MURKETING

Chicer By The Dozen

In Consumed: The Starbury: A (very ) cheap sneaker uses an endorsement deal to bring cachet to volume sales.

It’s no secret that a lot of consumers, for a long time, have found the price of some athletic shoes objectionably high. This has not, of course, stopped the sale of expensive athletic shoes. But it does seem to have created an opening for something not often seen in contemporary consumer culture: a deep-discount retailer’s positioning its low prices as a social statement. Read more

From ads to a sitcom: A big step backwards

I’m running behind on everything, so by now you’ve likely heard that the cavemen in the Geico ads might be getting their own sitcom. (If you haven’t heard, the WSJ had a good basic story about it.)

Personally, I take it as a given that — for better or worse — advertising and marketing can be evaluated like any other form of culture, just like a movie, a book, or a sitcom. And that’s why my reaction to this scheme is: Why would they want to take a step backwards, from a powerful and pervasive form like advertising, to something as boring and formulaic as a sitcom?

I’m not saying the caveman ads are on the level of a great novel or film or whatever, but they are compellingly strange, and as the series has continued, it’s become interesting to try to figure out what, exactly, they’re getting at. Are they poking fun at political correctness? Inviting us to consider unintended bigotry? Trying to connect with us as people who feel vaguely alienated and misunderstood by the modern world?

One reason the ads are open to interpretation, and thus somewhat engaginig (to me), is precisely the fact that they’re ads. They’re short, come out of nowhere, are nothing like the ads around them; the “story” advances only unexpectedly. (A new caveman ad!, etc.) Then repeats itself. We never really know the cavemen, we get only glimpses. There’s no exposition or explanation. There just happen to be these cavemen, and they’re tired of being discriminated against, and that’s it. None of it ever makes sense in any linear way.

Much of this goes away if you turn the cavemen into characters on a sitcom. We have to learn about their backgrounds, there have to be highly structured plots, filled with gags and laugh lines at predictable intervals. What’s good about that? If I’d created those cavemen, the last thing I’d want to see them reduced to is the low insult of a laugh track.

(Oh, and for the record: Do the ads do a “good job” selling Geico the brand? I don’t know, and don’t care.)

[Big thanks to B.A.]

PR Moment of the Day

I get lots and lots of PR email, some of it personalized, some of it mass-style and addressed only to “Hi,”. Here is a nice variation, in which the sender has taken the time to delete the name of the person she sent the release to right before sending it to me — but I guess didn’t take the time to turn off the show-changes feature.

Anyway. Can’t make it. Sorry.

To Do in Los Angeles March 16 (and March 10-31)

This sounds sort of interesting for all you unconsumption fans in L.A.:

The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest along with Machine Project will be present Heather Rogers, author of “Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage”. The talk based on her book will take us through the surprisingly brief history of the trash heap, as before mass production and mass marketing it would have been unthinkable to dispose of so much of what we produce so soon after it is produced.

“Hype-generating mechanism with fully integrated Mac compatibility”

So the Apple ad for the iPhone — see it here if you like — came on the tv set here at Murketing headquarters the other night, and although there are plenty of Apple products around Murketing headquarters, we all agreed: The company’s smug, self-congratulatory attitude is getting really, really tired.

Thus I was pleased to see this in The Onion: “Apple Unveils New Product-Unveiling Product“. Some highlights:

“Get ready for the future of product introduction,” said Jobs…

Described in its patent filing as a “hype-generating mechanism with fully integrated Mac compatibility,” the iLaunch is powered by Intel dual-core processors optimized to calculate a product’s gravitas. Apple claims the iLaunch can garner the same amount of press attention as a major scientific discovery, high court ruling, celebrity meltdown, or natural disaster at 200 times the speed of a traditional media-fostered launch….

“Do you want to know what the surprise of this unveiling is?” said Jobs to the eagerly nodding crowd. “The iLaunch itself generated this entire presentation, as well as this very surprise.” …
“Before today, I couldn’t imagine paying $12,000 for a product-unveiling product,” CNET editor Jasmine France said after the presentation. “Now I can’t imagine living without it.”

The whole thing.

Y’all talk funny

So, I’m from Texas. I was born in Texas, and I grew up in a small town. And yet, incredibly, I don’t speak in a slow, syrupy drawl. Or at least I don’t when I’m talking to a buncha damn yankees. (That’s a joke.) In the years I lived in NYC, I was constantly asked: “Where’s your accent?” I guess alla them cosmopolitan types figured I’s sposeda talk like I just got back from shootin an episode-a Hee Haw or somethin’. I really couldn’t say.
Anyway, the question made me pay a lot of attention to accents. I’ve always been interested in George W. Bush’s accent. You’ll notice that while he was born up north, went to prep school and college up north, and “summered” (a word that didn’t exist where I grew up) in Maine, he has an accent. Real folksy. Down to earth.

His brother Jeb, who was born in Texas, and did all his schooling in Texas, hardly has an accent at all.

Curious, no?

I bring up this completely random topic because, perusing the Dallas Observer’s blog, I came upon this entry that links to clips of Hillary Clinton doing what I guess she figures is a southern accent. It’s pretty funny. There’s also a link to Barack Obama sounding a lot more southern-accenty than I’ve ever heard him before.

I guess southern accents are hot. I better see if I can work one up.

Plague of visual stimuli: Check it out

Probably you need a recommendation for another YouTube video about as much as you need exposure to more advertising. Nevertheless, here’s a quite nice seven-minute film, on YouTube, highlighted the other day by the site of The Anti-Advertising Agency.

Looks like the film was made by Studio Smack, a “collective of young artists searching for new esthetics and concepts.” The film is basically a tour of an urban environment, in stark black and white, highlighting the logo overload. It looks really nice. The description on YouTube says it gives “an impression of the enormous amount of visual stimuli that plague us every day. The amount is so big that its commercial effectiveness has become utterly dubious.”

People have been making the argument in that last sentence for about a hundred years, and I don’t know if I buy it even now. But still. Cool little film.

“The Misery Market” and other obit news

Today’s obituary page is teeming with action. Paul Secon, co-founder of the Pottery Barn, has died. Ernest Gallo, co-founder of the famous winery, has died. And Jean Baudrillard has died. I’ll leave comments about Baudrillard to others.

In the Pottery Barn guy obit, I was surprised to learn that the first store was opened in Manhattan all the way back in 1949, selling “discontinued and slightly damaged” items. “In 1952, an article in The New Yorker mentioned that people could buy good-quality, if slightly flawed, ceramics at the Pottery Barn; it started a rush,” the obit says. There were only seven Pottery Barns when the mini-chain was sold in the 1960s — and I was also surprised that there are only 197 today. Doesn’t it seem more ubiquitous than that?

One of the interesting things in the Gallo obit is this:

The brothers were successful from the start, but in those days were no match for industry giants like Petri, Cribari and Italian Swiss Colony.

But the company’s introduction of Thunderbird wine would change that. In 1957, the Gallos developed the brand, a concoction of inexpensive fortified white wine with added citrus flavors.

It was named after the Ford sports car and was aimed directly at “the misery market,” according to “Blood and Wine,” Ellen Hawkes’s unauthorized biography of the family. By the end of 1957, Ms. Hawkes reported, Gallo was making 32 million gallons of Thunderbird.

Staple: The Q&A

Today I’m pleased to present a Q&A with Jeff Staple, of Staple Design, The Reed Space, etc. I’ve forgotten now how I first met him, but as an example of where he fits into “the scene” these days, consider this Consumed column about a collaboration between New Era (the old-school baseball cap company with surprising street cred) and NYC “custom bling” jewelry artist Garbiel Urist — put together and overseen by Staple.

Anyway, the story of Staple’s success has been told many times in magazines like Theme and… I don’t know, lots of magazines, but that Theme piece is one that I remember. The point is, the part of his story that seems to get the most attention is that he says he got into the streetwear/T-shirt/design business by accident (made some T’s for friends, stores wanted to sell them, etc.). I’m interested in what happened after that, because to me Staple seems a bit ahead of the pack in terms of building a real business. If I had to bet on one brand-underground entitity that’s really going to “make it big,” not just as a brand but as a business as well, it would quite likely be Staple. (Luckily for me, I don’t have to bet.)

Here, then, my Q’s, and his A’s.

Part of my interest in the so-called brand underground (so-called by me, of course) was the creative side, but part if it was always in the entrepreneurial side. I feel that by and large being sort of openly entrepreneurial is seen as not just acceptable, but kind of cool, for this generation. (I forget how old you are, but basically I mean contemporary youth culture.) But there’s still some stigma around “selling out” in the “wrong way.” Maybe I’m wrong about all that, so what do you think?

The way I see it, there are a whole lot of creative people in this world. The differences are the ones that are able to make something out if it. Even back in design school for instance, tons of kids had a great eye, great talent, and graduated with great grades. But what you were able to do with that talent was the deal breaker. Maybe it’s because I am now so neck deep in this industry, but in my opinion, there is a HUGE chasm between being an “entrepreneur” and “selling out”.

My company is somewhere floating in the middle of this chasm. I’ve been doing this long enough to remember the days when doing a shoe with Nike or designing a soda can would automatically be deemed as “selling out”. Now it’s a badge of honor. I wonder why this is sometimes. Read more

A (possibly vintage) classic

The other day, Bobby Hundreds posted a bunch of pictures of a friend’s “vintage collection of first generation, early ’90s streetwear shirts.” Putting aside any thoughts about the idea that something from the early 1990s now qualifies as “vintage,” I was interested to see the famous Freshjive Tide-riff T-shirt, which some say was the first of what’s since become a whole category of brand-“parody” shirts that twist a streetwear brand’s name into the graphic look of some other logo/style.

The guy’s collection is impressive. As I’ve said before, someone should do a book of streetwear T-shirts, along the lines of some of the sneaker books. (I keep saying this because I secretly want to write the introduction, but I don’t want to do any of the hard work of putting it together and finding a publisher and all that. Just for the record.)

Assorted news

Freshnessmag has no fewer than three interesting bits of news.

First, Disney freaks may recognize the character Oswald the Lucky Rabit, who pre-dates Mickey Mouse. According to Freshness, the first company that Disney has given (or sold a license, I assume) rights to use Oswald is none other than Comme des Garcons. See the Freshness post for details, including links to stuff about Oswald.

Second: In a post about Supreme’s new line, there’s this image below. I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for somebody to do a riff on the logo-covered NASCAR-style jackets that are (mysteriously, in my view) popular on “the street.” (Specifically, I wanted to see a bunch of the streetwear clique brands get together and do a collaboration on a set of these jackets covered with their logos.) Maybe somebody else has done such a riff before this, but so far as I know, Supreme is the first:

Here is Supreme’s site. Here is an old Consumed about Supreme.

Third & finally: While I’d read that Muji was planning to open a flagship store in New York, I hadn’t realized that it’s going to be in the new NYT building. Interesting. Here is an old Consumed about Muji.

To Do in NYC (and elsewhere)

My old pal John Sellers has a new book out, Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life. “An accomplished slinger of invective, Sellers provides a rousing evaluation of alternative rock… Spot-on observations and a willingness to name names and ascribe blame as well as credit make this one of the best resources to date on indie rock,” says Booklist. “Brilliant, hilarious,” says John Hodgman. (On the other hand: “Asshole,” says New York Magazine.) Anyway, he’s guest-blogging at powells.com this week, and has a slew of readings and events coming up, including appearances (in NYC) at the Chelsea Barnes & Noble on March 5 and Mo Pitkins March 12 — see his new site for details.

Big ups, John. You asshole.

Merchant Memories

In Consumed: Mall of America Merch: At the massive retail destination, shopping for souvenirs … of shopping.

This summer, the Mall of America will observe its 15th anniversary. It remains the largest mall in the United States by total area, at 4.2 million square feet. (But not the world, by a long shot: several new malls in Asia are considerably larger, with the 9.6-million-square-foot South China Mall in Dongguan, China, being the current king.) The Mall of America’s Web site offers various facts about its overwhelming hugeness: it houses more than 500 stores and 20,000 parking spaces, and “258 Statues of Liberty could lie inside.”

Located five minutes from the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, the Mall of America bills itself as “one of the most visited tourist destinations in the world” and a “major U.S. brand” unto itself. One bit of evidence to support these contentions is the sale of merchandise that promotes the mall itself, including branded T-shirts, coffee mugs, key chains and plush toys. Read more

Meta-Brand News: February 2007

I don’t know when it happened, exactly, but it’s an established fact by now: Everything can be thought of as a brand. To help you keep up, Murketing introduces what may become a new monthly feature tracking what’s become, or becoming, or trying to become, a brand.

Tips are welcome: murketing AT robwalker DOT net.

Here is the February wrapup. Links not guaranteed.

“Britain has become a brand,” reports The Times of London.

Maria Bartiromo has “become a brand unto herself in financial news reporting,” says Multichannel News.

“Montenegro, for sure, has a chance to soon become a brand which provokes the perception of a beautiful, safe, unique destination,” according to Visit Montengro.

Che Guevara has “has become a brand himself, a capitalist’s dream,” notes The Daily Texan.

Indian producer/director Vidhu Vinod Chopra “has become a brand,” according to an expert quoted by DNA India.

“I have a chance to become a brand, which is a big focus for me,” Annika Sorenstam tells USA Today. “So is golf.