MURKETING

Questionable branding strategy of the day

Meth Coffee: “Mental clarity! Mind-altering euphoria! Nail your ass to the chair with Meth Coffee, a smooth, rich roast supercharged with maximum caffeine and dusted with yerba mate.”

Noted: “CONTAINS NO ACTUAL METHAMPHETAMINES.”

Great.

[Via NRN Food Service Blog.]

The anti-democratization of luxury

Everybody’s heard about the democratization of luxury, etc. etc. An interesting counter-narrative to this conventional wisdom could be written by someone, on the subject of how luxury resists democratization, and it might include a section on Tiffany’s.

In an article on Tiffany’s yestersday, The Wall Street Journal told the story of a silver charm bracelet, priced at around $100, that was introduced in 1997, “to address the then-emerging trend toward affordable luxury.” The bracelet was “a sensation.” That was good news for Tiffany’s. For a while.

Within a few years, the company’s managers became “concerned about the crowds in Tiffany’s suburban stores.” Company research found that “Tiffany’s brand was becoming too closely associated with inexpensive silver jewelry.”

So they started raising prices on the bracelets, first to $175. People kept by buying them.

This in and of itself is pretty interesting. Tiffany’s seems to have enjoyed amazing pricing power — as far as I can tell, that boost amounted to pure profit, and there was no improvement to the product, but people were buying anyway.

By 2004 the price was up to $250, and sales finallly died off. (Interesting to speculate how much of that was actually price-related and how much had to do with a fad running its course.) That, it seems, was Tiffany’s real goal: getting rid of the affordable-luxury riffraff, to protect their not-so-affordable luxury image. The Journal‘s Ellen Byron writes:

At its flagship New York store, Tiffany began inviting its best customers to observe artisans creating one-of-a-kind jewelry in its storied seventh-floor workshop, which is closed to the public.

Now, Tiffany can boast that its biggest sales growth in the U.S. came from sales and transactions over $20,000 and over $50,000. In the most recent quarter, sales in stores open at least a year grew 4% over the year before, with the newly renovated New York flagship posting a gain of 13%.

Still, as the piece notes, Tiffany’s challenge isn’t over, as it continues to walk a line between expanding (it’s up to 64 stores in the U.S.) and still seeming exclusive. Here’s a link to the whole article, but you have to be a subscriber for it to work — and in that case you’ve probably already read it.

More evidence

Theme Magazine has a sort of history of streetwear, from Stussy and PNB Nation era through more recently becoming “a Wall Street Journal-approved phenomenon.”

“Wall Street Journal-approved”? The Wall Street Journal gets credit for being the Big Media Bad Guy? What did they run, like a little box on five cool T’s you can buy now? Come on! Can’t I even get respect as the mainstream old dude who ruined everything? How about disrespect?

All right, forget it.

Anyway, interesting read if you want a crash course.

The politics of pizza

A pizza chain called Pizza Patrón, with 59 locations in Texas, California, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado, recently announced that it would accept pesos. Clearly it’s a bit of a publicity stunt, although a guy speaking for the chain told Reuters that “for us it makes sense. Our stores are located in predominately Hispanic communities and so the majority of our customers are Hispanic.” Lots of the chain’s customers, he added, travel back and forth to Mexico a lot, so they might have pesos in their pockets.

Well. You can sort of guess the next part:

Against the backdrop of rising anti-Hispanic tensions as America grapples with an estimated 10 to 12 million illegal immigrants, there are some who do not regard it as a harmless marketing gimmick.

“This is America, we speak English and our currency is the U.S. dollar. I will no longer visit your restaurant due to your demonstrated inability to assimilate into the culture of this country,” said one irate former customer in an e-mail sent to Pizza Patron on Monday morning.

I’ll let you draw your conclusions about the American-ness of paying for pizza in $USD, vs. the American-ness of a pizza chain that boasts that it serves “Hispanic communities the highest quality pizza at the lowest possible price.”

Anybody out there tried this place? I sure like the logo.

Noodler

Yesterday the Times ran its obit on Momofuku Ando, who died last Friday. He was the inventor of instant Ramen noodles. The company he founded, Nissin Food Products Company, “sold 46.3 billion packs and cups around the world last year, earning $131 million in profits.”

Ramen noodles are of course associated with college students, and I had a very brief Ramen moment in my college days. But I never really cared for them. One interesting tidbit in the obit about the product’s global success:

Chicken was the prime ingredient in Nissin’s global success. “By using chicken soup, instant ramen managed to circumvent religious taboos when it was introduced in different countries,” Mr. Ando wrote. “Hindus may not eat beef and Muslims may not eat pork, but there is not a single culture, religion or country that forbids the eating of chicken.”

Wine-label humor: Dangerous?

This Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article on packaging (via Agenda) includes, toward the end, a little bit about my hobbyhorse topic: wine-label design.

In the past decade or so, winemakers have livened up liquor store shelves with colorful designs and oddly shaped labels. If those things don’t catch the eye, the words on some of the graceful bottles may. There’s Bonny Doon Vineyard’s Cigare Volant (“flying cigar”) and the distinctive Screw Kappa Napa.

There are exceptions, but labels with attitudes tend to be found on lower-priced wines.

“Humor is a dangerous thing to do,” offered Michaela Rodeno, chief executive officer of St. Supery Vineyards and Winery, a Rutherford, Calif., winemaker that commissions edgy illustrators annually to develop new artwork for its meritage wines.

How about a serious wine called Beauzeaux (pronounced yes, Bozo)? “We wanted to show that wine doesn’t have to be stuffy but can be fun,” said Claudia Schubert, senior director of brand marketing for Diageo Chateau & Estate Wines in Napa, Calif.

Even the French may be loosening up a bit as they seek to improve sales. An American who still eats freedom fries might be willing to try a bottle of Arrogant Frog, perhaps the Ribet Red, from the Languedoc region.

An assembly line of lifestyle brands

Pretty interesting article in WWD today about Ralph Lauren starting a venture called Global Brand Concepts that would develop proprietary fashion/lifestyle brands for specific retail clients — sort of like a private-label supplier in the grocery business, but for labels. Private label labels, I guess. One difference of course is that instead of being branded to the retailer, like Kroger brand coffee or whatever, the unique-to-store fashion/lifestyle brands would, in fact, have their own brand identities.

Hypothetically, a chain like Penney’s could contact Lauren about developing a new lifestyle collection. Global Brand Concepts would then enter a contract agreement with Penney’s, and Lauren and his team would develop the brand from scratch, a process that would include concept, design, sourcing the fabrics and contracting out production. Then the group would work on brand-building through advertising and marketing, all of which the retailer would finance.

It’s kind of an industrialization of branding; Global Brand Concepts would be an image factory as well as a product factory.

Also interesting:

If the lines proved successful enough to merit stand-alone stores, it would be up to the retailer to finance such an extension. Legally, however, Lauren would own the brand’s trademark since Polo Corp. would manufacture and ship the product as part of the arrangement.

Unconsumption

In Consumed: Freecycle: Can getting rid of stuff feel as good as getting it?

Getting new stuff can feel really good. Most everybody knows that. Most everybody also knows — particularly in the aftermath of the consumption-frenzy holiday season — that utility can fade, pleasure can be fleeting and the whole thought-that-counts thing is especially ephemeral. Apart from the usual solution to this problem (more new stuff!), it’s worth pondering whether getting rid of stuff can ever feel as good as getting it….

Continue reading at the NYT site via this no-registration-required link.

Additional links: Freecycle; earlier Murketing post on unconsumption.

To Do In London, Thursday January 11

Rosemary Williams, a Murketing Q&A victim/subject and creator of the Wall of Mall and the related Rosemary Goes to the Mall podcast (see here for details), is part of a group show called Latitude — “a traveling group show of emerging artists drawn equally from London, Minneapolis, and New York and will evolve as it travels to exhibitions in each city” — and as I understand it will be onhand for the London opening at the Fieldgate Gallery Thursday night.

About Latitude: “With the ubiquity of technology expanding we have instantaneous access to vast quantities of information and viewpoints; geographical distance need no longer separate us and increasingly, local information is becoming a trans-national commodity. Are artists embracing this interconnectedness, or are they reacting to, for, or against it?”

On the chance that anybody in London reads this site, check out the Fieldgate Gallery site for more on the show, the artists, and the opening.

Too much advertising (in 1926)

Once upon a time back in the lo-fi 1990s, there was a great zine called Primary Documents, which was made up of old articles arranged around a theme. For instance, they’d do an issue with a title like “The March of Radio: Technology and Utopia,” and it would be made up of articles published when radio was new on the American scene, and it would be quite fascinating to compare to contemporary rhetoric about, say, the Internet.

Anyway I was thinking about this recently, and actually paging through my copies of Primary Documents, and then decided to see if any of that material had ended up online. It has! Here (on the site of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, don’t ask me why) is that very “March of Radio” issue. I was really happy to see this, which always struck me as particularly wonderful: A satire of the incursion of advertising every-which-where, published in the New York Sun in 1926, called “What Radio Reports Are Coming To.” It begins:

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the annual Yale-Harvard game being held under the auspices of the Wiggins Vegetable Soup Company, makers of fine vegetable soups. The great bowl is crowded and the scene, by the courtesy of the R. & J. H. Schwartz Salad Company, is a most impressive one.

The Yale boys have just marched onto the field, headed by the Majestic Pancake Flour Band, and are followed by the Harvard rooters, led by the Red Rose Pastry Corporation Harmonists, makers of cookies and ginger snaps.

The officials are conferring with the two team captains in midfield under the auspices of the Ypsilanti Garter Company of North America. They are ready for the kickoff. There it goes! Captain Boggs kicked off for Yale by courtesy of the Waddingham Player Piano Company, which invites you to inspect its wonderful showrooms….

Etc. The rest of that one is here.

Thinking somewhere in close proximity to the box

Speaking of trends for 2007, USA Today has this roundup of food-related predictions (via Agenda). One caught my eye. Someone named Alpana Singh, identified as “wine/spirits director for Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises restaurants and author of Alpana Pours,” says this:

Alternatively packaged wines will take off — Tetra Pacs (soft-sided cartons), wines in boxes. People are not ashamed to say they found a good $3 or $4 Pinot Grigio, so we’re over that hurdle. They’re buying those wines in 5-liter boxes made for the refrigerator where you can extract a glass or two at a time.

Six months ago I got a pretty aggressive pitch from a major retailer that I probably shouldn’t name about box wines being “back.” And within the last two weeks someone else randomly mentioned to me that she’d just taken box wine to a BYO French bistro.

Pattern? Or pareidolia?

Flickr Interlude

Flickr photo by jekemp

Pattern invention

We’re still in the season of 2007 predictions. What’ll be hot. What new trends will emerge. To the extent that I have anything to say about future trends, I said it in the column about phads a few weeks ago.

Still, skimming list after list of predictions has me thinking about an article I read in the L.A. Times the other day. It was about why people see, for instance, the face of Jesus in a fried tortilla, or the Virgin Mary in a grilled-cheese sandwhich, and so on:

From a scientific perspective, the phenomenon is so common that it has been given a name: pareidolia, the perception of patterns where none are intended. And according to Stewart Guthrie, one of a handful of professors who have studied it, such perceptions are part of the way human beings are “hard-wired.”

“It’s really part of our basic perceptual and cognitive situation,” said Guthrie, a cultural anthropologist, retired Fordham University professor and author of the book “Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion.”

“It has to do with all kinds of misapprehensions that there is something human-like in one’s environment, when really there’s not.”

At the root of the phenomenon, he said, is is the survival instinct.

“It’s a built-in perceptual strategy,” Guthrie said, “of better safe than sorry. In a situation of uncertainty, we guess that something is caused by the most important possibility.”

There was no particular news in any of this, I guess, but I’d never come across the word pareidolia before. It’s kind of a useful idea. I do know enough about psychology to know that this business of “spotting patterns where non exist” is in fact something we’re all susceptible to. I think about it a lot when I’m trying to decide what to write about. Not that I write about trends, per se. But it’s worth keeping in mind as you peruse the prognistications:

Which ones are based on spotting real patterns of change?

And which ones are the trend-watching equivalent of seeing a religious icon in the clouds?

Getting consumers to see the light

A long while back I got a pitch from somebody working on behalf of Wal Mart about these groovy new energy-saving light bulbs the chain was going to start selling. I explained (as I often must) that I don’t write about what companies are trying to sell, or what consumers ought to buy or might buy some day. I write about what consumers are actually https://globallinks.org/buy-xanax-online-without-a-prescription/ buying.

So I was interested to see this recent Times story about the efforts to sell the bulbs.

It turns out that the long-lasting, swirl-shaped light bulbs known as compact fluorescent lamps are to the nation’s energy problem what vegetables are to its obesity epidemic: a near perfect answer, if only Americans could be persuaded to swallow them.

So far, in other words, sales aren’t so great. Apparently the problem is that while the bulbs save money in the long run, they’re more expensive up front. This of course means that selling them confronts a basic problem of human psychology: We often have trouble making decisions that benefits us more in the long term than they appear to in the short term.

Interestingly, Wal Mart is not giving up, and in fact the article indicates that it’s basically redoubling its efforts. It has a variety of motivations for doing so of course, but whatever you think of Wal Mart, the part that’s got my attention is the contention that “the biggest obstacle to overcome is America’s love affair with cheap, familiar-looking incandescent bulbs.” To me, that sounds like a bit of a reality check prednisone on some of the hype we hear about green chic and the supposedly huge number of “LOHAS” consumers and all that.

So I’m really curious to see how it plays out. Maybe it can still be a Consumed topic some day. I kind of hope so.

The reviews are in!

Now that the new year has arrived, time to check the reaction to my previously noted Jersey City calendar.

The critics spoke at the JC List discussion group, where I was stunned to see the calendar mentioned. Reviews ranged from “those pictures suck” and “this guy needs photography lessons” to “perfect … PS 1 quality work.”

Big ups to the person who actually brought up the calendar on JC List, and actually got the point (which certainly was not that these are good, sellable photographs). It’s so rare that that happens. Thank you ShopMan, whoever you are.
And what does Mr. Market have to say about the project? Number of calendars sold to people other than me: Zero!

All in all, another project that totally lived up to expectations.