Last week saw alarmist news stories about the use of carbon monoxide to keep packaged meat look red, and therefore fresh. Regardless of how old it might be. Well, Lintonizing, from Viands Concerted, is “an all-natural, preservatire free process [that] increases the shelf life of fully cooked vegetables and makes them look freshly cut by changing the cellular plant structure within the vegetable.”

Now that’s gotta be good for us! One food-science article I found explained how the process restores the turgor of the vegetable.

From Psych Central “one of the top 10 mental health and psychology
websites, providing reliable and professionally-reviewed resources since 1995″ comes a strange piece that claims to be about Web 2.0. In fact, it’s sort of a poorly designed and executed usability/findability test of del.icio.us (or whatever) and flickr. But Web 2.0 is clearly the hook/lede/headline to get the Psych-oriented reader to dive in.

He starts with Web 2.0, which then means tagging, which then means flickr and del.iblahblah.us, which then means findability.

But this is Pysch Central. Not web/design/interation Central. Clearly. Meanwhile, I think I’ll go look at AskMetafilter for some help with my personal life.

I’ve finally finished posting 269355 pictures from Hong Kong. I put every one most of them through Photoshop and tweaked and optimized and cropped. Uploaded ‘em all to flickr, tagged ‘em, titled ‘em, wrote a description, and sent them to various groups. No wonder it’s taken more than three weeks.

Still to come is Bangkok and India.

Here are just a few samples.

Sorta Tasty Snax

Schoolgirls and Bag-Noodles To Go

Panties on the Street

Burning Incense closeup

White Eyeglasses Frames

Busy Signs

The America’s Best Restroom contest has selected five finalists.

Organizers do research about the businesses but don’t actually try out the chosen throne rooms before selecting five for the online poll. “We have nominations from all over the place. It would be too hard,” said Bensten.

And the nominees are:

• All Seasons Bistro, East Lansing, MI.
  
• Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa, Atlantic City, NJ
  
• Hemenways, Providence, RI
  
• Quad City International Airport, Moline, IL
  
• Wendell’s Restaurant, Westerville, OH
  

IMG_1831, originally uploaded by GargoyleMT.

I’ll be in Houston next week for the first time. I’ve hardly been in Texas, actually. The Dallas airport. A day and a half in suburban San Antonio, and one trip to Austin that was airport->hotel->chip factory (computer, not corn)->airport.

I know that barbecue is in the plans!

Great Wired piece about involving ardent fans/customers in developing future products. Clearly, having the right attitude about your customers, and a whole lot of letting go is essential to innovation (okay almost a bad pun there, sorry).

The one key difference between the four panelists and actual Lego staffers: a paycheck. For their participation, Hassenplug and his cohorts received a few Lego crane sets and Mindstorms NXT prototypes. They even paid their own airfares to Denmark. That was fine by Hassenplug. “Pretty much the comment from all four of us was ‘They’re going to talk to us about Legos, and they’re going to pay us with Legos?’” Hassenplug says. “‘They actually want our opinion?’ It doesn’t get much better than that.”

and

Some Lego executives worried that the hackers might cannibalize the market for future Mindstorms accessories or confuse potential customers looking for authorized Lego products.

After a few months of wait-and-see, Lego concluded that limiting creativity was contrary to its mission of encouraging exploration and ingenuity. Besides, the hackers were providing a valuable service. “We came to understand that this is a great way to make the product more exciting,” Nipper says. “It’s a totally different business paradigm - although they don’t get paid for it, they enhance the experience you can have with the basic Mindstorms set.” Rather than send out cease and desist letters, Lego decided to let the modders flourish; it even wrote a “right to hack” into the Mindstorms software license, giving hobbyists explicit permission to let their imaginations run wild.

Soon, dozens of Web sites were hosting third-party programs that helped Mindstorms users build robots that Lego had never dreamed of: soda machines, blackjack dealers, even toilet scrubbers. Hardware mavens designed sensors that were far more sophisticated than the touch and light sensors included in the factory kit. More than 40 Mindstorms guidebooks provided step-by-step strategies for tweaking performance out of the kit’s 727 parts.

Lego’s decision to tap this culture of innovation was a natural extension of its efforts over the past few years to connect customers to the company.

More hubris for Sony as they sell the Metreon

Lisa Carparelli, a spokeswoman for Sony, said the company pulled out as Metreon’s original owner upon reviewing its corporate strategy and deciding to focus it on electronics, entertainment and games.

‘We had success in Metreon,’ Carparelli said. ‘We attracted an average of 6 million people a year, but the decision is based on corporate resources.’

Sony will continue to operate the Sony Style Store and the PlayStation store inside the Metreon. ‘We’ll be in essence a tenant,’ Carparelli said.

Visitors panned an exhibit based on the book ‘The Way Things Work’ as boring, and it closed in summer 2001. An anchor Microsoft store closed later that year. An exhibit based on Maurice Sendak’s book ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ was scaled back to four days a week and later closed. The Discovery Channel store closed in 2003.

The movie theaters flourished. But Sony didn’t receive any revenue from the theaters and in 2002 rebuffed a quiet proposal by the theaters to expand into the by-then-vacant fourth floor.

One industry observer said the complex ended up with a mostly teenage clientele that alienated the upscale families whom Sony had intended to attract.

‘Sony envisioned a much higher-end customer than ultimately wanted to be there,’ Taylor said.

‘The tenants they put in originally were very unique and esoteric. The Discovery Channel had unique things, but they were for affluent people with lots of disposable income for cute knick-knacks. The most successful tenants were ones who catered to the teenage moviegoing crowd, like the pinball arcades. They intimidated the more affluent crowds looking for a more museumlike experience.’

I guess hindsight is 20-20 in situations like these. Sony in Japan offers pretty much every sort of service you can think of; in the US their attempt at a mall mostly failed (despite their positive spin). It never really had any meaning - there was little Sony about it, and the Metreon brand never seemed to grow into anything. And the place itself always lacked coherence as an experience. Let’s see if it’ll become anything I care about now, though.

Also from this story:

I was shown around the building by a Metreon staffer as workers scurried to finish the project in time. Everyone I’d spoken with had gushed about how Metreon was going to reinvent retailing and serve as a model for similar ventures worldwide.

I said to my guide: “So the mall … ”

“It’s not a mall,” she interrupted. “It’s an urban entertainment destination.”

“Sorry?”

“It’s an urban entertainment destination.”

I dutifully described the place as such in the article I’d been hired to write. But I had no clue what Sony meant. Metreon was a mix of stores, eating places and a movie theater.

It was a mall.

Sony never understood this. Nor did it grasp Bryant’s notion of a seamless entertainment-retail experience. Instead, it attempted to package Metreon as a mini-Disneyland, with a handful of attractions and a bunch of ways to spend money.

Everything is 2.0 nowadays. There’s endless bandwagoneering (and of course punditry and debate) over the leading member of the 2.0 game - at least on the web - Web 2.0. We could talk about it what means, but that’s not the point.

Core77 is running a series of presentations called Design 2.0. Today there’s some references to Advertising 2.0. Indeed, it was a year ago or more than someone referred to Portigal 2.0 when I outlined my early plans for evolving my consulting business. I have to say I was charmed by the term, but, well, yeah. I guess it’s better than ePortigal or iPortigal.

Update: Library 2.0?

Technorati: web2.0, design2.0, advertising2.0, 2.0, two, 2, portigal, meme, lingo, jargon, buzzword, catchphrase

Hong Kong, January 2006

I believe these are phone numbers, but what function are they serving? Interesting mysteries in foreign countries.

Update: as qiawen points out in the comments, these are ads for local services, such as a plumber or appliance repair person.

I was intrigued by this NYT piece about the cultural changes at Fannie Mae (slightly edited here).

Among the mortgage giant’s new house rules:
1. Demonstrate humility.
2. Communicate openly.
3. Make the company a no-spin zone.
4. Respect the views of others.
5. Minimize internal politics.
6. Apologize and quickly fix mistakes.

The company was criticized by investors and lawmakers for making arrogance an art form. It relied on an army of professional lobbyists and powerful strategic alliances in the housing and finance industries to silence critics. And when federal investigators found almost $11 billion worth of accounting errors in 2004, Fannie denied it had any problems, choosing to attack its regulator instead.

Now, Fannie’s chief executive, is trying to change the company’s old ways. But even he acknowledges that it will take far more than a new mission statement to prepare the company for the political and business challenges ahead.

I’ve seen a lot of different company cultures in my work (although I’ve got no experience or opinion about Fannie Mae specifically) and dealing with company culture is a huge part of the gig. I know some folks make an explicit offer to change company culture as part of their explicit outcome; for me, I’ve more looked at ways of influencing individuals within a culture in smaller ways through experiences. The indirect approach. And that seems to be a natural offshoot of trying to succeed as a consultant in a new culture anyway.

I think it’s enormously challenging (and the article makes that case as well) to effect cultural change inside an organization. In many ways its like trying to encourage a certain demographic of the public to adopt a product or service, and in many ways it’s much harder since the outcomes are not so tangible (number of burgers served, number of new subscribers, profit) and since the thing you are looking at is all around you. For most companies - the customers are “out there” but the culture is “in here” with them, and obviously harder to see.

I am intrigued and encouraged to see corporate culture being part of the mainstream business conversation; it’s very important. I don’t have many of the answers, certainly nothing that makes a pithy blog entry, but I know the terrain and I respect those who travel it.

I was looking on Craigslist for a car, and I saw one listed in nearby Santa Cruz, so I wrote the seller with a question. Hilarious response (if scary)

Hello there,
Thank you for your interest in purchasing my car . First of all I must inform you that currently I’m in Zagreb, Croatia and the machine is here with me .My faher, who died two weeks ago was the first owner of the car. The machine is in great condition ,no damage,no scratches or dents, no hidden defects,keept in our own garage. The machine is an US model with US specs,it passed the test emissions and comes with all the documents you need to register the item. It has a clear title and it can be registerd into your name. I recently ordered a new car from a dealer down here and i need the cash in the next few days to pay for it. The price I hope to obtain is $10000 USD (this price includes the shipping and insurance) and if you agree with this price we can start to complete the transaction. I have to tell you that I have other serious offers that I have to consider and I will make a decision regarding this sale function of
time of payment and price. i will shipp the car using KLM 7-10 air days delivery, and i will cover all taxes. We can make this COD, but if you want to keep the car for you, then you have to make a down deposit with 1,500 USD. So email me back if you are intersted and you have the cash. The car will be shipped from Croatia and i will cover the shipping costs and insurance.You will not have to pay additional taxes,just only the price for it.
Let me know!

I think Zagreb is pretty much the cue that something is wrong wrong wrong here. Anyway, the posting has been taken down so obviously someone else discovered as well the ridiculous scam. Doesn’t it always involve someone dying? Fortune from misfortune? Silly.

swearingfestival is some event in SF to look at and experience swearing, of course. But lately I’ve been thinking about the silly words that we create to let us swear with out swearing.

Gosh instead of God
Gee whiz instead of Jesus Christ
Durn/dang instead of damn
Shucks or shoot instead of shit

And now we’ve got the network TV versions. My fave is jagoff (jagov?) for jackoff, appearing on NYPD, Law and Order (I presume), Third Watch, and the like. Anyplace you’ve got cops talking tough about the scum on the street.

It’s just so silly; you can say jagoff, but you can’t say jackoff?

I’m sure there are others I can’t think of right now.

Update: frigging, freaking, fricking all for fucking

Man Shot by Cheney Leaving Hospital

I just love that headline because you can read it a couple of different ways depending on what your expectation is. Perhas Mr. Cheney felt bad about not getting him the first time so he’s been lying in wait outside the hospital!

Technorati: headline, confusion, reading, cheney, shot, hospital, shooter, ambush

Oh to be in Los Angeles! The Kids in the Hall at the Steve Allen Theater

Not having performed together in four years, The Kids are back to rediscover their theatrical roots in three rare performances. As in the early years at The Rivoli, The Kids will come to the table Monday morning, work out new sketches and characters, then put up a show on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. It will be a unique opportunity for audiences to travel back in time to the day when The Kids in the Hall first discovered their gift for making strange things happen in normal places.

February 23, 24 & 25
8 p.m.
The Steve Allen Theater
4773 Hollywood Blvd.

For my class in Design Research Methods at CCA, I’ve asked the students to start either blogging or adding pictures to flickr. They are ideally doing this regularly, at least weekly, but I think it’s taking some time to ramp up.

I’ve asked them to think like design researchers and use this as a way to practice noticing stuff, and telling stories. They can blog whatever they want, but at least one piece per week should be something interesting they noticed - something funny or odd or curious or unusual - in their daily lives. An experience, a design, a need, a person doing something odd. Just to learn to pay attention to that alerting part of our judging selves. Ideally, this will help build the muscles they’ll need for making sense out of the fieldwork they start doing.

Anyway, I’m going to link to ‘em all here and maybe some of the folks who read this blog will check out what the class has done. Maybe offer some comments or encouragement. Once they got their feet wet, the hope is that having an audience will actually provide some inspiration, motivation, momentum.

http://blurr1e.blogspot.com/
http://cupanoodle.blogspot.com/
http://dcarchitect.blogspot.com/
http://shambacca.blogspot.com/
http://thegumbyproject.blogspot.com

http://www.flickr.com/people/weberdesign/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dearjy NEW
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12187480@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/14812574@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/37212535@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/74386819@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/91006549@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/benbassat
http://www.flickr.com/photos/justjump/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/samdidnotknow/
http://www.myspace.com/homelesswombat
http://www.optionsf.com/blog/

I listened to part of Fresh Air today

A new tactic has emerged in the angry debate over cartoons depicting religious figures, as an Israeli artist launches a contest for the best anti-Semitic cartoon — drawn by a Jew. Amitai Sandy says the Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoons Contest is a response to an Iranian newspaper’s competition for cartoons on the Holocaust.

Sandy, who is also the publisher of Dimona Comix, describes the issue as a matter of pride. He insists that Jews can offer sharper, more offensive satire of themselves than anyone. After the contest’s deadline of March 5, 2006, the winners will be displayed in Tel Aviv.

As the interview wrapped up, Sandy explained that Jews already control the American humor industry with Seinfeld, the movie studios, etc. But with his Israeli accent and serious Israeli manner of speech, any irony was lost. And Gross gave no acknowledgement to the words he was using, simply thanked him for being with them. It was a sort of awkward moment, you kind of wonder, is he serious, or is he lacking in English vocablary where he didn’t mean to say that Jews control, but since the whole thing is about Jews making jokes against Jews (in this case for a larger political purpose), it’s obvious (intellectually, if not emotionally) what the real intention was. But the lack of reaction from the host just kind of left me feeling weird.

Perhaps if I heard the story from the beginning (available at the link above) I might have a different take on it. Did anyone else hear this? Did you notice this particular comment?

Technorati: terry+gross, fresh+air, amitai+sandy, anti-semitism, humor, humour, jew, jewish

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I’ll be speaking at an AeA Event about Voice of the Customer in San Diego next month (March 9). Strange how the event description doesn’t include the details of the speakers. Seems like that would be the draw as much as the summary of the event.

Update: a more complete announcement (that includes my name!) is here.

Update: canceled (and since the actual announcement didn’t even include my name, is there much surprise?)

I am pretty fed up with how Amazon conceals information in order to eliminate or reduce customer service complaints. Not to solve problems, but to disempower the customer to actually do anything about it.

I ordered a used book (i.e., Amazon Marketplace). It came with some bent corners. Now, when I ordered it 2 weeks ago, did I pay the least amount for an “Acceptable” condition book? Or did I pay more and get a “New” book? I can’t tell from the book itself, so I go to the web. I look at my account info, I look at the confirmation email they sent me, I look at the detailed order page.

Nowhere is the promised condition indicated. I looked and tried and clicked. One of the links in the confirmation email even went to a dead page.

I guess it could be somewhere incredibly buried and I’m too much of a stupid user to find it, but I suspect rather that they don’t want to deal with this class of problem, so once you make the purchase, they delist the item and that info is gone-gone-gone.

I’ve written them to ask, but I don’t expect much from Amazon’s help, given past experiences.

Not a good day for e-commerce here at any rate - an eBay seller sent me the wrong item, so now I get to go through that whole hassle in resolving that. Sigh!

Update: Amazon wrote me back and in fact this info is available. Instead of looking at the recent orders in your account, you have to do the following from the main account page
Click “Your Auctions & zShops account” in the right-hand margin.
Click on “Amazon Payments: View all recent purchases.”
Ater logging in, enter the appropriate search dates to find the order you want.

Technorati: amazon, customer+service, quality, order, confirmation

Hallmark gets a Valentine from AP this year with a ridiculous story describing their detailed research processes to understand what people want.

An 80-person research staff’s analysis of Hallmark’s 2004 card sales was the initial impetus for this year’s line. That combines with more than 100,000 annual customer interviews, focus groups and in-store observations to lay the framework for roughly 2,000 cards in Hallmark’s core Valentine’s Day line as well as another 2,500 offerings through sister brands offered at supermarkets, Wal-Mart and elsewhere.

The card’s designer, Marcia Muelengracht, said she was not at all surprised the card sold five times better than the average Valentine — so well it’s being offered for a second year.

Five times better than the average tells you nothing about how well it sold relative to the number 2, 3, 4, or whatever. If it sold five times more than the its nearest competitor, that’d tell you that this particular Valentine really tapped into something special. This gets into all that horrible stats about standard deviation and mean and median that I don’t really understand - but I understand enough to know that lies, damn lies, and statistics are being used to create a puff piece about this special Valentine that is popular everywhere, and about how much work Hallmark does to understand their customer.

Technorati: hallmark, valentine, numbers, stats, figures, sales, card

Kiss Your Beer, Hong Kong, January 2006

Here’s an amazing advertisement for Budweiser, from Hong Kong. With the phase American Kiss across the middle, and the slogan Kiss Your Beer - Kiss Budweiser.

Drink it, if I have to, but kiss it? No way. Perhaps it’s a great image for Hong Kong, but it’s amazing how wrong it seems for us here.

A collection of strange, unlikely, funny, and maybe-cool products spotted at NAMM06 (The International Music Products Association tradeshow). Also many super-customer-stylin guitars.

Technorati: guitar, product, technology, design, namm, namm06, music, merchandise, gear

The NYT describes the Twinkies Brand Bake Set which allows kids to make a home version of the famous Twinkie. Not exactly the same, but a similar item. The home version is under license, and offers a second official channel to get the Twinkie experience. But no mention is made in the article of the various bakeries that sell a store-made fresh gourmet version.

Fluff in NYC is one such place.

They sell Fwinkies and Fwodels. I think this is a chocolate-covered Fwinkie (an evolution of the original).

SF Chron revisits this story yet again, taking the unfortunate thrust (backed up by lots of examples) that designing for women specifically means making it a pretty color, like pink.

Technology companies say they’re getting the message. Kodak, which has introduced a line of fashionable digital cameras in black, silver, red and — you guessed it — pink, also plays up the camera’s ability to take high-resolution pictures and record up to 80 minutes of video.

Likewise, Sony, whose products include a red digital camera, red laptop and pink digital music player, said it has studied not just appealing colors, but also how easy it is to use once the customer takes it home. Features such as the ability to charge the digital music player in three minutes and get three hours of use appeals to women, especially mothers on the go, said Kelly Davis, a Sony senior product manager.

‘Women are not just making the purchasing decisions, but making the purchases themselves,’ she said. ‘I think it’s definitely increased dramatically over the years.’

Nearly half of Sony’s digital music player customers are female, up from around 30 to 35 percent several years ago. Pink has been the No. 1 color sold among its Walkman Bean digital music players.

Cingular said it added the pink Motorola Razr to expand its line of popular black and silver models, which are super-slim camera phones. ‘We looked at it and said, ‘Can we expand our demographic and offer a different color?’ ‘ said Jennifer Bowcock, director of consumer media relations for products. ‘We want to hone in on the female audience.’

Is it the color? Or is it ease-of-use? It doesn’t seem anyone has any good (and non-insulting) ideas about designing for women.

Technorati: consumer+electronics, design, interaction, interface, women, pink, sony, kodak, ease+of+use

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AAA relocating 200 IT positions to Arizona

The California State Automobile Association is moving 200 of its information technology jobs to a new call center in Arizona but has delayed further plans to relocate its remaining 1,000 San Francisco workers.

Last autumn, the association, a branch of the AAA travel and insurance club, announced plans to relocate most of its IT department out of state and shift most of its administrative operations to other parts of the Bay Area. AAA officials said now the 200 IT positions will be relocated to a new call center in Glendale, Ariz., that will open early this summer and eventually be manned by up to 1,400 workers.

What do I know? I was telling someone recently how 10 years ago a friend temping at an Intuit call center in Palo Alto saw their office close while the work was sent to Santa Fe. I knowingly announced that there was no way that would be happening now, that this would all have gone overseas since that was soooo long ago. Looks like I was way off base - there’s still jobs in call centers (and no doubt other similar types of commodity work) that is being re-sourced within the US.

I stand corrected. Or at least more informed.

Technorati: offshoring, outsourcing, intuit, call+center, call+centre, relocating, jobs, work, economy, employment

This is creepy

Netflix typically sends about 13 movies per month to Villanueva’s home in Warren, Michigan — down from the 18 to 22 DVDs he once received before the company’s automated system identified him as a heavy renter and began delaying his shipments to protect its profits.

The same Netflix formula also shoves Villanueva to the back of the line for the most-wanted DVDs, so the service can send those popular flicks to new subscribers and infrequent renters.

The little-known practice, called ‘throttling’ by critics, means Netflix customers who pay the same price for the same service are often treated differently, depending on their rental patterns.

Technorati: service, netflix, throttling, customer+service, bullshit

Oh, jeez. This is the dumbest buzzword yet!
House Calls
by Larry Dobrow, January 2005 issue of Media (reg req’d)

JUST AS PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT GURUS learn about the capabilities of new products by watching consumers interact with them, media strategists are gaining a better understanding of media consumption behaviors by observing consumers at home. Deploying so-called “adthropology” strategies, they conduct in-home observation and interview sessions. A typical adthropological endeavor begins when an individual shows up at a consumer’s door, camera in tow. The observer tours the home, noting details like the location of TVs and piles of magazines that may have been saved for reference purposes. “When we were doing this for Kraft, we saw so many TVs in the kitchen. That’s an incredibly significant detail for a food company,” notes Jane Lacher, senior vice president of consumer context planning at MediaVest.

Information gleaned during home visits tends to bolster, and occasionally trump, intelligence gathered via focus group interviews, Lacher adds. “People tell you about their habits, but they tend to script a little bit. When you go into the home, you see if the newspaper has been read, or if there are coupons on the refrigerator, or how many TVs are on,” she explains. “People generally won’t tell you ‘my life is in disarray.’ So [with a visit] you get a better sense of where media fits into the picture.”

Technorati: ethnography, research, advertising, planning, media, adthropology, buzzwords

Design-It-Yourself is a new Ellen Lupton book to help plain folks like me avoid the unecessary time and expense of working with skilled designers. I’m especially amused by how poorly written and badly laid out (Hello? Typography? Punctuation? Caps? Bullets?) the page is. Hey, wanna look like crap? Buy this book!

simple ideas on how you can “think like a designer”

clear and coherent explanations of design technologies, from silk-screening to web development
what materials you’ll need to get your job done

where to find and buy them

Technorati: lupton, DIY, design, book, publication, typography, quality, lame

This page shows a screenshot of what portigal.com looked like earlier this week when hacked. I guess it’s a standard hack based on a weakness of some software I had installed. It was easy to restore my site and it was easy to (hopefully) block this from happening again, thanks to my ISP. I wonder if they created this page as part of their sysadminly duties or whatnot.

Technorati: hacking, portigal.com, invader, exploit, stacom, ownz

I’m looking for someone who has the chops to install a more powerful blogging package on my main site, portigal.com, as well as design a template that will look good with the rest of the site.

I guess there are lots of tricks so that the blog doesn’t technically have to be hosted on the same box as the rest of portigal.com, so I don’t care how it’s done, but I’d like the blog to appear as part of that site. I’d also want to move all the posts from here over there.

If this is something you’ve done, or you know someone who could help, please get in touch
steve AT portigal DOT com

Cosmetics companies are striving to understand how their products are used differently in their various emerging markets. Presumably, they are elsewhere looking at differences in meaning, in addition to simply understanding usage.

Crucial to that effort is the search for differences that could help build a brand in critical emerging markets like India and China. L’Oreal has an expanding network of 13 evaluation centers around the world created to observe grooming and ponder a variety of burning questions: Do national differences exist in primping styles? Would women in Japan and Europe, for instance, stroke on mascara with the same lavish hand? (The answer is that in Japan, women apply mascara with an average of 100 brush strokes compared with Europeans, who are satisfied with 50, a difference noted by ethnologists for L’Or�al.)

It was observations like these that ultimately affected how the company made and marketed its mascaras or developed the foaming quality of its shampoos. “We are far from understanding everybody everywhere. It takes time,” said Fabrice Aghassian, director of international product evaluation for L’Or�al, which is seeking to map the world’s beauty routines in a landscape the company calls geocosmetics. “When we know the behaviors of people, we know what unexpressed expectations we do have to consider.”

Technorati: global, research, user, design, cosmetics, emerging,