MURKETING

Thirsty for … crayons?

I noticed this stuff on the shelf at my local Kroger yesterday. It raised a few questions for me. I don’t immediately associate crayons with something I’m supposed to swallow.

It seems particularly odd to brand an “all natural” fruit juice this way. What’s all-natural about crayons? I don’t have the slightest idea how they’re made (Wikipedia says the key ingredient is paraffin wax, “a petroleum product,” and maybe that’s true) but I’m pretty sure it’s a synthetic process that happens in a factory, and they’re not plucked fresh from a field.

Obviously, though, they’re going after kids with this, and there seems to be a feeling out there that a healthy drink for kids could be a big hit.

Apparently Crayons has no direct connection to Crayola, despite the fairly indisputable attempt to suggest that connection. A Seattle Times story on the company’s site says the founder “bought the Crayons trademark for use with food beverages” in 2003. He got it “from someone who had been tinkering with using it with juices on the East Coast.” But it’s “not the same as Crayola.” I guess maybe “crayon” is a generic term that pre-dates Crayola. (Side note: Refreshing my memory about Crayola packaging led me to a collector site with some cool old designs).

Anyway, the Seattle Times article says this beverage is in 2,000 supermarkets nationwide, but there was no sales data.

What this seems to be is a kind of case study in the power of recognizability and familiarity. I’m sure that the stuff caught my eye on the shelf because I recognized the word crayon. In my case, I wasn’t tempted to see what crayons taste like, or whatever, but I guess it does “engage” the shopper on some level. Maybe others — again, children seem to be the main target — will be curious enough to try a can, and if it’s good they’ll come back for more.

One would assume that this strategy has limits, and that the recognizable word has to be not only recognizable, but relevant to the category at hand. But maybe this simply stretches the definition of “relevance,” in that “crayon” is sort of a fun, happy, feel-good word. (Compared to, say, “nylon.”) Interesting experiment.

Bonus link: Metafilter “All you ever needed to know about crayons.”

Ghetto Grocery T: Funny?

Freshness recently offered a look at the latest from Upper Playground, including the T above. I’m not sure what to think about it.

Mad Men Musings: Bad memories

Poor Don Draper! Fresh off a wildly successful presentation that landed Kodak as a client — leaving the execs slack-jawed in amazement at his spiel about their slide wheel as a “carousel” that reveals all that is truly important to us in life — Don goes home to find his family has left for Thanksgiving vacation without him. For a moment, he apparently envisioned arriving just in time to make up for his previously dickish behavior by joining them for a journey to the in-laws’ … but no. They’re gone, and all he can do is sit alone on the stairs, perhaps reflecting on the fact that his bullshit has gotten so good that evidently even he believes it. Or he did. For a minute. Read more

In Consumed: The Cult of Gocco

Print Gocco: How the end of a product turned into a publicity event — and, maybe, a new beginning.

… Print Gocco is both better known and somehow cooler than it has ever been here. And this is almost certainly because in late 2005, the Riso Kagaku Corporation, now an international and largely digital business, announced that Gocco was dead…

Read the column at the NYT Magazine site.

Additional Links: Save Gocco! … Shu-Ju Wang’s site … Blissen … Wurst Gallery Gocco show … Paper Source … Gocco at Poppytalk

Going for the Gut

New Murketing column in the November issue of Fast Company:

In the recent book Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer makes the case for intuition. Curiously, many assessments of the book took for granted that his arguments, familiar to readers of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, cut against conventional wisdom — that trusting intuition is, in fact, counterintuitive. As one friendly interviewer, casting Gigerenzer as a contrarian, put it: “In modern society, gut thinking has a bad reputation.”

Oh, really? …

Continue reading at Fast Company’s site.

The Ugly Americans — who rock BAPE!

Portfolio has a big piece about Nigo. I skimmed it quickly, and I have to say that the Complex blog found the one interesting quote, from Hiroshi Fujiwara:

Fujiwara, who is still revered in Tokyo as perhaps the one man who can launch a trend, is even more dismissive of Nigo. “I just wonder how he feels when he sees ugly people wearing his clothes. If you go to the countryside in America and people are wearing Bathing Ape, that’s not very cool.” Fujiwara, now a consultant for Nike and Levi’s, shrugs. “I thought he was more like us, but he changed.”

Hm. Well, I hope his clients Nike and Levi’s take heed, and prevent “ugly people” from buying their products.

Flickr Interlude

life in these united states
Originally uploaded by a nameless yeast

Another slap in the face

The Creative Class blog trashed last weekend’s issue of the NYT Magazine. But I escaped the beatdown — sort of:

The whole thing would be completely inane if it didn’t include Bob Walker’s piece on “the Donald’s” new project downtown.

Bad enough there’s no link to this site. But Bob Walker? That’s harsh.

Maybe global consumers know the difference between George Bush and Starbucks

If I had a dime for every story I’ve read about “trouble for American brands” in the global marketplace because of the U.S.’s poor reputation in the world right now … well, then I’d probably have something more fun to do than post this Business Week story about MTV Arabia:

How will the likes of Justin Timberlake and Rihanna go down in a region that’s not exactly brimming with goodwill toward Americans? Better than you might think. Middle Eastern youth may not agree with U.S. politics, but they can’t get enough of Western music and fashion. “The myth about the Arab world is that people go to bed at night hating the U.S. and wake up hating Israel,” says James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, a think tank in Washington. “But go to any mall in Saudi Arabia, and you’ll see kids in jeans and baseball caps hanging out at Starbucks and McDonald’s.”

Tuning out as turn on

Rolling Stone has a bunch of stuff from its “Hot Issue” online, but not the best piece in it, which is by Rob Sheffield. It’s the “Hot Mood: Not dealing with reality.”

Mini excerpt:

We keep hearing that newspapers are dying, and we keep hearing it’s because of all this shiny new aweso-media, but it’s probably just because ignoring any kind of news is now a fundamental part of the nation’s daily routine for not loosing what’s left of our shit.

It’s an amusing piece, and it’s meant to be amusing, but at the same time, I kind of think he’s on to something.

Why align yourself in public with a dog-fight organizer?

Speaking of uniforms: Three times in the last few weeks I’ve seen guys wearing Michael Vick jerseys. What’s that about? What’s the signal being sent by aligning yourself with Vick after he’s admitted to various unsavory and criminal acts related to dog-fighting? My understanding is that Vick jerseys have been pulled from stores and the NFL Shop etc., so clearly the league recognizes that the time for being pro-Vick has ended. Why haven’t these fans got the message?

I live in Georgia, and it’s pretty hard to overstate what a huge deal Vick was for the Falcons, so one theory is that it’s just residual football fandom. Basically: “Okay, dog-fighting is bad — but what a great athlete!”

Another theory is that, in addition to the above, Vick seems vaguely cooler now (to these people), for outlaw reasons.

Another theory is that these guys are, in addition to being fans of Vick, actually fans of dogfighting. Far-fetched perhaps, but somebody is a dog-fighting fan, or it wouldn’t exist.

Another theory is that it’s calculated provocation. Before Vick’s guilty plea, at least, a few voices suggested that there was some racial bias involved in going after him in particular. (Two of the three guys I’ve seen in Vick jerseys were black; all three were young to young-ish, between late teens and early 30s.) So possibly there’s some residual Vick-got-a-raw-deal sentiment. Or more abstractly, the provocation may have no particular connection to Vick, just provocation for its own sake, like Sid Vicious wearing a Swastika T-shirt: Basically, “I’m wearing this solely to piss you off.”

[Quasi-related: T-shirts saying “Vick Em” were briefly sold by a Texas Tech frat, showing a representation of Vick hanging a Texas Aggie dog mascot. These were promptly banned.]

Finally, there’s the cluelessness/indifference theory: It’s the only clean shirt on laundry day, and the guys wearing it just don’t think about or don’t really care how others around them react to Vick’s name.

Possibly there’s another explanation I’m missing. In all cases, I think it’s a weird decision.

Flickr Interlude

Virtual reality
Originally uploaded by tualatin

“Disney World. Galicia, Spain. 2007.”

Proof of membership

walker.jpg
Originally uploaded by UniWatch

Technically, this image is not in the Murketing Flickr pool, but I’m posting it anyway. It’s the JPG version of the card proclaiming my honorary position on the Uniwatch Active Roster. This weekend I got my real card in the mail from Paul “Uniwatch” Lukas. Card design is based on the uniform of a sports team chosen by the member. I chose the New Orleans Saints. See other card designs here. Very cool.

More of the recent very fine actual additions to the Murketing photo pool will be posted soon.

A book that needs a title

Maybe you’re wondering why there’s so little fresh material on Murketing lately, or maybe you’re just relieved. Well, here’s the reason.

I’ve been working a book for a while, and now it’s finally done and will come out circa May 2008, from Random House.

The broad subject of the book can be summarized in the subtitle: “The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are.”

As subscribers to the Journal of Murketing newsletter know, the title is still under discussion. (I’d been calling the book “I’m With The Brand,” but that’s been basically nixed.)

In the newsletter’s most recent installment I asked for feedback about four titles now under consideration. Thanks to the generosity of Random House (and some surprisingly good guesswork on my part as to how much feedback I’d get), almost all of the newsletter readers who weighed in will get an advance galley of the book next year.

Sadly I have no such incentive to offer you here — although maybe there will be other giveaways in the future, we’ll see — but I would still be very curious to hear any reactions you may have to the four titles being considered:

In all cases the subtitle, again, will likely be “The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are.” If you have opinions, suggestions, etc., please leave them in the comments. I truly value your feedback on this.

* * PLEASE NOTE: Do not email me about this. I beg you, put your comments below! Be anonymous if you want! But I’ve already given the email feedback to the publishers, so put your thoughts here where they can see them if they want. Thanks!

Back to more posting very soon.

In Consumed: Trumped

Trump SoHo: The Donald comes downtown — and maybe, these days, he belongs.

There was a time when the name “Trump SoHo” would have sounded like an oxymoron or a punch line. That time has passed. A 46-story, $3,000-a-square-foot condo-hotel with that very name is climbing into the skyline from a section of Manhattan once considered so hopeless that it might as well be razed to accommodate an expressway. Of course, some people still won’t accept the idea — like the neighborhood residents and preservationists who recently converged outside a promotional party for the project, waving signs scrawled with slogans like “Earth to Trump: Get Out of SoHo Now!” Donald Trump thanked them for the free publicity and claimed that although the building won’t open until 2009, there are already 3,200 purchase applications for its 400 units….

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site.