MURKETING

Nau now now

Everyone (well, everyone in the narrow slice of the marketplace that may or may not “lead” trends) appears to be going nuts for Nau.

In the last month or so, a couple of readers (not publicists) have emailed me about the apparel brand; it’s steaily been getting business press attention (and attention) as well as eco-blog praise (and praise); Coolhunting touted it earlier and is now involved in some kind of special promotional sale in New York this week (see below); and this past week PSFK published an interview with a Nau founder. (“We began Nau because, as far as we knew, there were no other companies in the apparel market designing product combining beauty, performance, and sustainability,” etc.).

Of course I’ve not been to an actual Nau store (locations in Boulder; Chicago; Tigard, OR; and Bellevue, WA) or laid on eyes on the brand’s garments (as opposed to pictures of the garments). But I’m intrigued by the level of interest. If you have any info or opinions I’d love to hear.

And if you’re in New York, the brand is having a sample sale at the Openhouse Gallery (201 Mulberry Street, NYC), “VIP Night” March 5, everybody else March 6 through 9. If you go, again, I’d love to hear about it.

What do ad agencies stand for?

Adrants has this blip about a project called Unscrew America. It’s a campaign to get people to use compact fluorescent light bulbs. There’s a site, and some ads.

I’m kind of ambivalent about the execution — well, to be blunt, I don’t really care for it. But never mind that. What I’m interested in is that as far as I can tell this is underwritten entirely by GSD&M, not for any client or pro bono client or cause/organization or nonprofit. Just their own initiative, their own time and money.

Seems like most of the interesting or successful “good” work I see from agencies is always on behalf of some other entity — whether it’s Arnold Worldwide and Crispin Porter’s famous work, or the TheTruth or the Droga5 Tap Project for Unicef.

Nothing wrong with doing compelling work on behalf of some else’s idea or cause. But are there many other examples of an agency doing something simply to promote an idea that the agency itself believes in?

Maybe there are. You tell me.

Can’t “average people” do green things?

I’ve been brooding for a couple of days now about Treehugger’s recent post, 4 Reasons Why Recession is BAD for the Environment. It’s a perfectly reasonable post, but this is the bit that’s bothering me:

Average people, when money is tight, will look for less expensive products (duh). Right now, that usually means that greener products won’t make it.

I understand what they’re getting at, and that many “ethical” products cost more, etc. But I feel like it’s become too routine to equate the consumer role in addressing environmental or sustainability (or whatever) concerns with simply buying products. And in particular, with considering eco-ness as something like a luxury.

Too often I think people trying to build eco-businesses get caught up in chasing the high-end, moneyed niche, and using the quasi-lux positioning as a hook. I know some people think it’s good when green-ness and “status” become intertwined, but I’m not so sure. “Status” is a fluid concept. It can spark backlashes as easily as emulation. (Grant McCracken has explored a similar point here.) And it can seem optional — if you’re buying green for status, not because of something more tangible, it’s much easier to stop.

Selling eco as a luxury or a status marker may or may not build a profitable business, but when it does, it tends to be a niche business. And the more this approach is used, the more it ends up creating a broader impression that consumer ethics is itself a luxury good — and something that “average people” just can’t participate in.

I suspect there are other ways to participate in the general idea of environmental responsibility that have nothing to do with buying anything at all, let alone status-buying. That’s what I had on my mind when I posted the other day about consumer behavior and the potentially grim economy: That maybe non-shopping activities — unconsumption, if you will — would be a good thing to think about.

More on ethics, consumption, and crafting

Vanessa at Etsy’s The Storque has written a thoughtful response to the Jean Railla column What Would Jesus Sell?, published here a few weeks back. Vanessa’s thoughts have gotten lots of comments over there, too much for me to attempt to summarize, so check it out. I’m just interested to see the discussion is continuing.

And because to so some extent it’s a subject dealt with in Buying In, I’m glad to see how much interest there is in the topic in general.

More on Honest Tea & Coke

The other day I linked to this Chews Wise (Sam Fromartz, author of Organic Inc.) post about Honest Tea‘s new relationship with Coca Cola. Two updates on that. Marketing Profs blog offers a few other examples of niche food/beverage brands, particularly with some kind of organic or other feel-good hook, being bought giants. (It also notes that Clorox “quietly” bought Burt’s Bees recently. I’m not sure how quiet that was, but here’s a huge New York Times story on the subject from a month ago.) The blog says:

On the positive side, the mega food companies also greatly expand distribution for their acquired brands, and have the ability to market with much deeper pockets. They sometimes even allow their new baby brands to influence some of their business thinking. While it is now au courant to become green or more natural, for example, the insights and influence corporate giants are getting from their newly acquired brands has actually begun to effect change in their thinking. . .and that’s a good thing.

Second, Mr. Fromartz has gone direct to the source and done a quite interesting Q&A with Honest Tea co-founder Seth Goldman. I recommend checking out the whole thing, but a few things I want to highlight here.

Goldman specifically mentions the distribution issue noted above as a major plus for his company in the new deal. I can’t tell you how many times this comes up when I interview startup entrepreneurs — you can have all the clever marketing and awesome consumer evangelism you want, but without distribution, you’re limited.

Most interestingly, Goldman even cites McDonald’s as “an example of the kind of account that we will now have access to,” meaning they can at least get in the door for a meeting, because of the Coke connection. It might seem surprising that a successful new beverage can’t do that on its own. And I’m not in a position to say with certainty whether it’s 100% true all the time. But it doesn’t surprise me at all; it’s quite consistent with stories I’ve heard before, in plenty of categories.

Then Goldman offers another example: Wal-Mart, he says, is a place where Honest Tea “should be.” Fromartz of course brings up the obvious question of how Honest Tea loyalists might respond to their little brand popping up in such places. Goldman:

We’ve gotten a lot of emails, mostly positive but some negative. One of the most important points is I’m not trying to excuse or rationalize what Coke sells. They’ve obviously been successful at it. But if people think their product is unhealthy, then their desire should be to see more Honest Tea available wherever Coke is sold.

Possible new inspiration for better consumer behavior: The grim economy

I’ve never really been a big believer in the theory that American consumers are going to be led to more ethical and/or less “wasteful” behavior because the trendy thought leaders are all buying Priuses and shunning plastic bags.

But I had an interesting conversation with somebody recently about whether, perhaps, consumers behavior will evolve in less-wasteful directions for a very different reason — a tanking economy.

This conversation was a result of an NYT story this week that was the most-emailed thing on the Times site for a day or two: “Economy Fitful, Americans Start To Pay As they Go.” Snippet:

With the number of jobs shrinking, housing prices falling and debt levels swelling, the same nation that pioneered the no-money-down mortgage suddenly confronts an unfamiliar imperative: more Americans must live within their means.

The shift under way feels to some analysts like a cultural inflection point, one with huge implications for an economy driven overwhelmingly by consumer spending.

Is there some chance that this will have an effect on “consumer ethics” — meaning everything from recycling to thinking about sustainability to simply being less wasteful and more thoughtful about consumption?

It’s not like everybody will become a Freegan, or join The Compact, or become a hardcore “simple living” adherent. But seriously. Will those sorts of ideas trickle more into the mainstream? Will Freecycle get more popular? Might style obsolescence slow? Could more people start thinking about their own consumer behavior in a different way — not because it’s “cool,” but because they sort of have to (or just fear that they will)?

Just a thought, but I’d love to know if you see anecdotal evidence (the friend I was chatting with did) and/or what you think.

Update 2/9/08: Treehugger offers reasons why the grim economy is bad for eco-ness.

Honest (Tea) critique

Samuel Fromartz of Organic Inc./Chews Wise offers a fairly skeptical take on Honest Tea (7/3/05 Consumed subject) selling a big ownership chunk to Coke. One excerpt, addressed to co-founder Seth Goldman:

Remember your name, Honest Tea? The name implies that there is something less honest or dishonest out there that is being sold, and you are the alternative. Being the alternative – it’s part of your DNA.

So you have to make the case that Coke will not compromise all that your brand stands for, and has stood for, over the years. Heck, all that YOU stand for.

Deconstructed denim

Marketplace had an interview yesterday with Rachel Louise Snyder, whose book Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade sounds interesting. Maybe your jeans say “Made in Country X,” but that’s not the whole story, she says:

You’ll have the cotton grown in a place like Uzbekistan or Azerbaijan — and in my book, it’s Azerbaijan — and maybe Turkey and then that’s woven, all the cotton from those countries is woven for consistency into one large roll of fabric and then its dyed in a different country like Italy and then sent maybe to India, where it might be cut, and then sent somewhere else. But you might have six or eight different countries involved in that process because of the way trade rules are set up.

And also:

We’ve now come up with these standards for food where it has to say where our food is processed and where it’s grown, but we don’t have those same standards for clothes.

Reminds me a bit of Travels of A T-Shirt in the Global Economy, a book I thought was pretty good, although I believe this one is more of a journalistic account, while Pietra Rivoli’s was a little more economics-focused. Anyway, I’m generally a fan of any account that gets beyond the oversimplified versions of ethics and consumption that tend to dominate. Check out the interview (transcript or audio) and see what you think.

Cheerios and cloned meat

So, what about this cloned-meat thing? Is it really going to happen? Clearly a lot of people are freaked out about it, even though the FDA says it’s okay. I assume the problem is twofold. First, nobody is all that impressed that a government agency says something is okay, because we’ve all seen enough problems with previously approved drugs and so on. Second, the FDA’s conclusion that clone meat doesn’t need to be labeled as such is just fishy.

The Times today quotes the owner of something called Prairie State Semen making the case of what’s in it for consumers:

“When you buy a box of Cheerios in New York and one in Champaign, Illinois, you know they are going to be the same. By shortening the genetic pool using clones, you can do a similar thing.

“It could improve the quality of meat in the supermarket.”

Okay, well, if it improves the quality, then why wouldn’t sellers of clone meat want it to be labeled as such? If it’s a benefit, then why hide it?

Catalogs, consumer choice, and the annoyance-to-profits formula

Back in October I mentioned a service called Catalog Choice, which is designed to let you opt out of, well, catalogs. I signed up, and have been steadily typing in catalog information ever since. But I can’t say I’ve seen a notable reduction in how many show up in the mail, week after week.

They tell you to wait ten weeks for results, or something like that, so I figured maybe it would just take time. But recently Business Week wrote about the service and it turns out there’s another issue. Apparently what Catalog Choice does is collect this data and turn it over to the catalog retailers, who are supposed to act on it by purging people like me from their lists. But BW says at least some retailers simply “blew off” off this information, and “have done nothing with the names.” And an email from something called The Direct Marketing Association to its members is quoted:

Bearing the subject line “JUST SAY NO,” it warned retailers that Catalog Choice’s “priority is to eliminate catalogs as a marketing medium. It is not in your interest to further their efforts!”

Evidently few retailers were willing to talk to BW. LL Bean claimed it is “evaluating [the Catalog Choice data] for accuracy.” Williams-Sonoma/Pottery Barn “says it ‘is still figuring out the right thing to do for our customers.'”

It would presumably be more accurate to say they’re still trying to figure out the right thing to do for their bottom line. After all, pretty much everybody claims to hate catalogs — but obviously lots of people order from them just the same. So the basic operating procedure is to send catalogs to people who say they don’t want them, and maybe even believe they don’t want them. It might seem wasteful to spend money pursuing such people, but I’m guessing the payoff is there: Annoying potential customers is, really, part of the business model. The question likely boils down to whether the Catalog Choice effort can make a big enough issue of this to embarrass the companies into deciding that maybe its annoyance-to-profits algorithm needs an adjustment.

Ethics, book reviews, blurbs

Romenesko points to the results of a survey on the subject of book reviewing ethics. (Potential conflicts, whether reviewers have to finish the book, etc.) The question that I’m curious about is number 11: “Should a person who has written an unpaid blurb for a book be allowed to write a fuller review of the book?”

An unpaid blurb? Are there paid blurbs?

In Consumed: Emergency Décor

HomeHero: A fire extinguisher makes a claim that good looks can be a virtue.

Not long ago, Home Depot began selling a $25 fire extinguisher that did not look like a fire extinguisher: white, smooth and resembling a countertop kitchen appliance, it is “attractive enough to keep within reach,” according to a sales circular. Earlier this year, the Industrial Designers Society of America came to a similar conclusion when it gave the HomeHero one of its top awards. As is typical, the organization’s judges praised both functional and aesthetic qualities of the object. The write-up for the International Design Excellence Award asserted that it is less cumbersome and easier to use than a traditional fire extinguisher. “Most importantly,” the statement concluded, its “fashion-conscious” looks mean that “homeowners won’t want to keep the HomeHero hidden out of view, ensuring it will be in reach when seconds matter.”

Industrial designers are forever pointing out they are not mere stylists; doing their job well means making better things, not better-looking things. So it’s attention-grabbing when IDEA judges call style the most important feature of a piece of home-safety equipment….

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site.

How to soften the truth about your company’s defective products

Blog Neuromarketing mulls the way the brain processes specific numbers and percentages differently, keying off the discussion of “framing” in Jason (not Philip) Zweig’s book Your Money and Your Brain. Zweig’s point is to help regular people understand how the different ways we think about absolute numbers and percentages can lead us astray. Neuromarketing approaches the subject from a, uh, different angle.

There are times when marketing and public relations people do have to address negative topics, as when dealing with press coverage of a company problem. In these cases, I’d recommend percentages. “Only 1% of our laptop power supplies have actually caught on fire” is, from a framing standpoint, better than, “Only 1 out of 100 …” Bad news is bad news, but people will be less likely to visualize their legs getting scorched if they don’t imagine themselves as “the one.”

Great!

Recall revisited

As you may recall, this very site wondered allowed in mid-August, when the blame-China response to the Mattel recalls was at its most mindlessly shrill, whether the magnet problem — which caused a much larger number of toys to be recalled than the lead paint problem — wasn’t a design issue, not a manufacturing issue.

Apparently Mattel says the answer to that question is yes.

Mattel has said repeatedly that its biggest recall had nothing to do with China or shoddy production.

That recall of more than 17 million doll accessories and cars — coming just after one lead-paint recall of Chinese-made products and in tandem with another — was because of high-powered magnets that could break loose and pose a serious danger if swallowed.

The problem, Mattel’s Eckert said again and again, was in design, not manufacturing.

Nevertheless, as this story indicates (via Wal Mart Watch), at least some politicians and other observers are determined to make this a demonize-China story. And maybe the speculation that Mattel is simply kissing ass to keep in China’s good side is correct. But next time read a hysterical assessment of the “China poison train,” at least keep in mind that the story might be more complicated than that.

Recall question

Here’s what I don’t quite understand about the latest recall, of various Mattel toys. It’s being positioned as another example of the China/supply/manufacturing-chain problem. About 250,000 of the toys had lead paint on them, as I understand it, and this seems consistent with that positioning, since the paint is being blamed on murky subcontracting.

But most of the recall is about something like 9 million toys with small magnets that can (I gather) easily come out and be swallowed. That sounds more like a product-design issue, no? If the design included these little magnets, and did not include any way to prevent them from being removed or whatever, then what difference does it make where the design was executed?

Moreover, it appears that some of these 9 million toys being recalled were actually sold as many as four years ago. Mattel was already involved in an earlier, similar recall, and a different company that had a similar problem with small magnets has already paid out millions of dollars to settle lawsuits on this same issue.

I’m not saying the magnets aren’t a serious problem, because from what I read it sounds like they are. I just don’t understand the general suggestion that the problem is the fault of shady outsourced manufacturing firm(s). Maybe I’m missing something?