Green Marketing Doesn't Work

People proudly swagger "green" badges but when it comes to purchase decisions studies are proving people aren’t quite a green-conscious as they let on. The basic economic principle of “self-interest” is the main hindrance to greener consumer purchase decisions. Smart marketers are discovering that green communication must first appease the selfish consumer in all of us.


Marketing eco-friendly products isn’t as easy as it might seem, particularly if the products involve some kind of sacrifice or behavioral change on the part of the consumer. Take a look at one of the supposed eco-villains, the auto industry. While one can criticize the big US auto firms (not to mention Toyota and Nissan) for continuing to push big trucks and SUVs to consumers who didn’t “need” them, the fact is that all of these firms were supplying what the consumer wanted. Yes, everyone knew that econobox cars used less fuel, emitted fewer greenhouse gases, and so on. Everyone was happy that automakers were introducing fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles. But when individual buyers visited their local dealership, by and large societal concerns went out the window and people bought what worked best for them individually. For many buyers, massive SUVs and powerful pickups were the kind of statement they wanted to make, even if they never drove off-road and did little hauling.

What finally got consumers interested in vehicles that promised miserly gas consumption? Pure self-interest. When gas prices surged to $3, and then $4, per gallon, and filling up a big tank approached the $100 mark, suddenly many consumers shifted gears and tried to dump their gas guzzlers. (One could argue that all aspects of this behavior had little to do with rational decision making. The consumer first purchased a vehicle with capabilities he would never use, and then in selling it took a loss of many thousands of dollars to save, perhaps, $100 month.) The key point, though, is that the individual purchases had little to do with the greater good of society and everything to do with individual preferences.

Towels Aren’t Trivial

An even more persuasive data point is described by Robert Cialdini, Noah Goldsten, and Steve Martin in Yes! The book spends its initial chapters discussing a series of experiments testing how frequently hotel guests would let their towels be “recycled,” i.e., folded and put back on the towel bar vs. being replaced by freshly laundered towels. One would think that this is a small sacrifice to make for anyone with the most remote concern about the environment - is it likely that one could even tell whether the towel was new by the time one returned to the hotel room at the end of the day? In fact, though, mosts guests don’t recycle their linens. (I wonder, too, how many inadvertently choose the recycling option by forgetting to throw their used towels on the floor.) In the first part of the study, a mere 35% of hotel guests allowed their towels to be reused when urged to do so with a typical “preserve our planet” message. (For more on this study, see A room with a viewpoint: conservation messages and motivation.)

To me, that’s a good indicator that appealing to people’s concern for the environment isn’t a winning strategy, at least by itself. Nearly two thirds of the hotel guests in Cialdini’s study failed to participate in the towel reuse program, despite the fact that doing so would have been a trivial inconvenience. Considering that few people have the kind of emotional involvement with hotel towels that they do with their personal vehicles, is it any wonder that for years people continued to buy big SUVs, powerful trucks, and other high-status vehicles in preference to economical compacts?

What’s a Green Marketer to Do?

It’s clear that green appeal isn’t enough to get consumers to do something they don’t want to. So, how can green marketers succeed in a competitive marketplace?

Performance Validation. One key, I think, is to offer consumers reassurance that they are getting at least as good a product as they would with a non-green alternative. A few years ago, I remember avoiding a “green” paint-stripping product that promised it had “no dangerous chemicals.” Why? At some level, I was convinced that a paint-stripper loaded with dangerous, smelly ingredients and a page full of safety cautions was likely to be faster and more effective than some wimpy green alternative. What the manufacturer of the green product should have done was label their package with some test data showing that it was equally (or more) effective than the traditional product. That bit of reassurance might have been enough to sway me to choose a product that had fewer potential hazards.

Social Reinforcement. Cialdini was able to boost participation in the towel recycling program by 26% by the simple step of rewording the card to suggest that the majority of hotel guests reused their towels. Instead of appealing to their guests concern for the environment, the hotel suggested that the social norm was to participate. Interestingly, a further tweak was tested: the cards were again reworded, this time suggesting that the majority of people who stayed in that particular room had reused their towels. By making the information seem even more socially relevant and establishing a closer tie with the guest, participation was bumped by 33%.

Indeed, I’d guess that many of the early Prius buyers were motivated by social concerns. Despite the initially poor economics of the hybrid and its questionable cradle-to-grave environmental impact, some of these buyers wanted to be seen as doing the right thing for the environment or even to help set the social norm for others. In my opinion, many of the early Prius buyers were influenced every bit as much by social factors as buyers of ultra-costly luxury sedans and sexy red convertibles.

Endorsements. While perhaps not a primary effect, a product’s green appeal may be strengthened by an endorsement from a credible third party. Clorox, a name that strikes me as synonymous with harsh chemicals, has seen strong adoption of its GreenWorks line of products following a somewhat controversial endorsement of the line by the Sierra Club. (See Clorox’s Battle to go Green .) The appeal of the GreenWorks line may have been enhanced by testing which showed the products to be at least as effective as the traditional alternatives.

Reasonable Expectations. As evidenced by the towel-tossing hotel guests and Clorox’s naming a 5% share of their market as a laudable goal, green marketing stil has to be considered a niche approach. Still, if a green product offers performance advantages, it has a much better chance of success. A good example of this is the Prius. In its early years, sales were modest. When gas surged past $4, though, interest in the Prius soared not because of heightened concern for the environment but because buyers saw the vehicle’s cost premium as justified by their anticipated fuel savings.

In short, don’t count on a “green” product to sell itself in today’s market. For the majority of consumers (at least in the U.S.), concern for the environment is trumped by self-interest. (It would be interesting to do some brain-scan neuromarketing studies to further evaluate the potency of the green message.) If you want it to move beyond niche status, be sure your product has got something beyond its green heritage going for it.

Source - Neuromarketing

Free Online Insights

Google provides web users with a slew of free application and tools that all marketers should be leveraging. If you were ever a fan of Google Trends you will love Google Insights. Essentially, Google Insights allows you to compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames for any topic. Wanna know how searches for “Maple Leaf Foods and Listeriosis” are changing – here’s your tool. It’s a great way to be on top of online conversations about your brand relative to your competitors.

Intro to Google Insights

I have recently been playing around with the insanely useful Google Insights for Search product. You should definitely try it out if you haven't. It's basically Google Trends on steroids, and shows you a ton of data on any search you try. An SEO wizard's dream, basically. It's described as:

With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames.

Basically you put in keywords and it give you pretty charts.

Navigation searches and geo-location
One useful query to try is to search for your favorite website - like "gaiaonline.com" and specifically target it towards the US. It shows you a neat state-by-state breakdown of who is doing those searches.

Although unscientific, it tells you a bit about the location of the people who use the website, since logically the folks in states where the product is popular would tend to search for it quite a bit. Interestingly enough, Nevada, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington are some of the top searchers for Gaia Online. Fascinating.

Now, another use for this is to figure out what websites are being used mostly by early adopters versus products that have broken into the mainstream. One could just go and search a whole bunch of domains and see what kinds of graphs are produced.

This is exactly what I've done below...

The graphs for Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Netvibes, Skype, Techcrunch, Twitter, and YouTube

Here they are...

Digg is pretty evenly used throughout the US, although there's a big hole in Montana, North and South Dakota, and Wyoming. Weird.

MySpace is mainstream and used throughout the US, although popular in California, Florida, and Vegas. Those are all places known for awesome club scenes, is there any connection? ;-) (er, SoCal)

Netvibes is California only - perhaps this is a good candidate for an early-adopter-only crowd?

Skype is interestingly close to Digg's geographic profile, actually. I'm sure the worldwide chart looks very different, but at least within the US there doesn't seem to be a crazy amount of penetration. Would be interesting to see this graphed against % of population that are immigrant populations, who are talking to their relatives overseas.

Techcrunch:

Twitter has a surprising profile - it's very strong within the states where it has any presence, but is basically dead outside of it. If you would conclude anything, you'd say that Twitter is in a transitionary period where it's certainly grown to be a larger-than Silicon Valley phenomenon, but is still mostly dominated by early adopters in specific states.

Facebook is mainstream, and unsurprisingly focused towards the east coast rather than the west.

YouTube is also quite mainstream, and looks like the MySpace profile.

Next steps
Basically this tool is a very interesting part of any internet analyst's arsenal, alongside Quantcast, Alexa, and the like. It gives a unique view of what's going on. You could do a lot with this also - I'm too lazy to do the full analysis, but you could run the entire Crunchbase database through this and see what sites have broken into the mainstream and which ones have not. You could also run the entire Quantcast top 100k site list though this.

Another interesting thing would be to translate the color shades into index numbers, and then calculate the sites with the highest variance of scores (Twitter would probably rank highly in this), which would indicate polarizing products. Similarly, products that were successful outside the Silicon Valley area might be interesting investment candidates for venture capitalists to look at.

If anyone does further work on this, please shoot me an e-mail and I will link you!

BTW, if you enjoyed this article, check out the list of 50+ essays on this site, related to viral marketing, metrics, go-to-market strategies, online ads, etc.

UPDATE #3: I did some additional work timeslicing the data for YouTube and Webkinz to show how they grew over time. You can read the new post here.

UPDATE #2: Some more interesting analysis, which shows the spread of Twitter over time, month-by-month, using the same tools. General trend seems like it hit the coasts and then filled in the central areas.

UPDATE: Techcrunch does some great analysis here - they basically point out that instead of querying for "twitter.com" and "techcrunch.com" I should have searched for "twitter" and "techcrunch." Good points and worth reading more.

Source - Andrew Chen Blog

Resuscitating The Microsite

Microsites are lame and outdated or are they? The microsite originated as the marketers’ gateway to the online environment however many people feel they’ve failed to keep up with the evolution of the Internet. Discover a few tips on how to revive the relevance of your microsite for today’s savvier and more demanding online audience.

If there’s one type of headline that gets attention—it’s about claiming the death of something. Well, I’d like to proclaim the “un-dead” nature of a format which I think has the potential to become something more powerful than we are currently seeing today.

The Micro-site first became adopted by the marketing community as a tool of convenience. It simply became too unwieldy to continue adding sections to our large company/product Websites every time we wanted to promote a new product, feature or service. And specifically for advertisers—well, they needed an online extension for their campaigns to live in the digital space.

And so the formula had begun. Launch a campaign, build a micro-site, buy online media to drive traffic to it. Everything was in it’s place—advertisers now had a presence on the Web, clients were happy about it and the big money was still being pumped into the traditional channels because that’s how it’s always been done. In the past year lots of us have had a grand ol time proclaiming the death of the micro-site, and with some validity. Fact is that the internet is littered with thousands of them, and the majority are either promotional in nature, designed to win awards vs. serving up value or simply provide no incentive to ever return to them. On top of that, most of the micro-sites I come across are difficult to use, take WAY too much time to load, crash my browser or use contrived marketing language written by professionals who have spent years perfecting their craft.

The reason micro-sites have come under fire is because the “amateurs” have provided more compelling experiences in many ways. Sorry, it’s true. If you Google a product name, it’s not uncommon to come across a blog which has reviewed that product and is ranked higher than the professionally produced micro-site. How do you think Engadget became so wildly popular? Still, I think the micro-site format has legs. Here’s why and here’s what we can do differently.

Analyze Digital Behavior
Where I see the opportunity for micro-sites lies behind simple human behavior in the digital space. Think about how the typical person interacts with digital media. My friends and family outside of the industry still send me links via e-mail. Simple copy and paste—the lowest barrier there is. Most “regular” people I know still bookmark WEB PAGES. They aren’t managing multiple feeds, readers and social bookmarks like I do. I am not a representative of mainstream digital behavior. I don’t have numbers to back this up, but going on intuition and personal experience, I’m fairly confident that this is the case. Think about how you use the Web. For all the talk about mobility, widgets and portability my guess is that you still spend a lot of time on simple, good old fashioned hypertext WEB PAGES. Micro-sites have lost some luster not because of the format, but because marketers and everyday people don’t often think alike.

We the people are looking for something we can use, and instead get a lot of bells and whistles which don’t reward us for our time.

Offer Content, Context, Connections
Next we have to ask ourselves why formats like blogs, social networks and other manifestations of emerging digital media have become so popular. Blogs look nothing like micro-sites. BUT, what they have in common is the delivery. Web pages—pages that can be bookmarked and e-mailed among other things. And they offer niche content, lots of links and of course the ability for people to talk back. Long form content is the new design language—I have become a convert. Debating the above-the-fold argument is a moot point—we should start channeling our energy into debating how we can provide VALUE to users who are clearly getting it elsewhere. I propose that we breathe new life into the micro-site format by fundamentally re-thinking it. Look at the visual above this post. What if micro-sites evolved into content heavy, long form Web Pages that aggregated not only your own content, but content from any place you could think of? Instead of being concerned about linking away from the “site”—that would be one of the primary objectives. I’ve found through my own experience in social networks that if you link to others and do the legwork of curating relevant content that people remember this, and guess what? They actually come back for more! Micro-sites can deliver this, simply because the format consists of Web pages and links. We’ve just over-engineered the whole enchilada.

Develop A Content Strategy of Distribution + Aggregation
Take a look at Lenovo’s Voices of the Olympic Games. The content actually lives across multiple platforms—and it’s all about content. Producing it quickly, updating it, uploading it via the popular networks which fuel the long tail. It looks nothing like a micro-site but if you break down the components, it’s still a Web Page, or at least that’s one of the main components. The core difference is content and distribution, Traditional micro-site thinking has marketers writing the copy, designers and developers building the site and a launch date followed by a maintenance plan. But if micro-sites begin to evolve into more “blog-like” experiences, they can quickly be launched, edited, refreshed, and have all the flexibility in the world to pull in the open source 3rd party applications which are pervasive on the Web. Events can be live streamed, photo galleries can live on Flickr, video galleries, on You Tube. And there’s a tremendous opportunity to actually embrace users who are generating their own content about your products. You can make them the star—and they’ll probably link back to you in return. The difference isn’t in the technology as much as it is in the mindset. In order to pull this off, we’ll need to think more like bloggers, uploaders, journalists and mash-up artists than marketers, copywriters and designers. Take a look at what 37 Signals does when they live stream video—it take very little production value to achieve this and the result is a sort of direct engagement which users on the Web are craving.

Ask "What’s Next"?
Like anything else, what I’m proposing isn’t a silver bullet, and it would take big mindset shift for many organizations to pull this off. But, it’s worth looking into. I recently came across a micro-site for HP featuring Shaun White, and not being the demographic I really can’t judge if the site experience makes sense, but I did notice one thing. The site had clearly embraced a more “2.0” approach by offering multiple social bookmarks. But if you actually bookmarked a video, returned to your link, it took you to the first page of the micro-site where you are greeted by Shaun’s talking/dancing avatar. You have to dig up the video all over again. I’m not a 20-something but I have a hunch this would piss them off. But I don’t blame the format—if that video was worth sharing, a simple URL could have sufficed. Better yet, getting involved in the comments about it would take things a step further. It’s probably a good time to re-think what the experience of a Web page can be—I think the simple format has a lot of potential, if we just look at things with fresh, new eyes.

Source - Marketing Strategy & Innovation Blog

The Pitfalls of Megabranding

Last week I went to my local supermarket for Pillsbury's Best all-purpose flour, a brand I have been buying for years.

No luck. The store had Pillsbury's Best bread flour, whole wheat flour, self-rising flour and unbleached all-purpose flour. They just didn't have the original Pillsbury's Best all-purpose flour.

So I bought Gold Medal all-purpose flour instead.

The week before I went to the same supermarket for Minute Maid lemonade, not exactly an exotic drink.

No luck. The store had Minute Maid berry punch, citrus punch, fruit punch, tropical punch, limeade, ice tea and pink lemonade. They just didn't have the original Minute Maid lemonade.

What's the similarity between Pillsbury's Best all-purpose flour and Minute Maid lemonade? They're both the most popular items in the two categories.

The rampant proliferation of flavor variations has a downside. Because each variation tends to have its own facing on a supermarket shelf, the first variation to go "out of stock" is inevitably the most popular one. Which annoys the largest number of consumers.

Few people are going to notice if Minute Maid citrus punch is out of stock, but many people are going to notice if Minute Maid lemonade is out of stock.

Too many marketing people have read Chris Anderson's book "The Long Tail" and are applying his theory to consumer package goods. But I maintain that there's a big difference between an internet store, which can have an almost unlimited selection, and a retail store, which needs to be focused on only the most popular items.

If a book store tried to stock everything that Amazon.com stocks, it would have one copy each of a million books that few people want to buy and no copies each of the thousands of popular books that everybody wants to buy.

Not a big problem, you might be thinking? Look at some of the statistics:

• Tostitos now comes in 11 different flavors, including the latest, Tostitos with lime. Not to mention the six flavors of Tostitos salsa.
  
  
• Wheat Thins now come in 11 different flavors including such weirdoes as Parmesan Basil.
  
  
• Gatorade now comes in 23 different flavors and varieties.
  
  
• Grey Poupon now comes in seven different varieties including Harvest Coarse Ground.
  
  
• Airborne now comes in nine different varieties including Pink Grapefruit.
  
  
• Edge shaving gel now comes in 13 different varieties, some of which have exceedingly long names like Edge Active Care Shave Gel Natural Cool, with Eucalyptus.
  
  
• V8 now comes in nine different flavors, including V-Fusion (three flavors), which is a mixture of vegetable and fruit juice, and Splash which is all fruit juice. I should also mention that Campbell has just introduced V8 soup in five flavors.
  
  
• Goldfish crackers now come in 16 different flavors, including odd combinations such as "Pretzel Goldfish" and "Blazin' Buffalo Wing Flavor Blasted Goldfish." Those are just the flavors, of course. Goldfish crackers also come in bags, boxes, cartons, multipacks and 100-calorie pouches.
  
  
• Five years ago, a typical Coca-Cola bottler handled 200 SKUs. Today that same bottler has more than 530 SKUs. And is facing the addition of more than 65 new SKUs a year.

Consumers are getting confused. A number of research studies have shown that the more choices a consumer has, the more likely that consumer will be unhappy with the choice he or she does make. (The only people who are getting excited about the proliferation of product flavors and variations are the vice presidents in charge of slotting fees.)

Kellogg now has 50 types of breakfast cereal, yet the consumption of breakfast cereal has been declining. Actually there's a correlation between the two. When business is declining, companies tend to respond by introducing new flavors.

Take the beer business. Despite a raft of new brands and new flavors (Bud Light Lime, for example), the per-capita consumption of beer has been declining.

Coca-Cola now comes in 14 different flavors, but in the last few years the per-capita consumption of cola has been slowly declining.

A declining category means that consumers are leaving the market. Some consumers who used to drink cola are now drinking water and other beverages. How can "more choice" bring them back to cola? What Coca-Cola needs to do is promote "cola," not choice.

An innovative new product gets turned into a megabrand in a series of stages that can take decades.

Stage 1: A company introduces a new brand that pioneers a new category. The brand stands for something specific and becomes red hot. Gatorade in sports drinks. V8 in vegetable juice. Red Bull in energy drinks.

Stage 2: No category can keep expanding forever. At some point, sales level off, so companies figure they need to do something to accelerate their growth, so they introduce line extensions. Gatorade energy bars, V8 Splash, Red Bull cola.

Stage 3: After awhile, the numerous line extensions have undermined what the brand stands for. So the company decides to turn the extensions into brands and the brand into a "megabrand."

Kellogg is in the process of turning a cereal brand, Special K, into a megabrand with Special K snack bites, waffles, protein bars and protein waters.

Procter & Gamble took Oil of Olay and extended the brand into moisturizers, cleansers and cosmetics, eventually changing the name to Olay and turning it into a megabrand.

And following the Olay pattern, P&G is also in the process of turning Gillette into a megabrand with razors, blades, pre-shave, post-shave, deodorants, face-and-body wash and hair-care products, all marketed under the Gillette megabrand name.

This is a massive program. There are six Gillette shampoos and 12 Gillette deodorants, for example. (I can't see myself using anything called "Gillette" under my armpits. To cut hair maybe, but not to deodorize.)

But then again, the whole idea of a megabrand is to strip the brand name of any actual meaning and turn it into a Paris Hilton. Famous for being famous.

Will it work? Maybe. Marketing is never one-sided. Winners are usually those companies whose strategies are better than the strategies of their competitors.

Whom does Olay compete with? L'Oréal, Maybelline, Revlon, CoverGirl. In other words, other megabrands. P&G has been winning, in my opinion, not because of a better branding strategy, but because of a better product strategy. P&G's research-and-development people have been turning out a large number of significant product improvements, such as "Regenerist eye derma-pod," a new anti-aging treatment for the eyes.

What megabranders should worry about is the potential threat of narrowly focused competitors.

Look at what Steve Jobs did when he took over Apple. At the time, Apple marketed some 40 different products, from inkjet printers to the Newton handheld.

On the computer side of Apple's business, there were four major lines (Quadras, Power Macs, Performas and PowerBooks) each with a dozen different models, a typical megabrand product lineup.

Jobs cut the product line down to four machines: two laptops and two desktops. Later he told BusinessWeek, "Everything just got simpler. That's been one of my mantras -- focus and simplicity."

Over the past few years, Apple has doubled its share of the computer market.

Walk down the coffee aisle in any supermarket and notice the profusion of brands and flavors. Folgers alone has 29 different varieties.

Then there's Illycaffe, the makers of the Illy brand, which has become the world's largest-selling espresso. Unlike any other coffee company in the world, Illycaffe makes only one espresso blend (and a decaf version of the same blend).

The company imports 100% Arabica beans from 13 different countries around the world. The company's coffee experts in Trieste, Italy, then decide how much of each coffee type should be blended into the final Illy product.

A brand with a message will always outsell a meaningless megabrand.

Source - AdAge

Hipsters: The Dead End Of Western Civilization

The late 60s had hippies, the early 90s had grunge and this current generation has hipsters. There’s a lot of chatter about this cultural phenomenon and what it stands for (or doesn’t). The following article by Adbusters is a very pessimistic but equally interesting look at one approach to defining today’s youth.

I‘m sipping a scummy pint of cloudy beer in the back of a trendy dive bar turned nightclub in the heart of the city’s heroin district. In front of me stand a gang of hippiesh grunge-punk types, who crowd around each other and collectively scoff at the smoking laws by sneaking puffs of “fuck-you,” reveling in their perceived rebellion as the haggard, staggering staff look on without the slightest concern.

The “DJ” is keystroking a selection of MP3s off his MacBook, making a mix that sounds like he took a hatchet to a collection of yesteryear billboard hits, from DMX to Dolly Parton, but mashed up with a jittery techno backbeat.

“So… this is a hipster party?” I ask the girl sitting next to me. She’s wearing big dangling earrings, an American Apparel V-neck tee, non-prescription eyeglasses and an inappropriately warm wool coat.

“Yeah, just look around you, 99 percent of the people here are total hipsters!”

“Are you a hipster?”

“Fuck no,” she says, laughing back the last of her glass before she hops off to the dance floor.

Ever since the Allies bombed the Axis into submission, Western civilization has had a succession of counter-culture movements that have energetically challenged the status quo. Each successive decade of the post-war era has seen it smash social standards, riot and fight to revolutionize every aspect of music, art, government and civil society.

But after punk was plasticized and hip hop lost its impetus for social change, all of the formerly dominant streams of “counter-culture” have merged together. Now, one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.”

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

Take a stroll down the street in any major North American or European city and you’ll be sure to see a speckle of fashion-conscious twentysomethings hanging about and sporting a number of predictable stylistic trademarks: skinny jeans, cotton spandex leggings, fixed-gear bikes, vintage flannel, fake eyeglasses and a keffiyeh – initially sported by Jewish students and Western protesters to express solidarity with Palestinians, the keffiyeh has become a completely meaningless hipster cliché fashion accessory.

The American Apparel V-neck shirt, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Parliament cigarettes are symbols and icons of working or revolutionary classes that have been appropriated by hipsterdom and drained of meaning. Ten years ago, a man wearing a plain V-neck tee and drinking a Pabst would never be accused of being a trend-follower. But in 2008, such things have become shameless clichés of a class of individuals that seek to escape their own wealth and privilege by immersing themselves in the aesthetic of the working class.

This obsession with “street-cred” reaches its apex of absurdity as hipsters have recently and wholeheartedly adopted the fixed-gear bike as the only acceptable form of transportation – only to have brakes installed on a piece of machinery that is defined by its lack thereof.

Lovers of apathy and irony, hipsters are connected through a global network of blogs and shops that push forth a global vision of fashion-informed aesthetics. Loosely associated with some form of creative output, they attend art parties, take lo-fi pictures with analog cameras, ride their bikes to night clubs and sweat it up at nouveau disco-coke parties. The hipster tends to religiously blog about their daily exploits, usually while leafing through generation-defining magazines like Vice, Another Magazine and Wallpaper. This cursory and stylized lifestyle has made the hipster almost universally loathed.

“These hipster zombies… are the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers and the marks of predatory real-estate agents,” wrote Christian Lorentzen in a Time Out New York article entitled ‘Why the Hipster Must Die.’ “And they must be buried for cool to be reborn.”

With nothing to defend, uphold or even embrace, the idea of “hipsterdom” is left wide open for attack. And yet, it is this ironic lack of authenticity that has allowed hipsterdom to grow into a global phenomenon that is set to consume the very core of Western counterculture. Most critics make a point of attacking the hipster’s lack of individuality, but it is this stubborn obfuscation that distinguishes them from their predecessors, while allowing hipsterdom to easily blend in and mutate other social movements, sub-cultures and lifestyles.

Standing outside an art-party next to a neat row of locked-up fixed-gear bikes, I come across a couple girls who exemplify hipster homogeneity. I ask one of the girls if her being at an art party and wearing fake eyeglasses, leggings and a flannel shirt makes her a hipster.

“I’m not comfortable with that term,” she replies.

Her friend adds, with just a flicker of menace in her eyes, “Yeah, I don’t know, you shouldn’t use that word, it’s just…”

“Offensive?”

“No… it’s just, well… if you don’t know why then you just shouldn’t even use it.”

“Ok, so what are you girls doing tonight after this party?”

“Ummm… We’re going to the after-party.”

Gavin McInnes, one of the founders of Vice, who recently left the magazine, is considered to be one of hipsterdom’s primary architects. But, in contrast to the majority of concerned media-types, McInnes, whose “Dos and Don’ts” commentary defined the rules of hipster fashion for over a decade, is more critical of those doing the criticizing.

“I’ve always found that word [“hipster”] is used with such disdain, like it’s always used by chubby bloggers who aren’t getting laid anymore and are bored, and they’re just so mad at these young kids for going out and getting wasted and having fun and being fashionable,” he says. “I’m dubious of these hypotheses because they always smell of an agenda.”

Punks wear their tattered threads and studded leather jackets with honor, priding themselves on their innovative and cheap methods of self-expression and rebellion. B-boys and b-girls announce themselves to anyone within earshot with baggy gear and boomboxes. But it is rare, if not impossible, to find an individual who will proclaim themself a proud hipster. It’s an odd dance of self-identity – adamantly denying your existence while wearing clearly defined symbols that proclaims it.

“He’s 17 and he lives for the scene!” a girl whispers in my ear as I sneak a photo of a young kid dancing up against a wall in a dimly lit corner of the after-party. He’s got a flipped-out, do-it-yourself haircut, skin-tight jeans, leather jacket, a vintage punk tee and some popping high tops.

“Shoot me,” he demands, walking up, cigarette in mouth, striking a pose and exhaling. He hits a few different angles with a firmly unimpressed expression and then gets a bit giddy when I show him the results.

“Rad, thanks,” he says, re-focusing on the music and submerging himself back into the sweaty funk of the crowd where he resumes a jittery head bobble with a little bit of a twitch.

The dance floor at a hipster party looks like it should be surrounded by quotation marks. While punk, disco and hip hop all had immersive, intimate and energetic dance styles that liberated the dancer from his/her mental states – be it the head-spinning b-boy or violent thrashings of a live punk show – the hipster has more of a joke dance. A faux shrug shuffle that mocks the very idea of dancing or, at its best, illustrates a non-committal fear of expression typified in a weird twitch/ironic twist. The dancers are too self-aware to let themselves feel any form of liberation; they shuffle along, shrugging themselves into oblivion.

erhaps the true motivation behind this deliberate nonchalance is an attempt to attract the attention of the ever-present party photographers, who swim through the crowd like neon sharks, flashing little blasts of phosphorescent ecstasy whenever they spot someone worth momentarily immortalizing.

Noticing a few flickers of light splash out from the club bathroom, I peep in only to find one such photographer taking part in an impromptu soft-core porno shoot. Two girls and a guy are taking off their clothes and striking poses for a set of grimy glamour shots. It’s all grins and smirks until another girl pokes her head inside and screeches, “You’re not some club kid in New York in the nineties. This shit is so hipster!” – which sparks a bit of a catfight, causing me to beat a hasty retreat.

In many ways, the lifestyle promoted by hipsterdom is highly ritualized. Many of the party-goers who are subject to the photoblogger’s snapshots no doubt crawl out of bed the next afternoon and immediately re-experience the previous night’s debauchery. Red-eyed and bleary, they sit hunched over their laptops, wading through a sea of similarity to find their own (momentarily) thrilling instant of perfected hipster-ness.

What they may or may not know is that “cool-hunters” will also be skulking the same sites, taking note of how they dress and what they consume. These marketers and party-promoters get paid to co-opt youth culture and then re-sell it back at a profit. In the end, hipsters are sold what they think they invent and are spoon-fed their pre-packaged cultural livelihood.

Hipsterdom is the first “counterculture” to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.

An amalgamation of its own history, the youth of the West are left with consuming cool rather that creating it. The cultural zeitgeists of the past have always been sparked by furious indignation and are reactionary movements. But the hipster’s self-involved and isolated maintenance does nothing to feed cultural evolution. Western civilization’s well has run dry. The only way to avoid hitting the colossus of societal failure that looms over the horizon is for the kids to abandon this vain existence and start over.

“If you don’t give a damn, we don’t give a fuck!” chants an emcee before his incitements are abruptly cut short when the power plug is pulled and the lights snapped on.

Dawn breaks and the last of the after-after-parties begin to spill into the streets. The hipsters are falling out, rubbing their eyes and scanning the surrounding landscape for the way back from which they came. Some hop on their fixed-gear bikes, some call for cabs, while a few of us hop a fence and cut through the industrial wasteland of a nearby condo development.

The half-built condos tower above us like foreboding monoliths of our yuppie futures. I take a look at one of the girls wearing a bright pink keffiyah and carrying a Polaroid camera and think, “If only we carried rocks instead of cameras, we’d look like revolutionaries.” But instead we ignore the weapons that lie at our feet – oblivious to our own impending demise.

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

Source - Adbusters

QR Codes - Object Hyperlinking

With the oncoming proliferation of 3G technology is only a matter of time before QR codes are ubiquitous in North America. Think of QR codes as an evolution of the bar code. Small, square, and strangely geometric, they appear in magazines, on signs, buses or just about anywhere. With the proper software on a camera phone, consumers can take a photo of a QR code and receive an array of information about a product, company, event etc. Be sure to check out some of the examples.

Object hyperlinking is the practice of linking physical objects to online information. One common way to do this is through an interface called Qr code - which we spoke last week. Qr code is a two dimensional bar code that when scanned with a compatible camera phone, will link to any URL on the web.

p8t.ch is now offering a geek fashion accessory they call the “Commando Nerd Patch”. It’s a Qr coded patch you can place anywhere as a way for people to access your website, or anything else on the web you would want to link to. Like a physical TinyURL p8t.ch links to your URL through their server.

This fictional conversation from the p8t.ch website will explain:

THEM: “Excuse me! Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.”

YOU: “Wonderful! Simply scan the p8tch on my shoulder.”

THEM: [scans the p8tch: BEEP!] “Thank you, I have just subscribed to your RSS feed in Google Reader.”

BRAND EXAMPLE

ANOTHER EXAMPLE

Homegrown Evolution points us to an interesting adaptation of QR bar codes in Japan. Bar codes are being affixed to produce that give a detailed history of the item’s origin. When scanned with a QR enabled cell phone, the code will tell the story of the fruits and veggies - where they came from, and how they were grown.

Wireless Watch Japan reports:

“Prefectural authorities and the JA Ibaraki Prefecture Central Union of Agricultural Cooperative cooperating with other farming and agricultural associations are adding QR code labels right at the point of origin. In the supermarket, consumers use camera equipped cell phones to scan the QR code on the label. The code links to a mobile website detailing origin, soil composition, organic fertilizer content percentage (as opposed to chemical), use of pesticides and herbicides and even the name of the farm it was grown on. Consumers can also access the same information over the Ibaraki Agricultural Produce Net website by inputting a numbered code on each label.”

All Sourced from PSFK

Online Ears

Understanding the myriad conversations that are taking place online is core to not only having successful digital strategy, but it's key in understanding how people actually feel about your brand, products and services. Here are six free tools to better understand online conversations about your brand. Also check out how EA Games responded to an online conversation involving one of their products.

In this age of new business, understanding the myriad conversations that are taking place online is core to not only having successful marketing and communications campaigns, but it's key in understanding how people actually feel about your brand, products and services.

And - most importantly - if they're buying from you, why they're buying, and what they're saying about you to their community?

The common mistake that most traditional businesses make is thinking that what is being said online has no real bearing in the "real world." Nothing could be farther from the truth. We now live in a day and age where almost every first (and ongoing) brand interaction happens at the search box.

Don't believe me?

Think about the last time someone told you about a brand. Odds are you did not rush down to the nearest store to check it out. You probably did a quick search online to see what's being said and read what others are saying. We're not just doing it for big ticket items, we're researching everything and anything - from hotels to HDMI cables to paperclips for the office (we're also comparing prices).

Here's the multi-million dollar question: what are they saying about you?

Most businesses haven't got the foggiest idea. Maybe someone in the communications department does an occasional search on Google to see what's ranking on the first page, but that's about it. In today's world of interconnectedness, you may be losing real-world dollars simply because you're not monitoring your reputation online. While there are countless robust (and expensive) solutions that help companies do this, there is a handful-plus of really good (and free!) ones that will take you there as well:

1. Google Alerts - input your search term (I'd suggest adding individual alerts for your company name, senior management team, products, brands, services and competitors) and you can choose what to be updated on (news, blogs, video, the Web, newsgroups, etc...) and how frequently (as-it-happens, once a day, one a week). Now, whenever the terms you input are mentioned online, you'll be notified immediately. You can create as many alerts as you want and you can be notified of updates either by email or through a RSS reader.

http://www.google.com/alerts.

2. Technorati - Much in the same way Google monitors the Web, Technorati is a search engine that monitors the blogs. At last check, Technorati was monitoring over 120 million blogs. That's a lot of people saying a lot of things. Technorati offers a free service called "Watchlists" and, much like Google Alerts, you can be notified as you are being mentioned in these millions of spaces.

http://www.technorati.com.

3. Search Engines - even if Google accounts for a huge percentage of all search done on the Internet, it's also important to know what comes up when Yahoo! and Microsoft serves search results about you.

There are two things you should immediately be looking at: one is how many results appear on your given search terms (trending if that increases and decreases is a great way of seeing how much buzz you're building) and the second is a little-known tool: if you enter your website address like this: www.twistimage.com/blog (obviously replacing your website with mine) in the Google search box, what returns is a list of all of the websites that are presently linking to you. In order to build your digital footprint, reciprocating a link back to an existing one that is valuable is a great way to build reputation. http://www.google.com

http://www.yahoo.com,

http://www.live.com

Don't forget to search on .ca versions as well.

4. Google Blog Search - Google has its own blog search engine that sometimes returns very different results than the ones you'll find on Technorati. One trick is to organize your search results by date (this way you can see the most recent conversations). You'll see the link "sort by date" in the top right-hand side.

http://blogsearch.google.com

5. Twitter Search - one of the hottest new media trends is micro-blogging. Platforms like Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku and Identi.ca give anyone 140 characters to publish their thoughts. They're also talking about brands. Twitter Search enables you to search one of the most popular platforms by keyword .

http://search.twitter.com.

6. Google Trends and Facebook Lexicon - not only can you find out what people are saying about you, but tools like Google Trends and Facebook Lexicon enable you to compare your brands with others. Not only does it feed back the volume of mentions, these tools also provide some fascinating market research by region, language and related topics of interest. http://www.google.com/trends

http://www.facebook.com/lexicon

It's important to note that just because you're seeing a high volume of traffic that everything is hunky dory. You could be getting a lot of traffic compared to another brand because of how much you suck as well.

Here's the bigger idea: the Web provides the ultimate focus group (and it's free). It's authentic because you're not locking people in a room and feeding them pizza to get their opinion. They're expressing themselves (good, bad and neutral) without being solicited and with passion.

Can you really put a price on that?

Can you really afford to not be listening?

Mitch Joel is president of the award-winning Digital Marketing and Communications agency, Twist Image. Marketing Magazine dubbed him the, "Rock Star of Digital Marketing" and the research firm, Onalytica, named him one of the most influential authorities in the world on blog marketing. Mitch is presently writing his first book, Six Pixels of Separation (Grand Central Publishing - Fall 2009), named after his very successful blog and podcast.

mitch@twistimage.com

Source - The Gazette

10 Solutions For Any Marketing Problem

Marketing is all about solving problems. Young people aren't buying cars. Mothers think your competitor's diapers are better. In the course of solving problems, marketers often stumble onto ideas. Come take a look at ten hot strategies making news in 2008. Notice any comment trends? We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback by posting a comment below.

Some ideas are sinister, but good. Like in the 1920s, when it was taboo for women to light up, Edward Bernays aligned smoking with the suffrage movement and got marchers to hold up Lucky Strikes as "Torches of Freedom."

Others involve nothing more than a single word (such as Lambert Pharmaceuticals' "Halitosis" that entered the lexicon and drove Listerine sales for decades) or a simple gimmick (like the steam jets behind New York's Times Square billboards that lend that inimitable piping-hot look to huge cups of soup or coffee.)

Times change, of course, but the need for good ideas does not; technology and social mores merely influence how they look, while innovation remains the immutable constant. So what are some of the hot new ideas in 2008? We went hunting and came back with the ones featured here. Granted, this list is hardly comprehensive, and these ideas might not all be right for every brand. But each contains the ingredient critical to any good marketing, cleverness, which solves any problem you've got.

Bright Idea No. 1: Dark Marketing

What's Gone Before: Ads where you could see the advertiser
What's the Innovation: Ads where you can't
Who's Doing It: (so far) McDonald's

Imagine an advertising campaign where the pitch is so covert that the advertiser is all but undetectable. That's the thinking behind "dark marketing," a term that seems to refer to ninja-type martial arts applied to shilling products.

Dark marketing most recently came to light in a New York Times story about The Lost Ring, an Olympics-themed alternate-reality game (ARG) developed and operated by McDonald's. The next month, Wired magazine's Jargon Watch cited Dark Marketing as "Discreetly sponsored online and real-world entertainment intended to reach hipster audiences that would ordinarily shun corporate shilling" and used The Lost Ring as a prime example. (The game is themed around a woman named Ariadne, who awoke with amnesia in a South African corn maze on Feb. 12; it's not exactly the stuff of Extra-Value Meals.)

All this said, Lost Ring is, strictly speaking, not all that dark. The fast feeder's branding in the game was minimal but, according to Jane McGonigal, director of AvanteGame, the Berkeley, Calif., firm that worked with San Francisco's AKQA on the McD's push, "We had the sponsor clearly marked in the game materials. I don't think there's anybody playing this game who doesn't know who makes it."

Perhaps. But according to Tracy Tuten, associate professor of marketing at Longwood University in Farmville, Va., the idea of minimal (or cleverly occluded) branding on ARGs and other nontraditional media such as viral video is gaining traction. "It's better for engagement," she said. "It puts more power on the side of the consumer if he chooses to participate."

Then there's "trans-media storytelling," another facet of dark marketing that refers to a storyline being cleverly divided among online, TV or even books. Case in point: Cathy's Book, a novel released in 2006 complete with phone numbers and URLs interwoven into the text—numbers and addresses that, it turned out, led readers to ads for Cover Girl makeup products. (Watchdog group Consumer Alert urged a boycott of the book, claiming that the seeded marketing disqualified it as a true work of fiction.)

More shadowy marketing: The 2006-07 promo for the band Nine Inch Nails' release Year Zero featured Web sites like iamtryingtobelieve.com, an otherworldly, vaguely conspiratorial-themed site that tied into the story behind the concept album.

If these efforts all sound in some degree like a variation on a puzzle, you're not far off. Despite the sinister-sounding name, dark marketing actually evokes the spirit of gift-giving more than trickery. Said McGonigal: "The whole idea is you want to create something amazing and then get credit for it."

Bright Idea No. 2: Web Serial Branding

What's Gone Before: Viral videos just hawked brands
What's the Innovation: Serial videos people watch like soap-opera episodes
Who's Doing It: Spherion

Chances are, most every professional has worked a temp job at one time or another and, chances are, it sucked. Patronizing co-workers, imperious mid-level managers, the endless refrain "make the temp do it"—all are staples of modern white-collar day gigging. So why on earth would an interim-staffing firm want to actually spotlight stuff like this?

In the case of Spherion, it was actually worse than that. The staffing firm hired agency CJP Communications to create a five-episode miniseries for YouTube that portrayed in graphic, eyeball-rolling, detail just about every 9-to-5 nightmare endured by temporary workers. The drama series (which just wrapped its fifth episode in April) is called The Temp Life. Absurd? Sure, and that's why people watched.

Viral video's nothing new, of course, but Spherion opted for a viral video serial that worked much like a TV drama series. The interlocking episodes, said Spherion corporate marketing director Kip Havel, "allowed us to dive deeper. We explored more scenarios, developed a following. People got to know the characters."

Drawn from the ranks of CJP's own employees, series stars included the superlatively bitchy "Paul," who insults a temp by assuming she can't use a photocopier, and "Nick," the midlife-crisis manager whose delusional visions including making his company "the global leader in synthetic cord and casing solutions for the global footwear market." If you had to put up with these people, you'd probably shoot yourself.

Which is exactly the reverse psychology behind the series. By acknowledging that temping is often a rotten gig, Spherion planted the seed with viewers that it could steer them clear of hellish gigs. "We all know that there are plenty of bad temp assignments out there," Havel said. "So the messaging is that we know, we get it, and Spherion is going to offer better experiences."

Thus far, The Temp Life has drawn 60,000 viewers, and while Spherion doesn't have a hard metric to measure returns, Havel said, "It's apparent this is resonating with viewers." What'll be the ultimate fate of this marketing experiment? Tune in next week...

Bright Idea No. 3: The Fake Action-Flick Pitch

What's Gone Before: Movie previews
What's the Innovation: Movie previews that are actually brands
Who's Doing It: LG Electronics

Even for a public besotted with sexy action/adventure flicks, this one looked like a must-see. For three months, moviegoers who grabbed seats in time for the previews sat wide-eyed over the karate-fueled antics of a sinuous brunette named Scarlet who, they were promised, would star in a new TV series bearing her name. Meanwhile, billboards in Los Angeles and Dubai; ads in People and Rolling Stone; and online banners on Gawker and E! all hinted at a blockbuster flick also starring Scarlet, the smoldering femme fatale with the low décolleté and a mysterious red glint in her eye.

Too bad it was all a hoax.

Oh sure, Scarlet herself was real enough. She's Norwegian actress Natassie Malthe. But on April 28, when the show's launch was to be announced at a red carpet Hollywood premiere, it was revealed that Scarlet, the show, was actually a new LCD TV line from LG Electronics Worldwide. Which made Scarlet, the female action hero, little more than the face of a gutsy viral campaign via Agency.com.

By rights, that red eyeball should have tipped everybody off. The ruby glimmer and the Scarlet name itself were both selected because of the TV casing's signature reddish hue. According to Agency.com CEO Chan Suh, the deception was a calculated risk. After all, LG went to considerable lengths to make a very fake show look very real, including hiring Sopranos director David Nutter.

However, as Suh explained via e-mail, "LG felt that if [it were all] done correctly, the target consumer would benefit and appreciate the twist, associating the entertainment campaign with a positive drive to purchase."

Has it? LG said it's too early to see if its global hoax has translated into TV sales but, by most indications, at least they know consumers took the joke pretty well. Said one online review site: "Kudos to LG for this decade's best pr stunt in the consumer electronics industry."

Bright Idea No. 4: Text Messaging Gets Big (Very Big)

What's Gone Before: Marketing messages texted to your cell phone (zzzz)
What's the Innovation: Text messages broadcast to image-enriched billboards
Who's Doing It: Motorola

Saying goodbye is one of those things that's pretty common in airports. So are billboards. The two wouldn't seem to have much to do with each other, unless you happened to be in the new Sky Plaza wing of Hong Kong International in February. Because two huge, LCD screens over the concourse didn't feature the standard fare of liquor ads or directions to the luggage carousel, but photos of ordinary (if slightly teary) people along with copy like, "Goodbye, mom. I love you."

Cheesy? Don't poke fun yet. Witness Motorola's "Say Goodbye" initiative which, with the joint help of agencies Ogilvy and The Hyperfactory, nudged user-generated ad content one giant, digital step forward.

The logistics: Light-box signs in the terminal check-in area encouraged passengers to take a photo with their cell phone cameras, add a farewell text message to it and then send both to a special number. Within seconds, a computer flashed both image and message onto massive LCD screens (each enclosed by a frame bearing the Motorola logo) big enough to be seen across the terminal floor.

"It was all user-generated content and this was the perfect environment," said Howard Hunt, Hyperfactory's regional business development manager. "People had the time and their loved ones were already standing there."

As an added bonus, departing passengers could choose from a number of custom goodbye messages that had been prerecorded by soccer star David Beckham and pop star Jay Chow, and forward them to loved ones. Those messages ended up in more than 30 countries. (Motorola officials would not comment on the initiative's penetration, though Hunt said, "We know from the numbers of [participants] that there was a good reach.")

"This was a good example of how mobile can be leveraged to aid in brand awareness—anytime, anywhere," observed Laura Marriott, president of the Mobile Marketing Assn. "I liked the viral aspect as well. It was definitely an excellent utilization of space in the airport."

Now, if only we could say goodbye to those checked-bag surcharges.

Bright Idea No. 5: PetroMarketing

What's Gone Before: Free this and free that
What's the Innovation: Free gas
Who's Doing It: Just about everybody

When the Tampa-based Sweetbay supermarket chain decided to drum up traffic at its new Sarasota, Fla., location, it had its choice of standard incentives like free food, free delivery, etc. But with crude oil now hovering north of $130 a barrel, Sweetbay's marketers decided there was one freebie people could use more than anything: the kind with fumes.

"The price of gas is just painful around here," said retail marketing manager Taryn Jones. "This is just one way of saying, 'Shop with us. We'll give you more value for your dollar.'" Between May 7 and July 1, customers who bought at least $50 in groceries received a voucher. After racking up six vouchers, they got a card good for $50 at the gas pump.

It used to be that complimentary fill-ups were the domain of auto dealerships. No more. This summer, Callaway Golf was giving away free gas cards with the purchase of select drivers. In the Midwest, customers who opened a checking account with TCF Bank walked away with a $50 gas card. Perhaps most telling of all, the state lotteries in Georgia, Florida and Oklahoma have replaced cash-for-life prizes with lifetime fill-ups of petrol.

Matt Arbuckle, customer service manager at the grocer's Sarasota store, said the initiative generated new and returning customers alike. One customer collected eight gas cards. "It was a challenge for him," Arbuckle said. "He wanted to see how many he could get."

While Sweetbay HQ declined to reveal the exact number of vouchers given out or sales figures, Jones said the promo might soon go systemwide.

Bright Idea No. 6: Lickertising

What's Gone Before: Scratch-n-sniff
What's the Innovation: Hell, why not just eat it?
Who's Doing It: Welch's grape juice

In these days of advertising overload, marketing should preferably engage as many of the other senses as possible. Hence, the growth of experiential marketing in which brands entice people to touch, feel, steal, scratch, sniff, poke, prod... and now, lick.

If that last one sounded more like just ick, think again. As one element of a six-month marketing campaign that led to a 5% sales spike, the purple people at Welch's Grape Juice recently stuck a fully lickable insert into ads it placed in national magazines.

The sealed, sanitary ad technology is the invention of FirstFlavor, a company based in Bala Cynwyd, Pa.

"To connect to today's Generation X mom, we wanted to shake things up," said Chris Heye, vp-marketing for the Concord, Mass. company. "Welch's had barely ever done print, but we knew it would be an effective way of reaching our target."

The ads featuring the Peel 'n Taste strips (copy: "For a tasty fact, remove and lick") ran in an April issue of People magazine. FirstFlavor executives got the idea for the Peel 'n Taste strips from the lickable wallpaper scene in the 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The lickable ads work much like those dissolvable breath strips and are technically not licked at all, but eaten. Welch's marketer Heye was happy with the outcome of the ads, which paid off in press as well as (undisclosed) sales. However, he's still mulling whether he'll come back for seconds.

Bright Idea No. 7: Break-Out Store Brands

What's Gone Before: Store brands
What's the Innovation: Store brands selling outside their home stores
Who's Doing It: Safeway

Private label brands such as Archer Farms (Target) and Essensia (Albertsons) fill an important market niche, giving the retailers that manufacture them a way to capture some of the dollars that would otherwise have gone to mainstream brands. Usually, private labels are reliable, affordable and solid, if not exactly as slick.

That is, until Safeway decided to get uppity about everything. Starting this fall, the nation's third-largest supermarket chain will start selling two of its store brands, O Organics and Eating Right, outside of its stores. The lifestyle-geared labels will appear in school cafeterias stateside and as far away as retailers in Singapore and Taiwan.

In theory at least, Safeway is overstepping the boundaries that private labels have always stayed safely within. Just don't tell that to svp James White. "We don't think about Eating Right or O Organics as private labels," he said. "These brands are rooted in meeting consumers' needs around different lifestyle solutions."

Of course, any brand would say that, but maybe that's the point. Increasingly, with the help of marketing efforts and more sophisticated packaging, store brands do want to be seen as mainstream.

Meredith Adler, a stock and equity analyst with Lehman Brothers, New York, lauded Safeway's distribution ambitions with its private label brands. "It's breaking new ground," she said. "[Safeway's] saying that this is good enough to sell out in the marketplace as a consumer product. That's pretty unique."

Bright Idea No. 8: Mob Rule for Ads

What's Gone Before: The remote control
What's the Innovation: Ads you can actually delete
Who's Doing It: Facebook, StumbleUpon

Imagine if there was another switch on your remote control where you could vote to dump an ad you didn't like. It's not out there yet, but a similar system is in place at StumbleUpon and, to a lesser extent, Facebook.

In Facebook's case, it's merely an experiment that the company initiated in May. As part of the program, a select portion of Facebook users can vote to keep or dump an ad they like (the choice is delineated by a thumbs up or a thumbs down). While Facebook rep Erin Zeitler said there are no immediate plans to bring the tool to a wider audience, "We are evaluating the response to the tool and considering whether to make it more broadly available," she said.

Nevertheless, StumbleUpon has been letting its 5.5 million users vote on ads for about two years. StumbleUpon is a tool that runs on certain browsers that picks content that the company thinks you will like, based on your interests, preferences, friends and other factors. Some of the content is paid ads, which sell for 5 cents an impression.

The catch is, if StumbleUpon users don't like the ad, it will be effectively pulled back from rotation, meaning fewer impressions. If, for instance, an advertiser orders $10,000 worth of ads but no one likes the ad, it may take a very long time to spend the money. On the flipside, a well-accepted ad will quickly rack up tons of impressions. Overall, general manager Michael Buher related that most ads do pretty well under the system. "We track all the ratings of all the content and ads are rated only slightly less than traditional content," he said. "The community is actually very accepting of advertising."

Deborah Aho Williamson, an analyst with eMarketer, New York, agreed that more consumer control over advertising is a positive. "I think ultimately the more feedback a marketer can get about how an ad is viewed by the public the better. That's the whole idea behind Web 2.0," she said.

Bright Idea No. 9: eBay as ROI

What's Gone Before: Expensive, elaborate, mathematical ROI modules
What's the Innovation: Dude, just check out eBay!
Who's Doing It: Papa John's (and probably others who won't admit it)

ROI, schmoi. Oh sure, if you really want to fork over serious bucks for a "measurement matrix" to see if that latest marketing stunt moved the needle, go right ahead. But with the Internets at their fingertips, some marketers (especially those whose branding efforts crank out tons of collectable swag) have found a quick, immediate—and free—way to track brand buzz: eBay.

With 84 million active users and 6 million new listings each day, eBay's a pretty good indicator of what's hot and what's not. "Our data reflect consumer trends," said eBay's pop-culture expert Karen Bard. "Therefore, it can be useful to marketers who are trying to gauge the likelihood of a product's popularity and success."

Case in point: DreamWorks' Kung Fu Panda and Columbia Pictures' You Don't Mess With the Zohan generated opening-weekend sales of $60.2 million and $38.5 million, respectively. When eBay number crunchers tallied the auctioned items related to the two films during the same period, they saw the pattern replicated: 263 Kung Fu Panda listings and 97 items sold, vs. seven Zohan listings and four Zohan items sold. Kung Fu Panda had the highest selling item (a $52 Jack Black KFP press kit) while Zohan's swag fetched far more modest prices—such as $14.17 for a movie blow dryer.

Alright, so, statistically precise analysis it ain't. But eBay can furnish a reliable anecdotal indication of a brand's or a specific initiative's popularity. Just ask Papa John's. Last month, the Louisville-based pizza chain used eBay to gauge the success and value of its promotional partnership with Universal Pictures in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. In less than 24 hours, the pizza chain's movie-related paraphernalia (from special packaging to employee hats) started turning up at auction. Papa John's did not return a call requesting comment.

Of course, what's hot gets cold faster than a delivered pizza. With Panda and Zohan virtually forgotten, what's hot now is anything related to Warner Bros.' brooding Batman franchise. A recent search revealed more than 6,000 items for sale under the keywords "Dark Knight"—up 69% from the week before press time.

Bright Idea No. 10: Greenrating

What's Gone Before: Green marketing
What's the Innovation: Green marketing that's certified to be legit
Who's Doing It: Private watchdogs, plus the Fed

With green marketing all the rage, it seems like just about every brand from pickups to potato chips is now making some kind of claim to being an upstanding steward of the planet. But the self-righteous muddle that's resulted has not only threatened to dilute the value of claims like these, it's left consumers wondering how many brands are really telling the truth. So how's a truly green brand supposed to make its case and get noticed by the public? One way is to submit itself to the scrutiny of the public itself.

Earlier this year, a company called EnviroMedia created a Web site (www.greenwashingindex.com) were consumers could post green ads and analyze the veracity of their claims. Visitors can post ads in any format, critique them, then assign a score from 1 (very sincere and accurate) to five (more yellow than green).

The effort's has the effect of not only improving the marketing punch of legitimately eco-friendly companies, it's also cast EnviroMedia as a kind of green police force for the marketing community. "In just 6 months, it's elevated our national reputation in a way that far exceeded our expectations," said Kevin Tuerff, EnviroMedia principal.

Indeed, EnviroMedia's efforts are part of a larger trend of monitoring green marketing across the board. Eco-conscious consumers can also visit www.idealbite.com, which recently developed an annual certification (complete with an official seal of approval) that recognizes brands that can back up green claims such as non-synthetic materials and minimal packaging.

Governments are getting into the act of policing green claims as well. The Federal Trade Commission continues to hold hearings on advertising with environmental promises in advertising as earth advocates clamor for an update of the FTC's "green guides," which have not been altered since 1998. Meanwhile, in California and New York, "global warming scores" will be assigned to 2009 vehicles, quite possibly contradicting marketing claims by some automakers. The implications are clear: Green marketing's still a great opportunity—if, that is, your brand is really green.

Here are some more ideas submitted by our readers:

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How about something the Koreans are cooking up, which really gives new meaning to instant gratification—mobile TV programs with entertainment content paid for by product placements. (Nothing new so far.) You can buy the products featured in the program, using a mobile phone menu while viewing.

—Jia Hyun, global interactive director, GE Money

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For me, the biggest idea to focus on this year is the concept of 'building and maintaining your online reputation.' A brand's presence online is no longer contained to its Web site. With the rise of social media, a brand's presence is now truly distributed across the entire Web ecosystem . . . Everything a brand does online should be to create, build, or enhance reputation.

—Marc Schiller, CEO/founder Electric Artists

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1. The customer is more and more in control. 'Pull Media' is emerging rapidly in an on-demand world vs. traditional 'Push Media.'
2. The rapidly changing face of media from traditional media to newer media (digital, mobile, viral, etc.). The impact of the new iPhone and 3G wireless.
3. Targeted marketing vs. mass marketing.
4. The convergence of selling channels.

—Mike Boylson, CMO of J.C. Penney

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Micro-mega branding.

—Andre Branch, director of global marketing, Smirnoff/Diageo North America

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The Branded Self: Multiplying Platforms for Communicating our Personal Story
While social networking sites are hardly new, opportunities to present and engage ourselves in this expanding landscape are proliferating rapidly. The idea of the “self” functioning as a brand has come into its own in 2008. If you’re a musician, just starting out a comedy career or simply a quirky exhibitionist, post your material on MySpace. LinkedIn, the professional networking site, allows us to build contacts, post resumes, create career peer groups and search for jobs. Originally a social networking site for college students, Facebook has become the second most visited site on the web – thanks largely to constant innovation: fan pages, photo tags, a marketplace and widget applications. These platforms allow any one of us a public venue from which to tell our own story, visually and aurally, in our own way. This is, in fact, personal 'brand building'–creating and “promoting” a recognizable identity from the inside out.

Widgets: Keeping Your Favorite Brand Always at Hand
With the advent of Widgets, it’s as though our favorite brands are stalking us, but in a good way. These clever little product gateways help us access what we want quickly and easily, wherever we are. They eliminate searching and waiting for a site to load–and take us directly to our favorite services, amusements and even products, all from the palm of the hand! While the iPhone is the most popular, and portable, medium for these widgets, they are increasingly available on laptops and hand-held communications devices of all kinds. Apple’s iTunes store already features over 15 categories for consumers to explore–everything from Scrabble to WeatherBug, banking applications, subway maps and wine logs. Whether free, or for a nominal fee, each can be downloaded to an iPhone or PDA and typically have a matching app for Facebook and other social networking sites. It is the realization of every marketer’s long-sought dream: 'The Brand at Hand'…instantly!

Case study in Open Brand Management: Starbucks
Branding experts have long preached the rigors and rewards of successful brand management. But one of the world’s true brand innovators found a way to reinvent the discipline yet again. Howard Schultz, the founding genius behind the Starbucks empire, chose to reinvigorate his stalling brand through a pre-emptive—and very public—strike at the very core of his organization. His 2007 “internal” memo challenging the growing commoditization of Starbucks rippled swiftly through the Internet and became an instant media sensation. It proved to be a brilliant (and virtually cost-free) way to broadly signal major change for the organization while re-articulating and celebrating a return to its core brand values. Subsequently, Schultz suspended sales worldwide for an afternoon of employee “brand re-engagement,” created an online forum soliciting customers’ opinions and suggestions (reporting back on actions taken), introduced new packaging and permanently shuttered unproductive locations, all in the service of rebuilding brand value. This is pro-active brand management in the global arena—a high risk, high reward performance by a true marketing master.

Design Reigns
Today, the virtual benchmark for state-of-the-art, sleek, user-friendly product and packaging design is inevitably an Apple product with an 'i' prefix in its name. However, it is only in 2008 that the internationally recognized Cannes Lions Awards finally acknowledged the critical importance of design in marketing and created a specific category for brand designers to compete on the world stage. It was high time. The power of great design to not only motivate purchase but actually change the way we perceive and engage in our world has never been more dramatically evident. Now design will be celebrated annually at this premier, celebrity-studded global event…and it is definitely ready for its 'close-up!'

—Hayes Roth, CMO of Landor Associates

Source - Brandweek