MURKETING

In Consumed: Sales Leader

Edward Boyd: He knew advertising was all about fantasy — but it was a fantasy that black consumers might want to be part of.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a certain unease could be detected about the American drift toward a culture of selling, marketing and consumerism. Even Fortune magazine opined in 1947 that “the American citizen lives in a state of siege from dawn till bedtime,” seeming to echo the sentiments raised in the best-selling novel “The Hucksters” and the celebrated play “Death of a Salesman.” One sales executive at the time, a man named Edward Boyd, later recalled leaving a performance of Arthur Miller’s famous play in tears. “I related to it,” he said. Even so, Boyd stuck with his job, possibly because his own role in the machinery of American selling was a bit more complex: He was a black man building an African-American sales force within the Pepsi-Cola Company when corporate America was anything but integrated….

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site.

Note: This column is a little unusual in being a person, but that’s because it’s part of the Magazine’s annual “The Lives They Lived” issue. Boyd died earlier this year. As the column notes, his story is a significant part of Stephanie Capparell’s recent book, The Real Pepsi Challenge.

In Consumed: Outlet for Exclusivity

Premium Outlets: How a new-luxury brand manages the dances with the mass market.

There was a time when outlet centers were associated with the grubby matter of liquidating unsold merchandise to unglamorous bargain hunters in a low-rent building in the middle of nowhere. Clearly this image has evolved, and many apparel makers even manufacture products specifically for their outlet channels. About 10 years ago, the Chelsea Property Group (a division of Simon Property Group) recognized an opportunity in this low-end category: branding high-end outlet shopping. Today, Chelsea Premium Outlets operates in dozens of locations in the U.S. and abroad, including the sprawling Woodbury Common Premium Outlets, about an hour north of New York City. Current Woodbury tenants include Jimmy Choo, Tory Burch and True Religion….

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site.

In Consumed: Emergency Décor

HomeHero: A fire extinguisher makes a claim that good looks can be a virtue.

Not long ago, Home Depot began selling a $25 fire extinguisher that did not look like a fire extinguisher: white, smooth and resembling a countertop kitchen appliance, it is “attractive enough to keep within reach,” according to a sales circular. Earlier this year, the Industrial Designers Society of America came to a similar conclusion when it gave the HomeHero one of its top awards. As is typical, the organization’s judges praised both functional and aesthetic qualities of the object. The write-up for the International Design Excellence Award asserted that it is less cumbersome and easier to use than a traditional fire extinguisher. “Most importantly,” the statement concluded, its “fashion-conscious” looks mean that “homeowners won’t want to keep the HomeHero hidden out of view, ensuring it will be in reach when seconds matter.”

Industrial designers are forever pointing out they are not mere stylists; doing their job well means making better things, not better-looking things. So it’s attention-grabbing when IDEA judges call style the most important feature of a piece of home-safety equipment….

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site.

In Consumed: Recycled Phrases

secret-weapon
Originally uploaded by Linzie Hunter

Spam One-Liners: Extracting pleasure from (digital) junk-culture detritus.

Like everybody else with an e-mail account, Linzie Hunter gets a lot of spam. It might be a little more unusual that she sometimes finds the subject headings so amusingly absurd — “No More Lonely Nights for Linzie,” for instance — that she forwards them to friends. (Recipients tend to be nonplused. “Maybe it’s just my sense of humor,” says Hunter, who lives in North London.) More recently, when Hunter, who is an illustrator, was experimenting with hand lettering, she did something extremely unusual. She found a way to convert commercial entreaty and flimflammery into something pleasing. That is, she made spam into art.

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site.

The Spam One-Liners Flickr set is here.

Late-breaking development: After the column went to press, Linzie Hunter began making prints available by way of Thumbtack Press. It would have been good to have this in the column, but … better late than never.

In Consumed: The Pretenders

Guitar Hero: A rock-star fantasy that demands a different set of skills.

It’s a familiar enough scene: The kid walks in, straps up and does his best to recreate some classic rock song. Maybe it’s the Rolling Stones, maybe the Sex Pistols. He makes mistakes, but still, as he bobs his head and appears to lose himself in the music, he looks like a rock star, and maybe even feels like one. Or he does these things to the extent possible while standing in the middle of a Best Buy, staring at a monitor, playing Guitar Hero III, the video game….

Continue reading at the NYT site.

UPDATE (11/27): Kottke reaction to the pretend factor: “If you don’t know the difference in the first place, does it matter?”

In Consumed: False Endorsement

Last Exit To Nowhere: Why imaginary brands can be even better than the real thing.

There is no shortage of logos in the world, no dearth of brands striving for consumer allegiance and no chance that the creation of new brands and logos will cease. In fact there’s an interesting subset of brands and logos that don’t bother with what seems like a crucial component: an actual product, service or company. Consider the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. It’s part of the fictional universe depicted in the 1979 film “Alien” and its sequels; Nostromo, the spaceship freighter in the first movie, is a Weyland-Yutani vessel. The company doesn’t do much in the way of branding in, you know, reality. But as it turns out, it’s possible to buy yourself a Weyland-Yutani T-shirt, or even a Nostromo T. It also turns out many people have….

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site.

Additional links: Last Exit to Nowhere; more on imaginary brands on this site, and elsewhere.

* Bonus link: The column mentions that the creator of Last Exit to Nowhere used to be in a band called Consumed. You can hear a couple of their tracks (and buy CDs) at the Fat Wreck Chords site.

Murketing readers know this imaginary brands topic is a regular point of interest for me, and I thank everyone for past comments on this site that helped prod me toward today’s column. Update: See comments for more examples.

In Consumed: Wild West: The Prequel

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: How a marketing strategy turned into myth — and influenced filmmakers for more than a century

Generally I post the column without comment, but if you happen to be reading this one outside the context of the actual New York Times Magazine, you might wonder: Buffalo Bill? What’s that about?

Here’s what that’s about. Several times a year the Times Magazine has special, themed issues. One of these is the annual Hollywood issue. This year the sort of sub-theme of the Hollywood issue is “The West.” When we have these issues, I’m supposed to “write to theme” — meaning I have to come up with something that makes sense both for my column, and for the special issue.

This can be a challenge, especially for the Hollywood issues. But often what I try to do is use it as an opportunity to do something different with the column, something that pushes the boundary of what Consumed can be. Thus, for this issue, I wanted to write about the pre-Western Western: The Wild West shows presided over by Buffalo Bill, presenting a quasi-mythologized “west” to millions of people in the U.S. and Europe, well before Hollywood existed.

Here’s the column:

The western genre and the Hollywood mythmaking machine match up so nicely that it’s hard to imagine one without the other. But the hunger — and the market — for a reassuring romantic national creation story as a pop-culture staple did not wait for the movies to be invented. In the late 19th century, even while the frontier was still a place and not a memory, “Wild West” shows traversed the United States and even Europe, drawing millions of spectators who paid to witness the western idea acted out as entertainment. As Larry McMurtry once put it, “The selling of the West preceded the settling of it.” …

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site.

And after you’ve read it, you might be interested in the following bonus material that I didn’t have room to address in the column: Read more

In Consumed: Getting Along Famously

Buddylube: A company greases the wheels between (the online presences of) celebrities and their fans.

In an interview with Rolling Stone published earlier this year, Bob Dylan commented that “the relationship between a performer and the audience is anything but a buddy-buddy thing.” The role of the Dylan fan, he suggested, is to appreciate Dylan music. This seems out of step with the pop zeitgeist. While the impact of digital technology on record labels gets more attention, it also affects the fan-star dynamic: online social networking tools promise us more interaction, or a more direct connection (to use the buzz terms of the moment), with artists. This version of the “buddy-buddy thing” has obvious appeal — so much so that the birth of a company like Buddylube seems almost inevitable….

Continue reading at the NYT site.

UPDATE: Nancy Baym (quoted in the column) has these interesting follow-up thoughts.

In Consumed: Timeless Objects

Low-functionality watches: How the value of a watch becomes detached from its role as a timekeeper.

The chief function of a watch, you might assume, is to tell the time, accurately. But watches can do other things too. Some years ago, for instance, there was a trend toward watches with calculators built into them, although that didn’t last. Also there’s the aesthetic factor. The look of a watch might sound more like a matter of form, but style has its functions, too.

The watch is an interesting product category through which to examine the function of style…

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site.

Regular Murketing readers will recognize that this is theme I’ve pursued a bit here, in previous posts here, here, here, here, here, and here.

In Consumed: The Cult of Gocco

Print Gocco: How the end of a product turned into a publicity event — and, maybe, a new beginning.

… Print Gocco is both better known and somehow cooler than it has ever been here. And this is almost certainly because in late 2005, the Riso Kagaku Corporation, now an international and largely digital business, announced that Gocco was dead…

Read the column at the NYT Magazine site.

Additional Links: Save Gocco! … Shu-Ju Wang’s site … Blissen … Wurst Gallery Gocco show … Paper Source … Gocco at Poppytalk

In Consumed: Trumped

Trump SoHo: The Donald comes downtown — and maybe, these days, he belongs.

There was a time when the name “Trump SoHo” would have sounded like an oxymoron or a punch line. That time has passed. A 46-story, $3,000-a-square-foot condo-hotel with that very name is climbing into the skyline from a section of Manhattan once considered so hopeless that it might as well be razed to accommodate an expressway. Of course, some people still won’t accept the idea — like the neighborhood residents and preservationists who recently converged outside a promotional party for the project, waving signs scrawled with slogans like “Earth to Trump: Get Out of SoHo Now!” Donald Trump thanked them for the free publicity and claimed that although the building won’t open until 2009, there are already 3,200 purchase applications for its 400 units….

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site.

In Consumed: Jesus Christ, Superhero

One2Believe: Christian action figures hit the mainstream.

David Socha had a problem with the toy aisle: Too many dolls for girls promoted promiscuity, and too many action-figure collections for boys included villainous demon types — or “spawns of Satan,” as he puts it. “The bigger subject is that evil is glorified,” he says. “Like it’s kind of cool to break the Ten Commandments and do things that even 20 years ago people wouldn’t think about promoting — just being as violent and overt as possible.” Socha, who happens to be in the toy business himself, figured that enough parents felt this way to make up a market. And among the retailers with some faith in that notion was Wal-Mart, which this summer began selling Biblical figures made by Socha’s company in more than 400 of its stores. …

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site.

In Consumed: A For-Credit Course

Chase +1: To gain campus recognition (and customers), a bank hooks up Facebook.

About a year ago, JP Morgan Chase started a new credit-card program aimed at college students, working with Facebook, the social-networking site. “We felt Facebook would be a good partner for us, since they had such strong credibility in the students’ world,” explains Sangeeta Prasad, who oversees branding for Chase Card Services. “And we felt, you know, financial institutions lacked credibility. Students don’t see credit-card issuers or financial institutions in general as meeting their needs.” Thus the company started offering a new card it called +1, primarily by way of a “sponsored” Facebook group….

Continue reading at the NYT Mag site.

Light Switch

In Consumed: Candela: How a niche product lit up consumers, and found its way to the mass market.

Vessel, a design company based in Boston, offers a surprisingly wide range of products for a small firm that’s been around for only six years — tableware, furniture, lighting and the occasional curiosity that fits none of those categories. But from early on, one product stood out: a lamp called the Candela.

Since it first appeared on store shelves in 2002, the Candela inspired a string of spinoffs and variations, and eventually these became popular enough that Vessel’s owners had to decide whether they were an industrial-design firm that happened to make some lighting products or whether they were a lighting-products company that made some other stuff, too. Lately, they have found a solution, which offers an interesting capsule story of how a niche product becomes a line, and then, step by step, reaches a mass market….

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site.

Earphone Identity

In Consumed: Emotibuds: The compulsion to personalize inanimate objects goes to your head.

Remember when white earbuds had status? Jonathan Hall does. But these days, as he and his fellow rail commuters in the tristate area know, the iPod’s once-cutting-edge headphones confer as much distinction as a gray-flannel suit. A couple of years ago, Hall and his wife, Kate, decided that there must be a way to capitalize on this shift. IPod add-ons, including cases and “skins,” had become big business by then — but those items decorated only the main device, which was usually stuffed in a pocket, out of sight.

Today, the Halls, who are both 29, have sold tens of thousands of pairs of flexible rubber charms called Emotibuds, which clip onto earbuds, almost like earrings. Each pair (they sell for $12 for a set of three pairs) features a blocky little face that incorporates an emoticon into a cute cartoon visage. There are a variety of faces, each set against a bright color and corresponding with a mood, like “starry-eyed” or “frisky.” Recently, Emotibuds were part of the online design store FredFlare.com’s Next Big Thing contest, and while they didn’t win, the store has had to reorder them at least four times to meet demand….

Continue reading at the NYT site.