Complex Numbers

Global Domination

Back in the early days of this blog, I had a running joke about ragging on Hello Kitty. Very recently, I found this article from Fast Company:

    Hello Kitty turns 50: Here’s how she became a global moneymaker  
As Hello Kitty’s commercial success expanded beyond Asia, so did her personal profile.

At least, I thought of it as a running joke. Looking back, it might have seemed like a serious hate-on. Either way, though, the whole reason for the gag was the Nefarious Neko's worldwide appeal, how the character seemed to be everywhere, on all things, in all contexts.

This, of course, is successful marketing. As I've said before, I sometimes put marketing articles in here because many people have things they want to promote, like, maybe, their books. And also, the psychology of it can be interesting.

Hello Kitty turns 50 on Friday.

For context, if you don't want to click on the link, "Friday" was November 1 of this year.

As a tabula rasa open to interpretation, the non-threatening creation was the perfect vehicle for making money, she said.

This strikes me as opposite to most marketing advice, which is to know your audience and pander to it. In the past, I'd have taken issue with the "non-threatening" description, but again, I think those jokes fell flat.

There have been anniversary editions of merchandise ranging from pet collars, cosmetics and McDonald’s Happy Meals to Crocs and a Baccarat crystal figurine.

On the other hand, I'd have had a field day with Hello Kitty Crocs. Hell, I might still be able to work up a rant about that particular combination.

By the late 1970s, Sanrio revealed the character’s name as Kitty White, her height as five apples tall and her birthplace as suburban London, where the company said she lived with her parents and twin sister Mimmy.

That much, I knew. ("Know your enemy," I might have said in the past.)

Her TV appearances required co-stars, including a pet cat named Charmmy Kitty that made its debut 20 years ago.

This was also always suspect to me. A cat owning a cat? Isn't that, like, slavery?

But Hello Kitty’s 40th birthday brought an update that astonished fans. Sanrio clarified to a Los Angeles museum curator that Kitty, despite her feline features, was a little girl.

Thus sidestepping the "slavery" issue and pushing the conversation back to animal rights. Just kidding; I doubt anyone else thought deeply about the ethics involved.

“She is supposed to be Kitty White and English. But this is part of the enigma: Who is Hello Kitty? We can’t figure it out. We don’t even know if she is a cat,” art historian Joyce S. Cheng, a University of Oregon associate professor, said. “There is an unresolved indeterminacy about her that is so amazing.”

Like if she were in a box with a radioactive atom. Schrõdinger's Hello Kitty.

Part of the confusion stems from a misunderstanding of “kawaii,” which is Japanese for “cute” but also connotes a lovable or adorable essence.

It may be cliché, but some things really do get lost in translation.

During a presentation earlier this year in Seoul, Hello Kitty designer Yamaguchi said one of her unfulfilled goals was finding a way “to develop a Hello Kitty for men to fall in love with as well.” But she’s still working on it.

I have some ideas, but I try to keep this blog 18+.

Even if I'd been serious about my ragging on Hello Kitty, that came to an end some years ago, when I read an article (which I can't find now) featuring some village in Northern Siberia, considered the most remote human settlement in the world (pretty sure they didn't include Antarctic research bases, just places where humans naturally settled). Of course, the village isn't entirely unreachable, or they wouldn't have done an article on it, but apparently, it's only accessible by some rickety train line in the week when there's summer there.

The article included pictures, and in one of them, a little girl in this remote village unconnected to the world at large was wearing a Hello Kitty shirt. That is when I knew that her dominance was complete, and no amount of rage, joking or otherwise, would end her hegemony.

Honestly, these days, I think we could do a lot worse.