Why Wes Anderson to "direct" Chatsworth? Well, initially it just felt right. The characters in The Catcher in the Rye are so strong, so well developed and so uniquely 'of' that book, it reminded me of characters from Wes Anderson's films. Doing a little research on Anderson I read he was a fan to TCITR.

Here's an interesting anecdote that was passed along to me by Rob Walker, author of Buying In, blogger (Murketing) and journalist (NY Times Magazine 'Consumed' column):

In college, while visiting a friend, Rob struck up a conversation with his friend's roommate, as one does in college.  Over the course of the conversation, this guy urges Rob to read The Catcher in the Rye. At this point you know where this story is going. That's right, Rob's friends' roommate was none other than... Wes Anderson.

So, it seems my choice of Wes Anderson for director was not only inspired, it was destined!

What I do mind is continually running into delays and cancellations! And it's not just United Airlines. Over the last year I have been stranded, delayed and grounded on the tarmac by a number of different airlines including American, US Air and United. It has gotten to the point where I just expect delays. Last Sunday night was no exception as I sat in Dulles Airport watching the departure time for my flight to Raleigh-Durham get pushed back time and time again. At least my luggage made it with me to Raleigh-Durham. I've learned not to expect that either. Once I got home, I was surprised to learn that one of the compartments in my suitcase was completely empty. It originally held a new hardback book and my travel alarm clock. Somewhere there must be a security person or baggage handler reading Rob Walker's Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are. More power to him.

The struggles within the industry must be impacting the flight attendants. On this trip they seemed more sarcastic and snippy than usual. Although I do have to give them credit, I don't have the patience to do what they do for a living. Compared to me, they are saints!

In all honesty, I still remain amazed that we live in a time when I can leave home (Raleigh-Durham) and make it to a meeting in downtown Boston by 9am and then be home in time to pick up my daughter from school. The convenience of air travel is amazing. And the cost doesn't seem at all out of line with the service they offer. In fact, I think it is generally a bargain. What bothers me is that I can no longer count on the fact that I will be home in time to pick up my daughter from school, despite all my planning and even if I've booked all the right flights. Based on my last year of travel, I've learned to plan for and expect delays. They have become the norm rather than the exception.

I've got a few ideas to help my friends at the airlines:

1. Increase your fares by 50% and get back to focusing on the passenger's experience. Traveling by air used to be an experience; it can be again.
2. Develop special bariatric (plus-size) seating and charge a small premium for those spaces. (Some have started doing this.) It will make both bariatric and non-bariatric travelers more comfortable. It is a fact that Americans are getting larger and a lot of them just don't fit in those tiny seats.
3. Treat your passengers like they matter. People working in the airlines industry used to act like they were in the hospitality business. Today, the vast majority of them act like they are in transportation - moving cargo from Point A to Point B. And unfortunately, we're the cargo.

On Monday I read a USA Today book review for a new branding text by Rob Walker. The book is titled: Buying In. So, I immediately went online Monday morning and ordered the book via Amazon. Ordering is an easy process; they've got all of my information on record. The amazing part of this is the book arrived Tuesday morning at my office and shipping was free. That kind of brand experience with Amazon over the years has made me a strong brand advocate. They understand certain values that are essential to me: Primarily the importance of convenience and speed. I am busy and inpatient, and don't want to wait around for a book to arrive. And Amazon gives me nearly immediate gratification. My whole relationship with them is quick and easy - and I don't believe that I am paying a premium for the honor.

Of course, they do a lot of other things very well. They typically have the texts I want in stock. They send me email messages when my favorite authors release new books. I find their site easy to use. And they provide a platform for me to review books and have a  profile that others can view.

For Amazon.com, the online experience and ensuing delivery on the service promise make up the bulk of the brand experience. When I think of companies who are doing it right, they are usually the first or second to come to mind. This week they have once again reinforced my bond to their brand.

Based on the USA Today review, Walker is describing a relationship between consumers and brands similar to what I call 'echo branding.' He believes that it is your interaction with the brand that defines the brand; you bring meaning to the brand. But Walker also looks deeper at what marketing has become: Part of the current of our lives and intertwined into everything we do. According to the USA Today article, "contrary to the belief that today's short-attention-span consumer is impervious to marketing, and that big brands no longer matter, Walker argues that marketing methods are stronger than ever, just harder to spot." The author of the article, Kerry Hannon, goes to say that consumers "are creating their own brands and participating in marketing campaigns for their favorite products. Motivated consumers are even creating Internet video ads and becoming loyal word-of-mouth agents for their brand du jour."

I'm going to order a copy of Walker's book today from Amazon. Can't wait to check it out. Click here to link to the USA Today article.

Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are
By Rob Walker

This is an absolutely fantastic book on the new evolution of marketing, or as Rob Walker calls "murketing", where traditional advertising and methods no longer work on our technology savvy consumers. He touches upon numerous examples to explain why and sometimes how we buy certain products. Can anyone think of a reason why Red Bull exists? Or why you bought it in the first place? Or, more importantly, who is Red Bull targeting exactly?

Marketers are continually finding ways to innovate and infiltrate us, showing up at our hangouts, giving out freebies at the water park, to get us to buy new products.

Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury Goods And How Companies Create Them
By Michael J. Silverstein, Neil Fiske, John Butman

How can you imagine a world without Victoria's Secret, Callaway golf clubs, Mondavi wine, or the ultra slick BMW car? Well there was a time where the market for all of these industries was flat and uninteresting. This is a book that explores how some of the most recognized lifestyle brands have achieved success by offering consumers a better quality product at premium prices. Trading Up is a natural progression, people like new things, and even better when they outperform the old stuff. By personal experience, I would say Japanese 7Eleven trumps our dépanneurs by a longshot, yet the corner store concept isn't anything new. But if you give consumers a distinctive advantage in better products and service, they will definitely flock to a 7Eleven store than your Couche Tard any day.

Trading Up is a good book to read if you want to find out how some brand names have made it, and can definitely help budding business entrepreneurs get into the mix.

Freakonomics : A rogue economist explores the hidden side to everything
By Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Here's a book that doesn't have much relations to fashion itself, but nonetheless finds an interesting link between what we perceive a certain situation or event to be rather than what really happens. Such as there's a strong link between abortions and the fall of rate crimes, or how drug dealers and their gangs operate much like legitimate businesses and that violence drives away the customers. So eventhough the media may report or explain things that make a lot of sense, often times they're really just deducing what seems logical rather than looking outside of the box for another kind of cause.

If Freakonomics can be applied to today's fashion industry, we can trace back all trends to specific subcultures, no matter how minute, that trickles down to the stores you shop in and into your closet, even if you're not particularly aware of the numerous influence and years of innovation it took to have that specific piece of clothing on your back.

]]> http://afternow.wordpress.com/?p=79 Tue, 29 Jul 2008 14:40:46 +0000 future http://afternow.wordpress.com/2008/07/29/invisible-brands/

Recently I’ve stumbled upon some of Rob Walker’s work in prelude to his new book “Buying In”.  In one of his write-ups he talks about invisible badges.  According to Walker, badges are signals that suggest a tighter relationship with the brand producer and the brand consumer.

Walker observes that people no longer buy stuff to impress others, rather to impress themselves.  This means that logos are becoming less important indicators of status.  Look no further than the high-end fashion industry where logos are shrinking.

Christian Louboutin has made red soles the staple of his shoe line.  Bottega Venta bags are identifiable by their intricately weaved patterns. Rolex is known for the weight of its watches and Armani for the slender rounded shoulders of its men’s blazers.

Intended for small affinity groups rather than mass markets, these companies are creating brand undergrounds where consumers need to be fully indoctrinated in the brand cultures to fully understand their subtle signaling.

This is a liberating trend for brands with strong belief systems like Zappos that pays their employees to quit or Gourmet that believe that there is no conflict between mixing high fashion and streetwear pieces.  Companies with substance can now start to tell richer brand stories through the product themselves.

Moving forward the miniaturization of logos will become more prominent, where embedded clues, colors, fabric and materials will become the main brand identifier.

He ended up creating a nametag2.0, which is a pretty clever idea. Rohit has done several really innovative tactics for his book promotion, as did Rob Walker for his recent book, Buying In.  Attention is a precious commodity today and with dozens of books coming out seemingly every week in the marketing/culture/consumer trends category alone, authors have to work very hard, and very smart, to get any traction. 

But the law of diminishing returns are going to set in soon. The novelty of blog book tours and other web 2.0 tactics that seem so fresh right now won't next time around.  I'd like to see an author bring readers into the process earlier, not just after the book is printed and ready to ship.  Can a social network be created around a proposed book? How could the 'wisdom of crowds' help direct the creation of a book, and how could readers have a sense of ownership? Is that possible, or even desirable?  Perhaps a blog about the creation of the book - a sort of 'behind the scenes at the sausage factory - from writing to working with the publishers to the book tours.

I think we soon going to be talking about the promotion of books as much as the books themselves very soon.

This past week, in addition to the New York Times story mentioned in yesterday's post, a couple of other articles caught my eye that basically reinforce the theory that, regardless of all the vast and rapid (vapid?) technological changes our society has seen and experienced, we humans fundamentally are the same lemming-like creatures we always were and probably always will be.

The first story is a Wall Street Journal review of the book Buying In, by Rob Walker, who wrote the "Consumed" column for the New York Times Magazine.  Walker makes the point that despite today's tools allowing people to block advertising, to access to more information and to have the opportunity to weigh a diversity of views, the consumer is still sucked into the most basic of advertising hype, blindly and somewhat irrationally going straight for that which he/she perceives to be popular. It's the power of group dynamics played to a ridiculous level.

The article rightly pointed out that the truth probably lies somewhere in between - that the Internet has spawned many, many more options and made superstars out of some of the offbeat content and personalities who would likely never have had a chance to raise to the level of public consiousness in the old media days, but that when push comes to shove, it's still pretty much one big popularity contest. Just like high school.

I wonder how I'd fare in one of those consumer-lemming studies.  Would I give an enthusiastic thumbs up to the vinegar-laced orange drink just because it has an appealing-sounding brand name?  Would I cave in and buy something I wouldn't ordinarily, just because everyone else is?  I've always prided myself on being independent-minded, but I can only hope that when put to the test I'd pass my own lofty standards.  With all the information and choices available to us, we could all probably afford to be more thoughtful.

And yet...I've heard that ABC's "I Survived a Japanese Game Show" is a total hoot and I need to set my DVR for Tuesday night's episode. Talk about being conflicted...Stay tuned.

Laura Miller, Salon, July 7, 2008

Perhaps the best key to the Barack Obama phenomenon (as opposed to Obama the man) is a book that never even mentions the Illinois senator: Rob Walker's "Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are." Observing the launch of Red Bull, an energy drink, Walker noted that instead of attempting to assert the brand's identity to a mass market, the manufacturer pursued a strategy of what he calls "murketing," sponsoring low-key events geared to distinct niches; ask any of these groups what Red Bull is and you're likely to hear a different answer. By refusing to define Red Bull, advertisers allowed each slice of its overall market to interpret the beverage for itself. Likewise, the "vagueness" that many flinty political junkies complain of in Obama permits all sorts of disparate people -- progressives, independents, intellectuals, young people, minority advocates, renegade Republicans -- to see the reflection of their own desires in the self-described "skinny kid with a funny name."

Obama the symbol possesses the enviable quality that Walker calls "projectability," and Obama himself has marveled that he often seems to be "a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." He is, in short, a cutting-edge brand. But if he does win the general election, what then? A brand can't be president of the United States. Once in the Oval Office what beliefs, values and ideas would Obama bring to the job? Rather than look at calculated official pronouncements (a recent release cited William Shakespeare and Ernest Hemingway as the candidate's favorite authors) it's time to take a closer look at some of the formative books in his intellectual and political life to see if we can learn more about the man behind the movement.

If Obama is elected, he'll be one of the most literary presidents in recent memory. Although his boyhood and youth in Hawaii and Indonesia were not especially bookish, Obama the reader blossomed as an undergraduate at Occidental College in California and, especially, during the two monkish years he spent finishing up his degree at Columbia University in New York. "I had tons of books," he told his biographer, David Mendell ("Obama: From Promise to Power"), about this time in his life. "I read everything. I think that was the period when I grew as much as I have ever grown intellectually. But it was a very internal growth." Even after he left New York to work as a community organizer in Chicago, Mendell reports, Obama lived so much like a retiring writer -- spending many hours holed up in a spartan apartment with volumes of "philosophy and literature" -- that some of his colleagues assumed he was gathering material for a novel.

A taste for serious fiction is rare in the American male these days, but Obama has it. According to several friends, he even tried his hand at writing short stories during those early years in Chicago, and he recalls priggishly scolding his half sister, Maya, while she was visiting him in New York, because she chose to watch TV instead of reading some novels he'd given her. Among the authors he favored during his years of intensive reading were Herman Melville, Toni Morrison and E.L. Doctorow (cited as his favorite before he switched to Shakespeare). He has also mentioned Philip Roth, whose struggles to shrug off the strictures of Jewish American community leaders must have resonated with the young activist.

The biracial Obama, invested with a sense of his African-American heritage by his idealistic white mother, but largely raised (by her parents) among whites, found himself questioning the social and political ideas of the educated blacks he met after moving to the U.S. mainland. His memoir, "Dreams From My Father," is framed as a quest, the story of a young man's journey toward an African-American identity that felt authentic and vital, yet didn't demand that he reject his white family and friends.

Read More Here

The fact is, there have been unapologetic fanboy gamers ever since the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis first arrived on the scene, and gave us all a horse to back. Sega even helped the process along, publicly vowing that the Genesis could do whatever "Nintendon't."

Of course, the anonymity of the internet has since turned the opinionated fanboy into some sort of annoying vitriolic supernova. Seriously, read any Kotaku comments thread that's been up for an hour. It's enough to make you wonder how any sane person could claim to love one console/developer/game so passionately, and yet hate another so vehemently.

Rob Walker, a regular contributor to Slate, the New York Times Magazine and blogger behind the stellar Murketing, looks at the bonds we form with what we buy in his upcoming book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are. It might shed some light into what causes the fanboy condition... Check out Rob's interview with Rick over at eyecube (one of our new friends in the Wordpress Marketing Bloggers Network, in the blogroll at right). It's definitely worth a read.

The man who coined the term murketing has released a new book, Buying In. 

As a cynical hack, getting older by the day, there are one or two things he says that my traditionalist journalist brain is fighting hard to disagree with.

But, overall, there is plenty of food for thought in the Q&A and I might well write a bit more on how murketing might or might not work for newspapers in their battle for a long-term future.

I'm sure many of you are familiar with Rob Walker. He's written for Slate; has his own blog, Murketing, which is a daily must read; writes a weekly column called Consumed for the New York Times Magazine; and his new book, Buying In, will be available June 3. Sure, Rob is ubiquitous, but that's not why I read him. I read him because he's crazy with the smarts, has his finger on the pulse of what people are buying and why, and presents his ideas in a clever, original way. I was fortunate enough to grab an advance copy of Buying In and devoured it over the weekend. Rob was kind enough to take time out from his busy schedule to answer a couple of questions. Hopefully this will give you an idea of the sorts of things Rob covers:

Rick Liebling: I love your term, 'murketing.' I think there is an equally murky side-effect of this sort of practice though - the inability to measure the success of the tactics. I'd argue Red Bull's unique can had as much to do with its success as a kiteboard or other extreme sport stunt. How do these brands measure what's working?

Rob Walker: I guess this gets at the eternal question of whether marketing is an art or a science. As you know, I'm not in the business, and so kind of ambivalent about that debate, but my outsider's view is as follows:

In the book I talk about the difference between rational thinking, and rationale thinking. The latter refers, basically, to decisions made for some borderline instinctual reason, and sort of rationalized, non-consciously, with a reason that sounds more rational. A lot of "metrics" that I read about in the trade press, for any medium, strike me as closer to rationales than anything else. One of the reasons I have a hard time following the debate is that any given marketer always seems to be able to come up with some kind of number that demonstrates how what he or she is proposing "works."

And since I take the position that non-conscious factors guide an awful lot more of our buying decisions than most of us care to admit, it has to follow that such things are very difficult to track and measure.

Finally, I take the influence of culture seriously, and since culture is always changing, that makes it very hard to do what marketers want to do, which is look at how Brand X succeeded because of a certain campaign, and simply recreate that campaign for Brand Y. Meanwhile, the brands are culturally different, and culture has changed in the interim, and so on.

But the upshot is that marketers, in my view, are going to continue to find rationales for more and more aggressive forms of what I'm calling murketing. They're not going to do it on the basis of empirical evidence that would convince a third party observer. They're going to do it because everybody else is doing it, and they're scared of missing out or they want to show that they "get it" or whatever.

RL: You site many academic/scientific studies that detail the hows and whys of consumer behaviour. I'm equally fascinated by instances when a product suddenly drops off the radar. An example is The Club car theft deterrent device. It seemed every car had them in the early-90s. Now, I can't remember seeing one in the last 10 years. The product isn't any less effective, so how does something like that happen?

RW: For years I've wanted to write a story about something like this, but the truth is I've never found the right convergence of a good case study, and someone willing to publish the story.

I don't know anything about the Club in particular, so I can't say much about what happened there. I actually use a Club, which I bought probably 15 years ago (and kept even during an eight-year stretch when I didn't own a car, because I correctly guessed I might have one again some day), at which point I stopped thinking about the auto theft device market.

RL: What's your take/where do you stand on the Duncan Watts - Malcolm Gladwell "Influentials" debate?

RW: I can't say I've followed that debate very closely so I can only address this in general terms. I do actually deal with it in the book, sort of, but of course when I wrote that material this debate hadn't yet begun, so it's not framed that way. Basically what I talk about isn't so much anything that, say, Gladwell wrote, but rather how people have interpreted what he wrote. The interpretation boils down to: "Hmm, a small group of people are responsible for making Hush Puppies a hit. Ergo, if we find those people, or people like them, and get them to like our widget, then our widget will be a hit."

I think what Gladwell had to say was a good deal more complicated than that, but this is how people want to interpret it -- and not just him but all the other people who have written over many years about the general idea of Influencers and Sneezers and Tastemakers and whatever.

So in the book I call this group Magic People -- shorthand that I assume indicates my skepticism about this theory. While I don't think Gladwell ever says "there is an elite class that influences everything the rest of us do," you can in fact find people who will say that, and I don't find it very convincing.

I've only read press accounts of Watts' work, as opposed to his actual papers, so I hesitate to offer an opinion there. From what I've read, many of his views seem reasonable, but when the accounts shift into "what it means for marketers" and so on, I just don't feel qualified to assess that side of it.

RL: Buying In certainly confirmed some of my feelings regarding companies and consumers playing a complimentary role in the creation and meaning of a consumable brand like clothes or electronics. Where does something like the 501st Legion - Star Wars fans so dedicated and passionate that they eventually became part of the Star Wars canon -fit in? Do you think we'll see the ideas and work of brand-passionate consumers be embraced by properties such as film franchises, book series' or TV shows?

RW: Well it's pretty tricky, we are seeing more of that, but on the other hand we're also seeing some cold feet about that approach -- some cultural creators actually suing fans over fan-generated content. It's tricky because we're in a weird time with intellectual property laws and people are having a hard time figuring out where to draw the line.

Can you let your fans actually profit from a combination of their fandom and your intellectual property? That freaks out people who make a living off their intellectual property.

The 501st (which I've actually written about) isn't making money off what they do, they sort of converted into something like a civic organization. There's kind of a gray area of people making and selling costumes that I guess Lucasfilm tolerates on some level, although I think in some cases they've possibly gone after people. What makes it extra tricky on the legal front is, as I understand it, you can't just pick and choose on this stuff: If you let one entity profit off your marks, then you are in effect not defending your marks, and others can argue as much in court and they can profit off them too because you've left the precedent out there. And maybe those others are people/entities that for one reason or another you're not comfortable with, but you're stuck. (I'm not a lawyer so maybe I'm getting this wrong, but this is my layman's understanding.)

In the brand realm, the reality is that very few brands are ever going to inspire the kind of passion that Star Wars, Prince, or Harry Potter does. One interesting example is a brand called Mike, positioned as a sort of Nike tribute. I wrote about it in Consumed, and Nike wouldn't comment. Two years later, they sent the guy a cease and desist.

On the other hand, it was pretty interesting when that guy did the freelance iPod ad that sort of took off on line, and Apple just let it go. I guess he wasn't profiting, though.

RL: Old media like newspaper publishers, major record labels and broadcast television networks don't seem to be very good at murketing. They are also all struggling. Coincidence?

Hmmmm. Well I don't think the problems of those industries have a lot to do with their ability or inability to market (or murket) themselves, so much as they have to do with larger forces that have encouraged and enabled the murketing era. By this I mean the usual suspects: Technology, cultural fragmentation, and the like. Each of those industries also has its unique sets of problems. So, not a coincidence exactly, but related side effects of the same new reality -- for better or worse.

To find out more about Rob's book, Buying In, click here

 (That's PSFK impresario Piers Fawkes in the foreground).

Rob will be glad to know that his book was enthusiastically snatched up by those in attendance (thanks Random House!).

There are a lot of really terrific books out there that fall into a similar category to Buying In, and it seems that get-togethers like likemind are popular. Is there a 'salon'/book club that focuses on marketing/branding/advertising/PR/culture/etc. books? If so, I'd love to know about it.

Whenever I see or hear Rob's name, it instantly takes me back to 2003.  I was the Pabst Blue Ribbon Brand Manager at Pabst Brewing Company and had been working with Rob as he was writing a story for the NY Times Magazine about the increased popularity of Pabst Blue Ribbon.  I hadn't met Rob in person, but I talked on the phone with him several times and facilitated his interviews with my boss and some other people in the company.

Although I knew Rob's story was going to be extremely positive for the brand and he seemed to be a nice enough guy, serving as the primary media contact for Pabst was an extremely painful process.  Our upper management was fairly scared of what media coverage could bring.  They worried that the writer might say "something bad about us" or could divulge this "secret strategy" we apparently had.  All of this culminated as I ended up talking to the NYT Fact Checker on speaker phone as I sat in the CEO's office, and tried to balance the truth and what the CEO wanted me to say as furiously scribbled his directions on a legal pad.  I remember comparing the experience to "diffusing a bomb" after it was all over.

A couple months later, I was celebrating my 30th birthday in Vegas and I was pretty sure the story was in that Sunday's edition.  I stopped by the newsstand at Mandalay and picked up a paper.  Sure enough, Rob's piece titled, "The Marketing of No Marketing" was on page 42 (he calls it "Pabst Unsold").  Although it was a huge honor to have my brand and strategy documented in a publication like the NY Times Magazine, I was still really scared what the big shots would think of the final article.

Five years later, I was in New York for a conference and after a huge night out on the town with the guys from VICE Magazine, I met Rob at a coffee show in Tribecca.  I was really hungover, but it was fun to finally meet Rob and tell him about all the behind the scenes shit that went down for this story.

Fast forward to 2008.  I got book in the mail a couple weeks ago and I noticed it was written by Rob Walker and had some post-it notes bookmarking some pages.  I jumped to those pages and started to laugh.  Sure enough, it was the extended version of the NY Times story from five years ago.

Rob's new book, Buying In hits the shelves on June 3, 2008.  The entire book is a great read, but I'm kind of partial to Chapter 6, called Rebellion Unsold.