“Hello Kitty: The Global Brand with Nine Lives” by Ken Belson is available from the IMA Museum on iTunes U.

The content of the presentation is quite good, but man this guy could use some help with slide design! He uses a serif font, a white background, and WAYYYY too much text. I guess he comes from the Microsoft School of Presentations. You can tell, because there’s a sales chart that definitely comes from Excel. For a guy in the know about a facet of Japanese popular culture and Sanrio’s global dominance, he could use some help from http://www.presentationzen.com/

When my sister and I were little kids (I was probably five at the time), we used to go to a stationery store in Rego Park on 63rd Drive (Same street as in my hitotoki.org story) and we were kind of nuts about Hello Kitty. There were these tiny playsets where kitty-chan was about 2cm high, and the entire playset would be about 10cm square. We had like 10 or so sets that could all be assembled together into a town. You could get Dear Daniel as well as Tuxedo Sam, lest you feel funny about playing with pink kitties and bunnies. To this day, I still like Hello Kitty; we even have a set of plushy Hello Kitty and Dear Daniel in traditional Japanese wedding garb. It came from McDonald’s in Japan. Talk about cross-cultural brand dominance!

So, bear with the awful presentation graphics and enjoy the rest of the content from this iTunes U presentation.