MURKETING

Influence and reality

A little more than two years ago, I did a Consumed column about Splenda. In the few years it had been on the market, the stuff had become the top-selling sugar substitute, with annual sales of more than $175 million. The brand’s tag line was the mysterious “made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar.” Among those unimpressed by this confusing claim were the makers of other sugar substitutes, as well as the Sugar Association. The makers of Equal had sued Splenda parent Johnson & Johnson, and the Sugar Association had started an anti-Splenda web site.

Right after the column appeared, I got an email from someone at a consulting company that tracks “online buzz,” chastising me for failing to check in with him before writing the column. Basically their data showed that the online buzz on Splenda had turned negative, largely as a result of the Sugar Association campaign. “The Sugar Association is really executing some effective reverse marketing….. What was once positive grassroots enthusiasm [for Splenda] seems to be turning negative.” The implication was that I’d made a fool of myself by writing about Splenda right when it was about to collapse in popularity, as the online buzz revealed. The “data,” I was informed, “underscore tremendously the crisis that Splenda is in.”

I checked back with this person six months later, in September 2005. I asked if there had been any decline in Splenda sales. “We don’t track sales – we only track the consumer buzz online among the hundreds of thousands of most engaged and influential food/nutrition consumers,” I was told. And the buzz among these people was still “very mixed,” with a lot of negative chatter about potential Splenda side effects, etc.

Interesting, I guess, but my editor is always pestering me for actual facts, so I forgot about the whole thing — until seeing a story in the WSJ on Friday. The Equal vs. Splenda trial is about to begin; the issue is whether Splenda marketing has misled consumers. And that’s an interesting issue, which maybe I’ll write about later.

But what jumped out at me was the fact that Splenda is still the top-selling sugar substitute, with sales of $212 million in 2006 – which is a 21 percent increase since I wrote that column.

Some “crisis”! Now I understand why that consultancy doesn’t track sales: Because the reality of what’s happening in the marketplace doesn’t sync up with the “influence” that it’s supposedly quantifying. After all, what do rising sales say about negative buzz among among “influential food/nutrition consumers”? If the “influential” consumers are buzzing negatively, and sales go up – then who, exactly, are the influential consumers influencing?

I’m astounded that consultancies can peddle this line that they’re collecting valuable, insightful, predictive data about online “buzz” — that ends up having absolutely no correlation to what happens in offline reality. But I probably shouldn’t be astounded. Maybe I’m failing to grasp how an “influential” consumer is defined. Maybe the key is to remember that they don’t necessarily have all that much, you know, influence. Except among certain consulting firms, and, perhaps, their paying clients.

Consumed, “Consumed”

So I finally get noticed by the mainstream media. Devastating takedown? Or yet more proof that “Gawker has become almost impossible to read“?

Who cares. It’s just another disappointment: No link to this site at all! Thanks for nothing. Gwankers.

Not Necessarily Toast

In Consumed: Back to Basics Egg & Muffin Toaster: How makers of a decades-old appliance still find new ways to catch consumer interest.

In a recent issue of The M.I.T. Sloan Management Review, Michael Schrage, a business writer and an M.I.T. researcher, challenged the thinking of a prominent Columbia Business School professor. More specifically, he challenged what Bruce Greenwald, whose work focuses on finance and investing, has said about the fate of all innovative technologies: “In the long run, everything is a toaster.” That is to say, even the most impressive breakthrough eventually becomes mundane, with all producers offering more or less identical versions of the same item and competing largely on the basis of price: innovation runs its course, and the thing becomes a commodity.

Schrage’s article, “The Myth of Commoditization,” argued that not only is this not true of technological breakthroughs, it’s not even true of toasters. “Heated bread lacks the high-tech cachet of multicore processors or polymerase chain reactions,” he wrote, but the “technical evolution” of toasters offers a “case study in profitable innovation.” The Back to Basics Egg & Muffin Toaster seems to offer pretty good evidence in his argument’s favor….

Continue reading at the NYT site by way of this no-registration-required link.

Related links: American Heritage history of the toaster; “Cool Tools” hype for the Egg & Muffin Toaster.

* April 14 Update: Selected reactions from elsewhere:

1) Glass House.

2) Marginal Utility.

Annals of empowerment

Catching up on some reading that I fell behind on after being away for a few days, I see that Bob Garfield invited the readers of a recent issue of Ad Age to ponder “a post-apocalyptic media world substantially devoid of brand advertising as we have known it…. a world in which consumer engagement occurs without consumer interruption.”

This is the latest installment of the “chaos scenario” he’s been pushing for a while now, and of course the Internet is a big part of it; the online video boom that’s taken off since his original chaos piece two years ago is underscored.

I always have to remind myself that Garfield is writing for the trade, not for the rest of us. And maybe he’s correct about What It All Portends for ad pros. (Although I have to say, most of the marketers I deal with don’t seem to be trembling in their limited-edition sneakers, but possibly they’re just in denial.) Yet when I read for the zillionth time that the “consumer is in control,” and the Webby world will be devoid of commercial interruption, all I can say is: Have you ever been on the Web? Cos I’ve kinda noticed some ads there.

And speaking of online video, I see that Lonelygirl15, the wildly hyped fake video diary, has cut a sponsorship deal, with Hershey. Of course the savvy forward-thinking types who made Lonelygirl15 a hit, or at least the subject of many articles in the “mainstream” media, won’t stand for commercials. So:

In a video posted on March 20 on the official Lonelygirl site, Lg15.com, the show’s main character Bree is seen offering her friends a piece of Icebreaker’s gum, and a close-up of the product is shown.

According to Brandweek, this is a “sophisticated” example of “branded entertainment.”

As a non-member of the ad trade, it kind of sounds to me like consumer interruption. It sounds like consumer interruption that can’t be avoided — because it’s embedded in the entertaintment. It sounds like a glimpse of a world in which ads aren’t segregated into 30-second chunks or double-page magazine spreads that consumers can focus on or ignore as they please: If I feel like engaging with Lonelygirl15, but I don’t feel like engaging with Icebreaker’s gum, I’m basically out of luck; I have no “control” over this scenario at all.

But what do I know? A co-creator of Lonelygirl15 sounds quite pleased. “It’s empowering,” he comments, “for us to have a major international brand like Hershey’s treat us like they would any other major entertainment property.”

Thinking like a champion

How will LeBron James decide whether to join the U.S. Olympic basketball team in 2008? Will it be a matter of patriotism? The champion’s desire for the gold medal? The raw need to compete at the highest level, with the best of the best?

Possibly. Or maybe it will just be a matter of what’s best for the brand called LeBron. ESPN notes:

Jeopardizing his spot on the Beijing roster would be a huge risk for James, who has been studying Mandarin as he seeks to become even more of a marketing and pop icon in China. There’s are financial implications, too, for James, who would lose more than $250,000 in endorsement bonuses from Nike, Coca-Cola and Upper Deck if he failed to make the 2008 Beijing roster.

Studying Mandarin! Not even Jordan did that.

Consumption fact of the day

[Venezuela] led Latin America in per capita consumption of beer in 2005, at 83.3 liters, even slightly surpassing consumption levels in the United States, according to the research firm Euromonitor International. (The Czech Republic topped the list, with per capita consumption of 160.5 liters.)

— NYT

83.3 liters = 2,816.71 ounces = a little more than 70 forties
160.5 liters = 5,427.15 ounces = a little more than 135 forties

‘Where Were You?’

Now available, my first zine since the “Letters From New Orleans” ones (which of course later became an actual book).

SFN Products: 008: Where Were You? (2006)

“Where Were You?” has nothing whatsoever to do with marketing, consumer culture, advertising, design, or anything else I write about on this site. But this is, after all, my site.

In a giveaway promotion for Journal of Murketing email subscribers a few moments ago, the three available “promo” copies were snapped up in less than 30 seconds! Doesn’t that make you want one? Even if one of the recipients admitted that he assumed any givewaway at all would go fast and replied before he even know what he was getting a free copy of? Well, doesn’t it?

It’s only a dollar, plus another dollar shipping, so that’s practically free anyway.

“Where Were You?” is a 44-page booklet, priced at $1, plus $1 shipping.* It’s an “edition” of 30 copies only. And what is it?

No longer available!

Or at least, not here. The last couple of copies will be sold only through www.robwalker.net. Click on “Spring 07” if you go there.

Package Deal

In Consumed: OpenX: How to solve a problem that consumers hate? With a product, of course.

Nobody likes those incredibly hard-to-open, clear plastic packages that hang from retail pegboards, trapping your new purchase inside, clearly visible but seemingly unattainable without a long struggle, a sharp implement and possibly an injury. Nevertheless, this packaging method is pervasive and shows no sign of disappearing soon. Here’s a case, then, in which the marketplace simply ignores consumers.

Actually, that’s not true. The marketplace is not ignoring consumers at all. In fact, in a recent roundup of the worst packaging, Consumer Reports noted that “a cottage industry has developed among manufacturers looking to cash in on packaging angst.” One prominent example: OpenX, a $5 device designed specifically to help people cope with seemingly impregnable plastic casings….

Continue reading here. (Problems with the NYT Magazine’s RSS feed continue, so that’s actually a link to the Boston Globe, which also publishes Consumed.)