In this brave new world where brand power rules, no longer can you enjoy the simple pleasure, and pain, of running or working out. Nor can you simply have the experience of running or working out, ultimate or otherwise. You connect, wirelessly of course, to this ultimate running or personal workout experience.

Has Apple found a way to interface the iPod direct to the human brain? Not quite. This wireless connection to the ultimate running and personal workout experience is between your Nike shoe and your iPod which will then display information on time, distance and calories burned. It will also provide "real-time audible feedback" just in case this running experience is so ultimate that you lose touch with reality and need to be informed acoustically that you are indeed lifting each foot in turn off the ground, bringing it forward and putting it down again and thus propelling yourself across the surface of Mother Earth at a goodly clip.

Or perhaps you won't do this anymore. So great is the synergistic power of these two iconic global brands that not only will they "create a better running experience" they promise to "change the way people run".

Don't take my word for it. Just ask Lance Armstrong. He won the Tour de France seven times and now he's going to run the New York Marathon, so he should know. "If you can incorporate time, distance and calories burned together and make it function for both the fitness runner and the high level athlete, it will take working out to a whole other level."

What's that supposed to mean? Pity he can't put together a sentence in praise of his no doubt generous sponsors that makes any sense.

But seriously, there is clearly enormous potential for combining one iconic brand whose primary manifestation is in a portable, popular and increasingly powerful information processing device with other seemingly unrelated brands to exploit consumers' endless appetite for slavish obedience to fashion by adding real or perceived functionality.

McDonalds and iPod could team up to connect consumers the ultimate eating experience: transmitters at point of sale in Maccas restaurants could communicate wirelessly with iPods relaying details of products purchased and consumers could then be provided with information on calories consumed, grammes of saturated fats and sugars and how much "ultimate running and workout experience " they would need to "connect with" in order to burn off aforesaid calories.

This system could be integrated with Nike running shoes to provide real time updates as this is accomplished, or give audible feedback in the form of progressively more persistent nagging to those who cannot be tempted from a recumbent position to connect with an ultimate running or personal workout experience.

Disclaimer: The author does not own an iPod nor any item of Nike apparel

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