MURKETING

In The New York Times Magazine: Latisse

EYELASH OF THE BEHOLDER:
A prescription product doesn’t claim to cure an illness. But is it a symptom of a different malady?

During clinical testing of a glaucoma medication called Lumigan, Allergan’s researchers noted a side effect: eyelash growth. Recognizing the market potential for such a thing, the company conducted a new safety-and-efficacy study, this time making the former side effect the main focus, explained Robert Grant, the president of Allergan Medical, the company’s aesthetic-products division. In December, the Food and Drug Administration gave Allergan clearance for this new use. By May, Latisse ads were on the air, and in its first three months on the market, the product totaled about $12 million in sales. This suggests that there is a bigger market for “eyelash hypotrichosis” relief than you might have guessed before Latisse’s promotional campaign began….

Read the column in the August 2, 2009, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Lululemon

MARKETING POSE:
Saulting the sun in a downward-dog economy

For its first fiscal quarter of 2009, the chain Lululemon Athletica reported that consumers spent $81.7 million in its stores, which represented a slight increase over the same period in 2008. What were shoppers buying? “Yoga-inspired athletic apparel” is how the company describes its wares. This includes specifically yoga-related gear like mats. But it also includes items whose connection to the practice of yoga is harder to parse: bags, jackets, dresses, even hats….

Read the column in the July 26, 2009, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: The Uniform Project

THIS YEAR’S MODEL:
Wearing one dress for 365 days sounds austere — but not in this case.

Rules stifle creativity and enforce conformity. Rules can do something else too: inspire creativity that thwarts conformity. Anyone who has observed a pack of kids in school uniforms will note the individualistic tweaks: rolled cuffs here, an accessory there; whatever loopholes in the sartorial rule book can be found are promptly exploited. Sheena Matheiken certainly noticed such things when she was just such a child, attending schools in Kerala, India, where uniforms were the rule.

In May, Matheiken, who these days is the creative director for a Web-design company in New York, started the Uniform Project, which involves wearing the same dress every day for a year, and seeing just how aesthetically creative she could be despite that limitation….

Read the column in the July 12, 2009, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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[PS: PSFK has an interesting follow-up here: “While not explicitly mentioned in the interview, Matheiken’s project is an interesting social commentary on the blight of “fast fashion” (garments with less than a one year shelf life), which is wreaking havoc on our environment, textile manufacturers, and perhaps even the fashion industry itself.”]

In The New York Times Magazine: “Keep Calm” and remixes thereof

REMIXED MESSAGES
What happens when an artifact of persuasion encounters the modern marketplace

A blunt slogan and a simple image: these basic elements of persuasion, protest, propaganda or making a point have been used in tandem and to great effect for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. Presumably, these messages have always been received in a variety of ways. But these days, it seems, when a slogan and an image reach a significant audience, that’s not the end of the process. In fact it’s just the beginning….

Read the column in the July 5 New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: A hotel chain’s “random acts of generosity”

FAVOR ENHANCEMENT:
Real gratitude can be profitable. How, then, to create it?

In the days ahead, managers and employees of the Hyatt hotel chain will be doing favors for some of their customers. Maybe they always did them, but these favors will be different: they will be what Hyatt Hotels’ C.E.O., Mark Hoplamazian, has called “random acts of generosity,” like unexpectedly picking up the tab for your hotel-bar drinks or hotel-spa massage. “Random” seems slightly off as a description, in that Hoplamazian announced this pending outburst of hospitality, and the months of consumer research that preceded it, in a guest post on a USA Today business-travel blog. But the idea is that the unexpected nature of the gifts will leave the customer not just pleased but also grateful. Gratitude is a powerful, and potentially quite profitable, emotion to inspire….

Read the column in the June 21, 2009, issue of New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Dead retail

REPURPOSE-DRIVEN LIFE:
America’s retail infrastructure is vast and abundant. That’s the problem.

Talk of American infrastructure tends to focus on inadequacies: roads that need to be repaired or widened, bridges fortified, electrical grids updated. All the more striking, then, that America’s retail infrastructure — its malls, supercenters, big boxes and other styles of store-clumping — has come to be characterized by rampant abundance. This has been a decades-long trend. But it has taken the economic downturn, with chain stores liquidating, mall tenancy slipping and car dealerships scheduled for closure, to focus popular attention on the problem with our retail infrastructure: there is too much of it….

Read the column in the June 14, 2009, New York Times Magazine (special architecture/infrastructure issue), or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Plinky

SAY WHAT?
Adding to the structure of online expression, but giving you something to express.

It has never been easier to express yourself in public. Whatever you might want to say, the online tools to let you say it to a (theoretically) worldwide audience are innumerable. Say it long, say it short, say what you want, when you want and how often you want. As the title of a forthcoming book about blog culture puts it: “Say Everything.” You have the technology. The only thing the technology cannot do is solve this problem: What if you don’t really have anything to express?

Ah, but technology can solve that problem for you….

Read the column in the May 31, 2009, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Swine flu neckties

VIRAL INFLECTION:
A sartorial symbol of conformity gets a subversive twist

At one time or another, most American males must reckon with the necktie. Some embrace it, some grudgingly acquiesce to it and plenty reject it. That the necktie seems to have no practicalpurpose is of course the very source of its potency. Over the past d ecade or two, a rising wave of tech billionaires have made even its absence a powerful signal. This is why a tie pattern that incorporates an image of the swine-flu virus is such a snug fit: while the necktie sounds like an unlikely canvas for dark humor or subversive sentiment, it is actually an ideal one.

“Terminal Illness” is the name of one of the most recent designs from Bethany Shorb, a Detroit artist, and the fact that it has a title is a good indicator that it is not a traditional tie….

Read the column in the May 24, 2009 New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In the New York Times Magazine: Lending Club

BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A LOAN?
As Americans rethink the debt idea, peer-to-peer lending attracts interest

Debt, credit, lending — these are financial matters, to be evaluated empirically and mathematically. But that’s not all they are, especially lately. Value judgments about both personal and corporate borrowing and lending abound in this time of tight credit: who deserves to borrow and on what terms, who abused the idea of debt and why. As Margaret Atwood observes in “Payback,” her fascinating book about the meaning of debt: “Like air, it’s all around us, but we never think about it unless something goes wrong with the supply.”

The debt supply was abundant back in 2005, when Renaud Laplanche dreamed up Lending Club, now one of the best known of a batch of companies that have added Web-enabled “peer to peer” lending to the ways that individuals can borrow money….

Read the column in the May 17, 2009, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Cheetos Giant

BIG CHEESE:
Is largeness its own reward?

We think of ourselves as sophisticated creatures, and the many brilliant minds of the consumer-industrial complex often think of us that way, too. But sometimes what we want seems pretty simple. Sometimes, we just want something big.

A case in point, perhaps: giant Cheetos….

Read the column in the May 10, 2009, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Digital goods

IMMATERIALISM
With more of life lived online, spending on things that don’t seems more normal.

I’ve actually been scooped by Core77 in posting my own column! Embarrassing. Anyway, Consumed this week is about immaterialism and digital goods — why people buy things that don’t exist.

Consuming things made of bits might sound weird, but actually it offers a lot of the same attractions that make people consume things made of atoms. Facebook’s digital gifting is one relatively mainstream example.

Other examples, and the case for what it all has in common with buying things that do exist, in the full column in the May 3, 2009, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Eco-remodeling and the possibilities of a new “normal”

REFURBISHING NORMAL
Looking at how consumer expectations about the home have changed — and how they might change again

This week The New York Times Magazine has a special issue with a “green.” Consumed plays along by looking at “expectations of normal,” how they change, and what the eco-consequences are.

Clearly our notions of “normal” change as a result of innovations or economic circumstances or even the vagaries of fashion. Quitzau and Ropke were looking at the way people in one country think about one room, but the pattern is familiar. A century ago, having a bathroom at all was “a sign of status,” they wrote. Gradually the bathroom became normal, as did more frequent showering and so on. And around the mid-1990s, a new wave of bathroom remodeling transformed a previously function-oriented and hygienic aesthetic into one of “identity formation.”

Not surprisingly, the cumulative effect included using a lot more water and energy. Observers of the American remodeling business have seen similar trends. … Today, given that many Americans’ consumption patterns have been affected by the economic slowdown, it’s interesting to consider whether a version of normal might emerge that is more environmentally sound.

Read the whole column in the April 19, 2009, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here. Discuss, make fun of it, or praise it to the skies on the Consumed Facebook page. For information about writing a letter to the editor, see the FAQ.

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In the New York Times Magazine: Garment Valet

WORK STUDY
What is entrepreneurship? One student’s answer: His thriving startup.

This week in Consumed, a look at a college student who built a business before he graduated — not by dreaming up a big idea, per se, but by executing.

It’s not a business plan; it’s a business, with 14 full-time employees and about $950,000 in revenue last year. Grim economy notwithstanding, Coryell says he believes the company will fare even better after he graduates next month.

Rooting for the abstract idea of the entrepreneur, whether a small-business owner or the hypothetical Next Bill Gates, is one of the great clichés of American politics and life. From consumers to politicians to whatever Joe the Plumber is supposed to be, everyone supports entrepreneurs. They’re pivotal figures who will get us out of this recession. Some observers suggest that the downturn is actually sparking entrepreneurship, as laid-off workers make a go of a variety of new small businesses. Funny then that, as Coryell notes, “the thing about entrepreneurship is that nobody knows what it is.”

Read the column in the April 12, 2009, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

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“Letters should be addressed to Letters to the Editor, Magazine, The New York Times, 620 Eighth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10018. The e-mail address is magazine@nytimes.com. All letters should include the writer’s name, address and daytime telephone number. We are unable to acknowledge or return unpublished letters. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.”

In The New York Times Magazine: 1BOG

PANEL DISCUSSION
Buying into solar power — and to the potential appeal of collective buying.

This week in Consumed, a business that rounds of packs of consumers to make group buys of solar power.

Collective buying power has been harnessed in various ways in the past, but generally speaking the strategy has been marginal among contemporary American consumers, maybe because it doesn’t mesh well with the rugged individualist’s self-image.

Then again, in a cultural moment when many individuals aren’t feeling all that rugged, perhaps it makes sense that a company called 1BOG has put collective buying at the center of its business model.

Read the column in the April 5, 2009, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. The Times’ Consumed RSS feed is here. Consumed Facebook page — now with wall-posting! — is here.

“Letters should be addressed to Letters to the Editor, Magazine, The New York Times, 620 Eighth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10018. The e-mail address is magazine@nytimes.com. All letters should include the writer’s name, address and daytime telephone number. We are unable to acknowledge or return unpublished letters. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.”

In The New York Times Magazine: Hyundai Assurance

What’s driving this deal?
An automaker offers reassurance — and, perhaps more important, commiseration.

This week in Consumed, a look at Hyundai’s Assurance program — which promises to let you return a newly bought car if you get laid off.

As of early March, no Hyundai buyer had yet returned a vehicle bought under the Assurance umbrella. This raises the intriguing point about what sort of consumer is being reassured. Probably anybody who is really afraid of losing a job simply isn’t going to buy a car right now. But somebody whose insecurity is more abstract, who perhaps simply needs a rationale for a big-ticket purchase at a moment when the headlines are full of doom — that’s different.

Read the column in the March 22, 2009, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

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Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. The Times‘ Consumed RSS feed is here.

“Letters should be addressed to Letters to the Editor, Magazine, The New York Times, 620 Eighth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10018. The e-mail address is magazine@nytimes.com. All letters should include the writer’s name, address and daytime telephone number. We are unable to acknowledge or return unpublished letters. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.”