SparkBlog by The Hartman Group

Ketchup + Relish = Dunny

Founded in 2002, Kidrobot creates limited-edition art toys and apparel for grown ups. We couldn't help but fall in love with their latest Dunny series, launched this month. 

Even though you won't find any actual condiments inside these pop gems, we think they'd be a welcome update to the same old packaging of our usual ketchup & relish.

Things You Should See: Persona

Jason Travis is capturing the contents of his fellow Atlantans.

The young photographer has been documenting what his friends, peers & family members carry close to them for several years.

Browsing Persona, Travis' photos become a game of eye-spy featuring a vast array of gadgets, lip balms, reading material, and one garage door opener. 

Travis is not the first photographer to encourage his subjects to empty their purses (see Francois Robert's Contents), but his street-style approach to the medium makes for some compelling visuals.

Doubling Down

 
There's been a lot of talk, shock and awe surrounding KFC's new Double Down lately. Is it really the unhealthiest fast food offering on the planet? If a sandwich has no bun, can it truly be called a sandwich? Is this a sign of the impending meatpocalypse? Never ones to shy away from a trend, we dispatched a few of our Extreme Food Ethnographers to see what all the fuss was about. The verdict?

"Far less offensive than one would have imagined." As far as taste goes, our Extreme Ethnographers assure us it's fit to be eaten, minus a potential steam burn from the breaded patties sans bread.

Sure, the Double Down contains almost an entire day's worth of sodium, but is it really that bad for you? KFC's cheesy meat globule has 540 calories (less than Big Mac's 590) 32 grams of fat (less than Big Mac's 34) and slightly more sodium than its bunned competitors at 1380 milligrams.

Reviews around the Internet began sour and turned a bit more optimistic last week, ranging from "deep fried madness" to "pretty darned tasty." So perhaps the Double Down isn't the dawn of more sinister things to come after all? Only time will tell if the world is ready for the Double Down Squared.

C'mon times aren't that tough...

Consumers are a bit more mindful about extravagant purchases these days. So it’s understandable that books will be written on the subject, such as the latest Be Thrifty. It’s interesting from a cultural perspective but less so from a “how to be thrifty” guide. Advice on cutting credit card debt is welcome, but cutting our own hair is simply not an option. Remember the Flo-be? Nor is cooking take-out at home.

Nevertheless, we tried Be Thrifty’s suggestion for making take-out at home. It cost $28.00 to purchase the list of ingredients for our fave Pad Thai and over an hour and a half to prepare and clean-up. And it wasn’t nearly as tasty as the $8.99 rice noodle-y goodness from the Thai place down the street, who has it ready within 15 minutes of our call.

Thankfully, the memory of cutting our own bangs at seven reminded us there are some things you simply leave to the professionals. This leads us to wonder about the nature of said tips. Keeping busy is certainly one way to avoid thinking about the economy, but many of us are simply lacking the time to get everyday tasks done, never mind trying to “do your own dry-cleaning” on top of everything else. 

Read more on The New Normal: Questioning our self-proclaimed thrift

Unleash the Power of Free

"Most transactions hae an upside and a downside, but when something is FREE!, we forget the downside. FREE! gives us such an emotional charge that we perceive what is being offered as immensely more valuable than it really is."

- Dan Ariely, author
Predictably Irrational

Why do FREE?

"Free" engenders a sense of surprise, delight and excitement to your customers
"Free" is a welcomed invitation to generations of shoppers weary of price promotions
"Free" is the most powerful strategy to help your customers feel better during difficult times
"Free" also triggers powerful cultural norms regarding reciprocity

...At minimum, your customer will feel they owe you the favor of returning

How to do FREE right

Deploy free as an alternative to traditional price and promotion programs

• Free is always unilateral
• Free should never be predictable (e.g., every Monday)
• Free should never be tied to any other promotion (e.g., Purchase $10 worth of X and get a free Y)

Google recently announced a plan to sponsor free Wi-Fi to holiday travelers in 47 airports across America until January 15th. This is the best kind of FREE - something unexpected, very useful, and entirely unilateral.

We've written about unleashing the power of free in our latest download, Big Ideas and Things We Like (Plus Bacon). Download it for a great read on things to come in 2010.

Also keep your eyes and ears to HartBeat, our online newsletter, in the coming weeks as we expound further on the Power of FREE.

We do not live in public

Currently the socialmediasphere is abuzz about Tumblr’s decision to reconfigure its entire site (or “Dashboard”) to accommodate Justin Johnson’s video-crafted marriage proposal to Marissa Nystrom. And, of course, she said yes.

Marissa, will you marry me? from justin on Vimeo.

Now, no doubt, an infestation of lifestyle journalist hacks will descend upon the “story” to document our life in these most curious of social media times. But Ondi Timoner’s pleadings aside, we’d like to interject a healthy dose of reality with the following proclamations:

1. We don't live like this: The last time I checked, many—though not all—of us live in houses or apartments, that’s how and where we distinguish our private space from public. True, we have cell phones and now waste the time that used to get wasted on comic books and sitcoms with things like Facebook, but we still live in private. Hey Ondi, I saw your film, but the more interesting thing is that when you and Josh were living in that giant tunnel pretending to be artists, nobody even cared…because they didn’t know! They were in their homes! Get it?
2. Nobody I know ever lives like Justin and Marissa: As others wiser than we have pointed out, the marriage proposal looks much more like life in a Zach Braff film (i.e., Garden State) than the everyday reality of mere mortals such as ourselves. Our friends have real life problems like broken cars, diabetes and divorce and tend to focus on much more important things than spending 6 years documenting their relationship with a $2000 video camera and a suite of editing tools.
3. It is a sad world when the notion of love becomes a commercial to lure the clueless marketing types further into the imagined world of social media.

Remember, social media is like advertising, if you would just quit looking and listening, maybe—just maybe—they’d go away.
 
Bottom line? Like wow man...

Airport board rooms going foodie

Evidence that no place is too hurried, transient or mainstream for food trends to make their presence. And of particular interest as this one is not only "foodie" but "local" as well. This from an Alaska Airlines statement:

An Afternoon of Epicurean Delight

Drop into the Seattle Board Room Thursday, November 19, between 2 and 6 p.m. for a special culinary event, featuring àMaurice Cellars and Chef Scott Lents from Kirkland's bin on the lake Wine Bar & Restaurant. Anna Schafer from àMaurice will be pouring a selection of wines and Scott Lents will offer a selection of delicious appetizers.

(Yet, clearly, there are some places where going gourmet just doesn't seem, well, appetizing. We probably won't be making a special trip.)

A Decade in Review

Everything you need to know about the first decade of the 21st Century.

via Kottke

Fighting obesity one Piano Stair at a time

We saw this on DVICE today and couldn't help but smile:

Piano Stairs aim to get Stockholm butts moving

No prizes for guessing the inspiration behind this little idea. Advertising agency DDB and Volkswagen teamed up for a little experiment they called the Fun Theory, an ambitious attempt to try and change people's lazy behavior in the Swedish capital. The transformation of a subway staircase into a piano increased stair use by 66 per cent. (I pity the poor creative who had to sit in the metro station for two days on the trot and count the travellers.)

Obesity continues to be a global problem. Interestingly, consumers believe that food intake and lack of physical activity are equally responsible for obesity in society. In terms of their own lives, however, consumers are more likely to cite physical activity as the method they would initially pursue to lose weight rather than changing or reducing their food intake. (People love their food!) Exercise is imagined to be a much easier course of “weight loss” for consumers than is tinkering with their own complex eating patterns. But "imagined" is the key word there.

Ironically, the relative attractiveness of exercise over dieting appears only in principle, most consumers we speak with showed no love of it. In fact, some willingly declared how much they “hate it,” including those who do exercise from time to time. To most consumers “exercise” is some physical activity solely designed around fitness or weight loss; it is not necessarily associated with an enjoyable activity, especially not happy feet taking the stairs. There is a sense that, in the morality of body weight, exercise is a form of punishment, punishment for “letting oneself go.” Making exercise exciting is a frustrating mystery to many consumers. Yet, here they are climbing the stairs. Hats off to DBD and Volkswagen for getting people off their butts with a smile. We love it!

Coupon Clipping and the Theatrics of Thrift

A recent New York Times article, A Clip-and-Save Renaissance, pronounces that coupon clipping is chic again. Whole groups of people who once shunned clipping coupons, the affluent and the young, are getting out their scissors. According to the article, coupon redemption rose for the first time since the early 1990s with a 10% jump in the fourth quarter of 2008 compared with the same period a year earlier.

What's behind this trendy behavior?: Consumers are responding to the recession and the events around them with a repertoire of thrift-seeking behaviors we call the Theatrics of Thrift. What we are finding is that simply engaging in these thrift-seeking behaviors helps to alleviate our collective anxieties, the stress in our day-to-day lives:

“I don’t really understand the details behind much of what is going on, and I surely don’t feel like I have any of the answers to this mess, but I know what I can do is try to help my family save wherever possible…”

“…at the end of the day, all I can do is to try to do my part.”

“I mean, how would I feel about my role as a mother and the family shopper if I just continued in my same old routine while the world seems to be going to hell…”

Simply put (or not so simply put): We engage in the Theatrics of Thrift by altering our traditional (pre-recessionary) shopping behaviors and styles in certain patterned ways that serve as an antidote to the current collective anxiety regarding the economy and our institutions.

While traditional coupon behavior is surging, here are a few insights on keeping your eyes online:

• Online coupon behavior is much more diverse, unpredictable and uncontrollable
• 100% of the qualitative consumers reported online as an important source of coupon collecting and nearly 80% reported “mommies groups” as an important source
• Many online “mommies” groups often limit access to outsiders with complex vetting processes
• A surprising number of qualitative respondents (~1/3) reported regularly purchasing coupons on secondary markets such as eBay

Retailers and manufacturers alike need to become increasingly creative and flexible with their coupon strategies—especially as consumers abandon traditional media for online media.

(Watch for more on the Theaters of Thrift in the coming weeks.)