Just saw the trailer for the latest Bret Easton Ellis adaptation: The Informers – Check it (if you’re seeing this in a reader, click HERE to see the video).
Ellis is one of my favorite writers. There’s a lot of people out there who enjoy his writing in a disturbingly literal way (particularly the people who like American Psycho the best of his work), but I think he’s one of the most explicit satirists around. He’s like the modern Evelyn Waugh. There’s an irony that’s as sharp as Patrick Bateman‘s machete cutting through all of Ellis’s books. His condemnation of the modern, over-privileged, narcissistic, instant-gratification obsessed yet terminally insatiable, superficial, alienated, self-destructive, overindulged, psychologically damaged society, is wrought precisely through a celebration of its most hyperblolically psychotic, emotionally anesthetized elements.
And for some reason there’s something inexplicably captivating about these stories about these characters for whom inhumanity comes effortlessly. I’m no psychologist, so I have no clue why THAT’s the case, but that Ellis’s stories–the seminal of which are some 30 years old now–continue to resonate with each new generation, is a testament to the persistence of this pathology.
Watching the Informers trailer I remembered my first introduction to Bret Easton Ellis: renting Less Than Zero back in high school. At the time the story was already a decade old but its glimmering bleakness was still just as compelling. Looking back on the preview for Less Than Zero, which came out in 1987, it’s kind of a trip:
In contrast to the Informers, Less Than Zero’s version of pretty much the exact same story, told three decades ago, seems so sincere! Almost quaint. And yet Less Than Zero was considered so controversial when it came out. Perhaps in that time we have steadily been moving more and more towards the society Bret Easton Ellis always envisioned as a satirical cautionary tale. After all, the Informers isn’t just an 80’s “period” film. As unimaginatively literal as I thought the film adaptations of American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction were, Informers looks like it might actually deliver on the kind of phenomenally allegoric treatment an Ellis tale deserves! Can’t wait to see it.
As consumer spending and ad budgets continue to decrease, it’s not unreasonable to think we may be entering a “post consumption economy,” as Ed Cotton of Influx insights describes it:
This latest downturn, recession, depression, or whatever you like to call it has gotten people scared.
There’s simply no way to see ahead to work out when this is all going to be over and life and business will return to normal.
However, there’s certainly an expectation from most people that things will eventually return back to normality, with the only question being when this will happen?
What if their expectations are wrong?
What if we are going through a giant “RESET” and there will be no return to normal, just a new post-depression era.
There are some signals already that suggest this might be the case; the shift from negative saving for US consumers, to the current 5% of income, is a big change that might not be temporary. The fall off in credit and the push to saving means a lot less disposable income floating around the system and therefore a much more challenging time for brands trying to chase these dollars
While it’s definitely not business as usual in these times, before we get too far ahead of ourselves down the “post-consumption” rabbit hole, it’s useful to remember that the underlying socio-psychological desire we all have to express our identities has not in any way been dismantled recently. We may be spending less and saving more, but we nevertheless still seek ways to express aspects of our selves, and the things we purchase still serve to fulfill that desire. Of course, the way we make purchase decisions now is changing, and for brands, adapting to this more challenging consumer landscape requires a more attuned understanding of consumers’ needs, and more strategical approaches to connecting with them. To that end, here are five directions I think brands should focus their energies and resources towards in the current climate: .
In our latest research: Social Media Playtime is Over, we found that 53% of marketers are determined to increase their social media budget during a recession, and 42% will keep it the same, a total of 95% of marketers bullish on social media marketing. Why? The reasons are obvious to some, it’s inexpensive and the opportunity to benefit from cost-effective word-of-mouth, are promising.
The problem revealed in the research findings, however, according to Adage’s B.L. Ochman, is that many brands “Are not integrating social media into their overall marketing strategy. Instead, they are ‘experimenting’ with isolated tactics and hoping that they will take the place of long-term strategy. Furthermore, social media is [considered] more of an after-thought than a marketing line item.”
Since new media budgets have generally been small to begin with, (three-quarters of marketers surveyed have $100,000 or less budgeted for social media marketing), it’s not surprising they are easier to sustain, and even expand upon in this economy than a behemoth ad spend. But the big difference between the traditional advertising model and social media is that the latter does not really function as an isolated “campaign.” Social media strategy is an ongoing process that is integrated into the brand’s overall messaging and a defining aspect of its identity. In a time when consumers are becoming hyper-conscious of finances, all the advantages of social media (that are not offered by advertising) become more pronounced. If we now need to be much more discriminating about how we spend our money, personal endorsements (or denouncements) from real people (and particularly those in our social networks) will have much greater influence on our purchase decisions. So will the way a brand handles consumer engagement. Understanding social media as a strategy rather than a gimmick or “add-on” will go a long way to extending reach, impact, and customer retention in the recession. .
Last summer I spent weeks shopping for an anniversary present for my wife. I searched all my usual retail sources but couldn’t find anything that hit just the right note. Then I went to Etsy—an ecommerce site where artisans sell unique handmade goods—and found the microstore of ClockworkZero, a woman who turns old electronics gear into steampunk accessories. Presto: ClockworkZero’s stuff was both gorgeous and geeky, precisely the vibe I craved. I came away with a necklace made from a vintage vacuum tube.
The economy may be cratering, but people are stampeding to handmade goods. Why? The Etsy guys attribute their success in part to customers tiring of cookie-cutter products. “The ’90s were the period of wearing big-box names on your chest,” says Adam Brown, who heads up Etsy’s cooperative advertising program. The site’s popularity may also be a reaction to the slightly sour, rummage-sale feel that taints eBay, progenitor of the modern microbusiness.
As Virginia Postrel wrote in her superb book The Substance of Style, Americans have become more discriminating over the past few decades. In the ’60s and ’70s, we worried about getting good-quality stuff, she says, because mass-market manufacturing was often of such poor quality. But most products these days are decent: the bargain-basement TV you get at Best Buy will last 15 years. So now we’re focusing more on aesthetics, beauty, and uniqueness.
And we are also focusing on personal meaning. We don’t just want a beautiful and unique product, we want a personal story. NYU Sociologist Dalton Conley writes about the very importance of having a story to tell about the things we own (like the one Thompson recounted about his search for his wife’s present) in his book Elsewhere U.S.A.:
Individuals are led to try to give their totemic objects of choice a personalized spin, embodying them with particular knowledge or histories that bestow status on the owner. It might be the handbag fashioned by garbage pickers in Manila’s slums: The fashion statement rests both in the political stand, of sorts, taken by the owner and in the pleasure of telling how such a bag was obtained (especially if one cannot yet order them online). Or it might be the ability to talk about wine “intelligently.” Or maybe the simple wooden table that was serendipitously purchased at a roadside house sale when your rental car broke down in New Hampshire, that comes with a great story about the old lady who sold it to you while being pestered by a presidential candidate seeking her vote in the 1992 primary. Or the willingness of the Prius owner to boast about the greatest mileage per gallon she has ever achieved with her hybrid car that she hacked in order to be able to recharge the battery from a wall socket.
Often the social value rests in the aura around the product with which we imbue it.
If you’re thinking about brand development during the downturn that last sentence is gonna be crucial. “Consider the numbers,” Thompson writes. “Etsy has 2 million users buying nearly $90 million worth of stuff annually. Its sales have increased twentyfold in the past two years.” When all products are of equally good quality, and custom-made objects are both affordable and easily accessible, it’s the brands that can offer us the most meaningful and distinctive story that will provide the greatest “value,” and as we are forced to deliberate our purchases ever more stringently, they’ll be the ones we’ll choose to buy. .
3. SUPPORTING COMMUNITY
(This is also part and parcel of #1.)
When everything else is uncertain (and nothing says everything’s uncertain like putting the word “global” in front of the word “crisis”) the comfort of community will matter even more to us. More important that pushing consumers to connect to a brand, is creating ways for consumers to connect to each other through a brand. Working in lifestyle events and music festivals for 10 years, I’m intimately familiar with the incomparable role social gatherings play in reinforcing community ties. Many events can, themselves, become identity-defining brands, motivating attendance not just by the promise of a good time, but by the opportunity to share an experience with friends and establish belonging within a greater community. In talking with South By Southwest Festival organizer Hugh Forrest, Owyang writes that attendance to the event’s Interactive portion is up approximately 20% this year. It is a testament to the the appeal of community-reinforcing experiences that this can be the case in a recession.
MillerCoors is among the companies currently seeking to increase their investment in event strategy, according to Adage:
That stakes-raising strategy paid off two weeks ago, when MillerCoors sponsored a U2 Day for Emmis’ XRT radio station in Chicago to promote the release of U2’s new album, “No Line on the Horizon.” For the month leading up to the event, MillerCoors and Emmis ran a co-sponsored mobile campaign where listeners could send text messages to win a chance to score tickets to an exclusive U2-hosted event. Ms. Luegers said the promotion was the perfect opportunity to establish a database of avid MillerCoors drinkers in the Chicago market and re-market to those consumers in the future.
Plus, the U2 contest delivered the ultimate success metric for both advertiser and media partner: “Fans got the feeling of, ‘Wow, I’m in a secret underground society where the average person walking down the street doesn’t know about, but I’m here because I’m an avid listener,” she said.
For brands, providing environments that reinforce community ties means not only a much deeper connection with consumers, but also a platform to jump start the “network effect.” If everyone else in your community is into something, you’ll feel compelled to be into it too because it’s a part of the lifestyle that defines you. Think about how this impacted the spread of Twitter, American Apparel, or Harry Potter, for example. .Just as the brands that offer us personal meaning will be the ones considered to provide more bang for our buck, so too will the ones that offer us a deeper community connection and shared experiences. .
4. ADDRESSING CONSUMER REALITY
Same as we seek to counteract our anxiety in tough times with the buffer of community, we’ll gravitate to brands that offer “Certainty in Uncertain Times,” As Hjörtur Smárason writes on “Why Hyundai is Winning the US Automarket”:
It’s a recession and it isn’t easy for the car makers. In January sales dropped 37% in the US (which is pretty good compared to 88% here in Iceland). The American producers are leading the drop with 55% (Chrysler), 49% (GM) and 40% (Ford). But Hyundai didn’t drop. They increased their sales 14%!
Why is Hyundai growing while everyone else is losing? They are playing their cards according to the situation. These are uncertain times. People don’t know how the economy will develop. More people are going to lose their jobs, and no one is safe. At times like that, people hesitate to make big commitments, like buying a new car. So to overcome that, Hyundai started their Assurance program: If you lose your job or income, you can just return your car. They'[re] even offering to pay for you up to three months if you can find another job within that time.
Brands that are genuinely able to address the needs and prevailing sentiments of the current consumer reality may even be able to undermine brand loyalty as deeply embedded as the Mac Vs. PC dichotomy. Back in October, Steve Jobs announced that Apple doesn’t “Know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that.” Which is why the nascent Netbook market is dominated by the PC. While the computer industry overall is going through a rather tough period, the Netbook segment of the market has shown a growth of over 160% quarter-over-quarter. With that kind of growth, there’s no doubt loyal Mac users are being swept up in the Netbook tide. Whether it’s figuring out how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, or allaying people’s car-shopping fears, or just seeking to provide certainty in uncertain times in general, genuinely addressing the current consumer reality is going to be the deciding difference between growth and decline during the economic downturn.
It’s totally funny, but it’s also kind of interesting social commentary in a way. I’ve been doing some research for a client over the past few months on community sites for kids such as Club Penguin, GuppyLife, Stardoll,imbee, etc. Because of the way that COPPA laws restrict what kids are able to do online, and what information they are able to share about themselves, all of these kinds of social network / virtual world sites aimed at kids under the age of 13 have to rely very heavily on the use of various Avatars instead of photos.
It’s gotten me thinking about what this means, that a whole generation is coming up right now whose youth will have been shaped by the use of avatars. It’s something that did not really exist to the same degree of pervasiveness for prior generations, and I’m very curious about how it will impact the way kids construct identity. It’s interesting. Replay that ad with this question in mind….
In case you happen to have missed it, Tropicana changed the design on their cartons last month, and in the process discovered that “Some Buyers Are Passionate About Packaging,” as Stuart Elliott writes in the New York Times:
PepsiCo is bowing to public demand and scrapping the changes made to a flagship product, Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice. Redesigned packaging that was introduced in early January is being discontinued, executives plan to announce on Monday, and the previous version will be brought back in the next month.
Also returning will be the longtime Tropicana brand symbol, an orange from which a straw protrudes. The symbol, meant to evoke fresh taste, had been supplanted on the new packages by a glass of orange juice.
The about-face comes after consumers complained about the makeover in letters, e-mail messages and telephone calls and clamored for a return of the original look.
Some of those commenting described the new packaging as “ugly” or “stupid,” and resembling “a generic bargain brand” or a “store brand.”
“Do any of these package-design people actually shop for orange juice?” the writer of one e-mail message asked rhetorically. “Because I do, and the new cartons stink.”
Others described the redesign as making it more difficult to distinguish among the varieties of Tropicana or differentiate Tropicana from other orange juices.
Such attention is becoming increasingly common as interactive technologies enable consumers to rapidly convey opinions to marketers.
It was not the volume of the outcries that led to the corporate change of heart, Mr. Campbell, [president at Tropicana North America in Chicago] said, because “it was a fraction of a percent of the people who buy the product.”
Rather, the criticism is being heeded because it came, Mr. Campbell said in a telephone interview on Friday, from some of “our most loyal consumers.”
“We underestimated the deep emotional bond” they had with the original packaging, he added. “Those consumers are very important to us, so we responded…. What we didn’t get was the passion this very loyal small group of consumers have. That wasn’t something that came out in the research.”
What has essentially happened here is that the ultimate fallout from the responses of a “very loyal small group of consumers” has exponentially magnified the exposure for what was originally just your run-of-the-mill packaging redesign:
The campaign, which carries the theme “Squeeze it’s a natural,” was created by Arnell in New York, part of the Omnicom Group. Arnell also created the new version of the Tropicana packaging.
“Tropicana is doing exactly what they should be doing,” Peter Arnell, chairman and chief creative officer at Arnell, said in a separate telephone interview on Friday.
“I’m incredibly surprised by the reaction,” he added, referring to the complaints about his agency’s design work, but “I’m glad Tropicana is getting this kind of attention.”
That’s the thing. Because of this vocal minority of avid Tropicana fans the attention of a far wider audience has been captured. Tropicana has now made a bigger splash by announcing they will be changing the packaging design back, than they did by changing it in the first place. Suddenly the avid Tropicana-fan minority has company.
Suddenly a lot more of us are now talking about orange juice. Thinking about orange juice! And thinking about it in a way that we never did before. After all, for the vast majority of us, just how different is one OJ brand from another? It’s not exactly a lifestyle product category, is it? (The whole organic argument aside for the moment, as it isn’t really specific to orange juice in particular so much as to grocery purchases in general). Do most of us really think about purchasing Tropicana vs. Florida’s Natural vs. Minute Maid because one brand is more relevant to our identity than the others? Unlikely.
So after enjoying its moment of unique distinction, Tropicana is now planning to scrap the new packaging and bring back the old familiar design so that the small loyal group who asked for it can be appeased, and all the rest of us can go back to not caring about orange juice.
But what if you could do something different?
What if discovering that your brand has more deeply passionate consumers than you’d imagined, and being open to to their input and responding to their concerns is just one part of the new marketing equation? What if the other part is understanding when you have an opportunity to get people really engaged. And not just engaged in giving you feedback, but engaged in helping to develop the brand’s identity itself. What if a non-lifestyle product category suddenly had the opportunity to stake out a piece of the cultural landscape? After all, Tropicana spent $35 million on the “Squeeze” campaign Arnell developed, which it now has to partially undo. What other direction could future advertising money be invested towards?
Having worked with various music festivals, I’ve consulted on and helped execute a number of “Battle of the Bands” contests. A proto-“User Generated Content” initiative, it’s always exceedingly popular. Different music acts submit tracks, or sometimes videos, competing for a chance to perform at the festival. This kind of initiative is most effective when combined with a voting aspect, so that it can extend beyond just the music acts, and actually get greater swaths of fans to participate in the process of selecting the winner to be added to the festival lineup.
In a more beverage-oriented variation on this theme, there’s last year’s “DEWmocracy” campaign, which allowed fans to vote on the new flavors for Mountain Dew (incidentally, also owned by PepsiCo), including the product packaging:
According to the PepsiCo press release, “DEWmocracy is the first-ever interactive, story-based online game that will result in a consumer-generated beverage innovation.” The campaign, which consisted of several phases, involved the launch of a website with a massive multi-player game. Once users created a profile they could go into the game’s 7 “worlds,” earning points and selecting different attributes for their ideal Mountain Dew beverage–i.e. flavor, “boost”, color, name, logo design, and so on. On top of all of this, the game/campaign had quite the storyline. As BevReview explains:
Pepsi and ad agency WhittmanHart Interactive tapped into actor/director Forest Whitaker to help craft the storyline. The entire adventure is setup up via a 3 minute short film that evokes overtones of Big Brother and overbearing governmental/corporate control. This has resulted in a loss of creativity….As is the plotline in most of these types of stories, a “chosen one” rises up to rebel against this oppression. Here’s the product twist… he seeks an elixir that will bring creativity and “restore the soul of mankind.” Now if you move beyond the irony that PepsiCo is a huge multinational conglomerate and that Mountain Dew is a top 5 selling soft drink found pretty much everywhere, you can see the somewhat unique spin this campaign possesses.
Not that I’m suggesting something this over-the-top is really appropriate for orange juice, necessarily, but the DEWmocracy site did reportedly have over 700,000 unique visitors, with 200,000 registered users participating in the first phase of the game. And that’s when they had to stir up consumer interest in engaging with the process of defining a brand direction for the Mountain Dew brand from scratch. Tropicana’s already got that one in the bag.
So what could you do if you were Tropicana?
Now that there’s already quite the buzz about Tropicana’s openness to fan-feedback in general, and about its packaging design in particular, why not create a platform for people to submit their design ideas? Yes, ok, clearly they discovered that people are deeply connected to the original design, but that is in response to just one other, radically departing, yet not particularly dynamic option. How might Tropicana lovers re-envision what that OJ carton could look like given the chance? It could just be a fun exercise in creativity, but then why not consider the possibility that the new design direction could emerge from the fans? Perhaps some new designs would remix the beloved orange-with-a-straw-poking-out image, but put a new spin on it with additional design elements or layers. Perhaps others would reinterpret the iconic image in totally new ways. Maybe others would find new ways to recreate the Tropicana logo in an unexpected style. Who knows?
What is definitely certain is that a small group of avid Tropicana fans clearly have deeply feelings about the brand and its design, and that a whole lot greater audience now cares that Tropicana cares about their input. So why stop the train there? Why not see how far it can go? In fact, why pick just one new design? How about different winning carton designs printed in “limited editions”? If it’s art, suddenly there’s a WHOLE new reason for choosing one OJ brand over another. In that case, why not deliberately set out to discover and promote emerging artists? Giving them their first break of mass exposure through orange juice cartons in grocery stores across the country. Nike’s doing it. So has Mountain Dew, for that matter. Suddenly it’s not just about a “campaign,” it’s an opportunity to create culture.
It’s like that scene in the Mad Men pilot episode where Don Draper suddenly realizes that if all the cigarette companies are facing the same limitations on what claims they can make in their advertising, then it’s “The greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal.” When you’ve got a bunch of pretty much identical companies, making a pretty much identical product–in this case, OJ–you can do anything you want to create distinction. The possibilities for what you could do are pretty limitless, if you were Tropicana.
the longtime Tropicana brand symbol, an orange from which a straw protrudes. The symbol, meant to evoke fresh taste, had been supplanted on the new packages by a glass of orange juice.