Brand Noise

Haagen-Dazs Promotes HoneyBee Buzz

Haagen-Dazs demonstrates some interesting and relevant green marketing with with their "Help the Honeybees" campaign.  Haagen-Dazs uses the campaign to warn that decline of the honeybee could become a big problem for the premium ice cream maker's business. According to Haagen-Dazs, one-third of the U.S. food supply - including a variety of fruits, vegetables and even nuts - depends on pollination from bees.

The campaign works well in promoting a real environmental cause, while also emphasizing the premium and natural positioning of the brand.  It is tied well to the value of the brand and plugs the consumer into what goes into quality ice cream.  Pretty basic.  Real flavors need real fruits - and that needs honeybees.  The campaign includes a new flavor launch called "Vanilla Honeybee" to further promote the cause.

David's Got a New Job

Here in a perfect case of cross-discipline learning, life imitates art:

For statues, stress injuries come from standing in place for hundreds of years. Using a novel technique, researchers have now developed a way to predict such fracturing, applying the procedure to Michelangelo's David in an analysis that proved simpler, faster and more accurate than previous methods.

In applying the technique to other objects -- including human bones -- the researchers are also gaining new perspective on how these structures are likely to fail.

Read more.

Tappening Taps into a Need

Not a new story, but certainly one of the most compelling ones in which a small group of influential consumers created a huge ripple effect of demand for a coveted item, like the bag at Whole Foods that everyone waited in line for.

When Mark DiMassimo, who founded and runs Digobrands, and Eric Yaverbaum, who runs Ericho Communications, founded Tappening, they intended the site, www.tappening.com, to be an educational website where the public could find up-to-the minute information about the detrimental damages the bottled water industry was causing the environment. They personally financed an inventory of reusable water bottles that were available for purchase on the site. DiMassimo and Yaverbaum expected these 39,000 bottles to sell throughout the first year of their new project and self finance their marketing message. Their initial inventory sold within 36 hours.

For a beverage company, a campaign like Tappening forever changes the value of bottled water. The question remains—how will the bottled water makers deal with that? So far, Coke is offering no comment. What remains is that there’s a value that lives on in regard to portability and functional aspects. But what price does that come at? Let’s look at the bottle. Will Coca-Cola encourage refilling their bottles?

The answers aren’t simple. This opens up a whole new set of issues. You’ll start to see filtration products on the horizon. Imagine a bottle with a built-in filter that you can refill, say 10 times. Each time the filter adds a functional aspect like electrolytes that you desire to your water.

Along those lines, Pur Water Filter known for its in-home filtration has been offering its Exstream portable bottle purification system to the outdoor sporting community. But no one has bought 39,000 units of it in 36 hours.

Expanding on Social Software Behavior

Google.org's technology project to help save lives in the event of natural disasters or public health threats is set to launch Thursday.

The project, called Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disaster (InSTEDD), is a nonprofit organization that ambitiously aims to help communities around the world use Web and communications technology to identify and warn others of outbreaks like Avian flu or disasters like Hurricane Katrina. That technology, which will include social software Twitter and Facebook, will be used to coordinate rescue responses and help save lives.

"We're not talking about pulling the red phone out of the bottom drawer here," said Eric Rasmussen, president and CEO of InSTEDD and a former adviser to U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense, referring to Twitter and Facebook. "We're talking about using ubiquitous, free software that is repurposed when necessary to fit into a humanitarian need."

Read more.

Good Aligns With Lifestyle, And So Begins Paradox

Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable:

Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug?

Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care.

The human moral sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity, with quirks that reflect its evolutionary history and its neurobiological foundations.

Dozens of things that past generations treated as practical matters are now ethical battlegrounds, including disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls and research on breast cancer. Food alone has become a minefield, with critics sermonizing about the size of sodas, the chemistry of fat, the freedom of chickens, the price of coffee beans, the species of fish and now the distance the food has traveled from farm to plate.

That said...Many of these moralizations, like the assault on smoking, may be understood as practical tactics to reduce some recently identified harm. But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible (hence Hummer HX), but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.

Read the whole story.

(Photo: Dr. Norman Borlaug, in his wrestling attire as a young man.)

Lap Dancers "in Heat" Earn Higher Tips

To see whether estrus (heat cycle) was really “lost” during human evolution (as researchers often claim), researchers in the Department of Psychology at the University of New Mexico examined ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by professional lap dancers working in gentlemen's clubs.

The researchers used ads and flyers to sign up 18 lap dancers from local clubs. Each woman was asked to log on to a Web site and report her work hours, tips, and when she was menstruating. Lap dancers generally work 5-hour shifts with 18 or so 3-minute performances per shift. They average about $14 per "dance"--all of which is called a "tip" because it is illegal to pay for sex in New Mexico.

Normally cycling participants earned about US$335 per 5-h shift during estrus, US$260 per shift during the luteal phase, and US$185 per shift during menstruation. By contrast, participants using contraceptive pills showed no estrous earnings peak.

Read more. Read the abstract. (Image: Hiro's Lapdance.)

Entertainment Farming

"In the past 20 years, corn mazes have become big business not only in this country but all across Europe," writes Jane Garmey in The Wall Street Journal.  The idea of planting maize as mazes is generally credited to "Adrian Fisher, an Englishman who for 20 years has not only created mazes but has turned them into a form of popular entertainment." Then there's Brett Herbst who will design any kind of maze you want, starting at $4,500.  Some of Brett's mazes attract as many as "50,000 visitors in a season that typically runs for less than two months."  Brett refers to his vocation as "entertainment farming.”

We liken that to agricultural tourism.

(Photo: Dole Plantation Maze, Hawaii.)

Read more.

Benadryl's Little Secret

I was taken a back a bit when I recently started seeing a new Benadryl product currently being pitched via TV commercials.  The product is called Benadryl Perfect Measure and is designed for on-the-go parent scenarios.  What has me a little uncomfortable here is the how the insights behind the development of a product like this unfolded. Is it a case of a definition of convenience being shaped to plug into a current behavioral pattern of use that is not healthy - but sells a lot of the product.  The ugly little secret [video] of this product is that many parents are drugging their kids [video] with Benadryl as a means of controlling behavior.  It seems impossible that this fact would not come out in any research that was done.  And the ads seem to promote the ease by which you can slip some Diphenhydramine while simultaneously checking your email on your Blackberry.  Reminds me of a product I had growing up in England called Dr J Collis Browne's chlorodyne which contained anhydrous morphine and peppermint oil.  How about making that into a pocket pack?

Scent as a Differentiator

At Las Vegas CityCenter, to get people to buy what is essentially a very costly lifestyle accessory — or a third home, they wanted to appeal not just to the minds of prospective buyers but also to “their emotions, psyche, heart and soul.”  One key to creating it, he thought, would be to employ the power of scent.

In real estate, a basic form of scent marketing has been around for decades; consider the seller’s trick of placing a freshly baked apple pie or cookies in the kitchen, which makes a house feel more like a home. The problem is one of scale he notes. ScentAir’s technology, originally developed for military simulators and theme park rides, is now used by Toll Brothers, D. R. Horton and other major builders to sell thousands of new homes nationwide.

Companies are also intrigued by the potential of using smell to unleash memories — positive, deeply held ones that could then be associated with the products offered — and also to strengthen brand memory. “The emotional power of smell-triggered memory has an intensity unequaled by sight- and sound-triggered ones,” wrote Rachel Herz, a Brown University neuroscientist, in a paper summing up more than a decade of her research.  Read more (NY Times Magazine)

Opening the Era of Personal Genomics

J. Craig Venter has just published almost all 6 billion letters, or 96 percent, of his own personal genetic code in the journal PLoS Biology. From diseases to personality traits, it's the most comprehensive human genome to date. Venter's gene map provides a new understanding of his genetic destiny, according to the DNA inherited from both his father and his mother.

Venter says it gives him more motivation than just a simple family history. "In my case it gives me a little bit more motivation to try and persistently stick with healthy habits because you don't have the excuse of saying ... you know, I don't really have those traits. ... I know what is in my genetic code," he says.  Read more (CNN)