MURKETING

Notes on a transparent apology

I’m still snickering over the recent comments of Fake Steve Jobs at about famous PR guy Steve Rubel. Rubel is one of these people who’s turned himself into a guru by touting the mighty Web and how it’s, you know, changing everything.

For example, it’s a great opportunity to “empower customer evangelists.” Actually, I first became aware of Rubel when he was talking up some project he’d come up with for Vespa, which basically involved “empowering” some Vespa fans to blog about Vespas, under the auspices of the company that makes Vespas. “What better way to evangelize the benefits of scootering than empowering existing customers to tell prospective scooterati why Vespa rocks?” he summarized. The two synthetic blogs that resulted were called Vespaway.com and Vespaquest.com. I kept an eye on them for a while, but then I forgot about them — and it’s not clear how that experiment panned out, since both those URLs lead to 404 Not Found error pages.

Still, Rubel ended up with a column in Ad Age, and a more prestigious job at Edelman. Probably he had some other success stories that I happen not to be aware of.

Anyway, one of his other big themes is transparency. Fake Steve Jobs finds something a little, uh, unconvincing about this. And then goes on the following rampage:

Apparently Rubel blabbered on Twitter that he doesn’t read PC Mag and in fact tosses his copy into the trash when it arrives. Smooth move for a PR guy right? [PC Magazine editor in chief Jim] Louderback blasted back here saying that since Mr. Bigshot PR man and blogger Steve Rubel of Edelman PR has so little respect for PC Mag, then he would start ignoring pitches from Edelman clients.

That in turn prompted this hilarious groveling open letter from Rubel to “Mr. Louderback” and everyone at Ziff Davis, which owns PC Mag. It’s really a must-read, if only because Rubel is one of these guys who’s been going around saying how the mainstream media doesn’t matter anymore, and how blogs are displacing all the big newspapers and magazines, blah blah blah … but here he is taking one deep down the windpipe on behalf of his clients, who no doubt carved him a new one for pissing off PC Mag.

From there it gets a little crude for the family-friendly environment of Murketing.com, so proceed at your own risk. And needless to say, I don’t necessarily endorse the views of Fake Steve.

But in this instance, I did find them amusing. I just thought I’d be transparent about that.

The anti-democratization of luxury

Everybody’s heard about the democratization of luxury, etc. etc. An interesting counter-narrative to this conventional wisdom could be written by someone, on the subject of how luxury resists democratization, and it might include a section on Tiffany’s.

In an article on Tiffany’s yestersday, The Wall Street Journal told the story of a silver charm bracelet, priced at around $100, that was introduced in 1997, “to address the then-emerging trend toward affordable luxury.” The bracelet was “a sensation.” That was good news for Tiffany’s. For a while.

Within a few years, the company’s managers became “concerned about the crowds in Tiffany’s suburban stores.” Company research found that “Tiffany’s brand was becoming too closely associated with inexpensive silver jewelry.”

So they started raising prices on the bracelets, first to $175. People kept by buying them.

This in and of itself is pretty interesting. Tiffany’s seems to have enjoyed amazing pricing power — as far as I can tell, that boost amounted to pure profit, and there was no improvement to the product, but people were buying anyway.

By 2004 the price was up to $250, and sales finallly died off. (Interesting to speculate how much of that was actually price-related and how much had to do with a fad running its course.) That, it seems, was Tiffany’s real goal: getting rid of the affordable-luxury riffraff, to protect their not-so-affordable luxury image. The Journal‘s Ellen Byron writes:

At its flagship New York store, Tiffany began inviting its best customers to observe artisans creating one-of-a-kind jewelry in its storied seventh-floor workshop, which is closed to the public.

Now, Tiffany can boast that its biggest sales growth in the U.S. came from sales and transactions over $20,000 and over $50,000. In the most recent quarter, sales in stores open at least a year grew 4% over the year before, with the newly renovated New York flagship posting a gain of 13%.

Still, as the piece notes, Tiffany’s challenge isn’t over, as it continues to walk a line between expanding (it’s up to 64 stores in the U.S.) and still seeming exclusive. Here’s a link to the whole article, but you have to be a subscriber for it to work — and in that case you’ve probably already read it.

Thinking somewhere in close proximity to the box

Speaking of trends for 2007, USA Today has this roundup of food-related predictions (via Agenda). One caught my eye. Someone named Alpana Singh, identified as “wine/spirits director for Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises restaurants and author of Alpana Pours,” says this:

Alternatively packaged wines will take off — Tetra Pacs (soft-sided cartons), wines in boxes. People are not ashamed to say they found a good $3 or $4 Pinot Grigio, so we’re over that hurdle. They’re buying those wines in 5-liter boxes made for the refrigerator where you can extract a glass or two at a time.

Six months ago I got a pretty aggressive pitch from a major retailer that I probably shouldn’t name about box wines being “back.” And within the last two weeks someone else randomly mentioned to me that she’d just taken box wine to a BYO French bistro.

Pattern? Or pareidolia?

Pattern invention

We’re still in the season of 2007 predictions. What’ll be hot. What new trends will emerge. To the extent that I have anything to say about future trends, I said it in the column about phads a few weeks ago.

Still, skimming list after list of predictions has me thinking about an article I read in the L.A. Times the other day. It was about why people see, for instance, the face of Jesus in a fried tortilla, or the Virgin Mary in a grilled-cheese sandwhich, and so on:

From a scientific perspective, the phenomenon is so common that it has been given a name: pareidolia, the perception of patterns where none are intended. And according to Stewart Guthrie, one of a handful of professors who have studied it, such perceptions are part of the way human beings are “hard-wired.”

“It’s really part of our basic perceptual and cognitive situation,” said Guthrie, a cultural anthropologist, retired Fordham University professor and author of the book “Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion.”

“It has to do with all kinds of misapprehensions that there is something human-like in one’s environment, when really there’s not.”

At the root of the phenomenon, he said, is is the survival instinct.

“It’s a built-in perceptual strategy,” Guthrie said, “of better safe than sorry. In a situation of uncertainty, we guess that something is caused by the most important possibility.”

There was no particular news in any of this, I guess, but I’d never come across the word pareidolia before. It’s kind of a useful idea. I do know enough about psychology to know that this business of “spotting patterns where non exist” is in fact something we’re all susceptible to. I think about it a lot when I’m trying to decide what to write about. Not that I write about trends, per se. But it’s worth keeping in mind as you peruse the prognistications:

Which ones are based on spotting real patterns of change?

And which ones are the trend-watching equivalent of seeing a religious icon in the clouds?

Phads

In Consumed: How to package trends into consumable ideas.

One of the things that have changed in the last few years is the number of people saying that lots of things have changed in the last few years. There are more of them, and what they have spotted are trends. Many trends. In fact, Reinier Evers has taken to saying that “trends are the new trend.” He says this with a bit of a wink, but still, he’s in a position to know: he is the founder of a company called TrendWatching, which by his reckoning has identified more than 60 trends since 2002. Each is backed by examples culled from a far-flung network of trend tipsters, and each has a name, like “Tryvertising,” “Life Caching,” “Transumers” (not to be confused with “Twinsumers”) and “Youniversal Branding.” Moreover, TrendWatching’s coinages compete with those of futurists, bloggers, business-book authors, advertising agencies, consulting firms, freelance gurus and even magazines. From “IDvidualism” to “Crowdsourcing” to “the One Life trend,” these new concepts are legion. …

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site via this no-registration-required link.

Additional link: TrendWatching.com.

Cute!

Vulture Droppings declares: “Cute is the new cocaine.”

And in fact: “The main use for the internet is for downloading cute pictures, mostly of kittens. people do this like it is a drug.”

Correct!

At Murketing HQ we’ve been into the whole cute thing for ages. And I don’t mean the “kawaii” version of cuteness, tarted up with vague allusions to cosmpolitanism. I mean pure, uncut, cute shit: kittens, dogs wearing costumes, and, of course, pandas. This is the stuff that keeps us coming back to Yahoo’s most-emailed page day after day, looking for what’s cute now.

Editorial note: Vulture Droppings links to several YouTube kitten videos, which I assume are cute, but which I didn’t bother to watch. Not bothering to watch YouTube videos is, of course, well on its way to being the new cuteness.

Coinage alert! “Meganiche”

In Wired, Clay Shirky writes that as Web usage has gotten huge, thin slices of the overall Web audience are, not surprisingly, bigger than they were when the overall Web audience was smaller. And thus:

I define a meganiche as a thin slice of the Web that nonetheless represents roughly a million users. The meganiche is something new, and it will have a lasting impact on online business and culture…

[T]he Net is chockablock with special-interest sites and services you’ve never heard of but whose user base exceeds the print circulation of The Washington Post.

Examples include Howard Forums; Gaia Online; and You’re The Man Now, Dog. It wasn’t always clear to me how “user base” is defined, and I’ve always been skeptical about measurement claims about millions of “unique users” for some sites. But in general this seems like a logical — or really a mathematically inevitable — development. And now it has a name.

Leggings up… Sort of…

Who’s wearing leggings these days? And who isn’t? And why?

Entertaining answers offered in the Washington Post by Robin Givhan:

Leggings have been touted on must-have lists as one of the surest ways for a woman to announce that she is acutely aware of this season’s fashion trends. They identify her as someone who keeps track of hemlines and silhouettes, probably has at least one subscription to a fashion magazine and may have, upon occasion, even put her name on a waiting list for a particularly desirable handbag.

The fashion industry desperately needs this trend-conscious shopper — even as it mocks her….

The rest is here….

“Messenger chic”

New York Magazine asks Dave Ortiz of DQM, “what’s new in the skater world?” He says:

The track bike—fixed gears, no brakes—is the new skateboard. We’re making six, basing them on the eighties; they’ll be out for February. The Williamsburg kids rock these with rolled-up pants, Vans. Messenger chic. You can do wheelies and skids and be in another borough in twenty minutes, and that’s whassup.

Strictly speaking, I’m not sure I would say it’s new, but I do think that what he’s calling “messenger chic” could be pounced on by the trend industry in a much more aggressive way than it has been to date. As an interesting bit of background, this Village Voice article on “mutant bike culture” was quite memorable — and not just because it includes a Brooklyn Industries guy bumming out about “malicious” graffiti on his shop window. Also possibly interesting (I keep meaning to get this book), is Pedal: “a wild ride alongside a band of New York City’s most feared and respected inhabitants: bike messengers.”

This Just In

“CONSUMERS DON’T MARCH IN LOCKSTEP ANYMORE.”

So announces a promotional mailing I just got, hyping a marketing-tips book that “draws lessons from today’s most interesting trends and countertrends.” The book is called The Hummer and The Mini, and that title is meant to suggest how, in today’s modern world, “every category now has many next big things — and they often contradict each other.”

The Hummer isn’t really doing that well right now, but still: Things sure have changed since, say, the 1960s, when some consumers were buying Cadillacs and others bought VW Bugs — “in lockstep,” of course.

Straight from the AstroTurf

According to Brandweek, earlier this year Sprint sent a free phones to a bunch of bloggers, under the auspices of a “Sprint Ambassador Program.” A Sprint rep called this “a grass-roots approach.”

What a snooze, right? Actually, there’s something interesting about the article (a truncated version, which I guess ran in Adweek, is online here), but it took me a while to realize what that interesting something was.

All the “Ambassadors” mentioned in the article are bloggers who happen to be professional marketers or consultants of one sort or another — people whose blogs are largely devoted to importance of blogging (and of hiring a consultant who, you know, really gets just how important blogging is).

Not surprisingly, these people are pretty impressed by Sprint’s tactic. After all, as blogggers they can tell the truth, no holds barred, blah blah blah. (Don’t Consumer Reports, or Walt Mossberg, etc., do the same? Whatever! Only someone who doesn’t get it would ask that question.) What all the marketing bloggers basically say (without actually saying it) is: “You can tell how smart Sprint is, because they agree with my point of view.”

Evidently it was actually one of the “Ambassadors” who told Brandweek about the “grass roots” campaign — resulting in the article that gave publicity to Sprint, to him, and to the concepts that he pushes in his own business. Intentionally or not, Sprint stumbled on something that’s better than grass-roots marketing: AstroTurf marketing.

Faux Logo

The Blackspot: A brand that appeals to the toughest consumers — the ones who are sick of brands.

“Dylan Coyle, who is 24, studies music at San Francisco State University. He has been a vegan for five years and is a careful consumer. Last year, somebody asked him what he wanted for Christmas, and he said he wanted a pair of Blackspot shoes. This was a considered choice: the shoes are made from ‘vegetarian materials,’ including organic hemp and recycled tires. They are manufactured in a ‘safe, comfortable union factory’ in Portugal and sold by the creators of Adbusters, a magazine best known for its withering critique of the advertising business and of mindless materialism….”

[To continue reading at NYT Magazine, follow this registration-free link.]