More Lessons from Europe: Storm Fronts Start in America

I used to live in St. Louis and was always transfixed by the weather in Kansas City. Why, because whatever weather pattern was hitting them was going to hit us 24 hours later. It would be with a horrible fascination that I would watch the people in Kansas City being buried by avalanches of snow or hit by torrential rain and knowing that I was going to soon be facing the same.

I think that that is what it must be like for Europeans whenever the see a new development in the US. Whether it is “High School Musical” or “Dora the Explorer,” they can figure that those cultural winds are going to be blowing through their countries in a matter of months.

On one hand, this certainly gives the Europeans an advantage in calculating which brands in which to invest. It’s a bit like me knowing to get out the snow shovel after watching the weather in Kansas City. On the other hand, there is a sort of horrible inevitability about it all; that you are not creating your own destiny so much as reacting to someone else’s. 

We in North America live in the pop culture epicenter of the world. The lesson for us is that this seems like a good thing until we realize that this inevitably means greater risk for us. Unlike the Europeans, we have no early warning system for what is going to be hot or not. The rest of the world gets to sit back and watch us deal with each cultural storm as it lashes its way through the country. In this particular case, advantage Europe.