SparkBlog by The Hartman Group

Breaking news! CSPI (Center for Science in the Public Interest) parodies itself!

According to "new" research by CSPI, the popcorn at movie theaters is loaded with fat in the form of “artery-clogging coconut oil!”
 
In what the objective scientists refer to as the “Godzilla of Snacks,” the consumer can expect to find as much “60 grams of saturated fat…That’s equal to three McDonald’s Quarter Pounders with 12 pats of butter.”
 
All of this might seem interesting if not for the fact that (a) they first reported these findings 15 years ago, (b) it is increasingly unclear why we should be concerned with saturated fat and (c) many people are actually trumpeting the benefits of coconut oil.
 
As ardent cinema fans, we would be the first to admit there’s no getting around that sinking, logy feeling you get when you snarf down a bucket of oil-drenched goodness. And the calories are enough to fill the stomach of the great Tanzanian Wildebeest.
 
But other than those few extra calories, there is simply no credible evidence to suggest that movie theater popcorn is any more dangerous to our lives than a good old-fashioned PB&J sandwich. But hey, debunking the CSPI is nothing new.
 
But cinema fans need not worry, for if there’s anything the CSPI’s 15-year cycle of parody has taught us, it’s that nothing has changed. We still devour our fat-laden goodness, only with increasing confidence from the real scientific community that the boogeyman doesn’t exist.
 
And for those who can’t wait for the sequels (SPOILER ALERT), the next villains will be cinnamon buns, Chinese food and, of course, the parade of evil fast food villains (i.e., The Hamburglar).

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.)

Soulful Green for the People

These days it’s no secret that it’s easier than ever to be green. Just last night our half-veggie-half-pepperoni pizza was delivered with a special note about composting and harnessing kinder, gentler energy sources. Once your local purveyor of fatty indulgence starts talking about sustainability, it’s time to listen up.

When trying to figure out what all the fuss is about, it's helpful to see what the kids are doing on the Internet. Perhaps you’d be interested in updating your Facebook profile to include your eco-friendly efforts while viewing Ben Affleck’s ethanol-rich "flex-fuel" PSAs and searching for sustainably grown food near you? Green sites are popping up all over the web, including the always trendy Treehugger, which not only implores its visitors to "get informed, interact and take action" in their communities, but to also make their daily lives as sustainable as possible, right down to the, ahem, more personal products they utilize.

From the glow of our monitors to the sparkle of the big screen, last week we were fortunate enough to attend a showing of The Real Dirt on Farmer John, a documentary exploring the lifetime struggles of Midwestern farmer John Peterson to heal and enrich his community. The fruits of  John's labor turned into Angelic Organics, a successful CSA bringing fresh, local vegetables to the people. In case you haven't heard, community-supported agriculture is en vogue, due in part to the efforts of many, many small farms like John's.

In a post-screening Q and A, John's longtime friend and director Taggart Siegel noted the fact that while his documentary has been around for a full two years, the climate (pun partially intended) simply wasn't right to receive the film until just now.

Talking to John, you can see that all of this green hullabaloo is simply not a trend to him. Rather, his idea of sustainable living is completely connected to his commitment to the farm. While his story may be inspiring, he is not, as one reviewer calls him, "Joe DiMaggio, Alice Waters and Spider-Man all rolled into one." At least, not deliberately. As far as we can see, John Peterson is a quirky farmer with his foot in two increasingly overlapping cultures.

While we're pretty sure we wouldn't take to farm life (both rural and urban) very well, we'd all do better to incorporate a little more green into our day to day habits, even if it means taking a minute to read the pizza box before chowing down.

The Zoundz of Life

Okay, so Zoundz first made the rounds of the blogosphere when we were vacationing in Mexico this spring, so it's not technically our fault we were so late to the game.

But oh what a marvelous game indeed.

On so very many levels, the Zoundz "device" made by the folks at Zizzle represents the intersections of innovation, culture and technology circa 2007.

From one perspective, Zoundz is a sound toy designed for young children. But even though it was marketed at Wal-Mart and other major retailers, its $50 price tag likely proved too steep for most parents. Besides, most folks likely had no idea what this thing really was...

But as word began to spread among the kind of folks who travel in bent circuit arenas, Zoundz began to pick up a life of its own. Suddenly, what might appear as a puzzling, cryptic, over-priced piece of junk to a parent becomes downright magical in the hands of young folks, trend-setters, designers and well nigh anyone else whose ever had the urge to build their own time travel device, replace their eyes with cameras or examine the inner workings of their own brain.

We think of Zoundz as a sort of open source soundscape for the bent circuit set. Or, as one colleague commented, ..."the pinnacle of acid toys in a world LSD appears to have sadly forgotten." The basic idea is that by moving around a set of weirdly shaped and textured "pawns," the user creates a variously textured soundscape reminiscent of "Music for Airports" era Brian Eno compositions.

And just to be most clear, your child may well tire of this thing in five minutes. But if you happen to be the sort of person who is much more concerned with the journey rather than simply getting to the end, you will have a new way to waste hours of your time.

Because mere words cannot to the Zoundz justice, consider this YouTube video of the Zoundz in action...

Threadless does it again (spoiler alert)

The folks at Threadless T-Shirts and Busted Tees are testament to the fact that kids doing things themselves will almost always outperform anything done by adults with an armload of marketing degrees and action plans.

My personal favorite is the "You Have Died of Dysentery" design...I mean, what would you expect if you spent your food money on 1500 lbs of shirt?

And to think, both of these outfits accomplished all of their success without having to rely on hot young models--or at least not so much.

So it is only to be expected that they would come up with this doozy of a T-Shirt design.

Yes, you too can be the first on your block to spoil all great film, literature and television stories once and for all.

(via Boing Boing)

Families...The New Minority Group?

We were shocked to see recent 2005 U.S. Census tabulations revealing what we had suspected for some time now based on our ethnographic work…Families are no longer the dominant social formation at the household level.

Defining ‘family’ loosely as any household with 1 or more minors living in it…(including single Moms here as well as 2 parent families), families now constitute a mere 34.8% of all households in the U.S. (based on data released in the 2005 American Community Survey).

The inverse finding, for those researchy geeks out there, is that most of us, at any given, time, either live alone, with a partner or with various #s of room-mates…As marriages continue to falter, childbirth gets delayed and people live much longer after their children leave the ‘nest’, the proportion of our lives spent inside a domestic ‘family’ unit with kiddies around will continue to shrink and shrink…unless we somehow adopt the joint family model of many traditional Asian societies….uuuuhhh…thanx but no thanx...

What, we wonder, will CPG brands that have spent decades marketing to ‘Mom’ as the key purchaser of their products (e.g. Procter and Gamble, SC Johnson, Unilever, Kraft, etc.) now do as they cope with this stunning confirmation of the drastically altered sociological landscape of American households…

Food for thought…

Death by Oreo

With all the hullabaloo about the American consumer’s penchant for overeating, indulgence and general predilection toward obesity, it strikes us that we’ve encountered scant few artists who ever address these issues head on, especially with regard to consumer goods.

That’s why we were all the more excited to encounter a series of provocative images from artist Daniela Edburg’s current show Drop Dead Gorgeous at the Kunsthaus in Miami. Daniela explores the ramifications of food binging and indulgence, albeit with a (markedly) dark sensibility.

As Edburg describes on the website The Morning News,

“There’s only your own dark side. The cake is not really to blame. It’s not really about the products, but the relationship of love and then hate that we have with them. When you look at a beautiful package of Oreos everything is new and shiny and attractive, and there is the promise of the sweetness and the pleasure, and then you go and open it and eat it and all you have are a stomachache, crumbs and garbage.”

via | The Morning News

Remixed Mary Poppins trailer

Holy Moly!

Who knew?!?!?!?

That Julie Andrews could be so darned...well...scary!?!?!?

In the tradition of the genre-bending re-mix, check out this trailer for a horrific Mary Poppins.

The branding triumph we call the real estate market

For those playing in the brand community, one of our basic goals is to achieve a product premium. That is, to convince a consumer to part with significantly more money for our product as compared to our competitors.

This premium could be achieved through measurable quality or performance cues—as in the case of, say, BMW—but it need not be. In many cases, premiums are achieved simply by creating the illusion or allure of desire. Not surprisingly, the latter is often a more common strategy for branders because it doesn’t require them to actually create a better product. Instead, they simply work hard to convince you of the products allure.

And in our recent musings on the US real estate market, it dawns on us that one could make a strong argument that the selling of real estate is perhaps the single biggest branding triumph of the past century. How ironic that the selling of dreams works remarkably similarly whether the product is real estate, wine or confidence?

Despite overwhelming evidence that equities have always outperformed real estate markets in nearly all places and times in the modern west, US consumers appear increasingly willing to pay sizeable marketplace premiums—for the “privilege” and status of home ownership.

As economist Robert Shiller notes, the real (i.e. inflation adjusted) home prices in the US have increased an average of .4% per year since 1890. A one half of one percent gain pales in comparison to the performance of the S&P 500 over the past 35 years, yet alone the performance of even the most mediocre of mutual funds, but still, we continue to throw money toward our dreams.

But what’s most interesting here is the source of the agency. In the case of great branding triumphs, we usually find a humble executive willing to step up and take the credit.

And in the case of real estate, it appears we have nobody to blame except our own foolish selves. As the growing literature of behavioral economics points out, our irrational behavior likely results from more foundational failures of judgment and calculation. To cite but one example, many of us are smitten by real estate’s allure with stories of properties purchased in 1948 for, say, $16,000 and later sold in 2004 for, say, $190,000.

Compared to equitymarkets, that investment’s something of a joke.

As Shiller notes:

“The appearance is that the investment in the house did extremely well. But the consumer price index rose eightfold between 1948 and 2004, so the real increase in value was only 48 percent, or less than 1 percent a year.”

We’ll take the S&P 500 any day.

Of course, the more sinister question lurking here is this: How far are we willing to go as individuals, family’s and a people to risk our economic future on something so seemingly trivial as a brand?

Avoid the looney Zune?!?!?!?

It is really something of a rare event when a print journalist unleashes a tirade on a consumer product. Even in the worst case scenario, when the manufacturer has completely missed the mark and brought to market something as atrocious as, say, Fruitopia, it’s always easier to err in the direction of silence and devote the precious print space to something more intriguing.

So we were as surprised as anyone to stumble across Andy Ihnatko’s systematic trashing of the new Zune player in last Thursday’s Chicago Sun Times.

He begins innocently enough by noting the (predictable and expected) setup challenges (you’ll need to be fully versed in creating .DLL files just to get the thing working), before moving on to a full-scale vitriolic rant. Here’s just a few paragraphs of what to expect:

“Yes, Microsoft's new Zune digital music player is just plain dreadful. I've spent a week setting this thing up and using it, and the overall experience is about as pleasant as having an airbag deploy in your face.

"Avoid," is my general message. The Zune is a square wheel, a product that's so absurd and so obviously immune to success that it evokes something akin to a sense of pity.”

Among the complaints:

• Songs are purchasable only with “credits” (ensuring less credit card fees for Microsoft along with the ability to challenge Apple’s 99 cent pricing structure)

• All around poor user interface.

• Zune is incompatible with Windows Media Player, the familiar hub of the Windows desktop media experience. This puzzles us to no end.

• Zune’s one supposed “feature”—the ability to broadcast wireless content to other players—is so heavily enshrouded in DRM that the feature functions more like an advertisement than a true product benefit. Any content shared wirelessly disappears afte 72 hours, only to be replaced with a link to the file on Microsoft's store.

But most damning of all, Ihnatko takes Microsoft to task for putting the interests of the music industry ahead of the all powerful consumer:

“Companies such as Toshiba and Sandisk (with its wonderful Nano-like Sansa e200 series) compete effectively with the iPod by asking themselves, "What are the things that users want and Apple refuses to provide?"

"Microsoft's colossal blunder was to knock the user out of that question and put the music industry in its place."

Ihnatko’s prediction: “The Zune will be dead and gone within six months. Good riddance.”

via | Boing Boing