MURKETING

Time out!

The truly brilliant among you noticed that last week’s column included a note specifying that Consumed is on hiatus until late March (thus: no column in today’s magazine, you see).
Meanwhile, I’ll continue to post links of note at the Consumed Facebook page. Also of course the action will continue unabated at Significant Objects, where I [...]

In The New York Times Magazine: “Hoarders”

STUFFED:
A TV reality series suggests the thin line between our national consumer frenzy — and psychopathology
…. Hoarding, he says, has “more to do with a person’s psyche than their taste in decorating.” Given how dark that psyche can be, why do people watch? Sharenow offers several reasons, from the visual wallop to the raw [...]

In The New York Times Magazine: Blu Dot’s Real Good Chair promotion

A REAL FIND?
A furniture maker hypes its wares by leaving them out with the trash.
In early November, a marketing agency’s “street team” began scattering a client’s products on the sidewalks of Manhattan and Brooklyn….
Read the column in the December 6, 2009, New York Times Magazine, or here.
Discuss, make fun of, or praise this column [...]

In The New York Times Magazine: Tauntaun Sleeping Bag

SLEEPING GAG:
A product idea becomes a joke — and then a product.
A lot of ThinkGeek’s customers, fooled or not, didn’t simply want to appreciate the funny idea of a Tauntaun sleeping bag. They wanted to own one. And said so in tens of thousands of e-mail messages and phone requests.
Read the column in the [...]

In The New York Times Magazine: Augmented Reality

REALITY BYTES
Does ‘augmented reality’ technology help us see deeper into what’s before our eyes?
This phrase has become one of the pervasive buzz concepts of 2009, and as is often true in such cases, it seems to describe a variety of manifestations from the practical to the pointless to the pie in the sky….
Read the [...]

In The New York Times Magazine: Ammo branding

TARGET MARKETING
Ammunition seem like a commodity, but even bullets get branded
ATK has been in the consumer-ammunition market for only a few years, but the commercial-products group of its armament-systems division now manages a portfolio of about 20 consumer-ammunition brands. That’s a fair amount of differentiation. Some of the reasons are obvious: the ammunition [...]

In The New York Times Magazine: Hummer Owners

HUMMER LOVE:
How do the drivers of a widely loathed vehicle see themselves?

Hummer loyalists come across as a beleaguered lot. Less predictably, Luedicke and his fellow authors, Craig J. Thompson and Markus Giesler, argue that Hummer drivers position their ownership at the center of a “brand-mediated moral conflict” in which Hummer enthusiasts are not only [...]

In The New York Times Magazine: Redbox

FEW RELEASES
For some at-home movie watchers, less is more.

Some studies show that consumers are happiest with a lot of choices. Other studies show that consumers are confounded (to the point of nonconsumption) by too many choices. So much, then, for studies. What about an actual business that allies itself closely with one or the [...]

In The New York Times Magazine: Mexican Coke

CULT CLASSIC:
An American icon’s Mexican formula develops a devoted following.
Spend a few years writing about consumer culture, and you might get a little jaded about products or brands with cult followings. The extreme-loyalist customer always insists that there are perfectly rational reasons for his or her devotion; to the disinterested observer, the reasons seem [...]

In The New York Times Magazine: Luxury e-tailers

EXCLUSIVE FOR ALL:
Buying pricey lux goods — along with the aura of virtuous thrift
You might decide not to buy a pair of designer shoes. Alternately, you might decide to buy a pair of designer shoes that has been marked down 50 percent. Abstaining can make you feel thrifty, frugal and (these days) admirable. Buying [...]