MURKETING

Flickr Interlude

basic black, originally uploaded by Tallent Show.

Assessing the Obama-as-muse marketplace

The WSJ weighs in today on a topic familiar to Murketing regulars, noting the Obama art of Shepard Fairey and others, the Obama stuff on Etsy, the Obama sneaker, and Obama-art backlash art.

Two bits in their piece worth noting:

It is far from clear that the value of the Obama works will hold up. Prices have fluctuated, driven by news and events throughout the campaign season. For example, prices for Obama-related items on eBay dipped in March during the controversy over the candidate’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, according to Ken Harman, a collector and art blogger.

That said, it still looks like a better financial bet than the anti-Obama art:

In Texas, Austin-based designer Baxter Orr, an Independent, created “Dope,” a parody of Mr. Fairey’s posters that makes sport of Mr. Obama’s cocaine use as a young man. The posters are still available for $30 on the artist’s Web site, and sales are slow. Mr. Orr says that buyers only want posters glorifying Mr. Obama. “If I [had] followed the herd and created pro-Obama posters,” says Mr. Orr. “I am certain I would have made more money.”

Consumption & politics, continued…

Since I’ve addressed links between political behavior and consumer behavior in the past (here and here) I may as well pass along this Salon piece about the Obama campaign’s data mining:

He’s got a decent estimate of your household income and whether you opened a credit card recently. He knows how many kids you’re likely to have and what you do for a living. He knows what magazines and catalogs you get and whether you’re more apt to get your news from cable TV, the local newspaper or online. And he knows what time of day you tend to get around to plowing through your in box and responding to messages.

That last bit — the time of day you check your email! — is a new one on me.

Spirit of ’79

So I’m clawing my way back from a computer snafu that’s cost me a lot of time the last two days (and that may have cost me a few lost emails, just so you know).

But somehow I got sucked in this morning to spending half an hour watching Jimmy Carter’s “crisis of confidence” speech from 1979. It’s been getting some attention lately because of his comments about the energy crisis. But the whole thing is kind of fascinating — the passion of his tone is pretty startling, he seems flat-out pissed sometimes. (On the other hand, his fist-pumping is pretty ineffectual.)

Anyway, one little sound bite:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

Cut to: The 1980s!

Anyway, the energy stuff is interesting, not so much because of his specific policy proposals, but because of the force of his argument that it’s a real crisis, “a clear and present danger,” etc. He’s practically yelling at that point.

Quite a performance. But let’s face it, Americans didn’t want to be lectured in 1979, any more than they do today.

On habits, products, marketing, and the public good

On occasion I’ve wondered why it is that “public service”-style marketing campaigns often seem so much less effective, less potent, than marketing campaigns on behalf of a product or service.

With that in mind I was interested in this article in the Times business section yesterday by Charle Duhigg. It’s about a public-interest organization focused on disease prevention in developing nations, teaming up with multinational consumer-products corporations with track records of “creating habits” via marketing.

(This is actually somewhat related to a June 10, 2007 Consumed on Unilever’s sales of Lifebuoy soap in parts of India.)

To make the point that such firms have a habit-creation record, Duhigg recounts the rise of Febreze, and its evolution into something that people basically spray in perfectly clean rooms, because they’ve acquired the (previously non-existent habit). A Procter & Gamble psychologist comments:

“For most of our history, we’ve sold newer and better products for habits that already existed. … But about a decade ago, we realized we needed to create new products. So we began thinking about how to create habits for products that had never existed before.”

Wow! You won’t hear a blunt description of demand-creation than that anytime soon!

Anyway, I digress, but the Febreze anecdote alone makes the article worth reading.

Back to the point. The piece explains how the role of advertising/marketing has in effect created good habits (hand washing, which greatly cuts down on the spread of certain ailments) via marketing that happens to yoke those habits to a product (soap).

So this brings me back to my curiosity expressed above. Are these companies just that much better at the persuasion process? Or, given that agencies/etc. who execute their campaigns also do plenty of traditional public service stuff, is it that there’s something about introducing the profit motive that affects the approach and increases the effectiveness? Is there some intrinsically more compelling about a “good habit” when it’s tied to a consumer good? Is it simply a matter of scale — ie, these consumer-goods firms have the budget to blow out a message in a far bigger way?

Flickr Interlude

pms 1807c, originally uploaded by weenieart.

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.

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

Save

Thingdown

(Note: The Thingdown will now appear on an “occasional,” rather than “fortnightly,” basis. However, it will still be on weekends. Unless I change that later. )

Dress For Dinner Napkins, via swissmiss.

Generate Design Sommelier Wine Glasses, via Ffffound.

Table resembling huge watch, via bookofjoe.

Lighter resembling huge match, via Popgadget.

Flickr Interlude

Coffee: the Golden Ratio 2004, originally uploaded by Harriete Estel Berman.

More about Harriete Estel Berman in the not-too-distant future. Meanwhile, her caption:

Coffeepot and cups constructed from pre-printed steel from recycled tin containers for IILLY coffee, 10k. gold and aluminum rivets, stainless steel screws. Plastic resin. Stacked espresso cups are permanently attached with a concealed rod going through the cups.

The coffeepot is based on a historical coffeepot from 1728-9. The ratio for the height of the coffeepot to the height of the precariously stacked espresso cups is based on the concept of phi (pronounced ‘fee’), the Golden Ratio, and a pun on the word ‘coffee’. Would you like milk and sugar with your coffee? What is your perfect ratio?

Playlist

1. “Little Johnny Jewel,” Television
2. “Mountain Mambo,” Country Cats
3. “Message To Society,” Wally Coco
4. “Bag of Hammers,” Thao
5. “Music In Marble Halls,” Tony Schwartz / Jimmy Giuffre

AntiFriday: Shame, privacy, trends, etc.

That’s right, it’s the latest weekly rundown of backlashes, complaints, critiques, and like that. Continues after the jump. Here goes.

1. Blackwater, ADM, Wal-Mart, and Countrywide head up the vote-getting for the Corporate Hall of Shame. (Earlier Murketing musing on the Blackwater brand here.)

2. Surely you caught the bit of Long Tail anti-ness in the HBR. WSJ columnist Lee Gomes, who has been skeptical of the theory in the past, piled on here. Tyler Cowen backlashes against the anti-ness here. These debates always seem to devolve into tedious numerical definitions — how the data gets counted and divided, etc. I’m invariably left wondering why, exactly, I’m supposed to care. But I suspect that in a broader sense it has the opposite effect: People feel they need to wade in and have a position, pro or con. Thus the anti-ness nets out to a huge plus for the Long Tail as a commodity-idea.

3. WSJ: “Phone operator CenturyTel Inc. and cable provider Charter Communications Inc. shelved plans to use ad-targeting technology from Silicon Valley start-up NebuAd due to privacy concerns raised by their customers and lawmakers.” Read more

Industrial design smackdown update: First airport-security-friendly laptop bag?

In the comments to the recent post about bag-makers scrambling to meet TSA guideliness for a product that would spare air travelers from having to take their laptops out when going through security, Bonnie in Richmond points to this item from a company called Aerovation.

Its site says: “We have begun manufacturing and will have inventory in late July or early August.”

The full writeup on the product page is interesting, as it gives a slight peek into the TSA process from a bag-maker’s point of view. Sounds like it was a somewhat imprecise process. Anyway this firm says it has patents pending on what it came up with.

I’ll keep an eye on it, but as noted earlier, I’m also kind of going to be waiting for evidence that the word is out among the actual screeners. I don’t care how compliant the bag is, if they tell you to remove your laptop, you remove it.

Consumed Update-O-Rama: Bankruptcy, murketing, collaboration

Well it’s been a long time since I’ve done a Consumed updates roundup, but three things came across the radar that I’ll note here at all at once.

1. Re the March 11, 2007 Consumed on the Starbury, sold exclusively through Steve & Berry’s: Steve Berry’s has filed for bankruptcy!

This surprised me: Turns out the mall-based super-discount chain has been in trouble for some months now, apparently owing to a debt management strategy that didn’t hold up in the current credit-challenged environment.

I’d been under the impression that shrewd real estate deals were a big part of the chain’s success. And on my couple of visits to a nearby Steve & Berry’s (admittedly, it’s been a while) consumer traffic was brisk. I guess I would have assumed that its reverse-sticker shock cheapness would have benefited the place in the current slow economy.

I guess not! Debt management is another one of those subjects that gets little coverage because it’s not particularly sexy (and because companies tend not to be forthcoming about it) — yet it can mean a lot more to the success or failure of a business than any amount of press coverage or any number of celebrity alignments.

I’m not sure if this turn of events makes me look bad … but it might. If it does, well, I have no excuses. Mea culpa.

2. Re the February 27, 2005 Consumed on the Victoria’s Secret Pink brand: Ad Age has a piece that says the “thriving” sub-brand is approaching $1 billion revenues. The piece also notes the newest Pink push will be “supported and promoted by a campus tour program and paid collegiate brand ambassadors.”

Pink is, for the first time, hiring two to three brand ambassadors at each of 15 campuses. Hundreds of résumés have been received, and the selected students will go through a training program in August to prepare them for the yearlong assignment.

In doing radio interviews for Buying In, every time the subject of word-of-mouth marketing comes up, either the host or a caller invariably says something like, “Oh, come on, how much of this is really happening?” A lot, okay? It’s routine. Especially (though not exclusively) for brands targeting youth. The “college rep” strategy that was maybe used by record labels a decade or two ago is now used by a wide range of consumer-products and apparel companies, basically signing up students to “get the word out” to their pals about brands. It’s an established tactic. It’s real. And it’ s just one facet of something that, I promise, I’m not making up.

3. Re the January 14, 2007 Consumed on Timbuk2, and the July 8, 2007 Consumed on Threadless: Timbuk2 has a line of bags with Threadless graphics on them. Via Josh Spear.

Interesting point about retail-sales data

BusinessWeek‘s Michael Mandel has written several pieces highly pessimistic about consumer resilience. This week he assesses retail sales data, up 1.3% in the first quarter even after gas stations and fuel dealers are removed from the figures. (Earlier Murketing post musing on this topic here.) “Nothing,” he writes, seems to stop the U.S. consumer from spending.”

Then he makes an interesting point, something I didn’t know: Online sales from U.S.-based e-commerce sites made to foreign consumers count as part of U.S. retail sales.”

How big a deal is this? Well, e-commerce sales accounted for “roughly 36% of the increase in nonenergy retail sales” in Q1, he says. But there is apparently no data on how much of that came from abroad. Mandel offers anecdotal evidence from Blue Nile, an online jewelry seller: its sales are up 3.8% over last year and “all of that gain came from Internet sales customers outside the U.S.”

I doubt there’s enough of this sort of thing going on to cause a significant difference in overall retail sales, not enough at least to explain why consumer spending hasn’t collapsed — not yet at least — to the degree Mandel’s earlier writings have suggested they will.  But he makes a good point: It would be better to have the details on this information, especially given that a weak dollar and other factors are likely to increase overseas sales.

Assessing loyalty to an imaginary brand

I’ve linked to past entries in the Brand Autopsy series “Would you miss …?”

But this is the best one: Would you miss Dunder Mifflin? That’s the non-existent paper company in The Office.

Side note: Look at all this Dunder Mifflin merch!