Via Commercial Alert, here’s a Chicago Tribune story about college “brand reps,” such as 20-year-old Northwestern student Alex Covington, who reps for Macy’s. Specifically she:
plans Macy’s events on campus, from a sorority slumber party to a casting call for a Web documentary. She hands out fliers, sends out mass e-mails and text messages, and angles for articles in the student newspaper.
And whenever she gets a compliment on her tailored white blouse or her California-casual sundress, she makes sure to credit the company that provided them free of charge.
“I got it from [Macy’s’] American Rag” collection, she says.
“You should check it out.”
In exchange she gets $450 “stipend,” and $400 gift card. She apparently says “she reveals her ties to Macy’s about 85 percent to 90 percent of the time,” when pitching fellow students. The piece says her employer is RepNation, a division of Mr. Youth that claims to have 5,000 college reps working for various corporate brand clients.
This style of murketing — breaking the fourth wall between commercial persuasion and day-to-day life — is discussed in some detail in Buying In.
Speaking of street art: Who do you figure might be responsible for this work in Montreal and other Canadian cities?
An ad agency of course. Working for Vespa. Via AdFreak.
I can’t resist highlighting this, via Craftzine: Someone posted on Craftster the dress she made for prom … out of Skittles wrappers. Apart from being a remarkable feat of DIYism and upcycling (and thus unconsumption), extra points for the use of branded trash.
Plus, for those of you who remember the Consumed column on donks: I wonder if she knows about the infamous Skittles donk?
What is it about Skittles, anyway?
The headline quote is one of the comments to the Getcrafty post.
Posted Under:
DIYism,
Unconsumption by Rob Walker on May 13, 2008
Comments Off on “Wow that’s a lot of Skittles”
PSFK notes this Japan Today writeup about Muji planning a further push into the U.S. market. Last year the company — maker of many products; the name roughly means “no-brand goods” — got some notice for opening a boutique in SoHo. (It has operated a store within the Moma Design Store since 2004; here’s a Consumed about Muji from January 9, 2005.)
Interestingly they’re sounding pretty ambitious. The president of Muji USA says: “I don’t want to just be accepted by design-conscious people or people who like Asian tastes…I want Muji to be accepted as a generic brand.”
While most brands target a certain segment of consumers, the purpose of being ‘‘a no brand’’ is to appeal to all people by ‘‘simply providing products that are comfortable and convenient.’’
The Japan Today item quotes a number of people who all seem pretty skeptical that Muji can make it outside “trend-conscious” locales like NYC. It also mentions something I didn’t know, which is that Uniqlo closed its three locations in New Jersey. I was really interested in those at the time, partly because I was living in Jersey, but also because I thought it was a really interesting move to test the waters outside of Manhattan, which is really an atypical retail setting. I was briefly in touch with somebody from Uniqlo at the time and my memory is that this was a very explicit strategy on their part, that they didn’t want to just be focused on superconsumers who prowl SoHo.
I guess that testing of the waters didn’t go so well? Or maybe they just shifted tactics. I have no idea what either company’s strategy is at this point, but if Muji is serious about trying to build a more mainstream base in the U.S., it’ll be interesting to see how the company goes about it. Apart from the forthcoming Times Square location, the article mentions “small outlets” in New York airports. Hm.
“Despite its American origins, Street Art is now centered in Britain,” announces The Guardian (via Arts Journal).
What this seems to mean is that the market for street art has been driven by Britain:
The auction houses here have been quick to sell it, and the media has turned it into a running news story. Faile’s comic-book inspired stencilwork will appear in the Tate Modern show, but founders Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, who talk over each other on speakerphone from their New York studio, say their art world isn’t as receptive. ‘New York has such a history of this art, but institutions are waiting to see what happens before they open the doors to it. The art is starting to surface in New York Sotheby’s and Christie’s, but it wouldn’t be if it weren’t for the excitement [in the UK].’
I’m not sure what to make of Faile dropping references to Sotheby’s and Christie’s. However, I do think it’s fair to say that for the most part the New York art world has not quite grasped the significance of the street art that started to emerge in the 1990s, and has grown throughout the 21st century. Yeah, some street artists have galleries and have done shows, but there hasn’t really been a sense of a big, important movement that’s been going for a decade, or longer. Why is that? Maybe it’s because of the earlier, late 1970s/1980s version of graffiti moving into the galleries (Haring, Basquiat, and a variety of Wild Style types), so there’s some kind of been-there, done-that attitude.
But I never could figure out why, for example, Beautiful Losers never got a New York venue. It should have been at MoMa, like three years ago. (Even if Moma did something similar tomorrow, I think it would feel very, very late.) And many of the street artists (or artists drawing on similar influences) who were in Beautiful Losers really made their name in the 1990s. Lots of new people have emerged since then (although not so many in the last few years, I’d argue), in New York, yes, but in L.A. and San Francisco and elsewhere as well.
So far as I know, only Banksy, of all people, has rated extensive mainstream notice in the form of things like a New Yorker feature. It’s weird.
Almighty Dolor:
As Americans, we like the greenback, but as investors, we’re a little more willing to go where the money is
This week Consumed looks at spending money — on other forms of money.
Currency prestige has a long history in the context of nation-states, but the idea that individuals might find some forms of money more desirable than others is less familiar. Perhaps rising awareness of the falling dollar is changing that.
There is a way to, in effect, spend your dollars on other forms of money, and apparently the number of people doing so is increasing. …
Read the column in the May 11, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.
Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.
It’s Mother’s Day and all. Craftzine points to this post about making tattoo-style cookies for mom (or anybody else, I suppose, at Zakka Life (where for some reason there’s a sound track, so you might mute before you go, just FYI).
Another example of the previously mentioned uncomsumption variation, upcycling: artist S.A. Schimmel Gold. Her site explains:
Every little “tile” you see was once advertising ephemera, junk mail, a postcard or packaging. I save everything and upcycle this resource to create fine art.
Via Everydaytrash.com.
As every Friday, here’s what I’ve noticed recently in backlashes, dissent, and critiques:
1. I haven’t spent a ton of time there, but I’m interested in this site: The EnviroMedia GreenWashing Index. Submit and/or rate marketing messages touting green-ness. Interesting idea; keeping an eye on it.
2. This got linked a lot (it was even in the murketing linkpile earlier this week) but Nerve.com put together a list of its Top 25 ad parodies. Fun.
3. Speaking of hating on Dove’s “real beauty” campaign, a New Yorker profile of photo retoucher Pascal Dangin included this: “I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual ‘real women’ in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. ‘Do you know how much retouching was on that?’ he asked. ‘But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.'”
Someone at Ogilvy subsequently told Ad Age: “There was no retouching of the women.” Still, some details are unclear, and Ad Age says the story is “potentially devastating” and recaps some of the backlashing against Dove to date. UnBeige chimed in to express “deliriously wonderful schadenfreude” about the possible undoing of the “deceptive” campaign: “So now, or soon to come, everyone will be up in arms about being blindly suckered into loving the campaign for its truth and honesty.” We’ll see.
4. Anti-Advertising Agency offers up a few testimonials from current and former ad pros in response to its previously mentioned efforts to get ad pros to quit their jobs. “Advertising is inherently evil … I am glad I am not doing that anymore. It is better to starve righteously.” Etc.
5. Wake Up Wal Mart Blog has posted a video ad arguing that tax rebate checks are being used to by cheap imports from China, at Wal Mart.
6. Brainiac points to this list of 8 Classic Toys Parents Hated. Top spot: Slime.
I’ve sure ready plenty of criticisms of Dove’s “campaign for real beauty” marketing tactics, but the thing just keeps metastasizing. Via Arts Journal, this article describes how marketers got playwright Judith Thompson involved in creating a theatrical production tied to the brand:
Dove Canada’s marketing partner, ad agency Ogilvy & Mather Canada, first proposed creating a theatre piece about beauty and aging as part of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, which launched in 2004.
Dove Canada’s marketing manager, Alison Leung, said Ogilvy targeted the theatre as a way to give a voice to women over 45, a group their research suggests has chronically poor body image and feels underrepresented in media and culture.
Early in the search for a playwright, Leung said Dove and Thompson forged an immediate bond during the first phone call.
Thompson concedes that for Dove, “it really is about is brand loyalty.” But: “I don’t care if ultimately they hope to sell soap with it, the soap’s fine.”
This has been all over the Web, it turns out, but just for the record, to follow up on the post about people in Ghana opting for coffins shaped like large products (beer and Coke bottles, etc.), a guy in Chicago has a PBR coffin. Since he’s still alive, he uses it as a cooler.
Recently I had to buy a new cell phone. I don’t mean that I wanted a new one with cooler features, I mean the “0” button on my old one stopped working, and it turns out you pretty much need all ten digits to use a phone, even if you’re a minimal cell phone user, as I am.
This happened to coincide with a fresh round of attention to the much-discussed problem of e-waste. (See this earlier post.) I assumed that Sprint would simply take my old phone and get rid of it for me appropriately. They didn’t. But when I got home, I noticed that they’d given me a special envelope, the one pictured here. So I guess I just pop it in there and put it in the mail and it gets taken care of for me.
Seems better to just take it from me at the store. But …
… assuming that this is on the up-and-up — and the disposal really is responsible — this envelope approach is kind of interesting. If it’s true, as this article mentioned, that there are hundreds of millions of cell phones just sitting in desk drawers, maybe somebody should come up with a way to distribute envelopes like these – or really even just distribute the mailing address. (I’ve obscured the address here because I guess there might be some kind of parameters about what phones they accept, and I don’t want the upshot of this post to be Sprint coming after me if a bunch of other providers’ phones start showing up, or whatever.)
I see that on the site of Recellular, the famous wireless recycling company, they list “use a pre-paid envelope” as a way to send them an old phone, noting that such envelopes are “available from most wireless retailers or packaged with your new cell phone.” (Does that mean all new cell phones come with an envelope? I don’t know.) I’m not sure if there’s some reason why they wouldn’t just publicize the address, for those who have an old cell phone sitting around and might be willing to spring for postage if it meant they didn’t have to drive somewhere to drop their old phone off or pick up a special envelope.
So it all got me thinking: Wouldn’t spreading the address or addresses to send your old cell phone to be a pretty easy online word-of-mouth (unconsumption) project for somebody? I mean spread them in a way that was fun and caught on and got people to take action? Good project for an agency looking to do something good? Clever student project that sparked thousands to properly unconsumed their outdated mobiles?
Is this already happening? If it is, could it be done better?
Or am I missing something obvious? About why it wouldn’t work?
Continuum Inc., in Boston, is throwing a book-release party for me there for Buying In. It’s Thursday night, June 26. It’s planned as a casual kind of thing: I’ll probably say a few words, maybe take questions if that seems appropriate, and then, you know, mingle, sign some books, that sort of thing.
It’s an invite-only affair, but if you are in Boston and interested, there’s a good chance I sneak you in. I would be pretty excited to meet an actual Murketing reader or two.
If you’re interested, email me at murketing@robwalker.net, with “Boston” in the subject heading.
There are space limitations, and this offer will expire, etc. etc. Bottom line is they’ll need my suggestions pretty soon. If we’ve never spoken or interacted, it might be helpful if you gave me some basic info to give my hosts about, I don’t know, whether you’re in the media, or marketing, or design business, or academia, or a student, or that you’re just incredibly cool. Name, title, company, and email address is what I’ve been asked to provide.
Hope to meet you…
So, see that giant representation of a beer bottle? That’s a coffin. Apparently.
Or maybe this is a hoax of some kind.
Either way, Delicious Ghost points to this Ghanaweb writeup, with more pictures: “The Ga people [of Ghana] believe that when their loved ones die, they move on into another life — and the Ga make sure they do so in style. They honor their dead with brightly colored coffins that celebrate the way they lived.”
Other branded examples include a giant Coke bottle, and an Air Jordan coffin.
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