MURKETING

In The New York Times Magazine: KAWS

New Looks
An established art entrepreneur makes his way into a new realm — the art world.

This week in Consumed, Brian Donnelly, a/k/a KAWS, and the relationship between art, markets, and value.

At 33, Brian Donnelly is enjoying a successful art career. Working out of a studio in Brooklyn, he has sold paintings to Pharrell Williams, the rapper and producer; Nigo, the designer-entrepreneur; and Takashi Murakami, the international art star, among others. He has also created a variety of products including toys, apparel and even pillows — and indeed he has his own store, Original Fake, in Tokyo. He has also been widely known in the “street art” world for years; one of his early altered-phone-booth-ad posters recently traded hands on eBay for $22,000. One thing Donnelly had not done until lately, however, is forge a relationship with a dealer or art gallery. This wasn’t because he shunned or had a problem with the traditional gallery system. He says it’s just that “nobody asked.”

[Now he has a bunch of gallery shows and relationship with a gallerist who] figures there’s another market for his work. “I think it needs to get out there in the art world,” she says.

Read the whole column in the August 3, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or right here.

Additional links*: KAWS site; Donnelly’s blog; Edward Winkleman’s blog; John Jay’s blog; Gering & López Gallery site.

Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.

[*QUESTION: I used to do this “additional links” thing all the time, then I stopped. Is it useful? Do you want it? Please let me know.]

In The New York Times Magazine: Coupons.com

SILICON CLIPS:
During an economic downturn, the coupon finds a new life online.

This week in Consumed: new life for the venerable coupon.

Coupon redemption has been falling steadily for more than a decade — until, it turns out, relatively recently. Of course, it’s the sluggish economy that’s inspiring this return to thriftiness — along with a newer digital iteration of coupon culture.

Read the column in the July 27, 2008 issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.

In The New York Times Magazine: Girl Talk

MASH-UP MODEL:
Music you could never buy on iTunes tests the pay-what-want business model

In Consumed this week, a subject that’s come up before on Murketing (most recently last week): Girl Talk, the Pittsburgh-based musical-collage-maker.

It’s one thing for various name-brand artists to dabble with giveaways. It’s something else for a creator who has operated artistically, financially and even legally outside the structures of the traditional recording business for his entire career to do so. Will “Feed the Animals” make Girl Talk a rock star? And what would that even mean?

Read the column in the July 20, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

Illegal Art site is here; direct link to access Feed The Animals is here.

Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.

In The New York Times Magazine: Organic Growth

O Organics and Eating Right: Name Brand? Store Brand? Safeway’s virtue-food products aim to blur the line.

This week in Consumed, Safeway private-label lines that break with the basic rules of that category:

Both were built much more like name brands than like store brands — in fact, both were supported by national television and print advertising. And more recently, Safeway has initiated the Better Living Brands Alliance, with the highly unusual goal of selling these two store-brand lines in places other than the chain that created them — school cafeterias, foreign markets and, ultimately, other U.S. grocers.

Read the column in the July 13, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Pirate’s Booty

SNACK MENTALITY
Puffed treats that make your noshing feel a little more virtuous.

This week in Consumed, a look at a snack that seems to have drawn a crowd by way of its virtues, its quirkiness, its honest — and kept it despite some pretty serious road bumps.

Pirate’s Booty hasn’t simply leveraged unusual consumer loyalty into a business with a reported $50 million in annual revenue. It has held onto that loyalty despite incidents that would seem to cut against its image. A few years ago, the Good Housekeeping Research Institute slammed the brand after its own tests found that a one-ounce serving of Booty contained 8.5 grams of fat, not 2.5 as the label indicated. And in 2007, the company issued a recall of its Veggie Booty and Super Veggie Tings varieties after they were linked to cases of salmonella.

Included: Founder explains that “Good For You” is not so much a claim as a congratulation: “You bought this bag — well, good for you!” The product contains no MSG and no preservatives, and therefore the buyer deserves a pat on the back for choosing a snack that’s not so bad: “Wow, you chose something that is going to change your life,” he says.

Read the whole column in the June 29, 2008 issue of The New York Times Magazine, or right here.

Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.

In The New York Times Magazine: The Chumby

TINKERER’S TOY:
A gizmo that needs hackers to make it better for the rest of us

This week in Consumed: The Chumby. On one level it’s an example of an “ambient device,” but in this case its usefulness depends entirely on the creativity of consumer-hackers. (“The Chumby model attracts people who crave actively creating something that will be enjoyed passively.”)

On another level, its creators suggest that this device reverses the traditional consumer-electronics dynamic:

The alpha-geek development model proposes a revision of a gadget’s life cycle: As creative people keep hacking into what a Chumby can be, the device theoretically becomes more useful the longer you own it. There are elements already in the Chumby that nobody has yet exploited — like a microphone. “Maybe somebody will figure out how to turn it into a Skype phone,” Tomlin suggests. The company is also hoping others will make devices — digital picture frames and the like — that will accept the Chumby Network’s feed. Tomlin doesn’t rule out future generations of his object, but argues that “the same Chumby today is better than it was when someone bought it in November, and one that you buy now will be better in six months.”

A fascinating idea, to be sure. But is this thing bound for garage sales of the future? You decide. The column is here.

Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.

In The New York Times Magazine: Destee Nation T’s

The Indie Look
T-shirts celebrating little-guy capitalism — or at least the idea of it.

This week in Consumed, a look at a company that sells T-shirts that at first glance look as though they advertise long-lost, or possibly imaginary, places and businesses. Actually, they’re all real.

Destee Nation is not selling nostalgia or hipster kitsch but romance — the romance of the American small business, the neighborhood diner, the old bar, the mom-and-pop shop that has managed to linger into the era of big-box chains. It celebrates little-guy capitalism with an agenda: “Let’s keep it,” the founder says, noting that every time Destee Nation sells a T-shirt, the business it advertises gets a cut.

Founded in 2004, the company now has 21 employees and sales approaching 10,000 T-shirts a month, and this month will begin distributing through a number of Nordstrom locations. “Basically,” the founder says, “we’re using fashion as a way to save local landmarks.”

Read the column in the June 15, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

Special thanks to Dan W.

Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.

In The New York Times Magazine: Noise-canceling headphones

SILENCE GENERATION
Technology adapts to eliminate the clatter of city life, one person at a time

For today’s special issue of The New York Times Magazine, The Next City, I devoted the Consumed column to a look at noise-canceling headphones, in particular the Bose QuietComfort line. The connection to the “city” idea is that such headphones are relevant to the thing that makes cities both appealing and oppressive: All the other people.

Originally developed for use in airplanes, Bose’s headphones moved from pilots to consumers, and then to city streets.

Deep into the age of cellphones and iPods, the portable soundtrack is a given in city life, although some of the conceptual pieces in “Design and the Elastic Mind” suggested that we’re still adjusting to this new reality. … One concept, by the Social Mobiles project, which originated in the London office of the design firm IDEO, proposes phones that modify their owners’ behavior — for instance by shocking them when they talk too loud.

Given the unease and adjustment that such projects imply, it’s no surprise that noise-canceling headphones have come to be tools for blotting out not just the dull roar of an airplane but also the clatter of city life…

Read the whole column in today’s issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

In The New York Times Magazine: Fiji Green

WATER PROOF:
A bottled water criticized by environmentalists tries to detox is image

This week in Consumed, a look at the efforts of the luxury/status water brand repositioning itself as eco-friendly. Is this in response to the much-reported backlash against bottled water? Sort of.

[A spokesman’s] most surprising assertion is that Fiji was already an environmentally conscious company — and that’s part of what has been “frustrating” about the media coverage. He points to various conservation efforts in Fiji, and to the fact that the brand’s entire business model depends on the aquifer there remaining pristine.

Others, of course, point to another unchangeable aspect of Fiji’s model: getting that water to far-flung markets where people will pay a lot of money for it. Fiji’s luxury-chic status has always been directly tied to the idea that this is a rare substance from an exotic place. Which, in turn, is the issue that enrages its critics….

Read the rest in the June 1, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.

In The New York Times Magazine: The Flip camcorder

FLIPPED OUT
Convenience makes a good-enough camcorder a hit

In Consumed this week, an object lesson in the awesome power of convenience — and when it trumps quality itself.

In the consumer-products world, progress can be gauged in measurable increments of improved quality. Contemporary consumers demand such improvements all the time and refuse to compromise on the good-enough when the better is available. So marketplace success depends on quality breakthroughs: tastier coffee, faster computers, smoother-riding cars. This is always true — except when it isn’t….

A high-enough degree of convenience is exactly what makes a “good enough” product consumable. Digital-compression formats like the MP3 and most of its successors have entailed a step down in audio quality — but for most listeners, they’re “good enough” when you consider that they’re obtainable instantly (and, often, free). As Fleming-Wood points out, the camera business went through its own version of this epiphany decades ago, with the rise of one-button devices that couldn’t possibly match the quality of single-lens-reflex cameras but were far more accessible….

Read the column in the May 25, 2008 issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.

In The New York Times Magzine: The Taser C2

SHOCK VALUE:
The Kleenex of stun guns brands balances sleek gadgetry with “take-down power.”

This week in Consumed, a look at the newest and most consumer-friendly version of … the Taser.

That would be “the Taser C2 Personal Protector, a model that is, if not exactly kinder and gentler, then at least more innocent-looking. Also: it’s available in pink and in a leopard print.”

Why the new form factor for the device?

“We finally listened to the customer,” Taser’s Steve Tuttle says. The customer was not comfortable carrying something that would cause people to dive under tables yelling, “Gun!” if you took it out in a restaurant. The customer liked sleek gizmos, and vibrant, fashionable colors. The customer wanted something light and small enough to put in a handbag. Of course, the customer still wanted to propel tiny electrodes up to 15 feet, affecting “the sensory and motor functions” (as the company Web site puts it) of whomever they strike, with “incredible takedown power.”

Read the column in the May 18, 2008 issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.

In The New York Times Magzine: Down on the dollar

Almighty Dolor:
As Americans, we like the greenback, but as investors, we’re a little more willing to go where the money is

This week Consumed looks at spending money — on other forms of money.

Currency prestige has a long history in the context of nation-states, but the idea that individuals might find some forms of money more desirable than others is less familiar. Perhaps rising awareness of the falling dollar is changing that.

There is a way to, in effect, spend your dollars on other forms of money, and apparently the number of people doing so is increasing. …

Read the column in the May 11, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.

In The New York Times Magazine: Brawndo

THIS JOKE’S FOR YOU:
A satirical product from a dark comedy crosses over to reality.

It’s interesting to consider the Brawndo project as metasubversion, making it possible to express knowing amusement at the absurdity of American commerce by buying something. But maybe the message is simply that cautionary tales about dumbed-down culture are a futile endeavor: show us an argument that we will buy anything, no matter how idiotic, and we say, “Awesome — how much for that?”

Or maybe the lesson is something else altogether….

Read the column in the March 4, 2008 issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

Previously on Murketing: about Brawndo; about imaginary brands. Even more imaginary brand links here.

Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.

In The New York Times Magazine: Despair.com

EMPOWERING BY DISEMPOWERMENT
How satirizing corporate doublespeak gets a promotion in a time of layoffs.

Despair Inc. It sells scores of posters satirizing the banalities of the motivation industry. The business first became Internet famous a decade ago, but has proved remarkably durable, with sales climbing to around $4.5 million last year.

And possibly its worldview is resonating in a lot of cubicles and offices just about now: the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently calculated that U.S. employers cut 80,000 jobs in March. Meanwhile, Despair’s sales are up about 15 percent this year. “We do see some people are buying because things are getting bad,” says Justin Sewell, a co-founder of Despair. “They’re Googling things like ‘despair’ or ‘failure,’ and we’re popping up.”

Read the column in the April 27, 2008 issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.

In The New York Times Magazine: Green Cell

DREAMING IN GREEN:
The value of a hypothetical, maybe even impractical, and unrealistic, product

If something similar had originated in the skunk works of a big company, or even at a start-up angling for venture capital, it most likely wouldn’t get far. But that, in fact, is the point: the nonmarketplace context of hypothetical products frees the designer to leapfrog practical-minded meetings about market share and profit margins and the like and to land at the bigger questions: is this something companies should do — or must do?

Read the column in the April 20, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.