MURKETING

Recall revisited

As you may recall, this very site wondered allowed in mid-August, when the blame-China response to the Mattel recalls was at its most mindlessly shrill, whether the magnet problem — which caused a much larger number of toys to be recalled than the lead paint problem — wasn’t a design issue, not a manufacturing issue.

Apparently Mattel says the answer to that question is yes.

Mattel has said repeatedly that its biggest recall had nothing to do with China or shoddy production.

That recall of more than 17 million doll accessories and cars — coming just after one lead-paint recall of Chinese-made products and in tandem with another — was because of high-powered magnets that could break loose and pose a serious danger if swallowed.

The problem, Mattel’s Eckert said again and again, was in design, not manufacturing.

Nevertheless, as this story indicates (via Wal Mart Watch), at least some politicians and other observers are determined to make this a demonize-China story. And maybe the speculation that Mattel is simply kissing ass to keep in China’s good side is correct. But next time read a hysterical assessment of the “China poison train,” at least keep in mind that the story might be more complicated than that.

Light Switch

In Consumed: Candela: How a niche product lit up consumers, and found its way to the mass market.

Vessel, a design company based in Boston, offers a surprisingly wide range of products for a small firm that’s been around for only six years — tableware, furniture, lighting and the occasional curiosity that fits none of those categories. But from early on, one product stood out: a lamp called the Candela.

Since it first appeared on store shelves in 2002, the Candela inspired a string of spinoffs and variations, and eventually these became popular enough that Vessel’s owners had to decide whether they were an industrial-design firm that happened to make some lighting products or whether they were a lighting-products company that made some other stuff, too. Lately, they have found a solution, which offers an interesting capsule story of how a niche product becomes a line, and then, step by step, reaches a mass market….

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site.

Not enough Murketing in your life? Fast Company can help

Lately I’ve done some back-page columns for Fast Company, which is now edited by Robert Safian, who I’ve worked with in the past at American Lawyer, SmartMoney, Fortune, and Money. I guess I like working with him! And also with my editor on these columns, Denise Martin, with whom I’ve crossed paths at almost as many magazines.

If all that weren’t exciting enough (for me, I mean), they’re now giving my columns the rubric, “Murketing.” And the theme of the new one will be familiar to readers of this site, though perhaps expressed a little better than usual, thanks to being, you know, actually edited.

Nothing thrills advertising experts more these days than advertising made by…nonexperts. Clunky buzz phrases jostle for pole position to describe the trend — “user-generated content,” “citizen marketing,” “co-creation”–but the gist is always the same: The future of advertising belongs to consumers. Advertising Age even made “the consumer” its latest pick for ad agency of the year, arguing that “the most compelling content” is being made not by creative directors, but by “amateurs working with digital video cameras and Macs, and uploading onto YouTube.” …

Read the rest here, or in the October issue of Fast Company.

KAWS take on Darth Vader

New from the ever-astonishing KAWS. He did this for/with Lucas Films, and it’ll be on sale in his Japan boutique soon, if you’re in a position to do anything with that information. I was just talking to somebody about Star Wars fandom the other day. I was into it for the first three movies, but never could get interested in the more recent stuff. Still, I had way too many Star Wars action figures not to appreciate the coming-full-circle nature of this particular item.

To Do in NYC: Kate Bingaman-Burt at jen bekman

I’m late on this, not having realized until hours beforehand that the opening was last night. But if you’re in NYC, you should stop by the jen bekman gallery and enjoy the work of Kate Bingaman-Burt, through Oct. 27.

Knockoffs, copying, and creativity: Debated

Recently, The New Yorker argued that apparel knockoffs are not only no big deal, but a benefit to all, because they spur innovation.

There’s little evidence that knockoffs are damaging the business. Fashion sales have remained more than healthy—estimates value the global luxury-fashion sector at a hundred and thirty billion dollars— and the high-end firms that so often see their designs copied have become stronger. More striking, a recent paper by the law professors Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman suggests that weak intellectual-property rules, far from hurting the fashion industry, have instead been integral to its success.

Counterfeit Chic counters this argument in this recent Q&A:

The tired, old argument that copying is good for fashion has been around since at least the 1920s – and has been clearly false since at least since the 1960s, when fashion’s youthquake upset the previous hierarchies of creativity. The article is based on an outdated, pre-internet portrait of the industry – in other words, it’s “out.”

More here.

Music biz slump 2: Optimism or denial?

Edgar Bronfman, Jr., CEO of Warner Music Group, says:

Our business is poised to rebound because the demand for music is as strong as it has ever been and our determination to meet that demand has never been greater

While it may take some time for the rise in all the new revenue streams to overtake the short-term effect of the decline in the CD, there is no doubt in my mind that the mid-to-long-term future for Warner Music is very bright indeed.

There’s no particular argument advanced in this news brief about why this might be true.

The music biz slump: Good for indies?

Some of the reader comments to this Freakonomics “quorum” on the music business suggest that “indie” music is doing better as “big label” music does worse. One person writes: “My suspicion is that the internet and emusic services have led to a dramatic increase in consumption of and money spent on music from smaller independent labels as artists on smaller labels – who would have difficulty getting radio airplay otherwise – can use new methods to spread word of their music (blogs, myspace, etc).”

So you, wise Murketing reader, what do you know about this? Is there any real data that proves or disproves this theory?

Not anecdotal evidence, not suspicion, but actual data?

I had been under the impression that music sales are down across the board. If you know something, I beg you to share.

Design critic + hoops fan = protest T-shirt maker

A fan of the University of Kansas basketball team, and, more to the point, of the “curling, arc-serifed typeface” on the team’s uniforms, is upset about a redesign:

[In] an ill-conceived (and expensive) attempt to standardize the KU brand, university officials have replaced these famed letterforms with a typeface that only a corporate consultant could love. The new typeface– Trajan–cuts a lackluster profile unfit for the country’s premier program.

Or the T’s he’s selling more concisely put it: Trajan Sucks.

I’ve been a little out of the loop, so maybe Uni Watch has already covered this. But I heard about it here.

Don’t Tase Britney (or whatever)

How small can an idea be, and still gain what at least appears to be cultural traction?

The answer is incredibly small. So small that we don’t even bother to attach a name to the person at the center of such an idea. We just call these people “[fill-in-the-blank] guy.” The two present examples are “Leave Britney Alone Guy,” and “Don’t Tase Me Guy.” In keeping with the rules of the game, I will not bother with actual names here, since it doesn’t matter.

Leave Britney Alone Guy is, of course, some guy. He made a YouTube video in which he offered a “tear-filled defense of Britney Spears.” Allegedly, he has a “large Net audience” that has made him “a darling of the mainstream media.” Also, he now has “a development deal.” Variety.com says: “Plan is to develop a docusoap built around Crocker, a 19-year-old who lives with his grandparents in Tennessee.”

Meanwhile, there’s Don’t Tase Me Guy. Again, this is some guy. This guy apparently said “Don’t tase me, bro,” while being tased at a John Kerry event. In an example of the kind of current-event product-making (“spinning products off events, or even off what the historian Daniel Boorstin called pseudo-events”) that I wrote about a while back in this Consumed, someone is selling related T-shirts. I would say the main change since that June 2006 column is that the threshold for just how pseudo an event can be before someone pronounces it a phenomenon and at least attempts to commodize it, continues to get lower.

[Update: I missed this earlier, but Adfreak prefers a different Tase Guy T.]

I should disclose that I haven’t bothered to watch any of the related YouTube videos; I’m operating on the Snakes on a Plane theory that once you “get” the phrase, you don’t have to bother with whatever cultural artifact the phrase supposedly refers to. I suggest you do the same. If you waste time actually watching Leave Britney Alone Guy, you may be several minutes late in hearing about Whoever Comes Next Guy.

Your stereotype is ready

Ever wonder how other people see you? What quick shorthand mental category they put you into? Here’s how the server at Jerry’s on Division in Chicago, IL, apparently summed up one customer yesterday, on what I assume was the order ticket for the kitchen, which ended up being given to the customer with his check. That’s my guess anyway. I mean, was the customer actually supposed to see that he’d been reduced to “hippie guy”? I kind of doubt it. (Though hippie guy was chagrined to learn that he was evidently not projecting as contemporary an image as he’d thought, he was also amused, and didn’t let the incident affect his tip.)

Coincidentally, I’m in Chicago for the next day or two and as they say, “posting will be light.”

Synthetic smells, synthetic sells

I’m afraid this link is going to expire, and probably requires registration, but: If you’re interested in scent marketing — meaning the way fragrance is used in hotels, retail environments, and so on — here’s a good overview by James Vlahos from the NYT Mag‘s Key, by James Vlahos. The piece is interesting, but it’s also long, so here’s the nut graf:

Take a whiff. Maybe you’ve noticed — and maybe you haven’t, and this isn’t entirely by accident — that the world has lately become a more fragrant place. Westin hotels waft a blend of green tea, geranium and black cedar into lobbies; Sheraton has jasmine, clove and fig. Jimmy Choo stores smell of cardamom and ivy, while Thomas Pink opts for the tang of fresh linen. Artificially introduced aromas are seemingly everywhere, and while certain applications are obvious — like pumping the smell of fresh-from-the-oven bread into a supermarket to draw shoppers to the bakery department — a growing number of companies employ the technique to sell products with no intrinsic odors. Sony Style stores, for example, are scented with a blend that includes orange, vanilla and cedar, an aroma the company hopes will put female shoppers at ease. Even “new car smell” isn’t what it used to be. Cadillac, for instance, wanting to ensure that its models smell not just like any generic new car, infuses interiors with a custom scent called Nuance.

And here’s my favorite tidbit:

The hurdles that scent marketing would have to overcome to achieve anything like that effect, however, are significant. Scent doesn’t work like a broadly efficacious drug, but rather by playing on learned associations particular to individuals. One man’s cinnamon is another’s skunk. Preferences are cultural (vanilla tops the charts for Americans, while sandalwood is a hit in India) and generational (people born before 1930 love natural smells like grass and horses, while people born later are fond of synthetic smells like Play-Doh and SweeTarts).

I find it somewhat depressing that a huge chunk of the population might be “fond of synthetic smells.” But maybe that explains Crayon Cologne (more on which here) or, for that matter, Play-Doh Cologne.

If you don’t like Mizrahi’s Target work, you’re a “brand racist”

We all know the old game of snob vs. reverse snob. When a guy at Vuitton says Coach “has nothing to do with luxury” and might as well be “selling iron ore,” well, that’s kind of snobby. The reverse snob from Coach of course decries the Vuitton guy as an elitist who needs to realize that “luxury has been democratized.”

These examples are from Fortune‘s recent recap of the eternal mass/class squabble in its latest issue. All pretty familiar, but noteworthy for Isaac Mizrahi popping up to defend himself from “critics of his work with Target.” His name for these people: “brand racists.”

Brand racists! That seem like a pretty harsh upgrade on snobbery, no? And actually, I’m pretty sure I read in one of the other recent mass/class articles somewhere else that Mizrahi’s Target success actually helped him to get Bergdorf’s (or something like that) to pick up his high-end line again. But maybe they just did it because they needed one line that had a mass-y connection to avoid looking like luxury bigots: designer tokenism, in other words.

Anyway, lux context aside, it’s actually kind of interesting to consider brand bigotry. Even those of us who claim not to pay attention to logos tend have very strong feelings about the ones we would never, ever wear. Three Adidas stripes may be fine, but put a swoosh on the same object and forget it; a polo shirt with an obscure brand’s icon is okay, but not with the Polo logo. Etc. Of course we all have our reasons for our biases, our lines of thought to assure ourselves that we’re acting on the basis of rational factors and rational factors only. Then again, bigots always think that way, too.

Really, though, I suspect brand bigotry is an underrated factor in the consumer/brand dynamic: How much are we motivated not by the brands we love, but by the brands we shun? If brand and identity are (or can be) tied together, isn’t the shun factor pretty crucial? If you have a very clear picture notion of the brands you simply won’t consider associating with, it makes shopping that much easier.

No wonder department stores are segregated by brand.

Next up for Thomas Hine: “The Great Funk” that was the 1970s

I’m admirer of Thomas Hine — Populuxe is a wonderful book, and so is The Total Package, and I’m a big fan of his The Rise and Fall of The American Teenager — so I was pleased to see this news, that he has a book coming out about the 70s. That’s a great subject, and a really great subject for Hine.

Here’s a bit from an interview in which he talks about the new book due out in November, The Great Funk (and in which he mentions in passing that Populuxe was out of print for a while; I find that astounding.)

The time when the assumptions of the Populuxe years were truly undone, once and for all, was the decade of the 1970s. And I realized that even though this was a period that was antithetical to the fifties in so many ways—a time of scarcity rather than abundance, fragmentation rather than national unity, personal exploration rather than social progress, corruption rather than trust, defeat rather than victory—it visually interesting and even positive in all sorts of unexpected ways….

[The Great Funk] reflects its time in that it is less about technology and more about consciousness. It deals a lot with clothes and the body, and thus is PG or even R rated, rather than G. The title is a play, of course, on the Great Depression, which is one meaning of funk. But funk is also about texture, and rhythm, and a sensuality, which is also an important part of the picture. And it contains some incredible pictures of interiors. I think that those who like Populuxe will be intrigued.

Sounds good to me. I actually think there’s much about understanding the 1970s that can help us understand the present era. Again: great subject for Hine.

Getting rid of a spent iPod battery

Last night, I managed to put a new battery in my (third-generation) iPod. It was slightly more of a pain than I thought it would be, but it seems to have worked. So this morning I was about to toss the spent battery into the trash when I realized that this was probably not a very responsible thing to do.

One quick Google later I found this: FastMac says that even though I didn’t buy my new battery from them, I can send them my old one and they’ll dispose of it responsibly through their TruePower Recycling Program.

So barring unforeseen developments, that’s my satisfying unconsumption moment of the week.