Posts from — January 2011

Ideas worth buying are ideas worth fighting for. By Dino de Leon. Welcome to Idea Club. The first rule of Idea Club is: you do not talk about Idea Club. The second rule of Idea Club is: you do not talk about Idea Club! Apologies to Tyler Durden (of Fight Club fame), but the process of creating ideas can be a bit like a bare-knuckle brawl.

Brainstorming, ideation, concepting — whatever you call it — is fraught with unpredictability. Even with a creative brief and clear objectives, there is no way to guarantee that you will emerge victorious. But we battle on in pursuit of ideas and innovation, blissfully ignoring conceptual skinned knuckles and black eyes … read >>

The "more than 26,000 Disney Princess items on the market" yielded some $4 billion in sales in 2009, reports Annie Murphy Paul in a New York Times review of Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein (1/23/11). Selling princess gear to little girls is actually a relatively new profit center for Disney. It all started in 2000, when Disney executive Andy Mooney attended a "Disney on Ice" show and "found himself surrounded by little girls in (homemade) princess costumes."

As marketing, writes Peggy, this was "genius, dovetailing with the precise moment that girls need to prove they are girls, when they will latch onto the most exaggerated images their culture offers in order to stridently shore up their femininity." Indeed, "developmental psychology research shows that until as late as age seven, children are convinced that external signs — clothing, hairstyle, favorite color, choice of toys" define their gender identity.

Peggy, herself, appears to be conflicted about all of this, writing: "Just because little girls wear the tulle does not mean they’ve drunk the Kool-aid. Plenty of them shoot baskets in ball gowns or cast themselves as the powerful evil stepsister bossing around the sniveling Cinderella. Yet, even if girls stray from the prescribed script, doesn’t it exert its influence? Don’t our possessions reflect who we are; shape, even define our experience?" Then again, as Annie Murphy Paul points out, the thing about phases is that kids grow out of them.

A "tweeting team of cleaver-wielding butcherettes" is opening a sustainable meat store in Los Angeles, reports Krista Simmons in the Los Angeles Times (1/20/11). Amelia Posada and Erika Nakamura, known as Lindy and Grundy, respectively, met at a drag show where Lindy was a bartender. Grundy was “a classically-trained chef” who liked “being assigned to the butcher block.” They were married in Connecticut and got the idea to open a butcher shop after having trouble finding a place selling local, sustainable meat.

They are both former vegetarians who relish their role as women in a traditionally male profession. Says Grundy: "I do think that no matter how good we are or how long we’ve been doing it, we are two five-feet-tall women … People will always look to the big dude in back." But Shawna Dawson, who organizes artisanal festivals in LA, thinks Lindy and Grundy have an edge. "I don’t think it’s shocking that people would be intimidated by someone who’s wielding a knife and splattered in blood … but they have an approachable, female face … it’s more accessible.

She adds: "Many of the butchers around are not people the younger generation would look at as peers. I think they’re filling a much-needed niche." Their shop "will have a distinct sense of their ’50s-inspired personal style … design elements include walls covered in subway tiles and floor-to-ceiling chicken-wire glass windows lining the corridor from the retail space to the walk-in cooler, which will allow customers to view the women breaking down animals." They also "aim to teach courses on cooking the whole animal and lessons on butchering," as well as offer online webisodes. "It feels like we’re making a contribution," says Grundy, "and that’s really awesome."

Linda Cummings is such a good cashier that customers will wait for her, reports Ralph Gardner Jr. in the Wall Street Journal (1/25/11). They’re not waiting because she’s slow: quite the opposite. Linda is known for her efficiency. She knows how to grab those UPCs on the first scan, every time, and has memorized the price of every fruit and vegetable. Her efficiency is confirmed by her employer, D’Agostino: "A recent performance sheet showed her with 179 customers over the course of her shift, an average of 48 an hour and 18.38 items scanned per minute."

That’s apparently well above average. But it’s in addition to Linda’s relentlessly sunny disposition, which is decidedly rare among cashiers. "It’s who I am," says Linda. "I just can’t see being nasty. I can’t walk around with that negative feeling inside me every day." Linda might have reasons to be sullen, though. The D’Agostino job is just part-time for her; just five hours, four days a week. Her full-time job, which she works seven days a week, is as a home health aide.

But she’s been working at D’Agostino — on Lexington and 83rd in New York City — for ten years now, long enough for her to get to know her customers, and for them to know her … "at least to the extent that anyone can get to know someone else over a transaction that usually takes no more than a minute or two to complete, where conversation occurs around the edges and with the next customer breathing down your neck." Linda says it’s all about flow, and keeping the flow going, especially when things are slow. "Working is difficult," she admits, but also says, "I love it when it’s busy … The busier the better."

Judge Philip S. Straniere is so entertaining that other judges go out of their way to read his rulings, reports William Glaberson in the New York Times (1/25/11). "I have to read it because I’m sure there will be some little twist or something that he wants to share that has very little to do with the decision," says Charles Apotheker, a fellow jurist. For example: "He has been known to opine for no obvious reason that Papa John’s does not sell what New Yorkers call pizza, and that Clark Kent ‘was in fact only a person who understood the difference between right and wrong.’"

He has also taken on the credit card industry, which he wrote is "like the Land of Oz, run by a Wizard who no one has ever seen." He has compared Citibank to Vito Corleone of "The Godfather," in terms of the way they justify their interest rates. In a single decision issued last June, he managed to include reference to "The Music Man," "The Miracle Worker," "Oklahoma" and "Seinfeld." He’s been known to quote Laurel and Hardy, Flip Wilson and SpongeBob SquarePants.

Judge Philip’s humor transcends mere pop culture references, however: "After one lawyer suggested that a ruling of his was not adequately supported, he responded by footnoting every word in the first paragraph of a later decision, including ‘a,’ ‘the’ and ‘two’ (‘the cardinal number between one and three in the Arabic number system probably derived from Old English, according to footnote 4′)." The goal, says Judge Philip, is simply to make sure everyone gets his reasoning. As he explains: "If you refer to ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ everyone says, ‘I understand that."

"… A success as uncanny as Apple’s has many fathers, one of which is luck," writes Holman W. Jenkins Jr. in the Wall Street Journal (1/26/11). The lucky one, in this case, is Steve Jobs, and his good fortune was his exile from Apple in the ’90s. That relegated him to building workstations for scientists at Next and making movies at Pixar while guys like Vivendi’s Jean-Marie Messier were prematurely chasing visions of wireless, digital nirvana, and creating "what became known as Europe’s $500 billion ‘wireless bubble.’"

By the time Steve re-joined Apple in 1996, he was more "preoccupied with cutting and bailing and creating the comparatively unambitious iMac" than with joining the bubble. And when Jobs did begin to develop a mobile strategy, he took a slow-food approach: "The original iPod had no wireless connectivity. The iPhone and iPad today are still designed in anticipation of the user storing most media content locally. Only now, in 2011, is Apple building a cloud farm in North Carolina," which could fulfill Jean-Marie’s decade-old vision.

In short, Holman writes, Steve’s "slowness is the key to Apple’s success. His focus on the device, his emphasis on perfecting the user experience, meant holding back, not overreaching. The iPod would only be a music player. The iPhone and the iPad would be web-browsing devices that wouldn’t play most of the video on the web. Apple TV remains a ‘hobby’ (his words) because there’s no way yet to deliver an acceptable user experience." Steve Jobs is "the great withholder," whose motto could be "speed kills." Jean-Marie, meanwhile, was last week convicted in a French court "for misleading investors."

Low-power FM radio — LPFM — is changing communities, if not the world, suggests Brian Stelter in the New York Times (1/25/11). For example, KOCZ-FM, a 100-watt, non-commercial station in Opelousas, Louisiana, "has become an unlikely lifeline in this town of 22,000, helping to promote local artists and church events in ways that commercial stations either cannot or will not." John Freeman, KOCZ’s executive director, says that among other things, the station has also brought zydeco music back to radio, and believes that it has prompted commercial stations to start playing the genre again.

"It helps promote that culture — and that’s something that’s very significant for the African-American community here," says John. The station also hosts local candidate forums that otherwise would not be broadcast. "Politically, some people don’t talk to other people, but we talk to everybody," says Lena Charles, chairwoman of the Southern Development Foundation, which operates the station. FCC chairman Julius Genachowski agrees: "Low-power FM stations are small, but they make a giant contribution to the local community programming."

Some see LPFMs as a "corrective" to commercial radio, although there are relatively few LPFMs. This is expected to change, however, with the Local Community Radio Act, which President Obama signed during the lame-duck Congress. The bill follows a decade of lobbying to enable the FCC to grant more 100-watt licenses for non-commercial, community use. Funding typically comes from local businesses, like funeral homes and beauty parlors. The stations have little idea how many listeners they attract, but they do have one metric: the number of volunteers to host shows. Right now, KOCZ has "more than 20 on the list … enough to start a second station."

Integration must be seamless with online and offline experiences. By Beth Ann Kaminkow. The current pace of innovation is hard to keep up with for the marketer, the retailer, as well as the consumer.

We ask ourselves as marketers, what purpose (if any) does innovation most serve today? Where can it provide the most value and growth potential for a business? Beyond manufactured news by brands, how do we harness and leverage the true power and potential of innovation? … read >>

"Burberry has benefited from globalization, and from its limitations too," reports the Economist (1/22/11). One benefit is that Burberry enjoyed a 27 percent revenue increase in the final quarter of 2010, much of it from a 68 percent increase in sales in Asia. Part of this growth is thanks to Burberry’s acquisition of 50 shops in China that previously belonged to franchisees. But it’s also because of "the rise of Asian rich," and the popularity of Burberry styles there.

The thing is that wealthy and trendy Asians might not have taken to Burberry’s had they been aware of its image back in Britain, where so-called "chavs" — "the stereotypical white working class delinquent looking for trouble" — took to wearing "Burberry baseball caps and jackets" featuring its trademark check pattern. Burberry successfully battled this trend in the UK by playing down the checks on its apparel and busting "vendors selling counterfeit versions of Burberry clothes at discount rates."

Meanwhile, in foreign markets, consumers "continued to see Burberry as the august outfit that clothed Ernest Shackleton for his Antarctic expedition nearly a century ago, not the favored label of a subculture they could barely comprehend. Modern economics and technology allows Chinese, Brazilian and American consumers to buy the wares of a London firm. But it has not made it that much easier to grasp the cultural nuances of another country." Lucky for Burberry, its Asian customers never really knew about chavs.

A new brand of bourbon called Angel’s Envy has captured Frank Bruni’s attention (The New York Times, 1/21/11). Actually, it was the promotional mailing that made Frank take notice. Instead of sending him a sample in a bottle, he explains, its marketers packaged it "in a vial of sorts, corked in the manner of wine." The impression was that this bourbon should not "be splashed around wantonly, in large quantities."

The vial also hinted that the drink was some kind of magic potion, which made Frank wonder: "With an infusion of Angel’s Envy, what would become of me?" The bourbon itself, he reports, is "sweeter and smoother than most, and appealing to a point. But its taste left less of an impression than its promotion, reflective of how fanciful, even silly, the marketing of boutique booze has become." This libation doesn’t come packaged in a vial normally, anyway — it comes in a "curvy, voluptuous bottle" with a winged pattern on the back (image).

Frank says the design plays "Scarlett Johansson to Old Grand-Dad’s Abe Vigoda." Then there’s the matter of the name itself, which Frank thinks invites mockery and disappointment "because you’ve basically promised nothing less than liquid rapture: heaven on the rocks." The name is actually a play on the phrase, "angel’s share," which refers to the whisky that evaporates as it ages. What remains is, well, angel’s envy. It sells for $45 a bottle, and is expected to come to market in selected states in March.