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Redefining Luxury: From Excess to Stealth

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scenarioDNA building enterprise intelliVillages

Just wanted to share some of the stuff we’re doing on the scenarioDNA side of thing:

We’ve been talking with Neighborhood America for years about its enterprise social network solutions. And at our clients’ urging, we’ve finally decided to jump in and do something with them. In this case, we’re exploring networked consumer panels, and we’re calling the collective intelliVillage™.

The key to a dynamic intelliVillage™ is to populate it with consumers who are already engaging in behavior that is in step with the brand in question--looking beyond demographics and beginning at a point of passion. And that’s where we get our kicks—looking for the most engaged. People already engaged in brand-related activity can evolve into excellent brand facilitators, even if they’ve never met the brand before.

The coolest part is that now we will be able to homerun all data—from mobile polls to online surveys to ethnography--into one easily accessible bucket where it can be compared and contrasted giving all info equal weight.

Read the release. (Image: Model Village by BaseGreen.)

Because the age of the early adopter has begun to shift behind us, it’s critical to evolve the way we look at consumers.

Kiwee Reaches One Million Members

Just wanted to share something that we were part of:

In just six months, social expression site Kiwee has reached one million members; delivering 500 million IM graphics downloads.

The content is all free and includes postCards, graphics, emoticons, winks, display pictures, widgets and backgrounds for all major online communications platforms including Facebook, MySpace, Piczo, Multiply, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and AOL Instant Messenger.

"The teen and twenty-something demographic communicates with friends and family immediately on whatever platform reaches them fastest, and we provide expressive content that isn't available anywhere else on the Internet today," said Rajiv Jain, SVP and General Manager, Kiwee. "We know how people connect with one another based on our 101-year American Greetings heritage and our deep psychographic knowledge of this market, and these exciting growth numbers illustrate how our content resonates with young people all over the world."

Congrats!

Read the release.

Rethinking Starbucks

Sharing some company press in today's AdAge:

Starbucks Coffee Co. has returned its No. 1 barista, founder Howard Schultz, to his former role of chief executive to perk up its sales and stock price. To differentiate its brand, Mr. Schultz said Starbucks would focus on its store "experience," one which he criticized in a memo to Jim Donald last February.

""It's time for them to evolve before the brand erodes any further," she said. Starbucks' problem is oversaturation, she said, but the company must be careful about which stores it closes, not just shuttering underperforming stores in poor neighborhoods.

Ms. Tupot, who consults for Starbucks' competitors, also said Starbucks might consider adding more local character to individual stores so that a traveler to another city might enjoy not just a predictable cup of coffee but be able to "capture the locality." While Starbucks has been careful to point out that it is not a fast-food restaurant, Ms. Tupot believes it could do well selling certain types of foods beyond cake and other sweets. For example, she said East Coast chain Le Pain Quotidien serve baguettes and spreads along with coffee and allows customers to sit at a long table and linger.

She noted one promising Starbucks initiative is its use of text-messaging, whereby customers can order drinks from a cellphone and pick them when they arrive at the store, bypassing those standing in line.

Publicis Ramps Up Planning in US

Publicis USA is overhauling its strategy-planning department, announcing a raft of hires with various backgrounds and new structure with an eye to better understand consumers.  (read the full article in AdAge)

It seems like the underlying story here is that agencies have to figure out what business they are in.  It starts with what role planning takes in building ideas and generating actionable insights.  A couple names here that I know - I've had conversations with some of these folks (really smart people) - but they have voiced to me in the past a definition of planning leaning as much to business strategy as to consumer insight. They are not alone - many planning departments have (and have had for some time) an identity crisis going on - what value do they offer and how is that value evolving with the agency and plugging into the work they do.  Reminds me of digital shops in the late nineties wanting to be more like technology consulting firms such as Accenture. Not a good move for agencies or clients.  Confusing - especially when it often did not integrate into the existing process of creative development the agency already had. 

The reality is that you can't do both - i know we all want to say that  we can - but fundamentally you can;t have credibility on both sides of the process equally.  Great shops need to be great at being creative - that is a big enough task under the new challenges of the marketplace. Advertising (and that word is certainly evolving) is about creative ideas - and the fundamental source of these ideas that result in messages, products and experiences is knowing more about people.

I'm glad to see more agencies getting in touch with this "knowing people" thing - but it only means something if the whole agency organism takes on that as what their fundamental value is.  Be creative and be in touch with people in ways that companies/clients can't be.  I remain optimistic.

Fashion Bullying Moves to Middle School

Dorothy Espelage, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign,  says she has seen an increase in "bullying related to clothes." Having access to designer clothing affords some kids "the opportunity to become popular -- and that protects you and gives you social power and leverage over others," she says.

Over the past three years, numerous designers have targeted the lucrative children's and teens' markets. Little Marc, the kids' clothing label by New York designer Marc Jacobs, expanded its line this winter and dropped its price, making it more accessible to a greater number of shoppers...

What's curious here is that middle school kids are at a crossroad, moving beyond the parental threshold. Yet they still are looking back for parental approval. Branding at this age shoots right back at the parents. How kids are perceived at this stage and how they receive that perception shapes their future brand directions. WIll they become Abercrombie kids and constantly seek what's "in" or will they break out of the mold?

Read the whole story.

(Photo: Vintage tintype of a pre-teen.)

Supermarkets Cycle into New Era

Saw this article in WSJ and made it click for me as to how retail is truly transitioning from a Brand X/Y culture shaped in the fifties and sixties to a much more complex era shaped by technology and multiplying polyglot brands.  Wal-Mart sits as the poster child for this post-industrial growth and expansion in the US ecomomy. The trouble Wal-Mart is having now has much to do with an overall shift in where people want to live, how they want to live and what they value.  A shift from post-WW2 suburban ideals of more stuff = trade up, to a new urban driven culture where differentiation is harder to achieve  and fosters a more nuanced view of what people value in general.  A move to more micro-retailing methods and micro-merchandising.  Smaller packages - bigger impact.  An increased knowledge level of even the most average laggards forces a mandate for more innovation than ever before.   Read the article (WSJ)

(excerpt) In some ways, Wal-Mart's loss of clout is a reflection of a more fragmented world. Retailing is a mirror to how we live and work. Big-box stores thrived by selling highly recognizable national brands, which themselves were fed by two phenomena: the growth of mass media and freeways, which encouraged large stores in remote areas. Stores and brands together achieved scale efficiencies that allowed them to overwhelm local chain stores and regional brands.

But the Internet is transforming the retail definition of scale. The once-stunning compilation of 142,000 items found in a Wal-Mart supercenter doesn't seem so vast alongside the millions of products available on the Internet. At the same time, the cost of creating and sustaining a national brand is rising because of media fragmentation. Niche brands, created by Internet word of mouth, are winning shelf space and sapping profits required to fund big brands' advertising. Manufacturers such as Apple Inc. and Phillips-Van Heusen Corp., lacking the retail distribution or presentation they crave, are opening their own stores. One result is that retail giants hold less sway over their customers -- and over their suppliers.

Passion, the Dividing Line? Call it Deja Vu

According to a new study by Yahoo and MediaVest called “Passionistas: The New Empowered Consumers,” highly-engaged consumers are more likely than most to create and share content online about issues they are passionate about and even the brands associated with them.

File this under “That’s What We Said”:

“At scenarioDNA, kids are grouped according to their passions much more so than their age or location. It’s essential to define them in the context of their passions…from skateboarders to rodeo queens and beyond.”

Excerpted from Billion Dollar Babies, American Way Magazine, December 2005

(Photo: WIsh Tree, Abington Art Center.)

What Analog Synths Can Teach Us About Media Planning

My first synth was a Korg 770 and I was hooked from then on...so I found this article in Reuters titled "Electronic artists find inspiration in vintage gear" rather interesting.  I think it also offers some interesting unexpected insights when it comes to looking at media planning today.  The idea of analog  and digital and the cyclical process we go through of over relying on one or the other..

Before preset sound banks overflowed with prefab beats, electronic musicians made them from scratch with freestanding synthesizers. Before drag and drop, remixers physically cut and spliced tape to move sonic parts. When the digital production revolution finally did come, dance producers led the charge, emboldened by the standardization of sounds and methods they had pioneered. Since then, nothing has sped the genre's growth (or dilution, according to some) more than the advent of increasingly cheap, easily manipulated software.

"People are realizing what's missing from the sounds they're getting out of software," Phil Moffa of production/DJ outfit Vinyl Life says. "They're conscious of how everything is sounding the same, and digital replication is the same every time. The magic of analog is it's never the same, depending on the weather, where you are in the world, the electricity supply."

Thinking in Brand "Packets"

In an article in this week's Advertising Age titled "Do Home Pages Have a Place in Web 2.0's Future?", some data from an Avenue A/Razorfish study really brings home how marketers still keep wasting time around brand home pages.  It puzzles me.  With everything that social media tells us it would seem obvious that attempting to aggregate consumers in such a way is clearly unnatural.  This from the article:

One of the most surprising things the team found was how many people are starting their online shopping with search -- more than 54% of the study's panel, in fact. The idea that more consumers are coming to brand sites through the side door of search means search engines are starting to circumvent brands when it comes to online shopping. While a consumer looking for a pizza stone offline might drive to her nearest Williams-Sonoma, in the online world she's more likely to just type the product name into Google and see what comes up.

"Marketers need to stop thinking so much about their site and more about what's happening outside their site, such as widgets, viral and search," Mr. Schmitt said.

My sense is that there is still an expectation that most marketers have that everything has to happen in one experience.  I have the ultimate brand  - build the site version of that and make it all happen there.  This goes against the grain of how consumers interact with media.  The reality is that the most effective brand interactions happen in small doses and incrementally. The key is delivering many more smaller meaningful packets (brand bundles that are designed to function in a specific way/with narrower scope)  to keep the brand bubbling up as consumers search for similar things as they move in a process of consideration and purchase. Packets that convert analog experiences into digital interactions [before I plug in a search term] and  digital interactions into analog behavior [in the fuzzy space leading up to a potential purchase or full brand connection]. 

To get to this  brand must explore new approaches to developing consumer personas that move beyond the cookie-cutter marketing segments. Personas that combine both the emotional and rational aspects surrounding the brand and work to identify the right "packet" to work with the flow of existing media consumption and cultural associations.  Not one voice, but multiple voices of the brand that help build  cultural and functional relevance on multiple layers.  This type of cultivation of relevance is what keeps the brand getting through the "side doors". 

These packets should be flexible to the many unforeseen ways consumers come in.  And not just from a marketing cycle standpoint alone - but an emotional one too. Understand how to get the brand more layered into the way consumers are accessing it. recommendations are not purely rational - they are mixed in with emotional peer interaction. Unbundle the brand into mini-narratives, engage with grassroots actions that are likely to seed conversation on message boards, build in calendar events  that draw people in and set off the need to organize and collectivize around the brand.   

Home pages used to be expensive ways to show TV ads of the brand.  YouTube does that better now.