MURKETING

Buzz Marketing

In Consumed: The Bodygroom: The electric-razor technology wasn’t very edgy, but the the marketing was.

About a year ago, Philips Norelco began the push to sell a device called the Bodygroom as a product to help men shave areas of the body other than the face. At the time, according to Jim Olstrom, director of the home division of the retail-data collection firm NPD Group, the idea of a product specifically made for below-the-neck shaving barely existed. Today, the Bodygroom is one of at least four products in what’s seen as a distinct and fast-growing category; nearly 250,000 body-hair trimmers have been bought in the United States in the last year, according to NPD data (which does not count Wal-Mart). “Nobody was talking about this category,” Olstrom says. “Now it’s completely out in the open.” …

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site.

Boxed Set

In Consumed: The Buddha Machine: A portable music player serenades fans by eliminating the element of choice.

A few years ago, an experimental music duo called FM3 toured Europe, playing a 40-minute set that the duo’s founder Christiaan Virant describes as “very reductionist, very minimalist, very sparse.” He and Zhang Jian, who are based in Beijing, performed on laptops. Some of these compositions were later released on a CD by Staalplaat, a specialty label based in Amsterdam; it sold about a thousand copies. In the context of avant-garde music, that’s not bad: “If someone can sell 2,000 CDs,” Virant says with a laugh, “they’re like a superstar.” So it’s hard to find the right superlative to describe what happened when some of that same sparse music was released again — not on CD but in a little plastic box called the Buddha Machine. Two years later, sales are approaching 50,000 units and still going strong….

Continue reading at the NYT site.

Additional links: FM3; Forced Exposure; Disquiet interview; Boomkat interview; Studio 360 episode.

Hello Kitschy

In Consumed: Domo: How Internet jokes helped a Japanese ad mascot make its way into American malls.

This fall, the cable channel Nicktoons Network will begin showing a series of two-minute stop-motion animation shorts featuring a brown, squarish creature with arms and legs and a mouth permanently thrown wide open to reveal sharp white teeth. Like any other cute character on a kid-friendly TV show, this little fellow, whose name is Domo, is perfect for the crossover into licensed merchandise. What’s unusual about Domo, however, is that he arrived in the U.S. retail marketplace well ahead of his debut on American television. He’s on T-shirts and accessories at Hot Topic, greeting cards at many Barnes & Noble locations and grocery stores and is expected to be sold as a plush doll at F.Y.E. stores. Then again, Domo is a merchandisable star not so much because he has a TV show in the works but because of his track record in what is arguably the most potent entertainment form of our time: clowning around on the Internet….

Continue reading at the NYT site, or at the Boston Globe site.
Additional links: Domo Nation site, includes the original Domo films; Domo on Flickr; Domo on DeviantArt; Domo at Hot Topic; Domo/kitten image referenced in column.

Croc On

Consumed: Crocs: A trendy shoe marches on despite detractors — or maybe because of them.

In the summer of 2006, Crocs wearers ranged from children to senior citizens, from the image-indifferent to the celebrity chef Mario Batali. The suggestion of ubiquity was probably magnified by the fact that seeing one pair of the oversize and often brightly colored footwear felt like seeing five. The Washington Post noted the “goofy” shoes were spreading “like vermin,” and Radar Magazine anointed the “hideous” items “summer’s most unfortunate fad.” The good news for critics was that fads fade and that the Croc thing seemed to be at a peak. But a year later Crocs still have traction; in fact, the company’s sales through the first quarter of 2007 are roughly triple what they were for the same period in 2006, and imitations and knockoffs abound. The shoes might still end up as props at the kitschy ’00s-themed parties of future college students (worn with trucker hats for the guys and huge sunglasses for the ladies). But it may be that Crocs have a foothold not just despite critics of the shoes’ appearance but because of them…. Read more

Crowd Control

In Consumed: Threadless: What one T-Shirt company has learned about community power — and avoiding a design mobocracy.

From Wikipedia to “American Idol,” shifting control from experts to the masses has never been more popular. As an example of what this can mean for consumer companies, the herd of anti-expertise experts often points to Threadless.com, which has sold millions of dollars of T-shirts by not hiring star designers. Founded in 2000, Threadless asks for designs from anybody who wants to submit them. These days, according to its chief creative officer, Jeffrey Kalmikoff, Threadless receives about 125 submissions a day. These are winnowed by the site’s hundreds of thousands of user-voters to half a dozen new T-shirt offerings a week and sold in batches of 1,500. Winning designers are paid $2,000; almost everything sells out. The site has evolved to include a variety of clothing for kids; the owners are dabbling in other products through a new brand called Naked & Angry; and in July, the first Threadless retail and gallery space will open in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago.

It’s a crowd-pleasing story, but there has always been more to Threadless than mere mobocracy. …

Continue reading via The NYT site, or The Boston Globe site.

Additional links: Glenn Jones’ site; interview with Jones at Threadless. Ross Zietz’ site; interview with Zeitz at Threadless.

Trading Partners

In Consumed: Coudal.com’s Swap Meat: How one online cool-stuff experiment evolved from promotion to swapping to selling.

Creative people want to express that creativity. Meanwhile, they need to make a living — possibly by finding an audience for some buyable form of that creativity. This is an old predicament, but the Internet enables new experiments in resolving it — like the Swap Meat, a project of a Web site called Coudal.com. Coudal Partners is a small firm based in Chicago that does branding and design work for clients and has also created products of its own. Coudal.com is certainly a promotional tool for the firm, but just as certainly a constantly updated trove of interesting links and cleverly entertaining goof-off projects. Which is more or less how the Swap Meat started. Read more

Go Logo

In Consumed: Themed Donks: Customized cars that use commercial logos as part of the creative palette.

The allure of aesthetics has been a fact of automobile design for many decades. But carmakers have never been able to match the inventiveness of some car owners, dating back at least to creators of tangerine-flake objets d’art that Tom Wolfe celebrated in the 1960s. To believe that auto expressionists will run out of gas at some point is to underestimate their ability to create previously unimaginable novelty. Picture, for instance, a 1976 Impala improbably perched on 26-inch wheels and painted in colors inspired by a variety of Hawaiian Punch. This is what’s called a donk….

Continue reading at the NYT site.

Additional links: Pictures of donks; more pictures of donks (site plays music); and more pictures of donks; Mr. Scrape Customs; Donk Box & Bubble magazine.

Discrete shout out: Thanks Kate!

Cleaning Up

In Consumed: Lifebuoy: A brand shows its social responsibility to the poor — by selling to them.

“Corporate social responsibility” often means leveraging the concern (or guilt) of the affluent on behalf of those less fortunate: Sell to first-world consumers and redistribute some of the profits to address third-world problems. But a case has been made for a different strategy that involves selling to the poor themselves. In a speech last month, for instance, Harish Manwani, the chairman of Hindustan Lever Limited, pointed to his firm’s marketing Lifebuoy soap to India’s sprawling underclass as an example of its efforts to bring “social responsibility to the heart of our business.” Read more

Vintage trend

In Consumed: Wine chains: Turning a purchase requiring specialized knowledge into something for Everyman — everywhere.

Consumer sophistication is on the rise. Just look at what we drink. Not coffee from a can or mass-market beer, but complex lattes and fine pinot noir. When there is a great enough thirst for sophistication (or anything else), something becomes inevitable: a chain of relevant franchises. Or in the case of wine, a couple of them: one recent list of fast-growing franchises included both Vino 100 (with about 60 locations open) and WineStyles (about 110 locations)….

Continue reading at the NYT site.

The Cover of Money

In Consumed: Credit Covers: Treating the credit card as an “edgy artwork” canvass.

The most recent figures from the Federal Reserve noted an uptick of more than 9 percent in “revolving credit” — that is, the debt carried by the millions of American consumers who don’t pay off their cards every month — putting the total at $888.2 billion as of March. Still, some consumers have come to see the credit card as an emblem of something other than an albatross of monies owed. A few months ago, a company called CreditCovers started selling “skins,” with special designs that consumers can stick over the fronts of their cards, theoretically transforming them from mere financial tools to emblems of identity and potential conversation starters….

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site, or the Boston Globe site.

The Worm Turns

In Consumed: Terracycle: How one company strives to turn invertebrate excrement into a hip brand.

TerraCycle is one of those tiny start-up brands that get so much free publicity that it can forgo advertising. And it’s easy to see why there’s interest. The founder is a 25-year-old Princeton dropout. Its flagship fertilizer products are packaged in used plastic bottles, many collected through a nationwide recycling program the company itself has organized. And a key ingredient in the fertilizer itself, as the label announces, is “liquefied WORM POOP.” Waste packaged in waste makes TerraCycle the “ultimate eco-friendly” product, the company asserts, putting it in line with organic and earth-aware consumption trends. “We kind of ride on the fact that all these things get a lot of press, and get people interested in the product” and the “young, hip company” that makes it, explains Albe Zakes, the company spokesman….

Continue reading at the NYT site.

Additional links: TerraCycle’s “Sued by Scotts” blog. WormWoman.com. Worm Composting Basics.

Toy Story

In Consumed: The Vladmaster: How a 3-D children’s toy found a new life as an indie art product.

Media forms come and go, and often this seems like a zero-sum game. New forms of communication pop up and others promptly become obsolete as a result: the killer app leaves a dead-media trail. When a man named William Gruber created what became known as the View-Master in 1938, he had high hopes for it as a media format. After all, it took a place among the wonders of the 1939 World’s Fair. “His original intention for the stereoscopic viewing device — he didn’t even like the name View-Master — is that it would be an educational medium,” says Annie Dubinsky, assistant director of the 3D Center of Art and Photography. Instead, it became a wildly popular children’s toy.

The View-Master is still around and is not radically different from what it was decades ago. Each View-Master reel contains 14 pictures that, to the viewer, appear as seven stereoscopic images. Hold the plastic device up to your eyes and advance through the images by pressing a lever on the side. Many would see this decidedly low-tech artifact as nothing more than a mildly nostalgia-inducing bit of consumer kitsch. But a few years ago, a 29-year-old Portland artist who calls herself Vladimir saw something different: a potentially potent media form….

Continue reading by way of this NYT Magazine link, or this Boston Globe link.

Additional links: Vladmaster; 3D Center of Art and Photography; Toy Hall of Fame View-Master entry.

Muscular Metaphor

In Consumed: Posit Science Brain Fitness Program: How one company found the right words to tap the baby boomer penchant for personal development.

A few years back, before the company now known as Posit Science even had a product on the market, its founders considered how to position just what it was they were aiming to sell. One of those founders was a neuroscientist named Michael Merzenich, a professor at the University of California-San Francisco, whose research focused on “brain plasticity.” One way of characterizing the commercial applications that his work helped spawn was “cognitive behavioral training.” Not surprisingly, such phrases gave way to something a bit sexier: “When we talked about it as ‘brain fitness,’ people got it instantly,” recalls Jeff Zimman, Posit Science’s chief executive….

Continue reading via this Boston Globe link.

Buzz Factor

In Consumed: Spykes: A new product gets lots of attention — mostly from vehement critics.

This past January, Anheuser-Busch rolled out a new product called Spykes. It comes in two-ounce bottles, in flavors like Spicy Lime and Hot Melons. The label says it’s a “premium malt beverage,” containing caffeine and ginseng; it’s meant to be drunk straight, or used as a mixer with beer, or as an ingredient in some new cocktail of your invention. It’s “whatever you want it to be,” the new brand’s Web site says. Spkyes, in other words, is a hodgepodge of every recent trend or fad that has caught the attention of alcohol consumers in the past five years. …

Continue reading by way of this NYT Magazine link, or this Boston Globe link.

Ink, Inc.

In Consumed: The Tattoo Aesthetic: Why, despite years of trendiness, the old-school tattoo tradition hasn’t faded.

It has been several years since even Ozzy Osbourne could see that tattoos were overexposed: “To be unique, don’t get a tattoo. Because everybody else has got tattoos!” Yet despite the fact that tattoo imagery is everywhere — serving as the basis for reality shows, as a de facto part of N.B.A. uniforms and, increasingly, as an element in marketing — it retains its appeal as “an authentic and real part of culture,” one advertising executive recently informed The Chicago Tribune. What’s surprising about the popularity of tattooing is that it won’t seem to go away — that some tattoo imagery still seems authentic, even when it’s mainstream….

Continue reading by way of this New York Times Magazine link, which will probably expire in a week, or this Boston Globe link.

Related Links: Gyro/Sailor Jerry case study; Scott Campbell.