Thang Nguyen 555

Cultures on Collision Course

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With some short-term relief work in Asia/Africa and long stint in Telecom, Thang also earned a B.A. at Pennsylvania State University. M.A. in Communication at Wheaton Graduate School, M.A. in Cross-Cultural Communication at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, Boston. In addition, he earned a CELTA – classes taken in Hanoi for cultural re-immersion.

Tag: tech and multi-cultural marketing

  • Don’t dream, it’s over

    The Maytag man finally wakes up from a long nap! Pent-up demand pushes consumers to go out and spend on big-ticket items such as refrigerators, washers and dryers. Walmart got a law suit for paying men more than women for the same job. Our calendar is very consumer-friendly i.e. plenty of  shopping events, from Mothers…

  • Clarity begins at home

    April 27th Newshour  featured Viet entrepreneurs coming back to Vietnam : a. to set up shop b. start an NGO and c. work  for the Clinton’s Initiatives. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/jan-june10/vietnam_04-27.html We found in it our own Victor Luu (Software), Andrew Lam (writer), a coffee-house artist and an NGO dedicate. The piece provided balanced perspectives  to the extent…

  • Moving online

    Roughly a quarter of ad dollars is spent on print where we only spend less than 8% of our time . Meanwhile 8-10% of ad dollars are spent online, where more than 1Billion adults spend much more than 10% of their time. There lies the mismatch. Then, arrives the fast 4-G train with ads online.…

  • Dentist and Disney

    Christopher Shaw, winner of the most recent Power Ball lottery, said he would go to the dentist and then Disney World. (this is a retweet, a year later. Not much has changed, except for Chris’ dentistry). I guess that’s how winning feels: being on top of the world, full of positive forces that lift you…

  • Let’s text again!

    Cirque Du Soleil has been featuring Elvis, the King of Rock. Let’s twist again. Soon this innovative company will “deep blue” once again with Michael Jackson, King of Pop. Meanwhile, a new generation of high school students cannot wait for recess to snack on text. I wonder who their idol is? Facebook founder? (When Bill…

  • The art side that remains

    If you flipped through A Brief History of the World, you would find our Informational Age just a blip. Yet it is the  Age we are in i.e. algorithm, self-check out, no Saturday delivery of Saturday Evening Post. Even when Google can translate a document into many languages, an editor is still needed since he/she…

  • view from the roof top

    35 years ago, I saw frequent planes leaving the Capital of South Vietnam, then called Saigon. I sensed that something was coming down. And that my life would never be the same. It turned out that my hunch was correct: two weeks later, I stood across from the US embassy to watch helicopters leaving from…

  • Vietnamese love for Ken

    It’s obvious, in your face and undeniable: Heineken rules, at least, in Vietnam. The company built a brewery there as early as 1990. And this preemptive move has paid off quite handsomely. As people in Vietnam say, when you are sad, you toast, when you are happy, you toast, and when you feel neither, toast…

  • Mozartian Requiem

    I heard that no two top executives at Coca Cola are allowed to fly together on the same flight. And that they hand-carry the secret sauce (just like the White House “football”). Maybe their risk-averse strategy should serve as a cautionary tale for our time, especially after today’s crash which took out most of Polish…

  • Springing and sneezing

    The pollen are out. The Claritin are in. And the cherry are blossoming, in Japan, and in DC. What a thoughtful gift! TIME documented a photo “Spring time in Japan”, dated 1989. It shows office workers lunching, in optimism, with cherry blossom in the background. Now, more than 20 years later, things have completely changed…