"
. With The Nietzsche Family Circus
“The Nietzsche Family Circus pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote.” Here it is. Seconds of pleasure, I assure you.
[Via a blog called Happiness And Public Policy.]
Q&A: Neek
At some point during the reporting of the Brand Underground story, I was introduced to Neek, a high school student who was into The Hundreds, and was also kind of a figure on the NikeTalk message boards. Not long after that, in fact, his notoriety on NikeTalk culminated in someone making a Neek T-shirt. (That’s it at left; the style is an echo of Supreme, of course.) Apart from being another reason that NikeTalk kind of freaks me out, I thought this development was fascinating: Neek had basically become famous by way of his fandom, to the point that he’d made some strange transition from consumer to brand. Of course when I say “famous,” it only applies in the sense of 21st Century microfame of a super-fragmented culture. But still.
Anyway, Neek ended up not being part of the Brand Underground piece, but he’s certainly an interesting manifestation of that culture, and we kept in touch. Lately he’s gotten involved with a project called Fruition — another step on the road to converting his lifestyle into a way to make a living — and I decided it would be worth a Q&A. So here it is.
Let’s start with the very straightforward background stuff about where you live and how you ended up there and so on — including where the name “Neek” comes from, if you please.
Yeah. I live in Vegas and I just graduated high school actually. I am 17 years old, turning 18 next month. I ended up in Vegas because my parents wanted to move away from the hustle and bustle in New York City. They wanted a more slow-paced life. So that is why I am here.
The design*sponge shop…
Grace Bonney, who has enjoyed quite of bit of success with her blog design*sponge, has taken that project to a new level: the design*sponge shop. She writes: “I’ve always wanted to have a place where I could showcase affordable, limited-edition designs by my favorite independent artists; I feel strongly about supporting the fantastic community of indie designers making their own goods by hand.”
While Bonney and various other bloggers who focus on products or designers might seem quite distant from the “brand underground” that I wrote about over the summer (using T-shirts as my example category), I see them as having fundamental similarities. So I’ve been very interested to follow how she and others have sought ways to convert what started as a hobby into a way of perhaps making a living — turning their “lifestyle into a business,” as A-Ron put in the brand underground piece. This is an interesting approach, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it, for sure….
Anyway, her initial lineup of six products/pieces includes pillows, a salt/pepper/olive set, and hand-printed wood blocks.
This Just In
“CONSUMERS DON’T MARCH IN LOCKSTEP ANYMORE.”
So announces a promotional mailing I just got, hyping a marketing-tips book that “draws lessons from today’s most interesting trends and countertrends.” The book is called The Hummer and The Mini, and that title is meant to suggest how, in today’s modern world, “every category now has many next big things — and they often contradict each other.”
The Hummer isn’t really doing that well right now, but still: Things sure have changed since, say, the 1960s, when some consumers were buying Cadillacs and others bought VW Bugs — “in lockstep,” of course.
A Smidge More Skoopf
Although I laid off writing about Second Life on this site for a while — basically until my Second Life Consumed came out — I have continued to make forays there from time to time, both as research and as a way to maintain an intense state of denial about real-world obligations. And I’ll keep doing that in the future, but meanwhile here are a few further notes related to the column.
At one point I did actually buy a pair of the Skoopf Ultra Roller Skates that I wrote about. That’s right, bought em with my own Linden dollars — no comps!
Also, after the column had gone to press, I read about this Skoopf machinima ad, which I promptly visited and checked out.
Finally, to back up the column’s point about in-world brands, here’s a snapshot of some “outdoor” advertising in Second Life:
Selling In a New World
In Consumed: Skoopf Ultra Roller Skates: One example of how a brand catches on in a nonexistent world.
Sometimes this life seems so cluttered with marketing and sales pitches that it’s enough to make you want to flee to another world. And you can. A second life awaits in one of the many increasingly popular online worlds, including one called Second Life. Inhabited by the alter egos of a few hundred thousand users, Second Life is not the most popular of these online habitats, but lately it has been attracting — yes — marketers. Toyota, Starwood Hotels and a variety of music and book companies have begun branding efforts in Second Life; the Virginia politician Mark Warner even gave an interview there recently. Longtime users like Gareth Lancaster have been expecting this. What’s not as clear is how well the new arrivals understand that there are already plenty of successful brands in this other world. Brands like Gareth Lancaster’s.
To use Second Life terminology, Skoopf is strictly an “in world” brand, not a carry-over from “RL” (real life). It was founded by Lancaster’s virtual-world avatar, Moopf Murray, a Second Life resident since January 2004. One of Lancaster-Murray’s products is the Skoopf Ultra Roller Skate, available in-world for about 50 Linden dollars. (That’s the Second Life currency; one U.S. dollar is worth about 250 Lindens.) Lancaster says he has sold about 50,000 pairs. …
Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site via this no-registration-required link.
Related links: Moopf; Second Life Herald account of Mark Warner’s Second Life appearance; about Starwood’s in-world project; about Toyota/Scion’s Second Life marketing.
The International Review of Wine Packaging and Aesthetics, Vol. 4
Red Newt
Cabernet Franc (2004) and “Dry White Wine”
Around $10 to $15 (Finger Lakes region of New York State).
[Note: This is the fourth installment in a regular Murketing feature. For previous installments and an explanation, go here.]
Anyway we went, and ultimately bought a few bottles. E “generally likes the newt,” but prefers the clear, white wine bottle to the red. Sure, she says, the red bottle benefits from the “nice little newt” on the label, and the fine detail of the newt on the foil thingy on top of the bottle, but is otherwise not that special. But the clear bottle is “one of the most exciting bottles of wine I’ve seen.” R. agrees, although he likes the red bottle more than E does. Still, he is on board with E’s contention that if we had easy access to this particular variety we would probably buy a bunch of bottles. “The clearness and the little guy – very exciting,” E reiterates.
REGARDING THE ACTUAL WINE: These actual bottles were pretty good. However, a different variety of Red Newt white wine, purchased in New York City, with a very similar bottle design, was too sweet, and we never bought it again.
House Partisan
Tastes change. I know it, you know it, Bob Dole knows it. (What? Never mind.) Anyway, although we all know tastes change, I was still a little startled by the obit for Evelyn Orton, “booster of Brooklyn brownstones.” Well, who isn’t a booster of Brooklyn brownstones these days? It’s one of the most prestigious forms of housing I can think of.
But in 1963, that apparently wasn’t the case. The obit said:
Victorian homes had fallen into disfavor and many middle-class New Yorkers were moving to the suburbs by 1963, when Mrs. Ortner and her husband bought a four-story 1886 brownstone on Berkeley Place in Park Slope.
Mrs. Ortner, an interior designer before she became a preservationist, was so enchanted by that house, with its original mahogany woodwork and papier-mâché and linseed-oil wallpaper, that she began a campaign to save thousands of other brownstones from neglect or the wrecking ball.
Many of the graceful 19th-century single-family homes in Park Slope were owned by absentee landlords and had been cut up into rooming houses. In other parts of New York, old homes were being lost to federally sponsored urban renewal projects.
Among other steps she and her husband took:
In part because of their own difficulty in getting a mortgage for their $32,500 house, the Ortners were prominent in the anti-redlining campaigns beginning in the mid-1960’s, when many banks were reluctant to finance mortgages in declining neighborhoods like Park Slope, Cobble Hill and even Brooklyn Heights…
“Declining neighborhoods like Park Slope”! Tastes change….
Brand Blogger Q&A: Moleskinerie, Positive Fanatics, and Notebookism
It’s time now for the second in our series of interviews with brand bloggers. Our gracious subject today is Armand Frasco, who presides over three interesting blogs: Moleskinerie (focused on Moleskine notebooks); Notebookism (on notebooks in general); and Positive Fanatics (on Ikea). Here goes…
We first spoke some time back, when I was writing about Moleskine (for Consumed, June 24, 2005), and came upon your site. When did you launch this blog, and why? And how has it changed since then?
Moleskinerie was launched in January 2001 on a whim, just out of curiosity and to find out who else was using the notebook. It turns out the answer is, a lot. Last year, Kikkerland Design, Moleskine’s U.S. distributor reported sales of more than 4 million units. Moleskinerie has since become the number one fan site for the product, with readers coming from as far as South Africa, Mongolia, Malaysia –- even Patagonia.
Lately you’ve started a newer site, called Notebookism. What’s that one all about, and why did you start it?
I initiated Notebookism last July in response to many requests for a non product-centric blank-book blog. With hundreds of brands and legions of aficionados out there we’ve just uncovered the tip of the journaling iceberg. Many Moleskine users also own other kinds of notebooks so Notebookism is just an extension of their paper playground. We are lucky to have the Blick Art Company as our founding sponsor.
What’s the big news around Moleskine these days, and how does it affect these two projects, if it all?
Lightly self-promotional Flickr Interlude
One pleasing surprise that awaited me as I eased back into the habits that go with having an actual working computer was discovering this nice notice on UrbanCommons.org about another one of my little side projects, the MLK BLVD Flickr pool. And so I say: Thanks!
Of course, if you visit Murketing.com often, you’ve probably already figured out that I spend too much time looking at stuff on Flickr. But another pleasing surprise was finding some pictures added to the MLK BLVD pool by a certain crfranko — shots of the MLK in El Dorado, Arkansas. El Dorado? I know who you are, crfranko! Thanks, bro …
Branching Out
In Consumed: Umpqua Bank: Selling a financial institution as a lifestyle brand.
Ours is the age of lifestyle. From clothes to coffee to cookware, every product or service seems to represent not just function but a statement about who we are and how we live. So the fact that Umpqua Bank, a chain based Portland, Ore., recently announced that it had “released its first album” makes a certain kind of sense. Umpqua isn’t just a financial institution, of course. It’s a lifestyle….
Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site via this no-registration-required link.
Additional links: Umpqua; Rumblefish.
Free Ride
In Consumed: Wonder Bread: What a hit movie can do for a venerable brand — and vice versa.
The proliferation of product and brand placement in movies and television programming has become so extreme that it’s barely noted anymore. An exception to this is the attention focused on the prominent inclusion of the Wonder Bread logo in the recent Will Ferrell vehicle “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.” Given that the comedy is set in the world of Nascar racing, where every car and every driver moves about in a branded sheath, it was inevitable that nearly every frame of the film would be cluttered with logos. What got people interested in Wonder’s inclusion is that the brand didn’t pay for it. Shortly after the film opened, a marketing consultancy called Joyce Julius & Associates issued a press release saying that “the Wonder Bread logo appeared clear and in focus for 11 minutes 32 seconds (11:32), while the brand was also mentioned on two occasions by the actors,” and that, it asserted, added up to media exposure worth $4.3 million. Another observer guessed that buying this level of exposure might have cost as much as $100 million. …
Continue reading at the NY Times Mag site via This Link.
Related link: Wonder/Ricky Bobby cap at Nascar online store. RetroCrush’s “Inside Look at Wonder Bread.”
Failure, Excuses, Etc.
So, about a week ago, the hard drive on my main computer began to fail. This was unpleasant. While it was interesting, in a way, to spend a lot of time waiting around at TekServe observing other people whose various pieces of digital technology had melted down in one catastrophic way or another, I’d prefer not to have done it. Anyway, while all that was going on, it wasn’t really practical for me to deal with Murketing.com.
Yesterday I got my computer back, with a new hard drive, and it looks like I’ve more or less completed the process of re-integrating many gigs of backed up data. I’m a little behind on email, and I may have lost a few messages, if you happen to be wondering why I haven’t replied to something you’ve sent me, etc. Feel free to re-send if you like. Meanwhile I’m returning this site to regularly scheduled programming now; in a minute I’ll post last week’s consumed.
Go back up your data.
“Low Income Is Hot”
In an article in the September 11 issue of Brandweek, headlined “For Some Marketers, Low Income is Hot,” Constantine Von Hoffman writes: “Marketers have discovered a new and sizeable underserved consumer demographic: the poor.”
For instance, P&G has introduced Bounty Basic and Charmin Basic, for the “price-sensitive” low-income consumer. Prepaid phone and (in particular) debit cards are also aimed at this “large, untapped pool of consumers,” namely the 20 million U.S. houeholds “without a bank account or relaible access to banking services.” Someone with a prepaid card company called Netspend comments: “For a long time companies did not realize that these low- to middle-income people can be profitable.” Participants in this exciting new market include Nascar, Virgin Mobile, and Domino’s Pizza.
Flickr Interlude
the infernal dance of Suicide DogFlickr photo by IntangibleArts.
We’re big fans of BBQ-joint signage featuring jolly pigs carrying steaming plates of ‘cue. So sad. But this, I admit, is even more poignant.
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Kim Fellner's book 
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