An "organic molecule found naturally in the body, particularly in the brain," is "popping up in beverages and dietary supplements," reports Laura Johannes in the Wall Street Journal (1/24/12). While not approved by the FDA as a prescription drug, Citicoline is prescribed by some doctors in other countries "to help regenerate the brain after a stroke." Some scientists also think "citicoline speeds up formation of brain cell membranes and may boost production of neurotransmitters essential to brain function."

However, "clinical trials found citicoline was no more effective than a placebo." That is plenty good enough for makers of Nawgan, a new drink that contains 250 milligrams of Cognizin, a brand name for citicoline, as marketed by Kyowa Hakko USA. Nawgan’s slogan is, "What you drink is what you think," and its "website invites consumers to track their mental performance with an online memory and focus test." Cognizin is also part of the mix in the 5-Hour Energy Drink from Living Essentials, and is sold in capsule form by Healthy Origins.

Citicoline is believed to be safe, although some report "occasional mild gastrointestinal upset." A study sponsored by Kyowa "of 60 healthy women found a monthlong regime of daily doses of citcoline resulted in improved attention and fewer errors on a cognitive test compared with a placebo." Another test, on 2,000 people, sponsored by another citicoline maker, is due out in May. Meanwhile, Dr. Gary Small of the Longevity Center (who has no vested interest) says citicoline "might be worth a try" but recommends "exercise and a diet rich in antioxidants" to boost brain power.

Cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus "investigates the intersection between neuroscience and music" in his latest book, Guitar Zero, reports Bruce Headlam in the New York Times (1/26/12). Gary’s interest was both personal and professional. At age 38, he decided he wanted to learn to play the guitar; as a scientist he wanted to explore the "long-held tenet" that the older we grow the harder it gets to acquire new skills. This may be especially true of guitar skills, given the instrument’s quirky, non-linear bent (e.g., "the guitar has the same notes at different frets along different strings").

The challenge was especially acute for Gary, who claims to have no musical talent. But he did have a year-long sabbatical from New York University, during which he dedicated himself to learning to play guitar, using a $74 Yamaha acoustic and various instruction books. Scientifically, he was interested in "how the brain can essentially rewire itself to make up for deficits caused by stroke, trauma or even a non-existent sense of rhythm." Musically, he was mainly interested in learning how to improvise, as opposed to learning specific songs or riffs.

Learning scales and improvising versus learning songs and copying actually represent the two "modes of mental processing at the heart" of Gary’s book. The former requires "a tool kit of rules that can be applied in new situations" while the latter is more about data mining, or "dredging up material from a vast store of knowledge." Gary’s interest is "in how the human mind toggles between the two approaches." Gary’s goal now is "to move beyond both and play from emotion, or as he said, ‘from the brain stem.’" He confesses to being mostly analytical as a guitarist but adds that he’s "not sure if that’s a limitation of me as a musician or as a human being."

The "cultural context" of the Glock, one of the best-selling handguns in America, is captured in a new book by Paul M. Barrett, reports Carol Memmott in USA Today (1/5/12). Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun, offers a “succinct and fascinating study of a weapon created by an Austrian businessman who, before he sold guns, made curtain rods and door hinges.” Gaston Glock created the pistol that “would become the weapon of choice for the Austrian Army” in 1982. It featured a “large-capacity spring-action magazine,” and “its quick reload, its reliability and its accuracy” soon attracted the interest of “law enforcement agencies around the world.”

As the Glock became a favorite of US police departments, “the gun-buying public followed suit. And like countless other consumer fads … the Glock, with its black matte finish and boxy shape, found its way into the popular culture.” Bruce Willis lauded its firepower” in 1990′s Die Hard 2 and in 1998′s US Marshals, Tommy Lee Jones told Robert Downey Jr. to get rid of his Taurus PT945 and ‘get yourself a Glock and lose that nickel-plated sissy pistol’.”

The Glock went on to be featured in rap lyrics and videos, while “authors like Elmore Leonard dropped Glocks into their novels. Prime-time TV cops began carrying them.” And then there’s real life: Saddam Hussein had Glock on him “when he was pulled out of his hidey-hole in 2003,” and when six people where killed and Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was injured last year, the gunman used a Glock. The book also includes a biography of Gaston Glock as well as “how the business missteps of Smith & Wesson, Colt, Beretta and other gunmakers helped Glock roll over all of them.”

A new book posits that a Jewish journalist should get credit for inventing the Volkswagen Beetle, reports Phil Patton in the New York Times (1/20/12). “The Extraordinary Life of Josef Ganz” by Paul Schilperoord “provides a picture of the automotive culture in Germany between the wars, with many, small, struggling companies.” It also challenges the “standard history — that Hitler hired Ferdinand Porsche … to design and build his Strength Through Joy car.” Instead it tells the story of a “people’s car” thought leader who “was arrested, chased from Germany and nearly airbrushed out of history.”

Paul says that the concept of a "people’s car" in Germany in the 1930s was almost a cliche, not unlike "personal computer" in 1980s America. So, there were lots of people pursuing the idea, including Josef Ganz, who wrote for a magazine called Motor-Kritik and "advocated a people’s car with an air-cooled engine placed at the rear, based on a backbone-type frame and using independent suspension at both ends." He favored a design advanced by a friend, Paul Jaray, “whose shape resembled what is now known as the Beetle.”

According to the book, "Ganz was the only one arguing for a combination of tubular chassis, rear engine, streamlined body and independent suspension — a formula that would produce a light, affordable, family car." Instead of thanking him, the Gestapo arrested him and threw him out of Germany. In 1965, Ganz gave an interview in which he claimed credit for inventing the Volkswagen, however lots of people were working on similar ideas in the ’30s. "The Beetle was an accumulation from many ideas and from so many people," says Paul Shilperoord, "that it is impossible to say one person was the originator of it."

Principles and practices for better branding. By Ayo Seligman and Kay Whitchurch. We hear it every day: Everything is changing. Social media, globalization and climate change are just a few of the powerful — and complex — forces at work in our lives. Not only are people more connected, with constant access to a world of opinion mixed with fact, but they’re also feeling less confident, lacking control over everything from home to work to politics.

Nearly every business category is more crowded, too. The grocery aisle was once the most salient example of brand proliferation. Now consumer electronics, fashion, entertainment, travel, and even finance boast a dizzying array of product and service brands … read >>

"The fastest-growing and wealthiest segment of the population has been ignored or forgotten by Hollywood’s broadcast and cable networks," reports Joe Flint in the Los Angeles Times (1/22/12). That segment would be "senior citizens," and John Erickson hopes to change their world with "a cable channel designed for the AARP-adjacent." John "made his fortune building large retirement communities," and got the idea for a seniors-specific television after building TV studios for residents and noticing how engaged they became in programming their own television station.

"What amazed me was the interest level of the residents in their own lives and how much attention they paid to this little television channel," he says. And so he developed RLTV (originally Retirement Living TV but now known as Re-define Life TV) and "bought a block of afternoon time on a few Comcast systems in the Northeast," as well as time on DirecTV along with some other distributors. He’s also recruited some familiar former network-television stars such as Joan Lunden (61) and Sam Donaldson (77) as well as Florence Hendersen (also 77!) to host shows.

Most of RLTV’s programming focused on healthcare, finance, politics and travel, although programming chief Elliot Jacobson hopes to launch a boomer version of American Idol soon, too. "It’s important for us to be advocates for the demographic we serve," he says. Senior power "can’t be ignored. According to the 2010 census, there are more than 99 million Americans older than 50. The over-50s are also one of the fastest growing groups on Facebook … And they have money. The AARP, citing information from the US Consumer Expenditure Survey, says adults over 50 spent $2.7 trillion on consumer goods in 2010."

Offering senior discounts is "absurd, illogical, and helping fuel the economic divide," opines Don Campbell in USA Today (1/18/12). "No doubt, there are seniors living in poverty and stories to be found of elderly couples eating dog food," he writes. "But the data are indisputable that seniors have continued to fare better financially than younger generations. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that from 1984 to 2009, the median net worth for people 65 and older had increased 42 percent, while the median net worth for those younger than 35 had dropped an astounding 68 percent."

A Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances, meanwhile, "found that net worth had dropped across the board" between 2009 and 2007, "but had dropped least for those heads of households ages 65 to 74. The same study showed that the median net worth of the 55-64 age bracket in 2009 was $222,000, while the median net worth for families in the 35-44 bracket was only $69,000." Seniors, says Don, are also "more likely to have a mortgage-free home, a retirement nest egg, Social Security income and perhaps a job-related pension."

What’s more, says Don, the "top income-earning years for most professional and skilled workers are from about age 50 to age 62. Which means that people who are making the most money and have the highest net worth are in effect being subsidized in the marketplace by a generation 20 and 30 years younger that often is struggling to pay off student loans, establish a career, start a family and buy a first home." He concludes: "What I wonder about is why thirty- and forty-somethings aren’t livid that senior citizens — the most pampered, patronized and pandered-to group in America — get to save money simply by maintaining a pulse."

Left for dead in 2009, Esquire magazine in 2012 is "killing it," reports David Carr in the New York Times (1/23/12). Just three years ago, Esquire’s editor-in-chief, David Granger, was firing staff and cutting editorial pages, having been "beaten up by a crop of lad magazines … then hammered by the flight of advertisers and readers to the web." Advertising pages were down 24.3 percent and the magazine made a list of "twelve major brands" that would be gone in a year.

Instead, in 2011 "Esquire was up 13.5 percent in ad pages from the previous year," and Hearst, its publisher, says it "was No. 1 in year-over-year performance." Esquire’s journey back from the brink "is complicated," but started with keeping its "seasoned writers and editors" versus dumping them in favor of "shiny faces with reduced price tags." David Granger also "departed from standard design templates and modernized the front of the magazine to reflect the growing interest in marginalia and small laughs, with goofy asides and in-jokes."

The net effect is that of a magazine that "looks and feels like something a bunch of guys put together for a bunch of other guys, not a glossy widget produced by a big corporation." Esquire also experimented with QR codes on its cover, calling up a video with Robert Downey Jr., for instance. Its iPad app similarly adopted a multimedia approach, and its website attracted more than "two million visitors in December," up from just 300,000 in 2009. David says he thinks "well-turned print products" are too often given short-shrift these days. "There’s nothing wrong with the magazine form that constant diligence won’t fix," he says.

Bricks-and-mortar retailers are still scrambling to respond to Amazon’s business model, reports Ann Zimmerman in the Wall Street Journal (1/23/12). "The traditional retailers are still doing business the old way while Amazon has reinvented the model," says Sucharita Mulpuru, a Forrester Research retail analyst. "Walmart and Target are willing to sell a few things at a loss," says Sucharita. "Amazon’s whole business is a loss leader." This is because Amazon uses its other businesses — like cloud data storage — "to subsidize" its lower prices.

Following a weak holiday season, "with sales at stores open at least a year rising just 1.7 percent, about half of what analysts expected," Target issued a letter to its vendors seeking "special products that would set it apart from competitors and shield it for the price comparisons that have become so easy for shoppers to perform on their computers and smartphones." It also "asked the suppliers to help it match rivals’ prices" and "said it might create a subscription service that would give shoppers a discount on regularly purchased merchandise."

Target hopes this will help reduce "showrooming," or the shopper practice of looking for an item in a store, and then buying it from an online rival. Target has suffered particularly "in electronics, movies, books and music … Those products accounted for 20 percent of Target’s annual sales of $65 billion in 2010, down from 22 percent in the prior year." The retailer has also re-launched its website and says "it will open a series of temporary boutiques" featuring items "from popular regional stores." While the boutiques may help differentiate Target, analyst Colin McGranahan says "they are completely immaterial" to its bottom line.

The future belongs to those who measure the total brand experience. By Al Wittemen. Each and every one of us has endured our share of pain over the last several years. In all my years in marketing, it’s safe to say I’ve never experienced anything quite like the last five. It now appears that the worst of the economic calamity is behind us, but it would be foolish to think that the pain is over.

In fact, in many ways, it is just beginning. A recent IBM survey of 1,700 chief marketing officers across 64 countries spelled out the sources of our discomfort. It identified some of the biggest challenges facing chief marketing officers, each of which is a pervasive and universal game changer … read >>