Brand Noise

MIT Student Creates iShoe for Seniors

Sometimes new inventions hit home just a little too hard.

MIT graduate student Erez Lieberman is working on an "iShoe" which uses technology developed by NASA to create an insole that could help elderly people keep their balance and prevent falls. The iShoe insole would measure and analyze the pressure distribution of the patient's foot and report back to their doctor.

Now which shoe to partner with is the question? Which brand of sneakers do seniors prefer? After my own mother took a major fall cracking her orbital, her doctor recommended Reebok's but Reebok's just didn't jive with her sense of style. These days, she's sporting Crocs and Land's End footwear just like other grandmas who want to be chic and comfortable. Wii Fit, anyone?

Sign of the Times: Compound Living

Neither the National Assn. of Realtors nor the California Assn. of Realtors is tracking "compound" type of housing, per se, but innumerable compounds can be found sprinkled throughout Southland neighborhoods. They are created by owners with large lots where zoning permits such housing and by buyers purchasing multiple adjacent properties.

Regina Petterson, a psychologist with Specialty Depression and Anxiety in Los Angeles, thinks that the interest among some in housing such as compounds reflects their desire to recapture the same sort of social change they witnessed or were a part of in the 1960s. "The difference is that it's more structured and less about experimentation."

Living together in a compound, she added, can not only increase the time a family spends together but also enhance the traditional nuclear family. For some buyers, a compound is one way to get some help paying the mortgage.

Nationally, "multigenerational" households represent just a fraction of the population. According to the 2000 Census, 4 percent of all U.S. households have three or more generations under one roof.

But in some parts of the country, these living arrangements seem to be growing in popularity. Twenty-somethings are taking their time moving out of the house, and young families are turning to their parents to help out with children.

Read more.

Toys for an aging japanese market

(Bloomberg) Purimopueru is a knee-high Japanese doll with soft, apple-spotted cheeks and big, black button eyes. It comes in green and pink, and when you cuddle it, it talks back. The doll, an award-winner at last week's Tokyo Toy Show, is generating new sales among the elderly for creator Namco Bandai Holdings Inc. as Japan's birthrate drops.

Bandai, which markets 20 percent of its toys to adults, started the Purimopueru line for children in 1999. It's now Bandai's best-selling doll with more than a million bought, mostly by women in their 50s and 60s, said the product's creative director, Hiroko Tajima.

``If you're the government, you've got the tax base to think about. But if you're selling toys or services, the shrinking market is really nothing compared to the gains you can get with a single product that sells well,'' says Martin Schulz, senior economist at Fujitsu's Research Institute in Tokyo. read more

Generational Synergy

I've been thinking a lot about generations lately, and specifically how developing pairing strategies of segmentation can offer new insights that are missed when looking at any generation alone.  The idea is that we often decide we want to reach a particular age group and we dive into that generation as the only source of data that will help unlock the code of reaching them. Could it be that the relationship generations have with other generations can be a way of opening up new ways of seeing them?  Developing pairings that unlock shared codes for specific tangibles and intangibles?

For example, there are opportunities to see where Gen Y is going by sometimes looking at their relationship to codes of their Boomer parents, and other times in their shared code with Gen X.  Codes of caution and status (Boomer) and codes of instigator and notoriety (Gen X). The reality is that generations are shaped by the ways they choose to assimilate or differentiate from the other generations in their world.

This idea of generational synergy can play out in all possible pairings between generations.  It can help develop bridges that broaden the market for products and brands.  It can help better identify as much the "i am" as the "i am not" when thinking about any given generation.  How they share and differ in translating trends that are impacting them as consumers. It can also help segment within those generations to see personas that give a better sense of where they may be going next.

An interesting current example is in the current political season.  When we see the poll numbers on Obama rising among Boomer independents, is this shift being propelled to some degree by how they see the way Gen X has embraced and validated him as a candidate?  Is there a point at which people see ideas from "the pack" hit a brick wall and start looking outside to see where we need to move next on certain issues? I think this is especially interesting as part of the essential DNA of Gen X is CHANGE.  They are the birth of the creative class and  invented sampling, tweaking and 2.0. Obama is the nuanced candidate - he is the first (at least in spirit) Gen X candidate.  While Obama is certainly popular with young voters, is the pairing of Gen X and Boomers the key to shaping the message that will likely result in  votes on election day?

Smooth Move for PETA

Aretha Franklin's US$19,000 tax bill will be paid by PETA if she promises never to wear fur again. The Respect singer is close to having her Michigan home repossessed unless she can come up with the money. PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) have agreed to settle the bill if she agrees to their terms, which also include handing over her collection of fur coats.

PETA says it's a win-win situation. Interestingly, should Aretha accept the offer and renege on her promise never to wear fur, she will be slammed and PETA will emerge even stronger. Lots of message board controversy wondering why PETA doesn't just donate the money to a shelter. The discourse of buying a celebrity resonates far louder and sustains itself longer than a donation.

Read more.

Birth of a visual subculture

Want to trace the roots of American subculture in the 20th century?  There is no better place than the silver age of comic books as the subculture visual language that defines the secret pleasures of Boomer kids. The cultivation of visual cues is critical to the code of the fifties.  Image gains value over words and defines the struggle between idealism and disillusionment.  For Mom it is the visual vernacular of Betty Crocker cookbooks that define new ways we connect with food.  The picture is more real than the ingredients. The look of things is power - and can represent everything from the perfect apple pie (the key to your husband's heart) to...well the decline of western civilization.  Here is some interesting reading on the comic subculture of the fifties in a New Yorker review of a new book by David Hajdu titled "The Ten-Cent Plague, The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America".

(excerpt from New Yorker article) On April 21, 1954, at the Foley Square U.S. Courthouse (now the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse), in New York City,  a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee charged with investigating the causes of juvenile delinquency took on an imminent danger within: the comic-book industry. The hearings were televised.

“The controversy over comic books was neither a subset of the Red Scare nor a direct parallel to it,” as David Hajdu (author of "The Ten-Cent Plague") rightly says. McCarthyism was a populist attack on the élites; the campaign against comics, on the other hand, was “a kind of anti-anti-elitism, a campaign by protectors of rarefied ideals of literacy, sophistication, and virtue to rein in the practitioners of a wild, homegrown form of vernacular American expression.” Hajdu suggests that the lost war over comic books might be seen as a rehearsal for the glorious war to come over rock and roll, an evolutionary step in the formation of the youth culture that emerged in the nineteen-sixties. “Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry added the soundtrack to a scene created in comic books,” as he puts it. EC Comics died for our sins.  Read more

The American Male: Not So Pretty in Pain

Growing pains are painful. And those pains are becoming increasingly evident as we move into a more Creative Class society. Hardest hit is the ideal American male and how he relates to Gen Y. As Gen Y moves toward a new standard as to what is okay male-wise, they’re see-sawing from Queer Eye to Man-vertising. The bumpy ride rambles over ambiguity, macho myths, sensitivity, intellect, prowess, et al. The good news is: the process is necessary.

It will be curious to see how it all evolves.

No more Marlboro man. Artist Richard Prince wrangled that identity in 1977 when he pilfered a bit of pop culture by rephotographing Marlboro ad images and presented them as his own.

No more jocks. Thanks, OJ, Michael Vick. The rest of the world views our athletes as criminal. Or so that’s what I overheard while eavesdropping on a conversation at Doma.

Canadian Club is trying to recapture an ideal of the 60s/70s via its campaign entitled “Damn right your Dad drank it.” Candid imagery calls to mind the confident thinking indie man of the era. The era of the “player,” one of the first in which women were celebrated.

But who identifies with this male? Gen X? Gen Y? Gen X may possibly relate. For Gen Y, the closest male they know to that era is Austin Powers.

Dr. Seuss had no idea of the precedent he would set when he first used the word "nerd." Apparently, his intent was to denote “a combination of school success, precision, unselfconsciousness, closeness to adults and interest in fantasy.”

Yet this isn’t the first time we’ve questioned the ideal male. In 1889, Mark Twain satired the reverence for Medieval knights, favoring industrial smarts over chivalric braun.

Vampira's Authenticity Pulled from the Culture

Maila Nurmi, whose "Vampira" TV persona pioneered the spooky-yet-sexy Goth aesthetic, has died. She was 85. Friends plan to transport Nurmi's casket in the same hearse she rode in when she served as grand marshal in a procession of hearses sponsored by Los Angeles' Petersen Automotive Museum -- a vintage 1951 vehicle that appeared in a scene of "Ed Wood." (Read more from CNN.)

Vampira played with her pet tarantula, gave gruesome recipes for vampire cocktails and bathed in a boiling cauldron. With a knack for the double-entendre and the requisite blood-chilling scream, Vampira was a hit.

The character won Nurmi short-lived fame and a dedicated cult following. Nurmi claimed Vampira was also the uncredited inspiration for later ghoulish yet glamorous female characters in film and television, including Elvira.

The unconventional came calling in 1953, after Nurmi attended a Hollywood masquerade ball dressed as the ghoul of Charles Addams' New Yorker cartoons. In creating Vampira, Nurmi said she went beyond the Addams cartoon, developing an alter ego influenced by beatnik culture and her experiences as a child of the Depression.

"The times . . . were so conservative and so constrained," Nurmi said in a video interview that was posted on her website. "There was so much repression, and people needed to identify with something explosive, something outlandish and truthful."

Read more from the LA Times.

Ralphie Represents Pop-Culture Shift

America has a new favorite Christmas movie. A Christmas Story, the 1983 tale about Ralphie, a 9-year-old in 1940s Indiana, and his lust for a Red Ryder air rifle, is everything Wonderful Life is not: satiric and myth-deflating, down to the cranky store Santa kicking Ralphie down a slide.

In a 2006 Harris poll, respondents from 18 to 41 years old named it their favorite holiday movie, while their parents and grandparents picked Wonderful Life or Miracle on 34th Street.

This is one of those little pop-cultural shifts--football overtakes baseball, salsa defeats ketchup--that signal bigger changes: here, in the relationship between the community and the individual. In a traditional Christmas story, the larger holiday is a social good. Here, the Christmas celebrated by the greater society is crass, stressful and risible.

In the end, the characters discover an authentic holiday outside the usual traditions. It's the individual Christmas that matters.

It's the nostalgia of its Gen-X and -Y fans, who remember childhood in terms of divorces and bad haircuts…Ironically, Christmas Story takes place decades before they were born. But [Ralphie] and his friends don't twitter about bells and petals and angels' getting their wings. Christmas is about the kids' getting their due. It's a time of disappointment and bullies but also of dreams…

(This points a direct line to Depression era holidays when my grandparents, for one, decorated a box instead of a Christmas tree. Once again connecting Gen Xers with the GI Generation where honest humor is appreciated.)

Read the whole story.

At Macy's NYC, Only Santa is Real

We made the annual trek to Macy's Herald Square to see Santa with much insistence from my 60-something mother. It's the only place where Macy's is like it used to be, claims she who has had a Macy's credit card since 1956. Or is it? She paraded herself proudly at each sales counter waving the 20% Macy's discount card recently mailed to her--Only to be dismayed that the card was not accepted at any of the favored spots that make Macy's feel like the "old days." It's been policy for as long as I can remember that certain discounts are not extended to these leased departments. Yet the prolification of today's leased departments have deconstructed Macy's Herald Square into essentially a mall. So the Macy's my mom thinks is a nod to yesteryear is simply on lease. That makes it impossible for the essence of what was Macy's to ever extend beyond the...(er)...flagship.

But at least we know that the Santa at Macy's is real. According to my five-year-old, he never has to ask her name and he knows that she's grown a lot. That gives Macy's about another five years to grab hold of their brand before this kid hits tweenhood and steps up her retail expectations. As for now, she thinks Macy's is magical--that one brief visit each year holds her imagination for 365 days.