MURKETING

Pop-culture Evolution

In Consumed: The Geico Cavemen: What an ad campaign spawning potential sitcom characters really reveals.

The recent news that ABC was willing to entertain the possibility of a sitcom starring the Geico cavemen seemed a sort of watershed. Here were characters dreamed up as part of an advertising campaign, potentially crossing over into a venerable form of mainstream, pop-culture entertainment. While that sounds momentous, it misses a larger point. As characters in a successful advertising campaign, the cavemen are already part of mainstream pop culture. More so, in fact, than the characters in most current sitcoms….

Read the rest of the column by way of this New York Times Magazine link, which will probably expire in a week, or this Boston Globe link.

[April 20 Update] Some blog references/reactions to the column: Scott Goodson/StrawberryFrog; Jason Oke/Leo Burnett Toronto; Disney corporate blog; PSFK.

Not Necessarily Toast

In Consumed: Back to Basics Egg & Muffin Toaster: How makers of a decades-old appliance still find new ways to catch consumer interest.

In a recent issue of The M.I.T. Sloan Management Review, Michael Schrage, a business writer and an M.I.T. researcher, challenged the thinking of a prominent Columbia Business School professor. More specifically, he challenged what Bruce Greenwald, whose work focuses on finance and investing, has said about the fate of all innovative technologies: “In the long run, everything is a toaster.” That is to say, even the most impressive breakthrough eventually becomes mundane, with all producers offering more or less identical versions of the same item and competing largely on the basis of price: innovation runs its course, and the thing becomes a commodity.

Schrage’s article, “The Myth of Commoditization,” argued that not only is this not true of technological breakthroughs, it’s not even true of toasters. “Heated bread lacks the high-tech cachet of multicore processors or polymerase chain reactions,” he wrote, but the “technical evolution” of toasters offers a “case study in profitable innovation.” The Back to Basics Egg & Muffin Toaster seems to offer pretty good evidence in his argument’s favor….

Continue reading at the NYT site by way of this no-registration-required link.

Related links: American Heritage history of the toaster; “Cool Tools” hype for the Egg & Muffin Toaster.

* April 14 Update: Selected reactions from elsewhere:

1) Glass House.

2) Marginal Utility.

Package Deal

In Consumed: OpenX: How to solve a problem that consumers hate? With a product, of course.

Nobody likes those incredibly hard-to-open, clear plastic packages that hang from retail pegboards, trapping your new purchase inside, clearly visible but seemingly unattainable without a long struggle, a sharp implement and possibly an injury. Nevertheless, this packaging method is pervasive and shows no sign of disappearing soon. Here’s a case, then, in which the marketplace simply ignores consumers.

Actually, that’s not true. The marketplace is not ignoring consumers at all. In fact, in a recent roundup of the worst packaging, Consumer Reports noted that “a cottage industry has developed among manufacturers looking to cash in on packaging angst.” One prominent example: OpenX, a $5 device designed specifically to help people cope with seemingly impregnable plastic casings….

Continue reading here. (Problems with the NYT Magazine’s RSS feed continue, so that’s actually a link to the Boston Globe, which also publishes Consumed.)

Dial Tone

In Consumed: Prepaid phone cards: How blunt graphics and cluttered design send signals to phone-card consumers

“The main business of manufacture is to make objects that people want to buy,” Russell Lynes wrote in “The Tastemakers,” his 1954 book. “It is not to improve public taste.” Thus he was dismissive of the way the term “good design” was being used by everyone from the Museum of Modern Art to Sears, Roebuck & Company. These days, of course, you can’t fling a Michael Graves spatula without hitting a panel discussion about the public “good” that radiates from adding what Lynes snidely called “taste appeal” to workaday objects. But not all objects. Read more

Chicer By The Dozen

In Consumed: The Starbury: A (very ) cheap sneaker uses an endorsement deal to bring cachet to volume sales.

It’s no secret that a lot of consumers, for a long time, have found the price of some athletic shoes objectionably high. This has not, of course, stopped the sale of expensive athletic shoes. But it does seem to have created an opening for something not often seen in contemporary consumer culture: a deep-discount retailer’s positioning its low prices as a social statement. Read more

Merchant Memories

In Consumed: Mall of America Merch: At the massive retail destination, shopping for souvenirs … of shopping.

This summer, the Mall of America will observe its 15th anniversary. It remains the largest mall in the United States by total area, at 4.2 million square feet. (But not the world, by a long shot: several new malls in Asia are considerably larger, with the 9.6-million-square-foot South China Mall in Dongguan, China, being the current king.) The Mall of America’s Web site offers various facts about its overwhelming hugeness: it houses more than 500 stores and 20,000 parking spaces, and “258 Statues of Liberty could lie inside.”

Located five minutes from the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, the Mall of America bills itself as “one of the most visited tourist destinations in the world” and a “major U.S. brand” unto itself. One bit of evidence to support these contentions is the sale of merchandise that promotes the mall itself, including branded T-shirts, coffee mugs, key chains and plush toys. Read more

Too Cool For School

In Consumed: Working Class Studio: A design project teaches students about the market — and gives the market what it’s looking for.

Since starting his online store Elsewares as a showcase for independent designers nearly three years ago, Ryan Deussing has had plenty of interaction with recent design-school graduates looking to find their way into the marketplace. Often they have interesting concepts but haven’t worked out practical issues of production and distribution. So Deussing was intrigued when he was approached by the founders of a program at the Savannah College of Art and Design (or SCAD) in Georgia, called Working Class Studio, that is so focused on marketplace realities that it seems more like a company than a college course. “I’d never been contacted by the product-development arm of a school,” he says. He liked some of the brightly patterned melamine plates that were part of the Working Class line, and it turned out that his customers liked them, too: they ended up being among his top sellers for 2006.

Read more

The Scent Sensibility

In Consumed: Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day: A cleaning fluid brand that combines the idealized Midwestern mom with boutique chic.

Depending on where you first encounter them, you might, for a second or two, mistake Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day products for some venerable brand. (Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap leaps to mind.) Aside from that homey name, you’ll notice the text-heavy design on these detergents, counter-top sprays and dishwashing liquids, definitely out of step with the sleek, uncluttered and information-light look that dominates modern packaging. But a glance at that text quickly reveals that you have not stumbled upon a holdover from the days of retail past: “Aromatherapeutic household cleaners” is certainly not an old-school product claim. And, in fact, the Mrs. Meyer’s brand is only a few years old; from a line of a half-dozen products in 2001, it has grown to a range of items that include soaps, wipes and even pet shampoos, sold in about 3,500 grocery and other stores across the country.

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Branding by the slice

In Consumed: Pizza Patrón: How a chain restaurant learned to sell pizza to Hispanics — but not Hispanic pizza.

When a chain of pizza restaurants with locations in Texas, Arizona, Nevada, California and Colorado recently announced a promotional stunt that involved accepting pesos, it sparked controversy, national news coverage and even threats. It seems predictable that the peso as an acceptable currency in Denver, say, 700 miles from the Mexican border, would have that effect at a time of emotional disagreements about immigration in America. But behind this hot-button debate is something else worth considering: what the success of a Hispanic-focused pizza chain says about Americanness.

Read more

Good Disguise

In Consumed: The 501st Legion: Can shared fandom for pop-culture iconography convert escapism to engagement?

[Note: Normally I link to the no-registration-required RSS link for the column on the NYT site, but for whatever reason, Consumed was not included in the Times Magazine’s RSS feed this week. So, the entire column follows, or, you can use this Times link, but it does require registration. Sorry. I have no control over that stuff.]

Some people might resent being mocked on national television by Bob Eubanks. But Mark Fordham is philosophical. Fordham, who is 43, is the commanding officer of the 501st Legion, an organization of Star Wars “costume enthusiasts.” Dressed as Darth Vader, he was among the 200 or so members of the club, all in shockingly convincing Star Wars villain outfits, who marched in the televised Tournament of Roses Parade this year, which was the occasion for Eubanks to crack that all of them were “groupies” who “need to get a job.” Of course Fordham found this annoying and wrongheaded, for reasons we’ll get to. On the other hand, he says: “Think about it — what we do doesn’t make sense. It transcends the reasonable.”

Extreme manifestations of fandom frequently transcend the reasonable, at least from the point of view of outsiders. And Star Wars has inspired extreme fandom and consumer behavior from the day of its blockbuster 1977 opening. Still, the 501st Legion is remarkable, and not just because it has 3,385 active members in 43 countries and enforces rigid costume-authenticity standards. The club was founded 10 years ago, after two fans in storm-trooper outfits attended a Star Wars rerelease opening. One of them, Albin Johnson, posted some pictures on his Web site, then started posting pictures other people sent him of their storm-trooper costumes. This led to the formation of a group that could, Johnson has explained, give the hobbyists a “collective identity at the conventions — a family of their own.” Such expressions of quasi community on the basis of shared admiration are common enough, but within a few years, the 501st had added a surprising dimension to its group fandom: costuming for charity. Read more

Decrunched

In Consumed: Bear Naked: Getting past the granola image — with granola itself.

One of the sturdy clichés of contemporary brand-building is the importance of avoiding an image that’s too “crunchy” or, worse, too “granola-y.” That’s particularly true — and maybe particularly challenging — for businesses that want to transcend green or health-conscious consumer niches. But it’s really challenging if what you’re selling is, in point of fact, granola.

The founders of Bear Naked were conscious of this when they started selling their product in 2002. It was “an enormous issue,” Brendan Synnott says, and for the first two and half years of the brand’s existence, he and Kelly Flatley didn’t even put the word on their packaging. “I used to hate being called granola,” he says. “You hear ‘granola,’ and you think hairy legs and Birkenstocks. That was the reputation.” …

Continue reading at the New York Times Magazine site, by way of this no-registration-required link.

Earth Cover

In Consumed: Bare Escentuals: How a cosmetics company replaced romance with the glow of rationality.

For a glimpse of what cosmetics marketing used to look like, flip through the recent book “Hello Gorgeous!” a collection of beauty-product advertising images from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. “Glamour for You!” squeals one such ad for something called Stadium Girl Cake Makeup, featuring an apple-cheeked young woman and a promise to make the user’s complexion “more romantic than ever.” Elsewhere, a presumably satisfied cosmetics customer in a bridal gown is literally hauled off by a handsome man.

Whether you see such images as being shot through with optimism or just naïvete, it seems a long way from the sort of pitch used by Bare Escentuals, a cosmetics brand whose revenues for 2006 topped $300 million — more than double the figure from 2004.

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

Biker Chic

In Consumed: Timbuk2: A blue-collar profession attains hipster status — and so does its paraphernalia.

To be a bike messenger, a former member of that profession explains in the documentary “Pedal,” is to be part of a “whole different culture.” The messenger feels free, envied and looked down on all at once. “Bike messengers fall into the realm of outlaw,” he explains. It’s not clear exactly when people delivering things by way of a bike came to be thought of as a “culture,” but in recent years it has become clear that this image is widespread and probably marketable….

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

Additional links: Peter Sutherland; Mash SF.

Unconsumption

In Consumed: Freecycle: Can getting rid of stuff feel as good as getting it?

Getting new stuff can feel really good. Most everybody knows that. Most everybody also knows — particularly in the aftermath of the consumption-frenzy holiday season — that utility can fade, pleasure can be fleeting and the whole thought-that-counts thing is especially ephemeral. Apart from the usual solution to this problem (more new stuff!), it’s worth pondering whether getting rid of stuff can ever feel as good as getting it….

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

Additional links: Freecycle; earlier Murketing post on unconsumption.

Pointed Copy

In Consumed: The Ginsu. His ads were followed by a phone number and an exhortation to “act now!” And people did. Isn’t that amazing?

In the annals of completely ridiculous advertising, the original commercial on behalf of Ginsu knives has a special place. More than a quarter-century later, anyone old enough to remember it and many people who aren’t old enough to remember it will know the highlights — the guy karate-chopping a tomato, the knife sawing neatly through a tin can and the kind of hard-sell language we tend to associate with the most blatant forms of hucksterism. It’s a knife that will last forever. It’s a product no kitchen should be without. It’s the most incredible knife offer ever. And after the superlatives, the inevitable: But wait, there’s more …

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site via this no-registration-required link. This is part of the magazine’s annual “The Lives They Lived” issue.

Additional link: The original Ginsu ad, on YouTube.