Product Description

Original and intriguing perspective on a significant and increasingly important marketing target group.
∗ A hip, contemporary issue that people will want to be aware of.
∗ Interesting comparison of various fashionable cities and places in the hub culture "league."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #974038 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 230 pages

From the Back Cover
Hub Culture takes an in–depth look at one of the most influential marketing target groups to emerge from the 90s — the global urban modernist, a network of modern individualists who now live in a post–national frame of mind and orient themselves around hub living, using urban centers as bases for their particular lifestyle. Hub Culture traces individuals from this seemingly disconnected group of people in several of these centers, or "hubs", defining their tastes and predilections, their motivations and their influences so that marketers and ad agencies can tap into this leading edge of a developing mass consumer force. This book provides:

• Magazine–like lifestyle stories with marketing intelligence.
• Interesting comparison of various fashionable cities and places in the hub culture "league".
• A fresh and innovative take on consumer behaviour.

The author draws upon his years of expertise in marketing and brand guardianship to provide a unique insight into the connection between successful branding and the interests of this important group of brand influentials. In this fascinating book, he sets out to explain a mobile way of living that has taken root in many of the world’s largest cities in an attempt to help marketers understand the new motivating factors for global brand development. It is this whole worldview on a unique lifestyle, says Stalnaker, that marketers need to be aware of.

Hub Culture offers a valuable glimpse into the future direction of global branding in an increasingly synchronized society and in doing so highlights a simple fact: no one country, race, or culture owns the new global aesthetic.

About the Author
Stan Stalnaker is Marketing Director, Fortune Group, based in Hong Kong and London. He oversees general brand development, advertising, partnerships, alliances, conferences, events and image building for FORTUNE magazine across the Asia–Pacific region.

As a multinational executive with this, the world’s largest media and entertainment company, he has developed expertise in a number of aspects of marketing and brand guardianship. He also works closely with a range of blue–chip brands to develop multimedia programs across AOL Time Warner platforms in categories that include automotive, banking, entertainment, luxury goods, nation building and travel. He wrote a weekly entertainment and trends column for cnn.com/asianow and timeasia.com (called Culture on Demand) and is a regular contributor to several magazines.

Customer Reviews

one to watch
I enjoyed this book a lot - Stan Stalnaker has written a great profile of some of the most influential yet difficult-to-reach consumers on the planet. His pace and style are good and chatty - with plenty of anecdotes and real-life examples.

While it rather runs out of steam towards the end, it is (as far as I know) the first and only book to examine this interesting and growing group of people - a group that Stalnaker neither over-romaticises nor patronises.

When I read the blurb I thought that maybe Stalnaker had just rediscoverd cultural imerialism - but his knowledge and understanding soon convinced me that it really is is much more complex than that. These people are the conduits of cool, they know more than anyone about what is happening around the planet in terms lifestyle and fashion.

If I have one criticism it is that he skips over the less glamourous side of this culture - drugs and alcoholism are not mentioned very much nor are the rootless sometimes lonely aspects of being a foreigner in a strange city. He doen't do much to investigate the parallel group of younger, less well educated "Hub Culturists" from Eastern Europe as well as Latin America and Asia that work in service industries in the "Hub Cities" while learning languages and developing international work skills and outlook - they too are very much world citizens and I suspect just as influential in their own way as the North Americans and Western Europeans mostly covered in the book.

I'll be looking out for his next book. Stan is a good thinker, an entertaining writer and certainly "one to watch".