Some 30,000 Dutch women (or maybe just most of them were women, I’m not sure) received letters that looked handwritten, seemed to come from a secret admirer, addressed them as “darling,” and said: “”When are we going to have a drink again; I am really curious about you,” the letters said. All were signed, “lots of love, M.”
Actually the letters were from Renault, as part of a marketing effort on behalf of one of its cars.
The Amsterdam headquarters of Renault was bombarded with angry calls from more than 500 people — mainly women, among whom the car is popular — who had received the letters in the post.They complained their partners either suspected them of carrying on an illicit affair behind their backs or that they believed they themselves had a secret admirer wanting to meet them.
Full story. Via Agenda Inc.
As a longtime fan of Joshua Glenn, I’m pretty curious about the book he has put together: Taking Things Seriously. “A wonder cabinet of seventy-five unlikely thingamajigs that have been invested with significance and transformed into totems, talismans, charms, relics, and fetishes…. The owners of these objects convey their excitement in short, often poignant essays that invite readers to participate in the enjoyable act of interpreting things.”
In all, sounds like a thoughtful take on on material culture (which is, of course, my beat, so I’m a little biased about why I think this project is such a good idea) by an interesting bunch of contributors including Paul Lukas, Thomas Frank, and Luc Sante.
I was also pleased to learn recently about Glenn’s Brainiac blog on the Boston Globe site, where he’s got a post listing all contributors and a running account of praise received.
For months I’ve been reading and hearing about the supposed backlash against bottled water. The stories, whether online or on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, always point to those couple of restaurants in San Francisco that serve tap water, and say that the bottled water industry is concerned about the tide turning against them, and so on.
And at some point, every story includes some equivalent of what’s known as “the to be sure graf.” That term refers to the paragraph — sometimes literally beginning with the words “to be sure” — that completely undercuts the entire thesis of the story. In this case, the To Be Sure Graf discloses that bottled water sales are rising steadily. That is to say: There is no backlash.
Yes, people are raising concerns. Yes, they make an excellent case about the downsides of bottled water. But in terms of marketplace proof that consumers are actually changing their behavior in a measurable way? It’s not there. As the WSJ noted yesterday: “Bottled-water volume rose 11% in the first half of 2007. Soda volume decreased 5.9%.”
In general, this kind of thing drives me crazy. But I’ve decided to stop complaining about it. Because I’ve had an epiphany. Bullshit trend stories can be a force for good.
What I mean is, it has occurred to me that it’s possible that the bullshit trend stories about consumers fleeing bottled water could, eventually, if they achieve critical mass, actually cause consumers to flee bottled water — or at least to recycle their empties.
For years, activists have made the case against bottled water. Lately, that case has also been made in some pretty good articles. But that hasn’t been enough to make any particularly noticeable impact on consumer behavior. So maybe dubious trend stories will do the trick. If enough people keep writing them, then some day, they will actually start to be true.
E pointed out to me this magazine ad. This project seems to come from Arrow, the apparel brand, and involves “saving” Ellis Island. Here’s the related Web site.
I don’t know what the threats are to Ellis Island, but saving it sounds like a good idea. What’s a little surprising about this ad is that line at the top of it: “Where the world came together and American style began.”
Yeah? Is that what we’re supposed to think of when we think of why Ellis Island should be “saved”? Its role in the history of American style? What’s that even supposed to mean? And isn’t Ellis Island kind of where the world came together and was instructed to assimilate ASAP? Maybe that’s why everybody in the ad is sporting the same blandly WASP aesthetic. Anyway, the United States certainly benefited from the generations of immigrants it attracted, but I kind of think the contributions weren’t really so much about style.
What makes cities grow in the 21st century? This IHT article points to consumers:
In a discussion paper titled “Consumer City,” Edward Glaeser and co-authors Jed Kolko and Albert Saiz call this “the demand for density.” People now want to live in dense areas because dense areas offer what people want to consume — opera, sports teams, art museums, varied cuisine. In France, for example, he and his fellow researchers found a robust correlation between the number of restaurants and the growth of cities.
“The sovereignty of the consumer is inescapable,” Glaese says.
The number of these “consumer immigrants” – those moving back to the city seeking a better quality of life – is relatively small compared with the hundreds of thousands of poorer economic migrants who traditionally head to the inner city.
But the “consumer immigrants” have a special significance because they are rich….
Glaeser et. al.’s paper, which is actually from 2000, can be downloaded as a PDF here. I haven’t read it yet, but I intend to. I’m wondering about that restaurants comment — a “correlation” between city population growth and restaurant numbers doesn’t seem to prove much.
Via Creative Class.
I’m a little late on this, but what can I say, I’ve been busy.
Remember this earlier post about New Era and gang-related cap designs that surfaced in Cleveland? Counterfeit Chic notes a similar ruckus in NYC. According Fox News (so it must be true):
Outraged local activists charge that New Era, the caps’ manufacturer, and the New York Yankees — whose famous interlocking NY cap features a choice of a red and black bandanna design for the Bloods, blue and gray for the Crips and a gold crown for the Latin Kings.
This an Abacus watch. According to the Josh Spear site: “Ignoring the fact that you may miss appointments by a few minutes thanks to the, um, interpretive visuals delivered by the watch, this thing may represent the most immature representation of time since the cuckoo clock, a fact further solidified by the watch’s refusal to tell time until the wearer is perfectly still.” It costs about $150, here.
Earlier notes on low-utility watches here, here, and here.
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Rob Walker on August 29, 2007
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So this piggish ad exec and his colleague are pondering the mystery of women as they sort through their agency’s research on behalf of a cosmetics client, and the piggish guy says, “I don’t speak moron. Do you speak moron?”
Apart from suggesting to the Mad Men audience — once again — that the typical 1960 ad agency employee held a truly contemptuous view of women, surely the line is an intentional echo of David Ogilvy’s famous observation: “The consumer isn’t a moron,” he admonished his fellow ad-makers in Confessions of An Advertising Man, published in 1963. “She is your wife.”
Ah, but on Mad Men, most advertising professionals seem to think their wives are morons. So it’s no great surprise when the secretarial pool is herded into a room to try on lipsticks, and the ad gang watches through two-way glass, amusing themselves with a barrage of nasty and condescending remarks about the women. Then again, Mad Men itself doesn’t seem that impressed with the female consumer of 1960. When one secretary declines to paw through the free samples, and manages to articulate an opinion that rises above the incoherence of her peers, she’s treated like singular creature: A thinking female. She’s treated that way by the fictional ad men, but also, really, by the show itself.
Now that she herself has apparently been drafted into the efforts to create advertising to sell lipstick, we’ll see what the writers have her come up with.
The interesting thing about Ogilvy’s famous quote is that he was making a broader point about the importance of facts in advertising. What the consumer wants, he wrote, is “all the information you can give her.” Amusingly, he suggests that in a market where “competing brands are more and more alike” (sound familiar?), sometimes the best strategy is to list facts that are true of all products in a given category. For instance, his ads for Shell gave consumers facts, “many of which other gasoline makers could give, but don’t.” (We saw this idea deployed by Mad Men central character Don in the first episode, for client Lucky Strikes.)
In other words, Ogilvy was really pretty much neutral on whether the consumer was a moron. His point was that the consumer doesn’t want to be treated like a moron. The ad pro may or may not be fluent “in moron,” as our piggish friend above put it, but better not use it to communicate. That’s an interesting distinction to think about next time you hear a contemporary marketing expert going on about today’s savvy consumers. Let’s face it: We’ll never never know what they’re saying behind the two-way glass.
[Complete Mad Men musings archive here.]
The Washington Post‘s Linton Weeks offers an entertainingly cranky piece on “cutility.” Examples: “Everyday tools and objects are receiving total makeovers. Orvis sells a tool kit that includes flower-patterned pliers, scissors and utility knife. Target offers a toilet brush holder shaped like a black bear.” Needless to say, cutility is a theme of many Consumeds, and I wish I’d thought of the word. It’s got phad written all over it! Anyway, Weeks writes:
Alan Andreasen, a marketing guru at Georgetown University, says the trend toward cutility is “an attempt by lots of people to individualize both themselves and their possessions.”
He equates the cuting-up of the commonplace with “tattoos, customized cellphones and ringtones as a way to step away from mass commoditization.”
Credit, he says, goes to the clever marketers who have found ways to breathe life into mundane commodity categories. “Sure,” he says, some “people have lots more discretionary money to spend on these things, but I think it’s more about the idea of trying to be your own person.”
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