MURKETING

Linkpile

• Mind Hacks on that placebo-effect article.: The one I linked to recently. MH offers caveats and further thoughts, most of which are convincing and valuable. Also this is relevant: “The article touches on a likely explanation — marketing. [Pharma companies] would like to influence your beliefs so the drug works better for you, because once it’s on the market, it’s the customers’ experience that brings them back for more.”
• Snailbooty aka CW Wells: Well-deserved shout-out from Drawn blog. Snailbooty’s photos are amazing.
• Sneaker marketing tries a smaller size: Embarrassingly ill-informed Marketplace story implies limited-edition sneaker phenomenon is new, and has something to do with lower sneaker company ad budgets in the recession.
• Bob Dylan to be the new voice of a sat nav system: “Comedian John Cleese is one of several celebrities who have already lent their voices to sat-nav devices.” Via Listenerd
• Sentiment Analysis Takes the Pulse of the Internet: Overview.
• Grain Thing | Significant Objects: “I believe history will redeem him as a frustrated artist, rather than a failed businessman.” Story by Joanne McNeil

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• Josh Glenn explains The New Kids: Per his generational periodization scheme. “Born from 1884-93, [they] were a generation outraged with the world they’d inherited. They were in their teens and 20s in the Nineteen-Oughts (1904-13, not to be confused with the 1900s), during which time — according to Virginia Woolf — human nature underwent a fundamental change, as a result of technological breakthroughs and global violence; and they were in their 20s and 30s during the war-torn Nineteen-Teens (1914-23, not to be confused with the 1910s).” One of the most interesting generational cohorts ever, in my opinion.
• Randy Ludacer: Songs about Packaging at Freshkills Park: “Saturday, September 26 at 12 p.m.: Mr. Ludacer will play a set of songs based around consumer packaging, specifically written to be performed atop Freshkills Park. Randy considers it an opportunity to ‘serenade the decades of discarded packaging buried beneath.’ Attendants will also receive a seven-song ‘Songs About Packaging’ CD from Randy, including handmade artwork created from the artist’s own recycling bin.”
• Authenticity: In The Eye Of The Beholder?: “The authors say they were intrigued by how consumers were able to judge seemingly mundane objects or mass-market brands as authentic. ‘Consumers found authenticity in The Simpsons, McDonald’s, cigarette manufacturers, and Nike,’ the authors write. ‘Another surprise was the way committed environmentalists found authenticity in work-related objects such as SUVs.'” I actually don’t think that’s surprising at all (consider PBR, Red Bull, Timberland, etc.), but I understand why some might.
• Russian Figure | Significant Objects: “Many were annoyed by his incessant tuneless humming.” Story by Doug Dorst

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• Consumers And Self-designed Products: Study: “Consumers enjoy intentionally competing against professionals” in designing stuff.
• Tale of successful non-designer product development: Non-pro inventor “wanted a neat and simple way to transport deviled eggs to get-togethers,” and got her product idea turned into a product, “subsequently featured on QVC.” Okay, but a deviled egg transporter?
• Spinning Lego minifig anatomy GIF reveals all: Enjoyable.
• Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why: This is interesting! “From 2001 to 2006, the percentage of new products cut from development after Phase II clinical trials, when drugs are first tested against placebo, rose by 20 percent. The failure rate in more extensive Phase III trials increased by 11 percent, mainly due to surprisingly poor showings against placebo. Despite historic levels of industry investment in R&D, the US Food and Drug Administration approved only 19 first-of-their-kind remedies in 2007—the fewest since 1983—and just 24 in 2008. Half of all drugs that fail in late-stage trials drop out of the pipeline due to their inability to beat sugar pills.”
• Doctors cling to white coats: “It’s as much sociology as medicine. I’m the doctor. I have status. I have the uniform. That makes me official.”
• A Manifesto for Slow Communication: “In the past two decades, we have witnessed one of the greatest breakdowns of the barrier between our work and per­sonal lives since the notion of leisure time emerged in Victorian Britain as a result of the Industrial Age. It has put us under great physical and mental strain, altering our brain chemistry and daily needs. It has isolated us from the people with whom we live, siphoning us away from real-world places where we gather. It has encouraged flotillas of unnecessary jabbering, making it difficult to tell signal from noise. It has made it more difficult to read slowly and enjoy it, hastening the already declining rates of literacy. It has made it harder to listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget.”

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• Designy-ness vs. Design: Dwell: “A recent essay got us thinking about how consumers identify real innovation beneath a cosmetically enhanced product. Join the debate.”
• Slate Is Switching From ‘Today’s Paper’ to a News Roundup: “The news cycle has sped up [so new feature] will collect the world’s news three times a day.”
• The City Submerged – Josh Neufeld Tells Katrina Stories in a Graphic Novel: Incredibly, this article mentions Titans of Finance! Anyway: Yay Josh!
• The Etsy wars: “2.4 million registered members in 150 countries. Its more than 155,000 active vendors sold $58 million worth of goods in the first five months of 2009, doubling Etsy’s sales volume over the same period last year. Despite the recession, the site facilitated sales of $87.5 million in 2008 and is expected to break even for the first time later this year.” Even so, article focuses entirely on complaints.

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• Virtual cooking is a hit on Facebook: “Keep the game’s mindless diners happy with a menu you have created by buying and trading various ingredients.”
• Desperately seeking something: Mind Hacks assesses previously mentioned Slate piece on technology, attention, and the brain.
• Is Berlin’s World Championship motto the worst ever written?: “After no doubt endless focus groups and countless thousands spent on branding specialists, they’ve come up with this cracker to sum up their championships – Have a Good Time. They’ve even added an exclamation mark for extra emphasis and a little ‘TM’ at the end to trademark their quite woeful effort – not that anyone sane would plan on stealing it – unless you’re a parent packing your kid off to their first day at big school.” Heh. Thx Lee N.
• Gideon Rubin: Paintings. I really like ’em. Via saint verde digest.

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• The rapid spread of “entertainment shopping” spurs indignation: “People will try it because they want to get a good deal. But it’s the experience that brings them back—they are in it for the thrill of winning.”
• Greenpeace makes up with Kimberly-Clark, releases sappy video: Greenpeace has dropped its “Kleercut” commercials in support of K-C’s “stronger fiber sourcing standards.”
• Brain circuitry that makes us love Google, Twitter, and texting.: Latest stab at this subject. On Slate.
• Ugly Dolls are a labor of love: L.A. Times story. This was one of the very first Consumed topics.
• Marines (Upside-Down) Logo Mug | Significant Objects: “The error was so basic, so obvious, that he wondered if there weren’t some hidden layer of complexity at work here.” Story by Tom Vanderbilt.

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• Men Without Sports Knowledge/Skills Are Inadequate Human Beings: “Ad for a Canadian non-profit called KidSport, claims that a lack of knowledge about sports makes you (as a man) literally less skilled at life.” This is from Sociological Images, a blog I’ve been really enjoying lately.
• How Children Draw Conclusions From The Products They See: Study: “Children as young as five years old are capable of forming consumption constellations.” That is, what Adidas or Mercedes “means.”
• The Monster Cereals Blog: “Everything and anything related to the iconic sugar frosted characters of Franken Berry, Count Chocula, and Boo Berry.” Drawn! blog explains.

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[NOTE: There is no Consumed column today, or next week. I’ve been on vacation (or my version of a vacation, anyway). The column returns August 30.]

• Reified design: “Designy-ness is an ideological sheen on consumerism, redeeming commodification while furthering it, permitting mass-distributed designy-ness to supplant genuine heterogeneity.” I would really like to see the design blogs pick up on this and respond to it.
• Denim sales still going strong: “Sales of premium brand jeans grew 17% during 2008 and 2.3% from December to February 2009, according to market research firm NPD Group.”
• Blowin’ in the Phone: Studio 360 piece. “The blockbuster iPhone app called Ocarina lets you play music by blowing into the phone. Its inventor, Ge Wang, thinks that the more people playing music, the better; but even he is a little nervous about the impact of technology on people’s lives.”
• Michael Eisner: Interview transcript: “Eventually there will be something on the Internet that is a cultural phenomenon that’s not available anywhere else, that’s not available on television broadcasts, that’s not on cable, it’s only on some Web site.” Well, there are plenty of cultural phenomena that happen on the Internet, cross over in the form of news reports about the phenomena, or follow-on media products. LOLcats, for instance. Or Twitter, for that matter. So I don’t really get what Eisner is talking about. Does he just mean a TV show that’s on a Web site?
• Wall Street fears U.S. consumers won’t spend: “What was a surprise was the record number of consumers who said their personal incomes have worsened.” Really? Why is that a surprise? Unemployment is at like 9.5%. What did they expect? And isn’t it fairly obvious that consumer spending is going to lag while big chunks of the population are jobless, or have taken pay cuts or forced furloughs, or are afraid they’ll be in those situations soon?

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• CraftyPod » A delightful zine about The Borrowers: Neat.
• What A Coincidence! Personal Connections Improve Sales: “If a salesperson shares a birthday or a birthplace with you, you’re more likely to make a purchase and feel good about it, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.” The basic not-at-all-new finding that underlies this was memorialized in a 48-Hour-T-Shirt. But still.
• Hipster Runoff Exegesis: 10 August 2009: “Carles Presents ‘IAmCarles.com’”: “Design is propaganda for the object, for materiality as such, and for the predominance of the material over the spiritual, positing ideality as a quality of materiality rather than the salvation from it. Carles, by posing as a budding designer, proclaims a radically materialist philosophy that denies transcendence as an ideal.” This is excellent. (Although only you if care about Hipster Runoff, I guess — or at least know what it is.)
• Small Stapler | Significant Objects: “So over to Dr. Marjorie Grimstone’s I went, on the cross-town bus, wearing my three-button dove-gray cashmere gloves with my navy suit.” Story by Katharine Weber
• Rope/Wood Monkey Figurine | Significant Objects: “It was just your ordinary childhood,” I would say. “I seem to recall there was some upbringing involved, and then, all of a sudden, I was upbrought.” Story by Kevin Brockmeier

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• Some Laid-Off Workers Seek New Careers as…: DJs. Okay.
• Museum of broken relationships: Traveling gallery show collects artifacts of broken relationships.
• Early Advertising of the West, 1867-1918: Very good online collection of images. Via Coudal.
• Steinski remixes Narragansett’s old Nichols & May ads for radio: Links to video original and audio remix on Brandfreak.
• Glenn Beck: “huge” Moleskine fan: Good or bad news for the cult notebook brand?
• Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment: Henry Jenkins posts his course syllabus. Personally, I think transmedia storytelling was invented by the contemporary branding industry. Their stories aren’t narratives, per se, but they do communicate an idea across every conceivable platform, without boundaries. (Axe, Dove Real Beauty, Red Bull, etc.)
• Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village: Onion video
• Unicorn | Significant Objects: “A few disheartening hours later, I found the only object in the house that reminded me of the Holly I had loved.” Story by Sarah Weinman.
• Pabst Bottle Opener | Significant Objects: “It’s difficult work, wooing Donna.” Story by Sean Howe

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• Commenters become stars: And advertisers are there to recruit them.
• I AM CARLES: Hipster Runoff brand extension.Or “brand” “extension.”
• The End of Indie: “Indie doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s dead. Which is OK, because it won. Open source, Twitter. Indie won. Etsy. The irresistible decline of major labels and network TV and corporate publishing. Indie won.” I don’t actually know precisely what that means. I think I half agree.
• The Nuances of the FREE! Experiment: Dan Ariely on the way his research is used in two books.
• Antidepressant use nearly doubles in U.S.: “Between 1996 and 2005, the rate of those reporting they had used antidepressants in the past year jumped from 5.8 percent to 10.1 percent. On a national scale, this translates to an increase from about 13.3 million people to 27 million.” Bummer.
• Listener’s facial expression alters speaker’s language: Study: “Speak to a positive listener and you’ll likely use more abstractions and subjective impressions, whilst if you talk to a negative listener you’ll probably find yourself sheltering in the security of objective facts and concrete details.”
• the writing’s on the wall: Got a note from the creator of this blog, which looks interesting. Mostly visual. This post: “My take on the designer’s pin board is it’s often a better reflection of what they are all about than the actual work they produce.”
• Rhino Figurine | Significant Objects: “Do you ever struggle to remember insignificant facts?” Story by Nathaniel Rich.
• Cow Vase | Significant Objects: “What I’m saying is, you basically pretended you were a mountain.” Story by Ed Park

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• Hordes Gather And Sing Along To ‘Purple Rain’: NPR piece.
• How to make a snow globe: It doesn’t look easy, but I kind of want to try it.
• Comprehensive List of the Most Boring Questions About Memes: “How can I make money using memes?” Etc.
• The Knack … and How to Forget It: An Inquiry into Consumption Deskilling: “Consumption becomes either a matter of following directions (the devolution of cooking into processed food consumption), a matter of tallying vicarious experiences, watching other people perform activities as a substitute for actually possessing their competence (what Pollan wrote about), or a matter of inspiring ersatz competence, as with box cake mixes or video games like Guitar Hero.” Rob Horning essay following up Pollan’s piece.
• Creativity & Psychological Distance: “What makes us more creative at times and less creative at others? One answer is psychological distance. According to the construal level theory (CLT) of psychological distance, anything that we do not experience as occurring now, here, and to ourselves falls into the “psychologically distant” category. It’s also possible to induce a state of “psychological distance” simply by changing the way we think about a particular problem, such as attempting to take another person’s perspective, or by thinking of the question as if it were unreal and unlikely.” Via Mindhacks.
• Ireland Cow Plate | Significant Objects: “This plate is about cowherds, about shamrocks, about Ireland, yes, but it is also about liberation, about preservation, about eternal life.” Story by Sarah Rainone.
• Idol | Significant Objects: “Meh!” the goat said. “Meh meh meh!” Story by Andrew Ervin.
• ‘If Significant Objects is a cynical marketeer’s scam, then consider me conned’: In The Independent. “A mildly romantic social experiment” is actually pretty much correct, though, I would say.

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• Old Cutlass transformed into luxury ride with magical Chanel logo: BoingBoing takes note. Previously: Consumed on themed-out donks. For more on appropriation of lux logos, see chapter five of Buying In.
• Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi, Revised Edition: Corrects a graphic lots of people — including me — have been linking to.
• Tattoo removal firm aims for IPO: “Dr. Tattoff says it’s seeing record high volume and revenue.”
• Predicting a Shift in Communications Spending: “An interesting shift occurred in 2008, the report said. For the first time, consumers spent more time with media they paid for, like books or cable television, than with primarily ad-supported media, like newspapers and magazines.” Huh? Don’t they pay for magazines? And aren’t there a lot of ads on most cable stations? And where’s the Web in this?
• Finding Clues to National Well-Being in Songs and Blogs: In a new paper, a pair of statisticians at the University of Vermont argue that linguistic analysis — not just of song lyrics but of blogs and speeches — could add a new and valuable dimension to a growing area of mass psychology: the determination of national well-being.
• Telegram Postcards: Neat.

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• The story of a New Orleans sign-painter: Artist Lester Carey: He isn’t a “street artist” celebrated on blogs or courted by corporate marketers. But he’s as “authentic” — a word those folks tend to be obsessed with — as it gets. This is a post by me, on one of my other sites.
• Burritos and Socially-Conscious Docs: Summarizes company that made Food Inc., and sponsorship deal with Chipotle chain. Interesting.
• Temptation More Powerful Than Individuals Realize: “The research found the sample, on average, displayed a “restraint bias,” causing individuals to miscalculate the amount of temptation they could truly handle, in turn leading to a greater likelihood of indulging impulsive or addictive behavior.”
• Video Blogger Lauren Luke’s Product Range Hits Sephora: “The YouTube star launched her new line last week.”
• Be consistent!: Something for your next redesign meeting. Via Swiss Miss.
• The evolutionary origin of depression?: “Dr Nesse’s hypothesis is that, as pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones—in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources. Therefore, he argues, there is likely to be an evolved mechanism that identifies certain goals as unattainable and inhibits their pursuit—and he believes that low mood is at least part of that mechanism.” Via Mindhacks.
• 10 Rules That Govern Groups: And group formation. Also via Mindhacks.
• Kneeling Man Figurine | Significant Objects: “Hell, of course, has a hierarchy.” Story by Glen David Gold

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• When Context Matters: Consumers Link Unfamiliar Products To Surrounding Items: “We might think a car advertised among expensive cars is also pricey—but only if we’re unfamiliar with the car.” Intuitive. Has now been studied.
• poppytalk: This Week from Lisa Congdon: Artist Interview – Amy Ruppel: Ruppel’s new painting series, “Birds That Are Mean,” looks quite interesting.
• The Joe You Know: On Shakespeare and “Stealth Starbucks”: Interesting writeup on Generation Bubble.
• A Top Etsy Seller Downsizes: Craftypod Podcast interview with Ryan McAbery , a top seller on Etsy who decided to walk away from it.
• Interesting aside in Nicholson Baker’s NYer Kindle piece: “Romance readers are major Kindlers. ‘The success of the ebook is being fueled by the romance and erotic romance market,’ Peter Smith, of ITworld, reports.” I didn’t know that. Extra detail: “Smith cites the actress and Kindle enthusiast Felicia Day, of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer,’ who has been bingeing on paranormals like ‘Dark Needs at Night’s Edge.’ ‘I’ve read like, 6 books this week and ordered about 10 more,’ Day blogged. ‘It’s stuff I never would have checked out at the Barnes and Noble, because the gleaming and oily man chests would have made me blush too much.'”
• Andy Warhol paints Debbie Harry on an Amiga: In 1985. BoingBoing link, to video. Neat.
• Shockingly violent coffee commercials starring Muppets: “The ads starred the cheerful Wilkins, who liked Wilkins Coffee, and the grumpy Wontkins, who hated it. Wilkins would often do serious harm to Wontkins in the ads — blowing him up, stabbing him with a knife, and smashing him with a club, among many other violent acts.”

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