SparkBlog by The Hartman Group

We're not Snackless in Seattle...

On a recent Trends Trek, we stopped by Snacks!, a bodega-style shop in Ballard, one of Seattle's hipper neighborhoods (local t-shirts read, "Ballard - A sleepy little drinking village with a Condo problem."). Snacks! is reminiscent of the grocery stores in Europe on every corner with something for everyone. And what a spot it was!

While kitsch is king here, with shelves lined with single-serve cereals, Pop Rocks and you never know when you might need a Scotch sponge. They really hit the mark when it comes to marketing to and owning an occasion. Snacks! hours reflects the fact that they know their Millennials audience:

Thurs: 5:00 pm - 2:30 am
Fri - Sat: 10:00 am - 2:30 am
Sun: 10:00 am - 6:00 pm

The brainchild of late night hot dog cart owner, Dante's Dog's, knows his crowd. And this crowd is way hip and stays up way late. Forget the middle-of-the-week lunch scene, Snacks! is going for the after-hours munchies crowd, staying open until 2:30 am each weekend. In addition to their Thursday, Friday, Saturday bar-friendly hours, they capture a captive audience on Sunday with the overflow from one of the city's best year-round farmers' markets, which attracts an eclectic crowd of local farmers and artisans, street musicians and patrons from families to foodies.

Snacks! offerings of candies, snacks and booze gives a nod to this market fare with an emphasis on all things local, from local ice cream purveyors to sodas and candies. Here, you can also grab a food-focused spread like Skillet's Bacon Jam and an iconic Pabst Blue Ribbon, along with a thoughtful bright yellow rain poncho (great when it's pouring on your way out of the bar at 2am.) Snacks! hot dogs and soft-serve ice cream are regularly praised on Yelp. No website, just a Twitter account and a Facebook page suggest their clientele are ahead of the curve when it comes to social media. 

If you're in the area and craving a snack at 2 in the morning, check 'em out!

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.)

Trader Joe's...it goes a little somethin' like this

We've written often about the magic that is Trader Joe's, but Carl Willat of Carl's Fine Films sums it up in his cell phone-filmed diddy, If I Made a Commercial for Trader Joe's.

Our old studio on Bryant was right up the block from Trader Joe’s and as you might imagine we would wander over there several times a day.

One day I was taking a photo of a primitive but lovely hand-drawn chalk sign when a manager came running over to tell me cameras aren’t allowed in Trader Joe’s. Well, he didn’t say anything about cell phones so I decided then and there to make a commercial for TJ’s on my Treo. Up until now they haven’t done any TV advertising at all so I have no idea if this is the kind of thing they would like.

Lady Depot

What's softly lighted, condescending and embellished all over? Well, in Concord, California Home Depot is launching a pilot store for women. Named Her Depot, the store is said to forgo the lumber isle for home furnishings and decorative storage solutions.

Home Depot's step towards the more feminine side of things is an attempt to draw in an audience typically lost to established home decorating stores. Between DIY trends hitting the mainstream and the increased popularity of sites like The Nest, home improvement is no longer segregated to the old orange-slathered warehouse. In fact, Her Depot will abandon the tried and true color all together in favor of modern shades, elaborate displays and lower shelves.

With His and Her locations planned to coexist mere miles away from each other, why not simply combine the two? Perhaps all that Home Depot needs is a makeover, not an adopted pronoun.

via Consumerist

Supermarket Sweep

Talk about controlling the retail experience. Shoppers in Shenyang, China are enjoying new views at one grocery store, where consumers hop onto roller coaster-like carts and are led through the aisles, grabbing items as they go. The downside? If shoppers forget an item, they must ride all the way through the store again.

The wild ride could be channeled into either a stressful nightmare or a low-impact game show, depending on your outlook.

(via Boing Boing)

Pizza: Now with Less Muzak

Think that NWA is just an airline? For those of you that haven't heard of "the world's most dangerous rap group,"  you might consider calling for delivery from Seattle-based Mad Pizza. One customer was surprised to hear the group's controversial 1988 single "F*** Tha Police" serving as hold music when he placed an order during the dinner rush.

While some may be offended by the song's lyrics (NWA earned one of the very first parental advisory warnings), the departure from the usual "your call is important to us" lingo could be a welcome one.

Can't get enough Muzak? Click here.

(via Consumerist, Seattlest)

Lipstick for the Lunchbox Set

For as long as we can remember, the toy isle at the drugstore has stocked brightly-colored makeup kits for girls. Plastic and poorly made, little thought was given to these products, tucked neatly between the dolls and the board games. This just in: times have changed.

With the growth of Bratz dolls and other fashion-focused products for children, young consumers have become more style conscious and, some worry, are maturing at lightening speeds. In an attempt to keep up with the increasing popularity of their edgier competitors (Bratz dolls captured forty percent of the fashion doll market last year) Mattel is partnering with Bonne Belle to create a makeup line targeted at young girls. Very young girls.

Set to launch in 2008, Barbie's new beauty products will be aimed at 6-9 year olds. The "girl savvy" cosmetics were initially inspired by Mattel's overwhelming success with last year's Barbie Loves MAC, a product line for adults featuring vivid colors reminiscent of America's favorite perma-teenager. As expected, the upcoming girl's line is already raising concern amongst those who fear that the makeup will promote prepubescent sexuality, furthering the push for age compression in the toy market.

Keep in mind that while Barbara Millicent "Barbie" Roberts' latest venture is selling cosmetics to pre-teens, she has shown her entrepreneurial flare in the past. In fact, Barbie has consistently updated her resume over the almost five decades she's been on the scene, taking on an average of one career per year. That said, we'd pick Paleontologist Barbie over Bonne Belle Barbie any day.

(via MediaPost)

How to Tell if You're Popular

Essentially the modern equivalent of contest judging via the clap-o-meter, the Party Timer Digital Clock gauges the success of your fete by decibels emitted by the crowd throughout the evening. Utter silence? Enter the “No Party” screen, where sad blobs reminiscent of a Zoloft commercial bemoan the absence of celebration. Attempting to permanently deafen your guests? Sounds over 161 db will activate the “Atom Party” screen.

The device practically begs for a consumer hack, from baby monitors to burglar alarms. Remember, if the kid reaches "club party" status, it's time to go change a diaper or two.

(via Gizmodo)

Legacy Brands of America...Your Future is in India

Today’s WSJ featured a fascinating tale of branding irony, one in which dollar store supply chains devised in America get taken to Mumbai and yield trendy specialty retail experiences.

Our tracking of global consumer culture increasingly points to the ability for tired, even stigmatized, CPG brands to find themselves spotlighted as specialty items a few continents away from their home markets.

The Indian chain, My Dollarstore, uses dollar channel buying and marketing techniques but ends up fostering a trendy, upscale specialty retail experience in the eyes of middle class Indian consumers…

This doesn’t come off as ‘ironic’ to Indians, for sure, who tend to see foreign imported brands as superior to their own in terms of quality (e.g. Hero Honda motorcycles, Philips TVs, Nokia cell-phones, etc.). For many categories of consumer good in India, the ‘foreign’ brand is pretty much the only option, further crafting a tight association between the ‘foreign brand’ and ‘the good life’ in general…

At 99 rupees a pop, with manual labor day wages at Rs. 50-60, Mumbai’s dollar stores have created an entirely new category of specialty retailing for the global marketplace to consider…the luxury ‘American’ store….where legacy brands in America starved for growth come off as trendy, even as ‘ethnic’…

Click here how the local press describe local Indian perceptions of this chain…

Consumer as guerilla web retailer

In the last 10 years, as retail has become the ascendant driving force behind modern consumption practices and the great establisher of ‘trends,’ quietly, a movement has been afoot in which consumer have become unauthorized guerilla resellers of brand new packaged goods.

Add this notion of reselling brand new goods to…the pre-order goods marketplace...and add this to the web auction and you get... individual consumers posing as instant online guerilla retailers.

As the holiday season approaches, the usual camp-outs for new toy releases are springing up all over. These ‘pre-order’ rituals orient often to video game consoles and toys but, with innovative marketing, could spread to other categories.

Here’s a forum post from an anonymous playstation devotee revealing a new way to leverage the pre-order culture into a revenue stream mediated by...no one:

“I'm thinking of camping for a pre-order [playstation] so I can get it on Ebay. I need the extra money and I was thinking, It's just buy low sell high and not like stealing or anything.”

We see huge opportunities in consumer-to-consumer reselling of new goods via auction and other drop-ship business portals.  This is all about consumers tinkering with the very fabric of consumption, supply chains and retail.

We fear that it’s only a matter of time before manufacturers start asking for a cut…