MURKETING

Muscular Metaphor

In Consumed: Posit Science Brain Fitness Program: How one company found the right words to tap the baby boomer penchant for personal development.

A few years back, before the company now known as Posit Science even had a product on the market, its founders considered how to position just what it was they were aiming to sell. One of those founders was a neuroscientist named Michael Merzenich, a professor at the University of California-San Francisco, whose research focused on “brain plasticity.” One way of characterizing the commercial applications that his work helped spawn was “cognitive behavioral training.” Not surprisingly, such phrases gave way to something a bit sexier: “When we talked about it as ‘brain fitness,’ people got it instantly,” recalls Jeff Zimman, Posit Science’s chief executive….

Continue reading via this Boston Globe link.

Unconsumption: Continued

I’ve finally finished consolidating the feedback from the earlier post(s) about Unconsumption on this handy page. (If you’re looking at the actual Murketing.com site, it’s one of the tabs under the title. If you’re reading it in RSS, then, you know, click the link.)

Thoughts?

More on this general subject in the weeks ahead.

Radical design

A few weeks ago BoingBoing had this post pointing to images of Black Panther newspaper covers, but I only just got around to checking them out. Some of them are pretty great. I don’t know if you’re still out there, Bobby H., but if you are, I think you should check these out.

I should also note that the images are for sale as posters, and are apparently part of Bobby Seale’s site — where you can also check out “Videos of Barbeque’n with Bobby Seale.” I don’t know quite what to say about that.

Meta Brand News: April 2007

[Editorial Note: Vis-a-vis this recurring Murketing.com feature, somebody observed that “Rob Walker has noticed that everyone wants to be a brand,” or words to that effect. I did once “notice” and write something along those lines, for The New York Times Magazine — in May 2000. However, that has nothing to do with the Meta Brand News roundup. The point of the Meta Brand News roundup is that “the brand,” as an idea, has entered the rarified sphere of metaphors that everyone understands, and can be applied to anything. That was not the case seven years ago. It is the case now. Hence, I wrote what I wrote seven years ago — and now I’m doing this. Until I get tired of it. Here goes the April 2007 version. As always: links not guaranteed]

“The German baby polar bear rejected by his mother has sent shares of the operator of the Berlin Zoo up 94 percent this week as investors bet ‘Knut’ will become a brand name like Paddington Bear or Winnie the Pooh,” according to Bloomberg News.

Pakistan needs “to become a brand name in international tourism like Sri Lanka and Thailand,” suggests the Hungarian ambassador to that country.

“Orange County is a change agent—it has become a brand,” a CEO informs the Orange County Business Journal

“New Zealand could be undermined as a brand if the Australian company [MFS Living & Leisure] gains control of” New Zealand’s Tourism Holdings Ltd., the country’s Green Party contends.

“It’s a shame that it should become a brand. It’s a work of art,” says the grandson of J.R.R. Tolkien, regarding the fate of his grandfather’s writing.

“The Tate used to be a polite collection of British and modern art, but it has become a brand,” observes The Guardian

Philospher Slavoj Zizek’s planned series of documentaries “sounds like a brand name in the making,” sneers the New York Times.

“Neil Perry, at the forefront of Australia’s breed of celebrity chefs, has become a brand,” says The Canberra Times

“Consultants are aiming to make a sale to American voters by positioning their candidate as a brand,” observes The Financial Express.

“Around Downriver [seems to be some place in Michigan], the last name Lesko [an area softball picher] has become a brand name for softball excellence,” reports The News-Herald.

Roger Daltry “carries his view of The Who as a brand name with him, and he is more of a fan than I am,” Pete Townsend tells The Voice of America.

And finally, director Shekhar Kapur denies being a brand! “I don’t want to be labelled as a brand because to me, it is to depend on my past work. It is an artistic death.” This at least is how he is quoted in Business Standard.

More 3rd ID

Today’s Savannah Morning News notes the deaths of three more 3rd ID soldiers from nearby Fort Stewart in Iraq: David A. Kirkpatrick, age 20; Nicholas E. Riehl, 21; and Eddie D. Tamez, 21. You may recall that the 3rd ID is the Army division now in the process of making its third deployment to Iraq.

I should probably say that one of the reasons we’ve gotten so aware of the 3rd ID — and that I sometimes come across like I know all about it etc. etc., when I really don’t — is that E has got an interesting project going:

She’s using the wet-plate collodion process that she has learned, and taking portraits of 3rd ID soldiers. I think the results so far are pretty impressive, but I suppose I’m a bit biased. Anyway, E makes the pictures in our back yard, so we have soldiers coming to the house all the time now. By mid-June, E will know a couple dozen people in Iraq…

Biker chic, continued

This past January, a Consumed column on Timbuk2 dealt indirectly with the fixed-gear bike fad, noting that these bikes “have attracted interest from increasing numbers of people who five years ago might have been drawn to skateboards.” Over the weekend, the NYT (in the City section, which I don’t see because I read the national edition), had a more extensive look at the fixed-gear-bike thing, of interest because it was written by Jocko Weyland.

Fixed-gear bikes are being ridden all over New York, by messengers, racers, lawyers, accountants and college professors — a diverse and not necessarily youthful cross section of the city’s population. They’re being ridden by people who work in sandwich shops and don’t know or care about gear ratios and bike history, and by people who have been racing these bikes for years in places like the Kissena Velodrome in Flushing, Queens, with its banked, elliptical track. They’re ridden by militant vegans who are virtual encyclopedias of arcane bicycle history, by thrill-seeking members of renegade bike gangs like Black Label, by shopgirls, street racers, Critical Mass riders, your aunt.

Noted in Weyland’s piece: Coast Cycles owner Johnny Coast “laughs at the absurdity of a brand like Mountain Dew approaching Black Label with an offer of sponsorship, as he says happened last year, and is wary of exploitation of the fixed-gear bike culture by corporations that have little to do with biking.”

Wal-Mart in the news.

Is all publicity good publicty? I’m no expert, but when your company is the focus of a 214-page report by Human Rights Watch, that can’t be good for the brand.

Slaughtered-goat marketing: Potential downsides thereof

Well, I don’t know if this is for real or not, but the Dailly Mail has a story about Sony getting some fairly unsurprising backlash for “using a freshly slaughtered goat to promote a violent video game.” The article says:

The corpse of the decapitated animal was the centrepiece of a party to celebrate the launch of the God Of War II game for the company’s PlayStation 2 console.

Guests at the event were even invited to reach inside the goat’s still-warm carcass to eat offal from its stomach.

Sickening images of the party have appeared in the company’s official PlayStation magazine – but after being contacted by The Mail on Sunday, Sony issued an apology for the gruesome stunt and promised to recall the entire print run.

I know that Sony has had some problems lately, and just feels a bit stodgy compared to its innovation-filled history. But maybe this isn’t the best way to get that edgy reputation back.

UPDATE: An associate of Murketing assures that it’s for real, etc. etc., and forwarded a Reusters story. But that’s not why I’m updating. I’m updating because the story quotes from Sony’s apology, which I might have missed in the Daily Mail story, but demands repeating:

“We recognize,” Sony said in a statement, “that the use of a dead goat was in poor taste.”

Somebody make sure Harry Shearer knows about this, k?

The Gadget Boom, 1935

From the February 1935 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics, via Modern Mechanix:

The American people spend more than $100,000,000 a year, in amounts from 5c up, on gadgets manufactured in this country—not counting the huge importations from abroad. Here is a field of invention, and unlimited new business possibilities, always open to the ingenious….

Gadgets have been in use, probably, ever since man emerged from the cave; and, while the earliest no doubt were extremely simple and uncomplicated, they were, nevertheless, gadgets. For instance, when some cave man first thought of putting his arrows into a hide pouch, in order to reach them more easily, that pouch became a sort of gadget; because heretofore the arrows had been carried in the loincloth, or in the animal-skin covering that served the prehistoric man as a cloak….

Gadgets should be distinguished from necessary tools, which do not come under the classification of gadgets. For instance, to make this clear, let me make an example: At the present time, most beverage bottles have the variety of cap known as a crown seal—other bottles have corks. A tool is needed to open the bottle; either a cork screw or a lever arrangement for the crown seal, which is a necessary tool. It cannot be considered a gadget….

And do not jump to a rash conclusion that all gadgets are just novelties. Some of the most successful gadgets have been on the market for many years, and millions of them have actually been sold. Just to name a few, such items as pan-scrapers, mechanical gas lighters, steel wool pan cleaners, have actually sold by the millions and have become staples. So have anti-window rattling devices, door checks of various varieties, and scores of pencil sharpeners that can be bought from 5c up to 25c….

When the automobile first came into vogue, there were hundreds upon hundreds of car gadgets, many of which sold into the millions. We had all sorts of gadgets from radiator emblems to flower vases, arm rests, mechanical signalling devices, etc. Many of these later became standard equipment….

And toward the end, this prediction:

Let no one think that the gadget market in this country is apt to decline. With our advance in civilization, the chances are overwhelmingly in the opposite direction; since the more mechanized we become, the greater the demand for gadgets.

Cover versions

Delightful gallery of old Russian book jackets. Via Couldal.

An Ink, Inc. pioneer

In the recent Consumed that dealt with Scott Campbell, the Sailor Jerry brand, and the persistence of the old-school tattoo aesthetic, I made passing metnion that Normal “Sailor Jerry” Collins left his estate to two of his proteges, who get a cut of Sailor Jerry brand sales. One of those proteges was Michael Malone, who has just passed away. From the Times obit:

Steeping himself in California’s 1960s counterculture, Mr. Malone worked in San Francisco on rock shows that had psychedelic lighting while studying ceramics and carpentry. He moved to Manhattan in the late ’60s and, under the tutelage of a local tattooist, began decorating clients at his downtown apartment. In 1971 he helped organize an exhibition called “Tattoo!” at the Museum of American Folk Art in Manhattan.

A year later Mr. Malone moved to Hawaii and became a protégé of the artist known as Sailor Jerry Collins, who was famous in the industry for introducing a sophisticated style and vivid new colors to the skulls, roses, hearts, tigers and sailing ships of classic tattooing. When Mr. Collins died in 1973, Mr. Malone bought Mr. Collins’s company, China Sea Tattoo, in the Chinatown district of Honolulu, and with it his mentor’s designs.

More on MySpace mourning

The other day, after noting that Facebook and MySpace mourning after the Virginia Tech killings wasn’t as surprising as it might seem, given the MySpace mourning for soldiers killed Iraq, I wondered about the long-term status of the MySpace pages of the deceased. The Savannah Morning News has a story today about military MySpace mourning. Regarding Kelly Youngblood, a 3rd ID soldier killed in Iraq in February, the story notes:

MySpace officials have said they do not delete inactive accounts, nor do they let others take control of a deceased user’s accounts, because of privacy concerns.Youngblood’s “last login” date will remain Feb. 5, 2007, in perpetuity, along with everything else on his page.

“I love that it will always be there,” said Youngblood’s girlfriend, Cecelia Jones, 19, of Westville, Ind. “I look at pictures and things he wrote … and if the page wasn’t there I wouldn’t be able to do that.”

Like a widow in a grief support group, Jones continues to post messages on Youngblood’s site. She talks about how she’s doing on any given day or recalls a memory they shared together as a way of coping with her loss.

Her latest post was simply: “I wish you were here.”

Buzz Factor

In Consumed: Spykes: A new product gets lots of attention — mostly from vehement critics.

This past January, Anheuser-Busch rolled out a new product called Spykes. It comes in two-ounce bottles, in flavors like Spicy Lime and Hot Melons. The label says it’s a “premium malt beverage,” containing caffeine and ginseng; it’s meant to be drunk straight, or used as a mixer with beer, or as an ingredient in some new cocktail of your invention. It’s “whatever you want it to be,” the new brand’s Web site says. Spkyes, in other words, is a hodgepodge of every recent trend or fad that has caught the attention of alcohol consumers in the past five years. …

Continue reading by way of this NYT Magazine link, or this Boston Globe link.

Notes on a transparent apology

I’m still snickering over the recent comments of Fake Steve Jobs at about famous PR guy Steve Rubel. Rubel is one of these people who’s turned himself into a guru by touting the mighty Web and how it’s, you know, changing everything.

For example, it’s a great opportunity to “empower customer evangelists.” Actually, I first became aware of Rubel when he was talking up some project he’d come up with for Vespa, which basically involved “empowering” some Vespa fans to blog about Vespas, under the auspices of the company that makes Vespas. “What better way to evangelize the benefits of scootering than empowering existing customers to tell prospective scooterati why Vespa rocks?” he summarized. The two synthetic blogs that resulted were called Vespaway.com and Vespaquest.com. I kept an eye on them for a while, but then I forgot about them — and it’s not clear how that experiment panned out, since both those URLs lead to 404 Not Found error pages.

Still, Rubel ended up with a column in Ad Age, and a more prestigious job at Edelman. Probably he had some other success stories that I happen not to be aware of.

Anyway, one of his other big themes is transparency. Fake Steve Jobs finds something a little, uh, unconvincing about this. And then goes on the following rampage:

Apparently Rubel blabbered on Twitter that he doesn’t read PC Mag and in fact tosses his copy into the trash when it arrives. Smooth move for a PR guy right? [PC Magazine editor in chief Jim] Louderback blasted back here saying that since Mr. Bigshot PR man and blogger Steve Rubel of Edelman PR has so little respect for PC Mag, then he would start ignoring pitches from Edelman clients.

That in turn prompted this hilarious groveling open letter from Rubel to “Mr. Louderback” and everyone at Ziff Davis, which owns PC Mag. It’s really a must-read, if only because Rubel is one of these guys who’s been going around saying how the mainstream media doesn’t matter anymore, and how blogs are displacing all the big newspapers and magazines, blah blah blah … but here he is taking one deep down the windpipe on behalf of his clients, who no doubt carved him a new one for pissing off PC Mag.

From there it gets a little crude for the family-friendly environment of Murketing.com, so proceed at your own risk. And needless to say, I don’t necessarily endorse the views of Fake Steve.

But in this instance, I did find them amusing. I just thought I’d be transparent about that.

Clutter

New developments regarding the predicted (by others, not by me) age of a world “devoid of brand advertising as we know it:”

TV “ad clutter” was “relatively flat” in 2006, according to one recent study, with broadcast and cable channels “running an average 15 minutes of nonprogram time per hour in prime time.”

This is seen as somewhat good news: At least clutter isn’t growing at the same pace of recent years.

On the other hand, Red Herring says:

Beware YouTube watchers, ads are coming?as soon as this summer.

The video-sharing site that was acquired by Google in November is experimenting with the precise length, form, and placement of those ads, and will begin rolling them out this summer, Suzie Reider, head of advertising for YouTube, [said recently]

“We’re looking at executions like a very quick little intro preceding a video, then the video, then a commercial execution on the backside of the content,” Ms. Reider said.

The idea is to generate long-promised revenues that Google can share with the more than 1,000 “premium” content creators whose video material is available on YouTube, Ms. Reider said.