MURKETING

Archival Consumed: Museum Quality

[Muji]

Someday, Andy Warhol once mused in one of his many deadpan ruminations on the future, ”all department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores.” If this has not happened literally, it has practically. In the former art-world stronghold SoHo, gallery-like retail outlets abound; the Prada store is at least as effective at inspiring reverence for its contents as the building’s former occupant, the Guggenheim. Meanwhile, as James B. Twitchell showed in his 2004 book ”Branded Nation” (the source of that Warhol quote), the chiefs of what he calls Museumworld regularly exhibit consumer products and have become increasingly sophisticated about marketing themselves.

So set aside the hoopla around the newly reopened and expanded MoMA, and look instead at the recent debut of a shop-within-a-shop at the SoHo branch of the MoMA Design Store: the first North American Muji outlet. Please continue…

Archival Consumed: Chavs

In Elizabethan England, there were sumptuary laws to prevent members of the rabble from dressing above their station. This was never really effective, but to understand how truly futile it is these days for the upper classes to try keeping the masses in their sartorial place, you need to know what a chav is. ”Chav” — the champion buzzword of 2004 in Britain, according to one language maven there — refers to something between a subculture and a social class. Experts disagree about the slang term’s origins, but the unofficial definition sounds rather condescending or even cruel: a clueless suburbanite with appalling taste and a tendency toward track suits and loud jewelry. Still, as with ”redneck” in America, a term that is imposed as a marker of scorn can be embraced as a marker of pride; at the very least, a certain humor and irony lace many of the discussions about chavs on Web sites and in books like ”Chav! A User’s Guide to Britain’s New Ruling Class.” Please continue…

Archival Consumed: Alife X Levi’s

[Levi’s / Alife Custom 501’s]

Levi’s is up there with Coca-Cola and Nike as a company people refer to when they want to make a point about how pervasive a brand can be. So it’s worth wondering what this household name is up to in deciding, after more than 150 years of existence, to forge its first-ever co-brand, the limited edition Levi’s alife Custom 501’s. There will be just 501 pairs, each in one of five colors, priced at $165 and available at exactly one store — which itself will exist for just one month.

The 501 is so iconic it’s hard to know what could be left to say about it. But what is alife? If Levi’s is a quintessential mass brand, alife could be thought of as an emblematic mini-brand. This is a distinct category: instead of being known by everybody, the mini-brand is known to a very specific and even rarefied group of somebodies — somebodies who are seen (by marketers, at least) as cultural connoisseurs, with forward-thinking tastes and an influence far out of proportion to their numbers. These are consumers open to the idea that certain products — even workaday items like jeans and sneakers — can be much, much more than a commodity. This group matters to Levi’s because it has struggled in recent years to stave off trendy new competitors like Diesel and the Gap. So when the Levi’s alife 501 Concept Exhibit opens in Manhattan on Sept. 11, with a big party, in the middle of Fashion Week, what it will really be selling, aside from a few hundred pairs of jeans, is Levi’s’ cultural relevance.
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Archival Consumed: A Spoonful of Attitude

[Vitaminwater]

By his own account, J. Darius Bikoff was ”confused” when he looked at the labels on bottled water — the ones showing images of streams and mountains. The connection between the packaging and the benefits of the water itself seemed vague. So Bikoff took a different approach when he got into the beverage business and created Vitaminwater, which he says now sells two million bottles a day. Please continue…

Archival Consumed: Conscience Undercover

[American Apparel]

The easiest way to add meaning (and marketability) to a commodity item of clothing — T-shirt, sweatshirt, underpants — is to add a logo. It could be a brand name or even a symbol or set of colors: the Nike swoosh, the logo of the Strokes, the colors of Tommy Hilfiger or just the words Abercrombie & Fitch. Absent such a signifier, the clothing is merely clothing. Or at least that’s the general thinking.

But it doesn’t really explain American Apparel, which offers its customers nothing but unlogoed casual wear and now has 2,000 employees cranking out a million garments a week, with sales of $80 million last year. Please continue…

Archival Consumed: Sharps

A recently published book called ”The Male Mystique” offers a collection of ads from men’s magazines of the 60’s and 70’s. Among other things, it makes a convincing case that the marketer’s construction of manhood has been conflicted and simpleminded for a long time: macho oafs, shameless peacocks and the interchangeable ”groovy” chicks who love them fill out pitches for Bacchus after-shave, Score Liquid Hair Groom and something called Male Comfort Spray (which ”helps prevent perspiration discomfort, the kind only a man can get”).

That stuff, whatever it was, seems mercifully to have faded from the scene. Men’s grooming products are now a $1-billion-plus category, with a snowballing number of new offerings. But the marketing dichotomy lingers in the form of two caricatures of maleness: the ”Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” guy vs. the Maxim guy. Still, one new brand, a small New York startup called Sharps, seems almost explicitly designed as an attempt to find a third way. Though around only since last year, it has found its way into top-end retailers like Barneys and Fred Segal, as well as newish boutique barbershop chains like American Male. One of its most popular items, called Kid Glove Shave Gel, is a top seller at the Barneys in Beverly Hills. Through Sharps’s online store, it sells to customers in all but a handful of states, thanks to attention from magazines like InStyle and Men’s Health.
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Archival Consumed: “The Purpose-Driven Life”

One central message of the book ”The Purpose-Driven Life” is this: ”It’s not about you.”

Who wants to hear that? Millions of people, apparently. The book, published by a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and written by Rick Warren, founder of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., is the No. 1 seller at religious bookstores tracked by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. It is also available in traditional bookstores and even Costco, and has been on the New York Times Advice best-seller list for more than 60 weeks; at the end of March, it was in the top spot.
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Archival Consumed: Uglydolls

The story of the Uglydolls, as David Horvath tells it, goes like this. A couple of years ago, he was living in Los Angeles, and his girlfriend, Sun-Min Kim, had moved back to Korea to be with her family. Horvath, an illustrator, wrote her long, pining letters, and at the end he would draw one of a number of cartoon characters he had made up — a blocky, orange guy named Wage, with startled round eyes and an apron. At Christmas, Kim surprised him by sending back a plush-toy version of Wage, about a foot high, that she had sewn herself. Horvath was so excited that he showed it off to Eric Nakamura, the owner of a store in Los Angeles called Giant Robot, which sold art books and magazines as well as toys and T-shirts made by artists. ”He thought I was pitching him a product,” Horvath recalls. ”He said, ‘Yeah, man, that’s great, I’ll take 20.”’
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Archival Consumed: Adult Swim

Television used to be a uniter, not a divider — a kind of nationwide campfire that regularly gathered tens of millions of Americans to watch, say, Johnny Carson. But that’s over. Now we’re a nation of tribes or, perhaps more important, a nation of carefully targeted demographic marketing segments. For proof, consider the following strange assortment of TV cartoons: Japanese anime; shows that were canceled by networks; a cheap original or two; and second-rate Hanna-Barbera action series that have been cut up and repurposed.These are the building blocks of a set of programs running from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. Sunday through Thursday nights on cable TV’s Cartoon Network. The ”Adult Swim” cartoons, as they are collectively called, are apparently more relevant than Johnny’s late-night heirs, at least to one demographic. In recent months, males ages 18 to 34 have watched the ”Adult Swim” cartoons in numbers that consistently beat David Letterman and that either beat or tie Jay Leno.

So what is it they are turning away from Letterman to watch? The most popular ”Adult Swim” show might be ”Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” in which a talking, human-size trio of milkshake, fries and hamburger meat have adventures. Actually, they fail to have adventures, and mostly hang around their rundown Jersey tract home and bicker instead. If there’s something drug-induced about this scenario (what if these fries could talk?), the ”narratives” have a jagged quality that practically begs for Ritalin. Its audience seems to find this addictive: a recent DVD compilation of ”Aqua Teen Hunger Force” has already sold more than 100,000 copies.

The popularity of ”Adult Swim” has won it sponsors that include video games, youth-oriented films and, alarmingly, the United States Army. Clearly ”Adult Swim” has a lot of college-age fans, and if any of them have to write a term paper about, say, ”Aqua Teen” for Postmodernism 101, they could deconstruct it as a celebration of commercial detritus. This is also a reasonable explanation for most everything in the ”Adult Swim” canon. ”Cowboy Bebop” (about bounty hunters in space) and InuYasha (about a schoolgirl transported into the feudal past) are recycled anime hits from Japan. ”Family Guy,” ”Futurama” and ”Home Movies” were all canceled by other, bigger networks. (”Family Guy” has been such a hit for ”Adult Swim” and through its own DVD releases that it may get a new life back on its original home, Fox.) The surreal chat show ”Space Ghost Coast to Coast” takes clips of the 1960’s superhero and splices them for maximum humorous effect with interviews of guests — by Space Ghost himself. An even more obscure figure from Hanna-Barbera’s cartoon-action library, Birdman, has been remixed as a lawyer named Harvey Birdman. And Cartoon Network repeats all this stuff relentlessly.

As Mike Lazzo, a Cartoon Network senior vice president, explains, this approach came about largely because of lack of funds. The network originally consisted mostly of reruns from the Hanna-Barbera library (which Cartoon Network’s founder, Ted Turner, had acquired) and had no budget for original programming; that’s where the ”Space Ghost” paste-together came from. ”We didn’t want to see an actual talk show,” Lazzo recalls. ”So what would be crazier than splicing this bombastic superhero with these B-grade celebrities?” Even ”Aqua Teen Hunger Force” — a rare original series inspired, Lazzo says, by fast-food promotional giveaway junk — is done for about $60,000 an episode, maybe a tenth of what ”The Simpsons” costs.

Asked what it is in the shows that seems to touch a chord with its audience, Lazzo says breezily: ”Oh, America. It’s all about America.” Looking for something more specific, I quizzed Sam Murr, a 22-year-old University of Florida criminology major, who is such a fan that he signed on to be part of Cartoon Network’s team of reps who promote the shows through college-town parties. ”It’s so different from anything else you’ll find on TV,” he says. For instance, ”There’s an episode of Harvey Birdman where Shaggy and Scooby get busted for smoking weed in the Mystery Van. Which everyone sort of suspected, but no one would ever really go there. That’s the kind of thing they’re willing to do.” Of course they are, so long as Sam and enough of his friends are interested.

[This installment of the Consumed column appeared in the January 18, 2004, New York Times Magazine; it was posted on this site some time much later, despite the fiddled-with time/date stamp.]