MURKETING

Consumption and (political) identity

So the Iowa caucus is upon is. What about it? Well, drawing parallels between the selling of political candidates and the selling of consumer goods is an old game, dating back at least to the Eisenhower era, and probably earlier. An iteration of this idea that’s gotten more attention lately is the (potential) connection between our consumer choices and our political ideologies. Over the weekend, a Times story about Democratic candidates digging for caucus-goers made passing mention of the Clinton and Obama campaigns relying on “sophisticated voter identification models, using detailed demographic and consumer data.”

In terms of political strategy, the interesting thing about these tactics is they have nothing to do with targeting the so-called “swing voter.” They are about identifying, partly on the basis of consumer behavior, people who are most likely to support your candidate. The effort then goes into making sure such people do so – that they actually go to the polls. It’s not about persuasion, it’s about motivation. (This is doubly important in the bizarre caucus system, of course.)

As an exercise in linking consumption and identity, what’s significant about it is that it only works if that demographic and consumer data really does give a good clue as to who someone will vote for.

Which sounds a little fishy.

Certinaly when it gets reduced to the extreme shorthand version. An example popped up in a recent New Republic piece about the Democratic nomination battle in Iowa, which quoted an unnamed Clinton operative, trying to spin Obama as out of touch with blue-collar workers, referring to him as “the arugula candidate.” Elsewhere there was mention of a pundit saying that, along similar lines, Obama has a “wine track” image that he needs to shed, in favor of a “beer track” image. This was followed by an anecdote suggested Obama has indeed tweaked a regular stump speech anecdote in which usually mentioned a glass of wine, to “a glass of wine or a beer.”

It’s easy to make fun of this as mere pundit-think – surely there is more to you or me than our appetite for arugula, or relative feelings about beer or wine. But when you get past the soundbites it turns out that the efforts to link politics and consumer behavior are pretty sophisticated … or at least complicated.

Another recent piece, in The New Yorker, mentioned the work of a firm called Strategic Telemetry, presently working for the Obama campaign, which “builds profiles of voters that include more than a thousand indicators, long strings of data—everything from income to education to pet ownership—that [the firm’s founder] calls ‘demographic DNA.’”

“The actual combinations that we come up with aren’t really anything that you could put on a bumper sticker,” Strasma told me. “You know, soccer moms or office-park dads. Sometimes people will ask to see the formula, and it comes out to ten thousand pages long.” When the demographic DNA is combined with polling and interviews with Iowa voters, Strasma is able to create the political equivalent of a FICO score—the number that creditors use to determine whether a consumer is a good bet to repay a loan. Strasma’s score tells the campaign of the likelihood that a specific Iowan will support Obama.

Several members of the Bush 2004 campaign team put out a book a year or two ago called Applebee’s America, which deals with similar material: Basically, that campaign’s mining of consumer data to figure out which voters to target. “If you’re a voter living in one of the sixteen states that determined the 2004 election,” the authors wrote, “the Bush team had your name on a spreadsheet with your hobbies and habits, vices and virtues, favorite foods, sports, and vacation venues, and many other facts of your life.”

According to the book, much of the mined data came from a company called Axciom, owner of the “largest collection of consumer data in the U.S.,” drawn from credit card companies, retailers, airlines, and “scores of other places where people do business.” In the election, the book said, Axciom gave (or sold to) the Bush team “a list … showing the stage of life (age, marital status, number of children, etc.) and lifestyles (hunter, biker, home renter, SUV owner, level of religious intrest) of each voter, drawn from a menu of more than four hundred separate categories.”

Again, the fact that the campaign was using this data to identify sympathetic potential voters (who as I understand it were then bombarded with direct mail and other more traditional entreaties to get them to the polls), significantly raises the stakes on the question of whether such demographic profiles are accurate. If a formula based on buying habits identifies the wrong people, a campaign risks motivating hostile voters – the worst possible outcome. And as the book described it, some weird things came up. “Dr Pepper is the only sugared soft drink that has a GOP-leaning consumer base,” the authors wrote. Also: Many republicans watched Will & Grace. They say the Bush team “didn’t know why” some of these patterns existed — and “didn’t care.” They just wanted it to work.

Did it? In the end, they say, their program “was able to predict with 80 to 90 percent certainty whether a person would vote republican, according to postelection surveys conducted by the Bush team.”

Obviously I have no way of knowing whether that’s true, or whether it’s politico bluster. But if it’s even close to true, it’s a pretty interesting statement consumer behavior revealing very surprising things. Interesting enough that I’m guessing the Dems are spending serious money trying to mine that data — and that we’ll see more such efforts in the future.

Happy sponsorship, one and all

“Corporations increasingly are attaching their names to holiday traditions across the USA as they vie for attention in a crowded media landscape,” says USA Today, which offers these examples:

•In Virginia Beach, McDonald’s Holiday Lights at the Beach Presented by Verizon Wireless features about 250 animated light displays, including a surfing Santa. The companies, along with other sponsors, finance the attraction.

•In Sioux Falls, S.D, the annual Sioux Falls Parade of Lights this year became the Avera Parade of Lights. The sponsorship by the local health care system enabled organizers to add a 60-foot Christmas tree.

•In Oklahoma City, the Sonic Segway Santa is a big part of the Downtown in December festival. Santa rides a Segway through downtown to promote green transportation and Sonic drive-in food.

The Sonic Segway Santa!

OK. And a happy holiday to you.

Totally wildly unprecedented change … and its precedents

For whatever reason, I’ve been pondering the big/huge/massive changes that have occurred in my lifetime. Seems like pretty much conventional wisdom that this is the changiest era ever, and often I think it does feel that way.

On the other hand, not all change is created equal. The Web is a big change. Twitter isn’t. Etc. Sometimes it’s hard to keep clear the difference, there’s so much hype about every new new thing these days.

So, as an exercise, I considered the last 25 years. I was around, and relatively aware, in 1982. What are the things that have happened since then that were really, truly, before-and-after, big? The stuff that hardly anybody in 1982 could have seen coming? The things that would really surprise and be outside the imagination of my 1982 self?

I settled on these (in no particular order):

• The World Wide Web. (Is it missing something to just make this a single entry, lumping everything from Google to Facebook to blogs to … everything else into one entry? How big a deal is any single Web-enabled development? And should email be part of this, or separate?)
• The end of the Cold War/collapse of Communism.
• AIDS
• Hip hop (technically existed prior to 1982 but became a giant cultural force after)
• Mobile communications. I’m not sure if this one counts or not. Probably though, right?
• September 11 / “war on terror”

Okay. That’s some stuff, some big & changy stuff. But what about the 25 years prior to that? What could you show to a citizen of 1956 from the vantage point of 1981, that would seem like Big Changes? What about earlier periods?

I decided to make some tentative lists of big changes. I stuck with things that had some sort of public dimension, in the sense that their impact was obvious, not subtle. So for instance, I wouldn’t include something like air conditioning, which I’m sure somebody could make the case has massively changed the way we live etc., but which doesn’t have that sort of public-culture dimension that I’m interested in.

• Vietnam
• Watergate
• Rock music (again, it existed in 1956, but think of the Beatles and Woodstock etc. — it’s a lot)
• The assassinations and riots of the 1960s
• The sexual revolution
• Civil Rights
• Oil shocks/gas rationing etc. of the 1970s (I’m on the fence about this one)

Okay, I kept going. How about 1930 to 1955?

• The Depression
• The Holocaust
• The atomic bomb
• Television

And finally: 1904 to 1929

• World War I
• Jazz
• Radio
• The car
• The airplane
• The movies

So that’s my tentative list at the moment. In some ways I’m now not sure if the most intense 25-year period of change through might have actually been the 1930 to 1955 stretch. The examples there are all pretty massive. Think of a person from 1930 looking at the world of 1955. Isn’t the difference there a lot bigger than 1982 to 2007? Maybe, maybe not.

I’m sure I’m leaving stuff out, and maybe in some cases my picks don’t make sense. This isn’t an intensely researched project, just something I’ve been pondering.

Thoughts?

120+ years of hating advertising

One of my running themes is that there is nothing new about contemporary consumers being fed up with advertising. We hear all the time about supposed discovery that what sets today’s consumers apart is that they (we) “see through” marketing, and don’t trust it, etc.

So I made sure to bookmark the above image from blog Paleo-Future when it made the rounds while I was away last week. It’s from 1885, and titled “Advertising In The Near Future,” one of the earliest examples I’ve seen yet of popular distaste for ad overload and just how bad it could get. Particularly interesting in the satirical slathering of the Statue of Liberty with commercial slogans is the presence of “suredeath” cigarettes.

Clearly there were people who could “see through” marketing in the late 19th century, and who could count an audience that would get the joke. Just as clearly, seeing through marketing didn’t quite add up to resisting marketing. Kinda like today.

Black Friday bonding

Friend of Murketing John Sellers, apparently on holiday in Michigan, posts this:

In other news, I survived Black Friday. I’m not sure if Black Friday is the same in other parts of the country, but here in G.R. there is folly, folly everywhere. It was reported that more than 2,000 people were waiting outside the Best Buy here before it opened yesterday morning at 5 a.m., and that dozens of them had been in line since the previous afternoon. In temperatures that dipped below the freezing point.

From The Grand Rapids Press:

S—-r B———x, 31, of Lake Odessa, joined the line at 3:30 p.m. Thursday to get her hands on a Sony laptop, case and printer half-price at $499.99. Her 13 1/2-hour wait was ameliorated by the kindness of strangers in line who shared their tent and heater.

“It was just to be able to get the laptops and be with everybody, and we made some new friends,” B———x said.

Mr. Sellers concludes: “I just don’t understand this country anymore.”

The local news here in Savannah featured very similar reports. I listened in amazement to a guy who showed up with his family at 3 p.m. on Thanksgiving day to wait in the Best Buy parking lot for the store to open the next morning. He was something like 25th in line.

He said he enjoyed it, did the same thing last year — that it’s a great way to spend a lot of time with his kids, away from the TV and the Internet. (Earlier he’d mentioned that they were actually hoping to buy some more computers on special.)

A subsequent report on Saturday shopping included an interview with a man who said he and his family had spent 12 or 13 hours in the mall on Friday, and figured Saturday’s expedition would go another 10 hours or so.

Certainly this is all better than last year’s retail mayhem. But it is a little confusing. Is a big box parking lot the best place we have left for family bonding? And how does one go about finding a way to burn 20+ hours in a mall? I don’t think I could do that on a bet. Given all the gloomy economic news, you’d think shoppers would be approaching the season with grim determination, not upbeat tales of making new friends with fellow consumers.

Maybe what this is what Black Friday is really all about now, one of the last occasions for public gathering in a fragmented era, doing the one thing that unites the American masses — shopping as a way to, as the Grand Rapids shopper quoted above put it, “be with everybody.”

Who says Americans don’t care about the homeless anymore?

To the contrary, this astonishing WSJ story suggests the homeless are much on our minds — as pop culture entertainment!

The main focus of the piece is a possibly schizophrenic homeless man in Los Angeles who has been adopted by three young brand-makers as the iconic centerpiece of their new line, named “The Crazy Robertson” in his honor. Featuring “stylized images” of the man, the includes a $98 hoodie “that has a graphic of him dancing and the phrase ‘No Money, No Problems’ on the back.” Available at Kitson.

Adds the WSJ:

The repackaging of [this homeless guy] as a fashion front man comes at a time of increased fascination with homelessness. The producers of “Bumfights” — a collection of videotaped street battles between vagrants — claim to have sold more than 300,000 DVDs since 2002, and a British TV series called “Filthy Rich and Homeless” made headlines this year for its depiction of real-life millionaires posing as London beggars.

Across the U.S., a growing number of homeless people have gained attention through the Internet. More than 17,500 videos on YouTube are tagged with the word “homeless.” Leslie Cochran, a street resident in Austin, Texas, who has twice run for mayor, has 10,775 “friends” on his MySpace page. In Boston, the profile of Harold Madison Jr. — a homeless man better known as “Mr. Butch” — rose through online clips and a Web site made in his honor.

Perhaps in an effort to be down with the trend, the WSJ includes links to video clips of the Crazy Robertson’s icon skating and dancing. Sadly I’m on deadline so I haven’t checked them out. Maybe The Medium will delve into this (or maybe already has).

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

The Ugly Americans — who rock BAPE!

Portfolio has a big piece about Nigo. I skimmed it quickly, and I have to say that the Complex blog found the one interesting quote, from Hiroshi Fujiwara:

Fujiwara, who is still revered in Tokyo as perhaps the one man who can launch a trend, is even more dismissive of Nigo. “I just wonder how he feels when he sees ugly people wearing his clothes. If you go to the countryside in America and people are wearing Bathing Ape, that’s not very cool.” Fujiwara, now a consultant for Nike and Levi’s, shrugs. “I thought he was more like us, but he changed.”

Hm. Well, I hope his clients Nike and Levi’s take heed, and prevent “ugly people” from buying their products.

Tuning out as turn on

Rolling Stone has a bunch of stuff from its “Hot Issue” online, but not the best piece in it, which is by Rob Sheffield. It’s the “Hot Mood: Not dealing with reality.”

Mini excerpt:

We keep hearing that newspapers are dying, and we keep hearing it’s because of all this shiny new aweso-media, but it’s probably just because ignoring any kind of news is now a fundamental part of the nation’s daily routine for not loosing what’s left of our shit.

It’s an amusing piece, and it’s meant to be amusing, but at the same time, I kind of think he’s on to something.

Don’t Tase Britney (or whatever)

How small can an idea be, and still gain what at least appears to be cultural traction?

The answer is incredibly small. So small that we don’t even bother to attach a name to the person at the center of such an idea. We just call these people “[fill-in-the-blank] guy.” The two present examples are “Leave Britney Alone Guy,” and “Don’t Tase Me Guy.” In keeping with the rules of the game, I will not bother with actual names here, since it doesn’t matter.

Leave Britney Alone Guy is, of course, some guy. He made a YouTube video in which he offered a “tear-filled defense of Britney Spears.” Allegedly, he has a “large Net audience” that has made him “a darling of the mainstream media.” Also, he now has “a development deal.” Variety.com says: “Plan is to develop a docusoap built around Crocker, a 19-year-old who lives with his grandparents in Tennessee.”

Meanwhile, there’s Don’t Tase Me Guy. Again, this is some guy. This guy apparently said “Don’t tase me, bro,” while being tased at a John Kerry event. In an example of the kind of current-event product-making (“spinning products off events, or even off what the historian Daniel Boorstin called pseudo-events”) that I wrote about a while back in this Consumed, someone is selling related T-shirts. I would say the main change since that June 2006 column is that the threshold for just how pseudo an event can be before someone pronounces it a phenomenon and at least attempts to commodize it, continues to get lower.

[Update: I missed this earlier, but Adfreak prefers a different Tase Guy T.]

I should disclose that I haven’t bothered to watch any of the related YouTube videos; I’m operating on the Snakes on a Plane theory that once you “get” the phrase, you don’t have to bother with whatever cultural artifact the phrase supposedly refers to. I suggest you do the same. If you waste time actually watching Leave Britney Alone Guy, you may be several minutes late in hearing about Whoever Comes Next Guy.

Next up for Thomas Hine: “The Great Funk” that was the 1970s

I’m admirer of Thomas Hine — Populuxe is a wonderful book, and so is The Total Package, and I’m a big fan of his The Rise and Fall of The American Teenager — so I was pleased to see this news, that he has a book coming out about the 70s. That’s a great subject, and a really great subject for Hine.

Here’s a bit from an interview in which he talks about the new book due out in November, The Great Funk (and in which he mentions in passing that Populuxe was out of print for a while; I find that astounding.)

The time when the assumptions of the Populuxe years were truly undone, once and for all, was the decade of the 1970s. And I realized that even though this was a period that was antithetical to the fifties in so many ways—a time of scarcity rather than abundance, fragmentation rather than national unity, personal exploration rather than social progress, corruption rather than trust, defeat rather than victory—it visually interesting and even positive in all sorts of unexpected ways….

[The Great Funk] reflects its time in that it is less about technology and more about consciousness. It deals a lot with clothes and the body, and thus is PG or even R rated, rather than G. The title is a play, of course, on the Great Depression, which is one meaning of funk. But funk is also about texture, and rhythm, and a sensuality, which is also an important part of the picture. And it contains some incredible pictures of interiors. I think that those who like Populuxe will be intrigued.

Sounds good to me. I actually think there’s much about understanding the 1970s that can help us understand the present era. Again: great subject for Hine.

(Red) remixed

Wendy Dembo writes:

Last year when the Gap came out with their (red) campaign, the first word that popped into my head, was insu(red)/uninsu(red). They did a few kind of ironic shirts like bo(red) and ti(red), but I wondered why they didn’t make an uninsu(red) shirt.

With insurance looking like it’s going to be the touch point for the 2008 Presidential election, I thought that making these shirts could hopefully get some uninsured kids to think about their need for health insurance, perhaps even the need for universal health care.

She got Jeff Staple to execute the shirts, which are on sale at the Reed Space in New York.

It’s interesting to see something in the brand underground realm using the visual remix strategy to address a political issue. It will also be interesting to see what sort of reaction it ends up getting.

“The sovereignty of the consumer is inescapable”

What makes cities grow in the 21st century? This IHT article points to consumers:

In a discussion paper titled “Consumer City,” Edward Glaeser and co-authors Jed Kolko and Albert Saiz call this “the demand for density.” People now want to live in dense areas because dense areas offer what people want to consume — opera, sports teams, art museums, varied cuisine. In France, for example, he and his fellow researchers found a robust correlation between the number of restaurants and the growth of cities.

“The sovereignty of the consumer is inescapable,” Glaese says.

The number of these “consumer immigrants” – those moving back to the city seeking a better quality of life – is relatively small compared with the hundreds of thousands of poorer economic migrants who traditionally head to the inner city.

But the “consumer immigrants” have a special significance because they are rich….

Glaeser et. al.’s paper, which is actually from 2000, can be downloaded as a PDF here. I haven’t read it yet, but I intend to. I’m wondering about that restaurants comment — a “correlation” between city population growth and restaurant numbers doesn’t seem to prove much.
Via Creative Class.

Dealers & rappers

Pretty interesting interview on Freakonomics today with a guy who studies gangs. Here’s one bit I thought was good:

Q: A lot of rappers, particularly Jay-Z and 50 Cent, claim to have been successful crack dealers. Any thoughts on this? Were they just low-level dealers barely making a profit, or did they really have something to pay for their future studio time? Did any of the gang members you knew claim to be on the dealer-to-rapper fast track program?

A: In all my years of studying gangs, I have met only a handful of individuals who have actually participated in the dealer-to-rapper fast track program. Alas, they end up going to jail before they get successful, and most of the ones I’ve seen can’t sing worth a lick. I’m deeply skeptical about rappers who proclaim experience with drug sales. Sure, there are a few exceptions, but for the most part I would be very careful about the claims that are made in songs. Many rappers are highly trained musicians who have spent little time on the streets, as it were — think of Mos Def.

Brand power update

I’m sure you’ve seen this, but if you haven’t, you should. The AP says:

Anything made by McDonald’s tastes better, preschoolers said in a study that powerfully demonstrates how advertising can trick the taste buds of young children.

In comparing identical McDonald’s foods in name-brand and plain wrappers, the unmarked foods always lost.

Even carrots, milk and apple juice tasted better to the kids when they were wrapped in the familiar packaging of the Golden Arches….