concept any number of times in my work, most notably when I was consulting for iRobot, the manufacturers of the Roomba, the high-tech floor vacuum cleaner. Founded in 1990 by three roboticists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, iRobot is a New England–based robotics company that creates autonomous home robots—the Roomba, and for hard floors, the Scooba—and also manufactures police and military robotic units that have been deployed by the US military in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. By 2002, iRobot had sold 10 million Roombas, but when sales leveled off without explanation, the company brought me in to create an integrated branding strategy to reposition the Roomba—a rechargeable black disc that slides across the floor of a house, sucking up dirt—as a high-tech alternative to the vacuum cleaner.

Once I began my Subtext Research, a few things became clear, among them the fanaticism of the Roomba’s core fans. Once Roomba users “experienced” the Roomba, they became lifelong brand ambassadors. Each had an intimate relationship to their Roomba, treating it almost like a member of their families. Many gave their Roomba names: Whitie, Big Red, Spot. The word cute kept coming up. Consumers loved how the Roomba zoomed across the floors of their house, until it crashed into a wall or a chair. One woman had recommended the Roomba to at least 20 of her friends, adding that she often steered even casual conversations toward iRobot and Roomba.

If most psychologists agree that identity is a construct, then we’re all engaged in three processes simultaneously: Expressing who we are; expressing who we believe, or hope, we are; and finally, expressing who we want other people to think we are. No one rolls out of bed fated to dress, or act, in any one way; each of us is a deliberate self-creation. Nowhere was this more obvious than when I interviewed Roomba owners in their homes and apartments across New York and New England.

In a suburb outside Boston, Massachusetts, I found myself talking to a 35-year-old man named Jim. A few minutes into our conversation, I noticed that Jim had his own hydroponic plant system installed on an outdoor balcony, clearly visible from the living room. Jim told me how much time he spent cultivating his balcony garden, though he admitted to me it yielded only three or four tomatoes every year. In another home, Sam, an engineer, had set out all his technological devices on a coffee table, in precise rows. He had 9 remote controls, 73 diodes and 11 tightly coiled cables. In one corner of the room he kept a portable rolling minibar with its own built-in brew station designed to make homemade beer. Sam later confessed to me that he seldom drank beer and didn’t even like the taste. Maggie, a 56-year-old woman, had a knitting pattern hanging off a sewing machine. “It’s almost done,” she told me. Eventually she admitted to me that she hadn’t gone near her sewing machine in 15 years. Why was it so prominent in her living room, then? Maggie laughed; she had no answer.

The bigger point was how the apartments of countless male Roomba owners were laid out intentionally and strategically. One man, Richard, kept a basketful of toys in one corner of his living room. Only once or twice a year did his three-year-old nephew come to visit, which is why it made even less sense to me that he would showcase children’s toys in his permanent collection—though I later found out he had his reasons. Two days later, I visited another apartment, this one belonging to a 29-year-old Roomba fan named Stuart. In his bathroom there hung any number of notes and placards announcing, in French, the name of certain items. The sink. The toilet. The shower. Was Stuart studying French, or memorizing grammar? No he wasn’t. Then what explained the French signs all over his bathroom? “I want to learn the language,” he replied. But when I pressed him further, I found out the real reason.

It’s as if the insides of our homes, and even our cars and handbags, all feature a small variation on public image—a piano, a guitar, a vintage tattered American flag—in order to provoke an emotional response in others, and signal that their owners are more than what they do for a living, more than who or what they appear. I call this phenomenon “Breaking the Frame.”

I first noticed this in Japan, when I saw that a middle-aged woman had hung a small key ring on the handle of her elegant handbag. I later realized how common it was, in fact, for local consumers to display a small twist of individuality in a controlled, efficient, structured, homogenous country like Japan. Japan, after all, is a country where if your meeting is at 1 p.m., you show up in the waiting room at 12:45 at the latest. The bonsai trees are impeccably manicured. The sushi presentations are small, aesthetic works of art and, as I wrote earlier, getting your purchase gift-wrapped can take up to 30 minutes. Japan is also a society where natives repress their emotions, with many feeling unable to express either their creativity or their imagination.

By “owning” a single word—time—Switzerland can be just as repressive, at least on the surface. Swiss trains enter and exit train stations at schedules down to the second. If Swiss dinner guests plan on showing up five minutes late, they will call and alert you first. In response, many outsiders would say that the Swiss are conservative, routine-oriented, unimaginative and even dull. My experience there tells me otherwise. For one thing, based on my analysis of toilet water there—yes, I even analyze toilet water—Zurich has one of the highest levels of drug consumption in the world. Zurich was also the first and only city I know of to construct street-side mobile booths where prostitutes could entertain their clients, as well as the first city to launch public vending machines that sold condoms. Today, among other things, Zurich is home to some of the planet’s wildest raves, and it is a popular destination for the world’s most popular deejays. In short, while Zurich, and Switzerland, may be known for straitlaced efficiency, they have found their balance elsewhere.

Japan has found its own way of Breaking the Frame. In Tokyo, after a morning spent doing business, many men and women change out of their office clothes and costume themselves in the uniforms of animated characters. They then eat lunch while interacting with other men and women dressed as animated characters, then change back into their office garb and return to their offices. Japan is also the site of cat cafés, where for 100 yen, people spend their lunch hour playing with kittens and older felines. Underneath the roles society asks them to play is an alternate life they are forbidden to play or express: Breaking the Frame.

In Japan, of course, many people express the concept known as cute. Cute would play a big role in the relaunch of the Roomba. Whenever I interviewed people about the Roomba, at first most would tell me about its functional benefits. The Roomba saved time. The Roomba freed up its owner from household responsibilities. Thanks to the Roomba, the house was cleaner, not just in the obvious places but in hard-to-reach corners.

But the body language of my interviewees gave them away. As they spoke, they moved their hands, and scratched the backs of their heads and their forearms. It was the exact same behavior I’d noticed in China when I asked Chinese men to sit behind the wheel of a car. It told me one thing: the Roomba may have had a slew of functional benefits, but its true, visceral appeal was to the owner’s Twin Self—in this case, the child inside who had never gotten what he or she wanted growing up.

In the course of Subtexting on behalf of iRobot, I repeatedly found myself interviewing men and women who held highly structured, disciplined, administrative jobs with establishment titles. They were lawyers, insurance claims adjusters, sales representatives, middle managers. At home, though, once they changed out of their office clothes, they revealed another side of themselves. To compensate for their standardized, regulated day jobs, most had created a small, rebellious quirk—a way of Breaking the Frame—that couldn’t help but remind me of plants trying to break through pavement—sprigs of hope, individuality, freedom. Not least, every one of them owned a Roomba.

Here, though, is where the story gets interesting. Most of us own a vacuum, or at least a broom, a dustpan or a box of Swiffers. Even if we decided to trade in our vacuum cleaner, broom and dustpan for a Roomba, we would no doubt store it in a closet, along with our other unsightly household gear. Or would we? As far as Roomba owners were concerned, the answer was no. In most homes and apartments, the Roomba was partly concealed, partly exposed. One half of the Roomba was visible, as if it had decided to hide—in a closet, under a bed—but changed its mind at the last moment. In most homes and apartments, there was ample room and space to store a Roomba, which meant that its passive-aggressive placement was intentional—a major clue, in fact. On the surface, the Roomba may have been about cleaning, efficiency and time savings, all wrapped up in a high-tech robotic package, but that wasn’t why consumers loved the Roomba. No, the Roomba was a way to Break the Frame of the institutionalized lives they led during the week. In common with Trollbeads fans, they were allowing a brand to announce to the world that they were interesting, different, imaginative, quirky and even cute.

Another interesting fact about many Roomba owners? Many of them had a pet who’d recently died, or else they were on the verge of getting one, and it was between these two points that the Roomba came into their lives. The Roomba represented a bridge connecting the past to the present, an earlier identity with a future one.

There was one final secret reason why young, unmarried males bought a Roomba: to get women into bed. It took me awhile, and numerous interviews, to figure this out. Absolutely, these young men loved keeping up to date with the latest technology. Yes, the Roomba was a time-saver, allowing them to vacuum and do other things at the same time. But the Roomba was also a major pick-up device, especially for Jim, the man who kept a boxful of baby toys in his apartment. When I asked Jim to list off in their order of importance the four aspects of his apartment most likely to appeal to visiting females, he didn’t even have to think about it. His dog; the baby toys; the frayed flag he had hanging over his bed; his Roomba. As for Stuart, the man who plastered his bathroom with French translations for “The Sink,” “The Shower” and “The Toilet”? For him, the French was (as with Jim’s dog, baby toys and dilapidated flag) a ruse designed to seduce visiting females, considering that French is linked to Paris, which, in turn, is associated with love and romance.

But I didn’t realize where iRobot had gone off course until I was headed to the airport for my next job, which was Subtexting for Pepsi. So far, what I had found out about the Roomba puzzled me. Clearly, the machine did a lot more than vacuum floors, and I suspected that I’d caught repeated glimpses of the emotional foundation that might ultimately reunite the Roomba with its fans.

People often ask me if I hate flying and the long hours I spend aboard planes. The answer is that I enjoy the flights more than I enjoy the long security lines, the crowded airports and the occasionally condescending TSA agents. I also can’t help observe how people change once they board a flight. If you want to understand aspiration, you might consider asking flight attendents, as I have, about their constituents. Contrary to assumption, the most haughty, demanding passengers are neither in the First Class cabin nor in the Economy zone. No, every flight attendent I have ever asked tells me it is the Business Class passengers who are by a long shot the most difficult.

As I sat in my seat, I began wondering, not for the first time, why food generally tastes worse when you are airborne. Does it have something to do with the airflow, the minimal cooking facilities, or the fact that airliners are cutting back wherever they can? I also observed that when I was wearing my earphones, my food seemed to taste better than it did when I removed those same earphones. I played around with my headset by adjusting the volume, switching off the noise-reduction feature, but it made little difference. Without a doubt my food—and even the soda I was drinking—did taste better when I was wearing my earphones.

My upcoming work for Pepsi focused around strengthening their brands in the wake of changes in social media consumption. While doing Subtext Research throughout the world, I couldn’t help but notice that in only five years time, consumers had begun gazing at screens in entirely different ways. That said, despite the variety of new platforms ranging from tablets to phones to binge-watching websites like Netflix, the television set endured. Among other reasons, its continuing popularity could be credited less to what consumers watched on TV, or to the larger screen, and more to what they heard. In my experience, we listen to the television more than we actually watch it.

Still, the question of airline food and flavor kept nagging at me. Over the next couple of weeks, I peppered catering company employees with questions. Did they know whether sound altered humans’ perceptions of food at an altitude of 35,000 feet and, if it did, rather than sound making food taste worse, could sound possibly improve the flavor of foods or beverages? Later, I found out that at several thousand feet, our sense of taste and sense of smell are the first to weaken, thanks to drops in humidity and air pressure and even the role of background noise.17 BBC News once reported that people eating to a soundtrack of loud background noise rated food as being less salty, less sweet and even crunchier than those who ate in silence.18

All of which made me wonder: Rather than Pepsi focusing on changing the visual appearance of its brands, wouldn’t it make far more sense for the company to concentrate on “owning” the sense space? When you consider most if not all television commercials for foods or beverages, there is seldom any sound. No frying. No sizzling. Rarely will you hear the sizzle of a steak on the grill, or the glug-glug-glug of a soda filling a glass. Wouldn’t it be smart if Pepsi could “own” the actual sound of its soda trickling over ice cubes?

When I brought up this idea with company executives, their response was enthusiastic, even though it made them ask the obvious question—namely, why had sound gone missing from their television commercials for decades too? Almost immediately Pepsi began experimenting with what would ultimately become its trademarked sound.

If it weren’t for Pepsi, it would have taken me much longer to grasp iRobot’s core issue. From Pepsi, I learned that just as a pair of earphones can persuade us that the meal we’re eating on the plane is flavorful; sound can also change our perception of product performance. (When consumers vacuum using a silent vacuum cleaner, most will tell you it’s not working. This same high degree of irrationality perhaps explains why when we vacuum the rug only to see a tiny thread on the floor, we pass the vacuum head over it stubbornly and repeatedly, even though it would be much easier to pick it up.)

Human irrationality led me to ponder the following question: By altering, or even eradicating its sound, had iRobot damaged the very heart of its brand? I wasn’t talking about the brand’s logo, design or efficiency, but the sounds that it made. By sending out the subtlest emotional message to Roomba fans, was the silent treatment compromising this particular love affair?

The technology team had gotten rid of the sound, inadvertently destroying the brand’s “cute” factor. It’s no coincidence that one of the founders of iRobot and the Roomba was a big fan of the Star Wars franchise. Over time, as iRobot scaled from its modest 1990 beginnings, the dash of cuteness inspired by R2-D2, the so-called “astromech droid” from the films, had vanished. By the time the company called me in, no one knew what the Roomba was anymore. When I asked the technology team to disassemble a Roomba, they did, and once the parts lay before me on the table, I asked them what was missing. No one could answer. “It no longer talks,” I said. “It no longer says ‘uh-oh’ or ‘dood-dood.’”

In the course of my Subtexting, most Roomba owners told me how much they liked the noises their Roombas made. When it grazed the wall by accident, the Roomba said, “Uh-oh.” When it backed up, it said “dood-dood,” similar to the sound a truck or backhoe makes as it runs in reverse. But in the hands of iRobot’s crackerjack technology department, all sounds had been eliminated. The Roomba was now another faceless chunk of high-quality technology—sleek, impeccably designed, efficient and boring—with all its humanity bred out of it. Instead of helping Roomba owners Break the Frame, it had become another dreary extension of their already technologically overloaded workweeks.

The Roomba team had engineered all the whimsy out of the product. When you opened the Roomba, the first thing you saw were the words: Warning: Do Not Return This Unit to Retail. And Please Read Instructions Carefully Before Use. If hard-core Roomba fans were looking for ways to Break the Frame, and if the Roomba served as a silent communication device intimately linked to identity (and in some cases, romantic success), this was a losing strategy.

My mission? To re-infuse the “cuteness.” When I asked Roomba fans what other brand reminded them most of the Roomba, most told me it was BMW’s MINI Cooper, which everyone will agree has cuteness down to a science. When you order a new MINI Cooper, among other communiqués, BMW promptly sends you updates from England, digital links about the MINI and a reflective decal. When a new MINI is aboard a container ship, bound for its destination, the company’s communications continue: The Mini is enjoying its cruise and relaxing, and can’t wait to see you! MINI owners who’ve had their cars serviced at a BMW dealership have their cars returned with a sign on its wheel saying, I Missed You.

Inspired by the MINI Cooper, I asked iRobot’s research and development team to set aside the Roomba’s high-tech functionality and to do whatever they could to bring back the Roomba’s emotionality and humanity. I asked them to bear in mind one simple fact: the Roomba may be a wizardly piece of technology, but it was also a toy, a baby, a pet, a conversation piece, a displacement for its owners’ identity and, for some young men, a way to get women into bed. Sure, it may have swept up the most difficult-to-reach places in a home, but that was probably the least of its talents.

I had the Roomba on my mind when I addressed the issue of tackling a “Made in China” automobile. Again, on the surface, the Chinese are unemotional or, at least, it is culturally taboo to express a range of emotions in public or private. Another critical point was that in contrast to the West, where women and children have a strong say in what car a family buys, in China the men purchase most new cars. Most businessmen are unwilling to buy a “cute” car, or a “cute” anything for that matter. (Japan, as I mentioned, has “cute” sewn up, and the Chinese, who don’t exactly love Japan, know this. Cute tends to be “small,” too, and the Chinese have a cultural preference for the splashy, the oversized and the exaggerated.)

That said, the concept of “cute” was slowly migrating into China, a phenomenon that can be traced back to China’s one-child policy. “The Little Emperor Syndrome” is the popular term used to refer to the single Chinese son or daughter who receives inordinate amounts of love and attention from parents and other family members. My Subtext Research revealed that more and more Chinese parents were seeking out their children’s opinions and perspectives. I had to bear in mind not just contemporary China, but also the evolving Chinese car industry. This meant that the future Chinese car had to operate on several tracks simultaneously. In order to appeal to the male Chinese driver, it had to be brash, masculine and powerful, while also appealing to his Twin Self, in this case, to a child denied toys when he was growing up. In a culture that lacked opportunities for “transformation,” a Chinese automobile had to create a new, special mood, the illusion that a driver had entered a zone distinct from his everyday life. Not least, the car’s styling—its lighting, how fast or how slowly the doors slid open and closed—had to reflect the unspoken Chinese preferences I’d observed over the course of my Subtexting.

Think about a song you love, one that has been covered in the years since by other artists, for example, “Something” by George Harrison. Since the song appeared on the Beatles’ Abbey Road album in 1969, it has been sung by James Brown, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Ike and Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Neil Diamond, approximately 150 musicians in all, making it the Beatles second-most-covered song next to “Yesterday.” But arguably, no matter how superior or inferior all the others versions are, I can guarantee you that Harrison’s original recording remains most people’s favorite version. Why? The simple answer: it was the one they heard first. We prefer what we saw, heard or sensed first, whether it’s the color of our childhood bedrooms or the lake, pool or ocean where we first learned to swim.

Our perception of what “quality” means is no different from our earliest exposure to music or to color. For Chinese cars designed for Chinese consumers, I focused both on male drivers and on the children who would someday grow up to buy cars. But if the Chinese car company was intent on exporting its cars abroad, I had to determine what “quality” meant elsewhere in the world. What better place to conduct my investigation than in two hubs of global car production, Germany and the United States?

Obviously, you cannot interview children using the same methods you use to talk to adults. Most children find it difficult to put their feelings and desires into words, which is why I’ve found that playing games with them often reveals greater insights. I carried out my study in Beijing, Berlin and Michigan, surrounded by a roomful of children accompanied by their parents. Before us were several boxes of LEGOs. With the goal of understanding the difference in how children in various countries manifested “speed”—which directly correlates with “quality” in the automobile sector—I asked them to show, build, construct and in general improvise around the concept of speed. Then I sat back with my notebook and watched.

All three nationalities—Chinese, American and German—built enormous cars. There were no surprises there. What did surprise me was when German and American children demonstrated “speed” by dragging their fingers across the floor. In contrast, the Chinese children showed no interest in finger demonstrations, but instead flung a LEGO piece against the nearest hard surface. Once they finished building their cars, both the American and German children, as invested in defense as they were in velocity, created bumpers, safety fences, garages and other protections around their cars to safeguard them against danger. One German child even constructed a rocket ship with a smaller survival capsule hugging the main frame, in the case of an emergency landing.

I next encouraged the children to play a game centered on “crashing.” Here, the differences among the three nationalities showed up at once. The Chinese children showed no hesitation about carrying out one full-on collision after another. Bumpers, garages and safety rails seemed to bore them. When the Chinese kids played a game of chicken with their cars, neither car slowed down at the other’s approach. The Germans and American children by contrast were far more cautious. Their LEGO cars slowed prior to impact. For them, the concepts of “speed” and “crashing” were both regulated and controlled.

The children couldn’t put it into words, nor should they have, but it was obvious to me that an exaggerated focus on security, safety and protection had affected an entire younger generation. Both the Germans and Americans had intuited an “adult” definition of speed that ran counter to their own natural childhood behavior.

What did this all mean? When I Small Mined all my data, this insight about speed confirmed that “quality” in China was perceived as fast, no frills, almost breakneck, and would remain the same for the next generation of car buyers, too. I’d seen this same thing in how the Chinese brushed their teeth, in the bars of shampoo soap, in the absence of bedcovers and in the way people ordered, and were served, food in restaurants. Relatedly, the Chinese perceived light—light that other nationalities would find overly direct, naked and even confrontational—as “high-quality,” as it was in the restaurant where I shared a meal with my Chinese host family. With the exception of the country’s religious and memorial festivals, there was a striking nationwide absence of build-up, foreplay and anticipation. Culturally speaking, China went straight to the point.

I next commissioned a global study of doors.

Yes, doors. My assistant and I traveled the world taking short films of department store doors, subway doors, bus doors, elevator doors and basically any kind of door we could find. When we filmed Japanese commuters boarding a train, and the door began closing, we took notes. Did the door spring back as if bitten? Did it close slowly, then accelerate for the next few inches? Did it move slowly and patiently? We also filmed escalators. How fast or slowly did they ascend? I carried out another experiment in homes around the world, this time asking people which part, or zone, of their kitchen, or bedroom, or bathroom best represented “quality.” Few Americans would ever discern quality in a drawer opening or closing, yet almost every northern European told me that a drawer that begins slowly, accelerates and slows down again is of higher “quality” than a uniformly fast-moving or slow-moving drawer.

Bizarrely, enough, the variation in these differences in how we perceive quality can be traced back to our grandparents’ era. In the 1930s and ’40s, doors in northern Europe were larger and heavier than they are today, as slow to open as they were to close. Without knowing exactly why, the perception of “quality” in how things open and shut has been handed down to subsequent generations.

Knowing that the Chinese car company had plans to go global, I created a “fast versus slow” translation kit for feelings and sensory signals to create the perception of “quality” in every country where they planned to expand. In France, for example, there is a widespread cultural emphasis on transition and on ceremony. France may have an ongoing love affair with frozen produce, but even when buying frozen food, the French will buy the ingredients for a three-course meal, and do the same when visiting McDonald’s. They will buy a starter—perhaps chicken nuggets—work up to a hamburger and French fries, and end things with a dessert. The French expect a similar three-part formula in the way their car doors open and close. Americans are accustomed to an instantaneous feedback loop, and have little patience with a product that doesn’t come to life immediately. An American tourist traveling abroad who switches on a Bang & Olufsen television in his hotel room will likely perceive the set as broken, not realizing it takes roughly seven seconds to turn on. Apple is one company that has solved this issue smartly. When a consumer powers on an iPhone, the silvery Apple logo appears, alerting users that the phone is on. Knowing the phone works, a consumer is happy to wait an additional 30 seconds before the phone is officially ready for use. I have no doubt that Apple engineers could tinker with the insides to make the phone turn on more quickly. Instead, they’ve designed the iPhone to give users both instant gratification and a sense of anticipation, which they interpret to mean that the phone is both technologically sophisticated and high quality.

China, of course, was different. Department store doors snapped open quickly. Elevators and escalators shot up. The trains were cannonballs. At the same time, outside of religious festivals, there was no space allotted for transition, or transformation. Even the Chinese cars I studied were more like extensions of apartments than automobiles. Which is why one of my first mandates for Chinese automobiles to appeal to Chinese markets was that the doors open and close fast. The next question—importing the concept of the Twin Self in the car design—was more challenging.

The Twin Self has two elements, both of which are linked to desire: what we had once, but lost, and what we once dreamed about having but never possessed. Males across the world not only have a younger person inside them, they also have a third party, which any number of superheroes and action stars reflect. What is the fundamental appeal of books and films such as The Godfather and the Bourne and Matrix franchises? What explains the popularity of Batman, or Superman, or Spider-Man, or the X-Men films, or the success of the American television series Breaking Bad? The answer: they all feature as their protagonist a normal, everyday, even somewhat mild male who evolves into an animal or, at the very least, a powerful, menacing, occasionally cold-blooded killer who plays by his own rules. It was this aspect—the driver with a Twin Self, who is also in possession of a masterful, powerful alter ego—that I recommended we incorporate into the overall design of our “Made in China” car.

Another element we incorporated into the car’s design was a transformation zone. Alongside a team of designers, we created a special internal ambience akin to the change in acoustics you hear when entering a sound studio. We used ambient light that snapped on when the doors opened and snapped off when the doors shut. The result: amplified masculine symbols, including a deep resonance to the sounds the doors made when slamming shut. We also made it a point to elevate the car seat, to give the driver a sense of omniscience and control. Knowing that Chinese children had a say about car buying, and were equally stimulated by power and mastery (and cuteness), we created a dashboard that resembled a flight deck. From watching ESPN, I’d learned about the power of information bombardment. ESPN strafes its viewers with an almost hysterical amount of data and details. Scrolling boxes. Panels. Bars. Graphics. Multi-angle camera perspectives. When exposed to a surfeit of data, men tend to feel more masculine and in command. Do most men bother to decipher these boxes, panels, bars and graphics? No—but that’s not really the point. My mission was for Chinese drivers to perceive their cars as fast, powerful and male, even if they weren’t. More to the point, the doors opened and closed quickly, in a fast, straight line, and the same went for the electronic windows. My mission was to appeal to the child inside the driver, the driver himself, and his children.

Today, thanks to its new “translation kit,” the Chinese car company is better able to translate “feelings” into sensory clues. A sliding passenger-side door in Europe, for example, opens very slowly, reaches a midpoint one or two feet in, then zips the rest of the way open. When the door is shut, the overhead light fades slowly. By contrast, the side doors on the “Made in China” car open and close furiously fast.

It’s too early to tell how our Chinese car manufacturer is doing, but they’ve far surpassed their sales from last year, and the brand has dramatically increased its revenues across China. More to the point, the company is more hospitable than it has ever been to the emotional aspects of branding. Has the “Made in China” brand made forward progress? Yes, but there’s still a lot of work left to be done. Someone asked me whether the Chinese predilection for speed will eventually migrate across the rest of the world, helped along by our own digital habits. I told him no, that in fact I believed that the opposite is true. As always, and whether they know it or not, human beings seek balance. The faster we go, the slower, in some respects, we will become. It may not always be conscious, but unconsciously we are all seeking to redress acceleration with idling, velocity with patience, chatter with quiet. How do I know this? Because small data is everywhere, if we know where to look.