MURKETING

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.

Pointed Copy

In Consumed: The Ginsu. His ads were followed by a phone number and an exhortation to “act now!” And people did. Isn’t that amazing?

In the annals of completely ridiculous advertising, the original commercial on behalf of Ginsu knives has a special place. More than a quarter-century later, anyone old enough to remember it and many people who aren’t old enough to remember it will know the highlights — the guy karate-chopping a tomato, the knife sawing neatly through a tin can and the kind of hard-sell language we tend to associate with the most blatant forms of hucksterism. It’s a knife that will last forever. It’s a product no kitchen should be without. It’s the most incredible knife offer ever. And after the superlatives, the inevitable: But wait, there’s more …

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site via this no-registration-required link. This is part of the magazine’s annual “The Lives They Lived” issue.

Additional link: The original Ginsu ad, on YouTube.

Mini-Me McMansions

A pretty amusing piece in the WSJ today happens to be one of the articles the paper has made available to non-subscribers, and I recommend it. It’s about people who are so pleased with their fancy houses that when it comes time to build a playhouse for the kids, they make a miniature replica of their actual home — “Mini-Me McMansions,” as writer Troy McMullen puts it.

The lavish replicas, which can include such grown-up amenities as hardwood floors and media rooms with satellite TVs, generally cost from $10,000 to $100,000. Some run even higher than that, exceeding the median price of a single-family home ($218,000 in November). In some areas the playhouses are running afoul of local zoning ordinances, building codes and housing-development covenants, annoying neighbors who object to the backyard estates and racking up substantial fines.

Here’s the rest.

Something to do in NYC

If I lived in New York, I’d probably go take a look at this show of images by Belgian photojournalist Teun Voeten:

In an exhibit titled ” Saddam Mania,” on display at the Think Tank 3 gallery, Mr. Voeten documents a period of 10 days in Iraq’s history — just after the infamous toppling of the Saddam statue in front of the Palestine Hotel. Thousands of likenesses of the deposed despot — which could once be seen “on every other street corner” and at the entrance to every public office, Mr. Voeten said — were vandalized and finally destroyed by Iraqis and, in some instances, by American soldiers.In a room filled with striking images, Mr. Voeten shows the clash of two conflicting realities: In one, Saddam’s face is a constant reminder that his word is law; and in the reality of post-invasion Iraq, a people’s longsuppressed emotions are vented on that same all-pervading face, leaving knife slashes, bullet holes, and puddles of urine in testament to their rancor.

Although the invite image and the New York Sun article quoted above say the show was originally meant to run through late November, I have it on good authority that it’s still up. The gallery is at 447 Hudson, at Morton.

Princess Mania

I think that this story was pretty widely circulated & read, but just in case: I hereby note that I really enjoyed reading What’s Wrong With Cinderella, by Peggy Orenstein, in the New York Times Magazine. It’s about (https://www.maulanakarenga.org/klonopin-online/) Princess mania. Here is a no-registration-required link. Here’s a quick sample:

To call princesses a “trend” among girls is like calling Harry Potter a book. Sales at Disney Consumer Products, which started the craze six years ago by packaging nine of its female characters under one royal rubric, have shot up to $3 billion, globally, this year, from $300 million in 2001. There are now more than 25,000 Disney Princess items. “Princess,” as some Disney execs call it, is not only the fastest-growing brand the company has ever created; they say it is on its way to becoming the largest girls’ franchise on the (tretinoin) planet.

Meanwhile in 2001, Mattel brought out its own “world of girl” line of princess Barbie dolls, DVDs, toys, clothing, home décor and myriad other products. At a time when Barbie sales were declining domestically, they became instant best sellers. Shortly before that, Mary Drolet, a Chicago-area mother and former Claire’s and Montgomery Ward executive, opened Club Libby Lu, now a chain of mall stores based largely in the suburbs in which girls ages 4 to 12 can shop for “Princess Phones” covered in faux fur and attend “Princess-Makeover Birthday Parties.” Saks bought Club Libby Lu in 2003 for $12 million and has since expanded it to 87 outlets; by 2005, with only scant local advertising, revenues hovered around the $46 million mark, a 53 percent jump from the previous year.

It’s a really interesting read, very thoughtfully done.

A couple of side notes about this.

First, yes, I also write for the New York Times Magazine, so maybe this is a biased recommendation; on the other hand, I’ve never met Orenstein.

Second, I’ve been gradually adding a few old Consumed columns to this site that aren’t really available anywhere else for free, so after reading this I put up an old column about Club Libby Lu, right here.

Third, yet another Times Magazine contributor, Stephen Dubner (who I did meet, years ago, but have no particular contact with these days), happened to note on his Freakonomics blog that “Princess” is not only among the top three names for dogs — it’s also among the top 750 or so names for babies!