SparkBlog by The Hartman Group

New idea for generational marketing

Slo Pokes and Walnettos to Freshen Up and Cry Baby Gum, generational gift baskets of old time candy favorites is sure to deliver sweet memories of childhood, or at least an old-fashioned sugar buzz. The Candy Crate packages up "favorite nostalgic candy assortments from past decades ~ 1940s-1990s."

In order to market effectively to a generation, folks claim that one must find a way to grab their attention, find something that resonates with them. Do this by understanding how the motivation of your consumers correlate with the underlying values of their generation. When you know this you are able to customize your message to cater to the generation when it comes to your products and services. You can then present the message with your products, services, and communication to their needs and desires.

Of course, every generation ultimately will pass through the same life stages, from youth to old age. As the younger generations find their place in society as consumers, employees and parents, it becomes more and more important for businesses to acknowledge this soon-to-be-powerful demographic. Build brand loyalty with them now, and you may reap the results for the rest of their lives.

Food Hack: Kool-Aid Dills

All families boast their own unique food combinations, from your aunt’s baloney and jelly sandwiches to your childhood passion for peanut butter and mayo. The union of unlikely flavors is what makes consumer remixed foods so intriguing.

A food hack currently sweeping the Delta? Kool-Aid dills. These DIY pickles, marinated in a potent mixture of sugar and “double-strength” Kool-Aid, are so popular amongst rural youngsters that local vendors are pursuing patents for the tart treats.

Upon learning of this growing trend, a spokesperson for Kraft noted, “We endorse our consumers’ finding innovative ways to use our products.” Kraft would do well to capitalize on the sheer novelty of the Kool-Aid pickle. Double-Quick, a regional convenience store chain, is currently seeking to trademark the name Koolickle.

Apparently, sweet and sour pickle hacks have a long history, from the insertion of peppermint sticks and Blow Pops to simply dipping the spears in Kool-Aid powder. For a list of other Kool-Aid hacks, including bath salts and scratch and sniff watercolors click here.

(via New York Times)

I Know! Let's Put More Cheese in It

As time goes by, the regurgitation approach to innovation in chain restaurants like Taco Bell and Pizza Hut has become almost self-mocking.  The latest non-innovation offered to generate some buzz among  loyal Pizza Hut fans (who must be mostly under the age of 10) is the cheesy bites pizza. That's right, cheese-filled crusts weren't enough on a pizza already layered in cheese to begin with...now there's 3 zones of cheesy goodness to enjoy. 

Would you like some pizza with your cheese?

What strikes us as odd here is not really the excessive, child-like obsession with adding more cheese...it is how out of touch with food culture trends this kind of innovation is. It is a techno-magical approach to innovation that reached its peak in the 1960s. The logic is more or less this: look what we did, admire it and buy it.  This couldn't be more opposed to what we tell clients all the time:

1) Know the consumer world you are playing in
2) Know how the definition of quality is shifting in that world
3) Then innovate within that evolving definition of quality

So, we ask, why can't Pizza Hut ever evolve to the point of marketing the quality of its cheese, the one ingredient it so heavily focuses its innovations around....?

Taking Hotel Service to the Next Level

It is perhaps no surprise that it was, in Asia, that we most recently found a boutique hotel taking hospitality to new levels of generosity. The power of branding 'experience' in this global tier of hotels is old news. Westin brands its bed. W brands its vibe. Examples abound. But in our constant tracking of luxury consumption trends, we were amazed to discover a tiny boutique hotel in northern Thailand, dubbed the D2, offering a truly unique category of experience to its guests: the daily gift.

Upon arrival in our room, we found a gift box containing two lively sweetened rice cake treats. At first, we interpreted this merely as a welcome gift, something even the Wyndham hotel chain has glommed onto...mainly to make up for its otherwise mediocre experience. Instead, we found that, every day when we returned to the room, a new gift had been placed in the transparent box. And not just food either. Our hotel swag included:

• Herbal ayurvedic massage compresses
• Thai biscuits
• Thai rice cake cookies
• Thai candy
• Incense sticks

The notion of welcoming the hotel guest back to their room each night with a gift struck us as a brilliant extension of the boutique hotel experience, because it gets interpreted as a gift, not as something 'paid for' by the room rate. And, as we know from gift theory class, the gift obligates some form of reciprocration...i.e. spending elsewhere in the hotel.

But the main effect was to take the brand experience to a whole new level with the notion that the guest is welcomed again each day...

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…

The Economist Gets Post-Modern!

We were quite amazed and heartened to see that the Economist, of all the staid observers of social life out there, has recently, and independently, concurred with our own view that a truly democratic, post-modern, self-empowered consumer society  is emerging globally. In its recent article (December 19^th 2006) on post-modernism and shopping, the hallowed journal points to the power that companies are seeing in leveraging anti-establishment discourse to design consumer experiences that move beyond the ‘here is our lovely, immutable widget’ model. Foucault has come a long way it seems, from an inscrutable, soporific grad school obligation to a marketing primer for a new consumer era.

If post-modernism truly is the apotheosis of the democratic global impulse to not be controlled by superiors (a word which also includes cultural ideals we unquestioningly submit to), then our consumer culture is already showing strong signs, as this article highlights, of becoming a cultural landscape in which power is diffused across consumers and not held by brands or companies.

The implication is that the corporation and the consumer may eventually fade away as a relevant marketing dichotomy. And, in some categories, this is already going on…

As much as it pains we anthropologists to praise the economics tribe, we say kudos to the Economist for giving such prominence to an important, long term cultural trend.

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

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

Thanksgiving moment of Zen...

We at Tinderbox couldn't think of a more fitting tribute to the Thanksgiving holiday season than to share with you, our devoted friends and family, our favorite recipe for stuffing.

In this case, we defer to the fifteen year tradition that is White Castle Turkey Stuffing.

Heres to wishing all a safe, sane, nutritious and, most important of all, tasty holiday.