It’s time now for the second in our series of interviews with brand bloggers. Our gracious subject today is Armand Frasco, who presides over three interesting blogs: Moleskinerie (focused on Moleskine notebooks); Notebookism (on notebooks in general); and Positive Fanatics (on Ikea). Here goes…
We first spoke some time back, when I was writing about Moleskine (for Consumed, June 24, 2005), and came upon your site. When did you launch this blog, and why? And how has it changed since then?
Moleskinerie was launched in January 2001 on a whim, just out of curiosity and to find out who else was using the notebook. It turns out the answer is, a lot. Last year, Kikkerland Design, Moleskine’s U.S. distributor reported sales of more than 4 million units. Moleskinerie has since become the number one fan site for the product, with readers coming from as far as South Africa, Mongolia, Malaysia –- even Patagonia.
Lately you’ve started a newer site, called Notebookism. What’s that one all about, and why did you start it?
I initiated Notebookism last July in response to many requests for a non product-centric blank-book blog. With hundreds of brands and legions of aficionados out there we’ve just uncovered the tip of the journaling iceberg. Many Moleskine users also own other kinds of notebooks so Notebookism is just an extension of their paper playground. We are lucky to have the Blick Art Company as our founding sponsor.
What’s the big news around Moleskine these days, and how does it affect these two projects, if it all?
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Posted Under:
Blogging The Brand,
Fandom,
Murketing,
Q&A
This post was written by Rob Walker on September 25, 2006
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This week’s third Q&A is, like yesterday’s, probably the beginning of a series: A series of interviews with brand-specific bloggers. In this case I imagine the series will be less open-ended (but I could be wrong). I’m starting with a relatively new brand blog, one that focuses on Whole Foods. It’s called Food Market Index, and so far it’s been quite good. The proprietor is Mr. Food Markets, Rob Denton, who kindly agreed to answer some questions.
When did you start the blog, and what goals did you have in mind?
May, 2006. My goals for the Food Market Index were to have fun and to try to amuse and inform readers. It was also a creative outlet for my ideas about organic foods, shopping, and Western civilization in general. I wanted to explore an area of personal experience that is also a familiar one for millions of people.
And were you perhaps inspired by any other brand blogs, or not so much?
Not at all. Oddly enough, I wasn’t all that aware of other brand blogs until after I started mine. I found that every niche has its fans — from Trader Joe’s to Toyotas. Some of the other brand blogs are quite inspiring in their scope and execution; others are a little snarky for my tastes. I feel like I walk a middle line down the shopping aisle — I like Whole Foods Markets, obviously, but I can also laugh a bit at the whole milieu, and at myself and fellow consumers too. [ Read more
This week in Consumed: Wawa: A low-glamour business enjoys surprising fandom. Maybe it’s the service.
The I Love Wawa group on MySpace.com has more than 5,000 members, making it the largest of several Wawa-related groups on the online-community site. Over on Livejournal.com, there’s a group called We Love Wawa, with about 950 members. This would be pretty ho-hum if Wawa were an indie band or video game. Instead, it’s a chain of convenience stores, with 550 locations in five states on the East Coast. Many of the postings to these groups involve praise for Wawa’s house-brand goods — coffee, hoagies, etc. But the most intriguing factor in Wawa loyalty may be something else: the service.
Continue reading at the New York Times Magazine site via this no-registration required link.
Additional links: I Love Wawa Myspace group; We Love Wawa’s LiveJournal; Wawa pool on Flickr.
Posted Under:
Consumed,
Fandom,
Retail
This post was written by Rob Walker on July 30, 2006
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An interesting find by Josh Spear: This artist, Gautum Rao, does oil paintings of Apple products (among other things), and I guess sells them on eBay. More of Rao’s “Mac Paintings” here.
Looking at them immediately made me think of Dave White, who is most famous for doing paintings of sneakers. (Although he paints other things too — like Stormtroopers from Star Wars, for instance.) A lengthy Sneaker Freaker interview with Dave White, including lots of images, is here.
From this article, written for the Detroit Free Press and reprinted in the Seattle Times, I learned of Church Marketing Sucks. That site turns out to be a project of a bunch of church marketers, who I guess are trying to shake things up. “We’ve got the greatest story ever told, but no one’s listening,” one of these people is quoted saying. “We think the church has a communications problem. In general, the church has been resistant to the idea of church marketing.” The article says: “Some marketing-savvy Christians believe higher powers need help getting good word-of-mouth.”
This isn’t quite so new as the article implies. There’s a good book called Selling God that lays out the rather long history of the way church culture and pop culture have interacted since the 1800s. Maybe I’ll say more about that some other time, but here’s a relevant quote from that book: “If religion is to be culturally central, it must learn to work with other things that are also central. Previously that might have been feudalism, kings, or Platonic philosophy. More recently it has been market capitalism responsive to consumers with spare time and a bit of money to spend.”
Still, there’s something jarring about religious marketers playing the ‘tude card with a “your strategy sucks” approach. More interesting is that this comes at a time when quasi-religious metaphors (brand “cults,” brand “evangalists,” etc) have become incredibly commonplace is marketing-talk. The book Pyro Marketing baldly suggests that the same tactics that made Purpose-Driven Life and Passion of the Christ into hits can work for any old brand at all.
This article from the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture (Volume XII: Spring 2006) reports on the results of a survey designed to explore similarities and differences among types of secular fans, different groups of religious believers, and, finally, between secular fans and the religiously devout in general. The secular fan categories were music, media, and sports. I don’t think this should be surprising, but maybe it is: The study concluded that there are differences between the religious and secular devotion. (It also found that the answers of the secular fans were similar across different categories of fandom.)
For example, in discussing how they came to their specific devotion (“the indoctrinating medium”), the religious respondents cited parents or other family members, while the secular respondents point to media. Also: “Religious respondents stated that they believed other people viewed their interest in religion to be positive, while the secular group thought others viewed their interest as either neutral or negative.” Religious devotees said “they would pray [for] or love” critics of their devotion. Secular fans said they would “ignore” critics of theirs.
Finally, religious people apparently described the degree of their devotion by how much they would give up for their beliefs — right up to giving their lives, for instance. The secular fans described their degree of devotion by “the amount of time they have spent on their given interest.”
Presumably this is one of the things that makes secular fandom so appealing: You get feelings of community and being part of something bigger than yourself and so on, but you don’t have to sacrifice anything, really. And the more time you spend enjoying whatever it is you’re a fan of — well, that just proves the depth of your commitment.
I’ve been wondering why there has not been been, to my knowledge, any particular backlash from religious believers about the ways in which the commercial, secular-fandom world hijacks their language. But maybe the answer is that religious marketers are too busy hijacking right back.
Flickr is thoroughly, consistently fascinating. And lurking about in its endless depths are plenty of images that in one way or another relate to brands, products, consumption, and material culture. Here, for example, is one of many Flickr images of the recent Apple store opening in Manhattan.
I got to this particular set by way of an extremely detailed report from someone who arrived at the new store on Tuesday (to wait for the actual opening … on Saturday.) If you want all the details on who those people were who waited on the street for several days in order to visit a retail location, well, you have your link. The highlight: “With just 15 minutes left before opening,” one guy in the line, named Steve, ” turned to his girlfriend Patti and proposed to her. She accepted, and that set off a ripple of ‘Awwww’ back through the crowd, and up to the Apple staffers.”
Great story to tell the kids. Anyway, the site containing that report is ifo AppleStore: News and Information About Apple Computer’s Retail Stores. I ended up there by way of a link from this Wired News report: “Fans Storm Apple’s 5th Avenue Store.” Another account, from one of the Apple fans pictured above, can be found on her blog.
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