The majority of people worldwide wouldn’t care if 73% of brands disappeared tomorrow.

Is that all?

Read the full thing on trendwatching

Apparently 800,000 commuters pass through the station every day.

Ikea on facebook

Here’s a few food trucks to whet the appetite. All brands whatever their purpose could follow this model for some pop up retail.

Wahaca Food Truck, Southbank London

Shuck Truck, the obligatory converted Airstream, but this time selling oysters. Originally from Coolhunting, more on their website cabincoveoysters.com

The Marination mobile’s Big Blue, website here marinationmobile.com

Del Popolo Food Truck, a wood burning oven on wheels, originally from the very excellent Fox is Black.

Big Green Truck Pizza Company, more images on their website biggreentruckpizza.com

The Innocent van, is this still going, not sure?

There’s a whole load of type driven design trucks, and even a Food Truck Tracker, who knew!

And last but not lease Molly’s Milk Truck, website her mollysmilktruck.com

Originally spotted on the Retail Focus twitter feed.

Here’s a nice little eBook, courtesy of Elateral.

Just the right thing to get those juices going for your New Year’s to do list. Of particular interest is the four principles and seven imperatives and some good links at the back of the book. Happy reading.

Here’s the download link. (You’ll need to give up your email address).

Of particular note is the immensely long home page, scroll all the way down to read a huge amount of information. We’re still getting comments regularly about designing ‘above the fold’ so it’s refreshing to see a client that understands that scrolling is probably easier than clicking through and keeps customers on the home page longer before they make their choice to enter the store. Think of it as the decompression zone that we build into stores in the offline world so customers can get used to crossing the threshold before deciding where to head.

Also worth noting is the launch. A particular time and date backed up by a twitter campaign (the more tweets the greater the discount) Lucky 10 to get the ball rolling on launch day.

Finally, retail design is all about the details. Nice to see a message about free shipping right there in the checkout button which you can see when you hover over the Shopping Bag button.

Also worth looking at his flickr group of the café. The Rapha website’s not too shabby either and a nice video on Monocle.

These days there’s no reason not to have a shop, a pop up shop, a twitter, a facebook page, a van, go to festivals, write a book, a photo essay, a magazine, have a loyalty card, a website, a microsite, a tumblr, a flavors.me, print a t-shirt the list goes on. Brands that market themselves as authentic and have an idea win. Those that buy off the shelf and stick their logo on, fail.

Update: just came across another piece about Rapha here on everydaylife.style loads more to explore on there too.

More on The Escape Pod’s blog.

Originally spotted on Brandflakes for Breakfast

Also available is The Word of Mouth Manual (Vol II) available from your blog of choice … Word of Mouth Manual