MURKETING

In The New York Times Magazine: Blankets with sleeves

FUNNY BUSINESS:
Everybody’s laughing at this year’s infomercial fad — but the sales are no joke.

This week in Consumed, the Snuggie and the Slanket and their ilk: What’s driving their sales into the tens of millions of dollars?

The idea seems to be that if the product is goofy, it ought to be pitched in the most ridiculous manner imaginable. Don’t turn into camp; create camp. The upshot is something like the Pet Rock of the Depression 2.0 era.

Read the column in the March 10, 2009, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Preserve

Revalued:
A maker of recycled-plastic products bets that eco-chic will outlast the downturn.

This week in Consumed, a look at Preserve, and selling an ethical-consumption story in a time of penny-pinching:

Organic-food sales are suffering. Some people are flat-out bragging about shunning cool design. And both Target and Whole Foods, which happen to be Preserve’s biggest retail distributors, are struggling. So what does this new environment mean for a brand like Preserve? Its products aren’t terribly expensive — $2 for a toothbrush, $6 for a set of tumblers, $10 for a cutting board. But shoppers who value frugal over eco can clearly find cheaper alternatives….

CEO Eric Hudson and firms like his are hoping shoppers will ask themselves, “How can I feel really good about the 5 things I’m going to buy in the store today versus the 25 that I used to buy seven months ago?”…

Read the column in the March 8, 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 We are unable to acknowledge or return unpublished letters.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: Crafty Chica

HAPPY MEDIUM:
How an alt-crafts venture is making its way to the mainstream.

This week in Consumed, Kathy Cano-Murillo, better known to fans as Crafty Chica, as an example of the evolution of the do-it-yourself busines.

Anecdotal reports have suggested that the business of crafting may not be suffering quite so much as the rest of the retail landscape in the current recession. But whatever the state of the economy, the Craft and Hobby Association is largely focused on expanding the sales of its mass-oriented member companies. (Alt-craft aside, the show also included a preview of craft products from, of all people, Paris Hilton.) And it’s fair to say that some indie crafters are skeptical about the attention. CraftyPod, an influential blog and podcast, noted with exasperation that the material at the show described new-wave crafters in the context of “the hippie generation.”

Cano-Murillo is perhaps uniquely situated to bridge this craft gap. She’s widely known in the indie world and has built her own contact list of a few hundred indie stores. But last year she quit her newspaper job to work for Duncan Enterprises, maker of well-known craft products like Aleene’s Original Tacky Glue, and that move made it possible to approach big chains like Michaels and Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft. …

Read the column in the March 1, 2009, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Fail Whale

FAIL WIN
An unlikely social-media icon

This week in Consumed, how a service-interruption image got a fan base — as if a song heard mostly as hold music hit the Billboard charts.

As with many Web-popularity stories, there’s a lot of flukiness to Fail Whale’s rise. For starters, Lu had never heard of Twitter when she created the image (which she called Lifting Up a Dreamer) as an electronic birthday card for a friend overseas while she was still finishing her visual communications degree at the University of Technology, Sydney. In July 2007, she uploaded a number of her illustrations, including that one, to a service called iStockphoto. That’s where, almost a year later, it came to the attention of Biz Stone, a Twitter founder….

It probably took two specific factors to create the accidental icon. First, it’s a lesson in the power of raw repetition — the “mere exposure effect” identified by psychology studies that suggests we like things more simply by seeing them more often. Second, Twitter enthusiasts are almost alarmingly zealous….

Read the column in the February 15, 2009, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Premium chocolate

THE SWEET PAYOFF
Does an $8 chocolate bar offer something besides taste to the beleaguered consumer?

This week in Consumed, a look at “compensatory consumption,” through the lens of pricey chocolate.

Their thinking is that the little boost of, say, pricey chocolate, might not be solely about mood but about responding to threats to status or competence, Rucker told me. Ideally you would respond to such challenges directly: standing up to a boss who is pushing you around, demonstrating skill to silence skeptics and so on. But often the sources of undermined confidence are more abstract. “What’s happened in modern society under capitalism is that people have found consumer products as an outlet, a safety valve for addressing these threats in a very indirect fashion,” Rucker contends.

Read the column in the February 8, 2009 issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here. [2/9 update: Here’s me talking about the column on “Word of Mouth,” on New Hampshire Public Radio.]

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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: The iFart App

APPED
Even in a down economy, silly novelty 2.0 evidently still sells

This past Sunday in Consumed*, a look at “venturesome consumption” and the vibrant iPhone apps market — using the example, of all things, of the iFart app.

As you can pretty much deduce from the name, it enables your $200 to $300 mobile device to emit a variety of noises simulating flatulence. This 21st-century whoopee cushion hit No. 1 on the paid-application chart shortly before Christmas, stayed there for three weeks and remained in the Top 10 until mid-January. It has been purchased more than 350,000 times.

The obvious question, which could forgivably take the form of a plaintive howl, is why?

Read the column, from the February 1, 2009, issue of The New York Times Magazine, here.

* Posting this so late because of this site’s previously mentioned problem.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Margaux Lange’s Barbie-parts jewelry

DECONSTRUCTING BARBIE:
Loved, hated, analyzed, critiqued — the iconic doll gets repurposed.

This week in Consumed, a jewelry-maker whose raw materials include pieces of Barbie, the consumption icon who turns 50 this year.

Margaux Lange figures she was about 4 or 5 when she got her first Barbie. “I remember very quickly becoming obsessed with collecting as many as I possibly could,” she says. Eventually she had around 50. “I played with them, embarrassingly, until about seventh or eighth grade. In secret.” She’s 29 now and makes jewelry for a living; in her studio, along with her soldering torch and other standard tools of the trade, is a much larger Barbie collection. But these dolls are mostly in pieces, stored in stacked plastic boxes marked with phrases like “One Eye” or “Mouths With Teeth.”

Lange is still playing with Barbie, in a way, but now the dolls are not so much toy companions as elements that she breaks down and incorporates into handmade rings, necklaces, brooches and the like: work made from “sterling silver and Barbie parts,” as she puts it.

Read the column in the January 25, 2009 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.”

AFTER THE JUMP: Some background regarding how this week’s column came about. Only for those who are hard-core curious about the way I think — proceed at your own risk (of being bored).
Read more

In The New York Times Magazine: Pur Flavor Options

TAP DANCE
Want to stand out in a category that’s all about subtracting? Add something.

This week in Consumed, Pur Flavor Options, which allow you to add flavor to filtered tap water.

It may seem surprising, then, that a filter maker would attempt a kind of jujitsu move on the notion of purity: What if you took water with all the bad stuff screened out and . . . added something to it? …

But if Flavor Options suggests that progress on the front lines in the marketplace is incremental, it also offers proof of just how resistant the marketplace can be to limits. At a certain point, you would think, the race to purity gets won; eventually, you cannot get purer than pure. And yet, just as you can never actually drive to the horizon, the end point of “new and improved” simply does not exist.

Read the column in the January 11, 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: Drank

SLOW PITCH
An ‘anti-energy’ drink’s novel image: chic … or shameful?

This week in Consumed, a beverage containing allegedly relaxing ingredients such as valerian root, melatonin and rose hips, but that skips the health-store image in favor of one striving for  hip-hop chic — and whose name  happens to echo slang for sipping prescription cough syrup.

This has attached some controversy to Drank, as well as to a rival drink called Purple Stuff, made by a different Houston company. “One of the most asinine things I have ever seen,” a public-health professor commented in one Houston Chronicle article that also included complaints from local religious figures and rappers. Not surprising, right? “I’m a little shocked” at the criticism, Peter Bianchi, the inventor of Drank, told me. “We’re not advocating drug use at all,” he continued, but merely offering an innocuous beverage to anyone who feels a little stressed out — carbonated counterprogramming, as it were, to the firmly established “energy drink” category.

Read the column in the January 4, 2009 issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Joan Winston

ENTERPRISING:
Her Star Trek conventions harnessed the power of media fandom long before the barons of content did.

The New York Times Magazine publishes its annual The Lives They Lived issue this weekend, and Consumed focuses on the Star Trek fan who helped organize the first Trek convention.

There’s another way of looking at such fans: as extremely active media consumers. And there’s another way of looking at the Trek convention culture Winston helped create: as like-minded individuals gathering to connect over a shared taste. In other words, Winston’s world was a template for what is now widely seen as the mainstream-media-consumer paradigm of the 21st century. Henry Jenkins, co-director of the M.I.T. Comparative Media Studies Program, has been studying and writing about media fans for more than 20 years and has summarized the Facebook/YouTube era as fandom without the stigma. “It takes all the things that fans have been doing throughout the 20th century and makes them public, mainstream, commercial,” he told me in an interview. “The mechanisms that fans were early pioneers of have become absolutely widespread in our society, whether we’re talking about early communities or social networks or participatory culture.”

Read the column in the December 28, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Functional gift cards

CARD TRICKS:
The latest spin on the most transactional form of holiday giving.

This week in Consumed:

The nature and meaning of the gift has been mulled by philosophers, anthropologists and economists for many decades. The thinking on gift cards is less extensive but has its place in that history. To the believer in the idea of gift-giving as a practice that binds individuals, and indeed societies, a store-specific piece of plastic preloaded with $50 is an offensively thoughtless dodge. To the believer in marketplace solutions to the problem of well-meaning but misguided givers, it’s a triumph of efficiency. Gift-card sales are expected to suffer this year on widely publicized fears that they’ll be rendered worthless by failing retailers. But that has overshadowed the more surprising development in the nature of the form: the introduction of gift cards with functionality….

Who gets the real payoff from this development? Read the column in the December 21, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Deconstructing the “New Thrift”

TALK IS CHEAP
Consumer spending finally falters — can it be good news?

This week in Consumed, as part of the Times Magazine‘s annual “Year In Ideas” issue, I look at the repackaging of falling consumer spending as frugality chic. Is this truly a sea change in values?

The truth is that we have long had mixed, even contradictory, feelings about consumption. A few years ago — pretty much at the height of our most recent nationwide spending binge — a nonprofit group called the Center for a New American Dream released a poll in which 81 percent of those surveyed agreed that Americans are “too focused on shopping and spending,” and 88 percent said our society is “too materialistic.” Not long after, the Pew Research Center surveyed Americans about various consumer goods we say we “can’t live without.” Between 1996 and 2006 the number of material necessities in our lives grew substantially. Aside from new entries — 49 percent can’t live without a cellphone, and 29 percent said the same of high-speed Internet access — our need for more familiar items spiked, too. The number of people who considered the microwave oven a necessity, for instance, nearly doubled. Some respondents added iPods and flat-screen TVs to the list. Uneasy as we may be about “materialistic” purchases, they remain a tangible proxy for progress.

Second thoughts about that paradigm are nothing new. “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” Jimmy Carter declared in 1979 in his “crisis of confidence” speech. “We’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.” It’s hard to imagine anyone, then or now, arguing otherwise. But who, at the end of the 1970s, would have predicted the emergence of a new normal that included gas-guzzling S.U.V.’s and McMansions?

Read the whole column here, or in the December 14, 2008 issue of The New York Times Magazine.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Comme des Garçons for H&M

BETWEEN THE LINES:
How the latest high-low fashion hit fits the new shopper model.

This week in Consumed, a look at the recent Commes des Garçons/ H&M collaboration, and what it says about how such team-ups may be adapting to a new role in a changing marketplace.

The underlying trend-logic of this strategy previously turned on the belief in a societal surge toward the finer things — a nation “trading up” into new “masstige” lifestyles. Lately, enthusiasm for that theory has retreated even faster than our credit-card limits…

[Now] it is not so much about the masses grasping for prestige as it is about a rarefied consumer group grasping for deals — or, perhaps, for a form of splurging that seems more socially acceptable while fellow citizens are losing jobs and nest eggs. If new trend-logic invariably demands a fresh coinage, consider frugalitism. (Or not.)

Read the whole column in the December 7, 2008 issue of The New York Times magazine, or here.

Earlier in the week I did a short interview previewing this column for New Hampshire Public Radio’s Word of Mouth, here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: The Layaway

DELAYED GRATIFICATION
A new installment, for an old form of payment.

This week in Consumed, the layaway plan at KMart and Sears:

Kmart has struggled for years to change its image as the has-been retailer competing with more up-to-date rivals like Wal-Mart and Target, so hyping such a musty, old-school service seems risky, to say the least. But times have changed, Aiello says. “When we talked to customers, they gave us a lot of credit,” he says. “They didn’t see it as tired or a throwback. They saw it as a really great solution.” And not just fixed-budget consumers, he asserts, but also “more affluent people who see it as a risk-free way to get something while it’s in stock, at the price they want to pay.” At Sears, he adds, layaway’s comeback was a direct result of consumers simply asking for it.

Red the column in the November 30, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Seinfeld reruns

REPEAT BUSINESS:
The selling — and reselling, and reselling — of a show that ended a decade ago.

This week The New York Times Magazine has a special issue about “Screens,” and Consumed approaches this theme with a column about … Seinfeld reruns.

Fluttering along in this blizzard of the new, there is the not-new, the still-with-us, the vintage, the classic . . . the old. Sitcom reruns, for instance, angle to keep entertaining us, over and over, and profitably. It is in that context that the “Seinfeld” promotional bus tour concluded in Las Vegas this weekend — a 30-city marketing gimmick for a show that went off the air a decade ago.

Read the column in the November 23, 2008 issue of the Times Magazine, or here.

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