• Come On Us
  Not what you’d expect (not sure what it is exactly, but not what you’d expect). SFW.
• Brasco(tm) The Liberty Bear Coloring/Story Book (PDF link)
  Great for introducing children to guns, freedom, and responsibility. Now you can print out your own copies. From Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, America’s Most Aggressive Defender of Firearms Ownership.
• Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership – Boing Boing
  Looks like I’m late to the party on the bear. 2004! Ah well, it’s new to us.

• Thailand Ministry of Culture issues booklet to promote traditional nicknames
  Moving to Yaay (big), Ouan (fat) and Dam (black) and away from Bank, Bonus, Oil, Ball, Tomcruise, Elizabeth, Army, Kiwi, Charlie, God, Gateaux, Shrimp, Chubby or Crab. 2007 is the Year of Promoting Correct Thai Usage.

Recent political scandals have much to teach us.

…Officers wrote that they knew from their training and work experience that the foot-tapping was a signal used by people looking for sex.
…
After a man in the adjacent stall left, Craig entered it and put his luggage against the front of the stall door, “which Sgt. Karsnia’s experience has indicated is used to attempt to conceal sexual conduct by blocking the view from the front of the stall,” said the complaint.

The complaint said Craig then tapped his right foot several times and moved it closer to Karsnia’s stall and then moved it to where it touched Karsnia’s foot. Karsnia recognized that “as a signal often used by persons communicating a desire to engage in sexual conduct,” the complaint said.

Assuming this is true (and recalling humorous-in-retrospect documents that we’ve all seen about law enforcement deconstructing hippies, punks, heavy metal, gangs, etc., it very way may not be), it’s cool to consider a signal that can only be interpreted by those that know what it means. To everyone else, it may not even penetrate your awareness. Until the communication is decoded, it’s almost perfect, especially for messages that may be risky.

I’m fascinated to consider that (maybe, just maybe) someone may have at some point tapped at me, and I wouldn’t have necessarily noticed and certainly not interpreted it as it’s presumably intended.

Tags: airport, bathroom, communication, encounter, homosexual, message, proposal, semiotics, shibboleth, shoe, stall, tapping, toe

This story (link may expire) about an evolution in Japanese shampoo marketing points to a loosening of traditional advertising personas (and an associated shift in beliefs about who their customer really is).

Kaori Sasaki, who heads a communication consulting company, said Japanese businesses long viewed female consumers in three oversimplified categories — the housewife, office worker and schoolgirl.

But that formula is rapidly growing obsolete as more women pursue ambitious careers and more mothers join the work force, she said.

“Marketing is changing to reflect a changing lifestyle,” Sasaki said. She noted a recent TV commercial for detergent that depicts a man doing the wash — something once virtually unthinkable in male-dominated Japan.

Tags: Japan, marketing, persona, shampoo, stereotypes

I’ll be in London for the first half of September, and Peter Merholz will be in town for a few days as well. We’ll be having a meetup on September 4th (coordinated by Andrew Harder, thanks so much), at John Snow at 19:00.

Looking forward to it!

Update: event is listed on Upcoming.

Tags: design, london, Meetup, peterme, pub, research, strategy, user experience

The other day we went to JumpSpace for a JumpTalk by Chuck Darrah about the work featured in his (along with James M. Freeman and Jan English-Lueck) new book Busier Than Ever!: Why American Families Can’t Slow Down

Busier Than Ever! follows the daily activities of fourteen American families. It explores why they are busy and what the consequences are for their lives. Busyness is not just a matter of personal time management, but of the activities we participate in and how each of us creates “the good life.” While numerous books deal with efficiency and the difficulties of balancing work and family, Busier Than Ever! offers a fresh approach. Busyness is not a “problem” to be solved—it is who we are as Americans and it’s redefining American families.

Chuck gave a compellingly accessible talk peppered with stories from their in-depth fieldwork (like something about of Albert Brooks’ Real Life, they spent a huge amount of time with these families, becoming unavoidably involved with their lives. So different than doing “an interview” as is typical in consulting work).

He handed me a copy of the book, so I’ve got some reading to do, but some cool themes/behaviors he told us about (and this is my scribbly documentation and doesn’t necessarily fully represent their work)

• Everything is work…but what is work? Some companies take 2 hours off to play Dungeons and Dragons, other folks go get a tan. There are stories as to why that is part of work for the people concerned. People define boundaries, proclaim that they don’t take home work with them, but when asked about the briefcase they are hauling out of the office, they explain what category of activity (i.e., reading HR memos) they will do at home that is not work.
• People are taking on more stuff, by choice, but present busyness as an external force
• Coping strategies have emerged (but I wonder if these are in fact the creators of the increased busyness?)
• Planning and routinizing – time spent planning the day or working out processes for dealing with daily activities
• Communicating – seemingly trite phone calls to check in about the plans already made
• Anticipating – energy put into coming up with contingency plans – “what if this happens?” or “what if that happens?”
• Adjusting – being flexible (with layers of power embedded in those negotiations), making last minute changes to the plans already developed and communicated
• Protection – i.e., create a phantom meeting to keep blocks of time free for whatever purpose
• Intelligence gathering – you don’t know what info will end up being relevant, so knowing what is going on with coworkers or family members becomes crucial
• Simplifying – One father looked at every item in the house once per month and if he didn’t know what it was, it went to the dump or Goodwill immediately
• Chunking – using interstitial times to accomplish tasks, i.e., moving items out of a meeting agenda into hallway conversations (although this isn’t always successful depending on the person and the task)

Ultimately, Chuck told us, it’s not about time, it’s about activities.

Meanwhile, a story that struck me a few weeks ago referred to a study (funded by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, as was the Darrah et. al work above) about convenience food.

the researchers saw that convenience foods weren’t used as a time-saving substitute for the same dish made from scratch. Instead packaged foods offered a way for families to eat more elaborate meals than they would normally have time to prepare.

When families did cook from scratch, they ate simpler fare — like one-pot meals or stir-fry. In the end, dinner took about a half-hour to an hour to prepare, whether it was made from scratch or with convenience foods.
…
The study showed that meals with little or no convenience foods took 26 to 93 minutes to prepare. Meals that used a lot of convenience foods took 25 to 73 minutes to prepare. While convenience foods were time-savers on very elaborate meals, overall, there was no statistically significant difference in total preparation time.

One difference that emerged was “hands on” time — the amount of time people spent slicing, dicing and stirring foods. Using convenience foods shaved about 10 minutes of hands-on time, but it didn’t make any difference in how quickly the food got to the table.

The study authors noted that the biggest time savings of convenience foods may be at the grocery store, where it’s faster to grab a frozen entree than to collect six separate ingredients to make the same dish from scratch. Grocery-shopping time wasn’t measured in the study. The average American spends about 22 minutes in the grocery store and shops about twice a week, according to the Food Marketing Institute.

Convenience foods also helped cooks offer a greater variety of dishes; cooks who made dinner from scratch offered three or fewer dishes. One family made a simple meal of sandwiches and edamame, using bread, cheese, greens and salmon and tomatoes. That meal took about a half-hour to prepare. Another family had a six-dish convenience-food meal of microwave barbecued ribs, macaroni and cheese, prebagged salad, bagged dinner rolls and a cookies and ice cream dessert. That meal also took a half-hour.

Tags: anthropology, balance, busier than ever, chuck darrah, culture, families, food, life, lifestyle, meals, research, Silicon Valley, society, study, time, work

• Beloit College’s Mindset list for the class of 2011
  Great piece of Zeitgeist. For a student entering college shortly, what unique frames of references are they bringing with them (i.e., having never rolled down a car window, or seen Johnny Carson live on TV).

Every week we sit down for humor/drama/angst/sorrow/disbelief with Rescue Me (starring Denis Leary as a substance-abusing, sex-addicted, post-9-11-traumatized death-wish-harboring fireman). Every week Match.com runs an ad that tries to link their brand to the Rescue Me brand.

Yes, Match.com. The site that says “Last year alone, more than 500,000 singles found meaningful relationships through Match.com’s online personals and singles ads.” Meaningful relationships? Have they ever watched Rescue Me? Here’s some of the “meaningful relationships” that the show has dealt with

• Denis Leary’s character (Tommy Gavin) lives across the street from his estranged wife, and does some very nasty stuff to sabotage her relationship (I seem to recall the man being framed for some credit fraud)
• Tommy’s brother takes up with the same estranged wife, and Tommy seems to rape her (but maybe she’s willing?) in response (oh, and the brother is killed and the wife has his baby)
• In parallel, Tommy takes up with the Sheila, the widow of his cousin (killed on 9-11) and they are on again and off again (violently) when she shacks up with a physically abusive lesbian
• Tommy gets involved with the woman who teaches Sheila’s son, who is also having sex with the son
• After finding his wife in bed with another fireman, one firefighter decides to “rescue” a prostitute from the life, only she scams him for his life savings
• He becomes an alcoholic, then gets involved with a nun who is leaving her calling but ends it when he can’t keep up with her voracious and unemotional sexual demands

This barely scratches the surface. The storylines move far and wide, but you no doubt get the point. How does this really fit with what Match.com is offering? Match.com could be a way to avoid having your life turn out this way, but that’s not how it’s presented.

Seems like stupid advertising to me.

Tags: advertising, bad decisions, brand, denis leary, endorse, relationships, rescue me, values

I just started reading Guerrilla Marketing and was bemused by the list of associated books.

It’s way too small to read here, but click the picture to see it larger.

Tags: book, brand extensions, guerrilla, guerrilla marketing, line extensions, marketing, publishing, titles

• Mom and Pop vs. Big Box (and throw in the Internet for good measure); where’s the service?
  I just started reading Khoi Vinh’s blog and this is the best post in that short time.

• Worst line extension ever: Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover’s Soul pet food
  Using “kitten” and “chicken” in the product name where one is who will be eating and the other is what they metaphorically will be eating is dissonant, to say the least.

Looks like I’ll be in London for the first half of September; my first trip there in 17 years. I’ll be mostly focused on the work I’m doing but do hope to meet up with readers of this blog/folks I know. Drop me a line and let’s see if we can set it up.

Steve in London, 1990 (I still have that shirt!)

Tags: business travel, england, london, Meetup, networking, pub, travel, trip, UK

Hot on the heels of my Foreign Grocery Museum article in Ambidextrous Magazine, I received a piece of spam informing me of the availability of Poppins cereals in Kuwait.

I really like their enthusiastic descriptions of the benefits provided: true value for the money, great morning start, all the energy it needs, essential for the growth of children, etc.

And if we needed further proof that they were watching this blog, the email asked me to take a survey about Poppins. We [heart] surveys!

Tags: breakfast, cereal, foreign grocery museum, grocery, kuwait, poppins, product, spam, survey

Not quite sure it’s really a new story, but still amusing/disappointing to read about the lower case leading i and its incursion into branding and naming

Just about anywhere consumers look, they will find products, brands and other commercial offerings that begin with a lowercase “i,” inspired by popular technology names like iMac, iPhone, iPod and iVillage. [Which of these things is not like the other? Although the article later points out that iVillage came before iPod -- SP]

A contest sponsored by the Friendly’s restaurant chain, for instance, is called iScream. A television show that made its debut Tuesday night on ABC is titled “i-Caught.”

Other examples include iWireless, a line of prepaid cellphones available at Kroger supermarkets; iCare, a brand of liquid hand sanitizers; iBoxer, underwear with pockets for MP3 players, sold by the Play division of Intimo; and i-Report, video clips contributed by viewers of CNN and visitors to the cnn.com Web site.

“It’s a nice strategy for borrowing some equity” from the better-known i-brands, said Michael Cucka, a partner at Group 1066, a consulting company in New York specializing in corporate identity and branding.

“It seems to work because you’re associating yourself with the idea of trying to be cool,” he added.

“But when you start to do what everyone is doing, you start to lose the power of borrowing that equity,” Mr. Cucka said. “And perhaps the more people who do it, the less cool it becomes.” [Umm, yeah, can you say "i-played-out?" -- SP]

The piece also acknowledges the earlier trends for e-names and even u-names.

Tags: branding, cliche, imac, ipod, ivillage, name, naming, trend