Fritinancy

Mixed Signals

Bay Alarm, a California security company that's been around for more than 60 years, does a very good job with its outdoor advertising:

Sorry about the poor-quality photo; I didn't have time to go back when the light was better. You can see a much better image, and examples of two other signs, in the Portfolio section here, which I'd have plundered if it weren't programmed in Flash, the bane of my blogging life.

"Making Nothing Happen" made me stop and think—and laugh. I also like "We're Pros Against Cons." And the company's tagline, "What Have You Got to Lose?", is smart and memorable.

The outdoor work was done by a Walnut Creek agency I hadn't previously heard of, JStokes, which doesn't show any Web work in its online portfolio. Which probably explains why the Bay Alarm Web content reads as though it belongs to a completely different company than the billboards.

"More Than a Burglar Alarm Company" is how the About Us page leads off—the first indication that creative thinking wasn't a priority here. Not only is "More Than an X" an utterly unoriginal formula, it's rarely supported by facts. Sure enough, the Bay Alarm copy goes on to say "We're a burglar alarm company" five times. Where's the "more than"?

And when it does offer "We provide more than a typical burglar alarm company," it fails to make the case. The next sentence is "Above all, we provide peace of mind and security." Well, how? By stationing a couple of ninjas outside my front door? By patrolling my neighborhood with Black Hawk helicopters? Nope. Only this, which any burglar alarm company can say (and probably does):

Our customers rest easy knowing their homes and offices are protected by the largest independently owned and operated burglar alarm company.

That's circular logic: "Trust us because we're trustworthy." It doesn't tell me why independent ownership is a benefit (if in fact it is).

It's common for companies large and small to use different agencies for different marketing projects. That doesn't have to be a problem if the company owns its brand message and communicates it clearly to all its agencies. I don't see evidence of that with Bay Alarm.

Smells Like...

What a crazy-wonderful thing is Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, an online emporium with a real-world address in that Paris of the Southland, North Hollywood, California.

I entered through a back alley, as it were, but you may as well start with the home page:

Welcome to the Black Phoenix Trading Post. We specialize in locating archaic treasures, demonic glassware, fae artwork, sleazy garb, and both mourning and perfume jewelry.

I love the "trading post" part. So folksy.

Now click on the menu at random—how about Ars Moriendi, a perfume page? Ah, yes, a description of Danse Macabre:

An allegorical expression of the ineffable, indisputable triumph of death, generally expressed in medieval artwork as a violin or flute-wielding skeleton leading a procession of dancers to their graves. Black cypress with oakmoss, frankincense, oude, and a sliver of toasted hazelnut.

Who wouldn't want some of that?

A fragrance called Darkness is described as "bottled gloom." Embalming Fluid? "A light, pure scent: white musk, green tea, aloe and lemon."

Any of them would make the perfect belated Valentine's Day gift for the Goth gal who knows that Saint Valentine was no cheery cherub but rather a martyr who was beaten with clubs, stoned, and finally beheaded.

How, you are wondering, did I discover BPAL? It wasn't through morbid meanderings or an interest in fae artwork. (I'm not even entirely certain what "fae" means, although one source I consulted referred to "a tribe of winged creatures," which sounds about right.) Nay, it was from a link to this page, titled Novel Ideas for Secret Amusements II, from which one can buy 5ml vials of perfume. To be precise, fragrances from "a limited edition Salon series celebrating the joy, humor, playfulness, and thrill of sexual intercourse through scent interpretations of Edo era Japanese erotic art." 

That's very titillating, but not half as titillating as the potions' names. Let other, more conventional marketers name their perfumes Obsession or Eternity or No. 5. BPAL is more ... descriptive in its nomenclature.

Here we have, for instance, Lovers with Rutting Cats (vanilla, red ginger, oakmoss, palm date, and oud)—just the thing to arouse Monsieur's flagging interest, peut-être. No? Then maybe Man with Phallus Head (smoky musk, ambergris, tonka bean, brown sandalwood, daemonorops, black currant, and honey) is the appropriate tonic.

You say he's still torpid with ennui? We have the perfect remedy: an elixir of skin musk, sugar cane, honey, beeswax, vanilla flower, and copal. What's it called? Why, Giant Vulva. Naturellement.

I couldn't help imagining the classic perfume slogans of yore repurposed to sell this intoxicating essence:

"Promise her anything, but give her Giant Vulva."

"He can't get you out of his mind ... when Giant Vulva whispers your message."

And of course, "The 'forbidden' fragrance."

A tip of the chapeau to Apocalypstick Now, who helpfully adds that copal is "a cedary resin."

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P.S. If kinky olfactory enigmas turn you on, check out "Whole Lot of Non-Scents," Chandler Burr's column in last Sunday's New York Times's spring fashion magazine, in which he reports on "If Ever There Was: An Exhibit of Extinct and Impossible Smells" at the Reg Vardy Gallery in Sunderland, England. One of the featured displays is described as "the body odor of of political suspects in East Germany, carefully stored in jars by the Stasi in order to track them someday with dogs."

 

Sour Taste

A couple of weeks ago, in an update to my post about the new Pepsi logo, I mentioned the new Tropicana logo and packaging, designed by the same agency that did the Pepsi work. (PepsiCo owns Tropicana.) "What could Arnell ... have been thinking?" wrote designer/critic Steven Heller. "It's one thing to change the logo; it's another to abandon the mnemonic orange with the straw in it."

Well, Heller wasn't the only one raising hell. The New York Times reports today that Tropicana

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.

Old and new versions shown above.

Here's the part where my jaw dropped. For reference, "Mr. Campbell" is Neil Campbell, president of Tropicana North America:

It was not the volume of the outcries that led to the corporate change of heart, Mr. Campbell 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.”

Now, I don't work for a big consumer-products company or a fancy agency, but I know this about branding: Never, ever underestimate the emotional bond. Because branding is all about the emotional bond. Before you start redesigning logos and packages (or changing brand names, I am compelled to add), you absolutely must find out what your customers think and feel about your product, its packaging, and your message. And if they tell you, "Don't take away the orange with the straw!" you'd better be able to explain why you didn't listen to them.

This is not the same thing as conducting focus groups, by the way. For the record, I think focus groups are mostly a waste of time, a bit of theater to impress the big bosses. People in focus groups feel all kinds of pressure to tell you what they think you want to hear or—sometimes—to say they hate everything, just to be obstructive.

No, what I'm talking about is before-the-fact research, so that you don't end up spending a million bucks, or more, making your customers hate you.

But designers and agency execs are often too obsessed with winning awards, and in-house brand managers are trying too hard to impress the big bosses (see above) to concentrate on what should be their top priority: What do our customers like and want? And the corollary: What would really piss our customers off?

Instead, we get responses like this one from Arnell chairman and chief creative director Peter Arnell*, quoted in the Times:

“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.”

Armin Vit at brand-identity agency Under Consideration could barely restrain his fury:

Um, yeah, it's the wrong kind of attention, the kind you would never want your client to get because of your work. Way to work the press. In terms of design justice coming down upon crappy design, this day is as big as it gets. Every year from here henceforth, on February 23rd, corporations should be allowed to take back a design mistake and repent… a branding Yom Kippur if you will.

By the way, the Times story laid some of the credit, or blame, for the Tropicana debacle on everyone's favorite scapegoat, "interactive technologies" like Twitter and blogs, which encourage those pesky consumers to actually tell you what they think.

As for the Tropicana redesign, all is not lost, apparently:

One aspect of the new Tropicana packaging is being salvaged: plastic caps for the cartons, also designed by Arnell, that are shaped and colored like oranges.

You know why? Customers liked them. Giving customers what they like: what a concept!

Photo by Flickr user justinlai, via Brand New.

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* That would be the Peter Arnell who told Ad Age, "When I did the Pepsi logo, I told Pepsi that I wanted to go to Asia, to China and Japan, for a month and tuck myself away and just design it and study it and create it. There was a lot of research, a lot of consumer data points ... and dialogue that I had with the folks at Pepsi, consumers and retailers. We knew what we were doing." Uh-huh.

Word of the Week: Hospitalist

Hospitalist: A doctor, physician's assistant, or nurse practitioner who manages a patient's care from hospitalization through discharge.

The term may have been coined by Dr. Robert Wachter in "The Emerging Role of 'Hospitalists' in the American Health Care System," published in the August 1996 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. (The quotation marks around hospitalist are an indication of the word's novelty at the time.)

The March 2009 issue of O The Oprah Magazine includes hospitalist in an article about "New Kinds of Primary Care." (The other "new kinds," physician's assistant and nurse practitioner, are much less new.) Why seek out a hospitalist? According to author Lauren Dzubow:

A hospitalist makes it unnecessary for a PCP [primary care physician] to visit hospitalized patients, says Patrick Cawley, MD, president of the Society of Hospital Medicine. It also means a hospital patient will have an in-house point person to oversee the care she receives from nurses, surgeons, and specialists. ... Hospitalists are available around the clock, and are intimately familiar with the hospital environment. This can translate to a reduction in length of stay—and expense—by an average of 15 percent. And research shows that hospitalists provide a standard of care that matches or surpasses that provided by PCPs. In fact, a few studies indicate lower mortality and readmission rates in hospitalist programs.

Image: Today's Hospitalist magazine.

If You Can't Beat 'Em

 Item in the San Francisco Chronicle's "Inside Scoop" column, February 19:

The new Belden Place restaurant from Elite Cafe's Peter Snyderman and Plouf/Cafe Bastille/B44 owners Olivier Azancot and Eric Klein will now be called Trademark: An American Bar and Grill instead of District: An American Bar and Grill. It seems the original choice was in conflict with District Wine Bar (216 Townsend St.), leading to a possible trademark violation. That inspired Snyderman and partners to pick the current name. It's set to open in early May at 56 Belden Place.

Here's hoping the USPTO has a sense of humor.

Everyone Needs an Editor, Part 2

I can't get enough of Savage Chickens.

Everyone Needs an Editor, Part 1

I knew that Gay Talese was a former journalist and writer of important nonfiction books such as The Kingdom and the Power, about the New York Times. His 1966 article, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," was named "the best story Esquire ever published"; we studied it in journalism school.

But I hadn't known Talese was a marketing maven until I read "When Panhandlers Need a Wordsmith's Touch," in the City Room blog of the New York Times.

Here's how Talese's account (which also made it into print, though buried deep in yesterday's A section) begins:

As I strolled past Bernard L. Madoff’s apartment house in the East 60s the other day on my way to cash a check at my neighborhood bank on Madison Avenue and 63rd Street, I was greeted by a middle-aged panhandler who sat on the sidewalk leaning against the bank’s brick wall waving a plastic cup in my direction.

After handing him a few dollars, I asked, “How’s the economy affecting you?’’

“No different,’’ he said. “It’s always lousy.’’

I entered the bank to complete the transaction, and when I came out he was gone. But as I headed downtown past Barney’s I met another panhandler who held up a sign that read: “Homeless. Please Help.’’

I dropped a dollar into his container, but at the same time thought that the sign might benefit from updating — it needed a touch of stimulus, that word that dominates the headlines. “I assume you’ve been reading and hearing about the financial crisis, yes?’’ He nodded. He was younger than the other fellow, and appeared to give me his full attention. “Maybe if you’d change the words on your sign you’d get more attention in the street, and people will donate more money…’’

Read the rest. It's a great story.

It gave me a sense of déjà vu, though. I couldn't help wondering whether Mr. Talese had seen "La Historia de un Letrero" ("The Story of a Sign"), a lovely six-minute film from Mexico (with wonderful Argentine music) that won a top prize at Cannes last year and was much viewed on YouTube. Watch it and decide for yourself.

The moral of both stories: Success is all about changing the words. I've been telling my clients that for years!

February Linkfest

Short month; short attention span.

Anatoly Liberman explores the enigmatic etymology of akimbo at the OUP blog. Italian? Gaelic? Icelandic? Middle English? Liberman: "[W]e are still not quite sure where akimbo came from, but 'origin unknown' would be an unnecessarily harsh verdict."

Tom at Minor Tweaks shares his e-mail exchange with Pepperidge Farm, makers of Artisan Cheese Snack Sticks: "Each snack stick is like a tiny baguette, one that might be carried by a tiny French person who is walking along a miniature Seine smoking an extremely small cigarette, thinking about existentialism and surrender." (A lesser writer would have stopped with "existentialism.")

You know about those atheist ads on buses in the UK, right? ("There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and get on with your life."*) Now you can generate your own bus slogan. Beancounters shows us how it's done. And Christa Allan alerts us to the lookalike poster (real? generated?) in an English bus stop: "There's probably no bus. So don't just stand here, start walking."

Love this YouTube video for ESPN: Shaq plays Scrabble by his own rules. "How did you get so many Qs?" "Don't worry about it." (Via Grant McCracken, who has a nice appreciation of the ad on his blog.)

Speaking of sports, it's time for—cue flourish of trumpets—the Name of the Year tournament, the annual companion to March Madness. Early contenders include Harvard fencer Moonlit Wang, LSU football recruits Barkevious Mingo and Shavodrick Beaver, and CNN reporter Casanova Love. Get that office pool going!

Twitter circa 1649: "Enough I have had of King Henry. He be a veritable bag with which a woman doth douche." (Via Roadkill Refugee on Twitter.)

And as long as we're in the mid-seventeenth, I saw this T-shirt on a guy standing behind me in a movie line, and I almost fell over laughing. Thanks, anonymous movie-line guy! Oh, and if you don't get the joke, read this.

Image source: H_NGM_N.

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* They call it atheist. I say the "probably" makes it agnostic.

Fashion Week, One Tweet at a Time

Just hours after I published my complaint about the New York Times's  Fashion Week coverage, I discovered the perfect corrective to all that divorced-from-reality blather: Renata Espinosa.

Ms. Espinosa is the fashion correspondent for The Daily Beast; earlier today she posted "The Fashion Twitterati," about covering Fashion Week on Twitter. (You can follow her yourself, here.) Because she's writing for a publication that doesn't (yet) see much need to suck up to designers and retailers, she can write what she pleases. Better still, she writes really well.

Here's what she says about tweeting the shows:

Besides vicarious pleasures, another bonus to following fashion week experts on Twitter is that it doesn’t get bogged down on interpretation (we can always psychoanalyze later—that’s what reviews and trend reports are for, right?). Instead, Twitter works as is an ongoing narration as though fashion reporters are truckers on the highway staying connected via CB radio or hobos leaving warnings through cryptic roadside graffiti. “All news that’s fit to print,” is reduced to an insta-headline or a visceral first impression. When you’re dealing with fashion, and not the finer details of an economic stimulus package bill, a snap judgment is all you really need. Fashion blogging feels downright logorrheic in comparison, and of course, a newspaper is too slow. The new fashion journalism is a Zagat’s guide to style courtesy of Twitter.

And here's an example of the difference between Ms. Espinosa and the mainstream fashion media:

At Donna Karan, I broadcasted to my followers the news that “Spanx will be doing brisk business if women with booty want to wear Donna Karan's draped jersey skirts or dresses. Which is, uh, most women” while The Moment, the New York Times T Magazine’s blog, relayed this description: “Draped cashmere with a strong, emphasized shoulder—wearable Donna Karan!”

(The trouble with writing a non-fashion blog is that I can't assume you know about things like Spanx. Oh, all right then.)

I only just discovered her, but Ms. Espinosa has been hiding in plain sight. She's the New York editor of Fashion Wire Daily, and she's the co-founder of a fashion and art blog with a name so breathtakingly good I want to send her roses: The NuNu.

Go read it all.

Hat tip: Rowland Hobbs, via a Twitter link.

Blown Backwards Through a Carwash of Products

It's Fashion Week in New York, and if you're expecting to see a Depression-appropriate procession of feedsack dresses described in thoughtful, chastened prose—well, that just shows how out of touch you are with All Things Fabulous and Anachronistic.

Here, for example, is New York Times fashion reporter Cathy Horyn at one of the Monday shows:

When the model Ali Stephens came out at the start of Diane Von Furstenberg’s show on Sunday dressed in a leopard-print turtleneck with stretch jeans in contrasting red leopard and a grandfatherly camel cardigan and a big metallic green tweed coat thrown over the whole thing, she was essentially selling the idea that she was a member of fashion nation. She was defending every girl’s right to look as if she just blew backwards through a carwash of products. If there had been a subtitle printed on the sunset backdrop of Ms. Von Furstenberg’s show in the Bryant Park tents, it would have said “I love to shop.”

The outfit Ms. Horyn describes is pictured above.

You may be as surprised as I was to discover that Ms. Horyn means this passage to constitute praise for that particular DVF ensemble. A few lines down she writes approvingly:

The collection was not so much about great fashion as it was about the things you want now. ... Those stretch jeans and jacquard knit leggings, which were the basic underpinning of the layered collection, come in checks, tapestry patterns, black glazed cotton (like leather at a glance) and a print that suggests camouflage. They’re the kind of easy wardrobe pieces that women are always looking for.

I understand everything about that last sentence except "easy," "wardrobe," "pieces," "women," "always," "looking, and "for."

Of course, the Times fashion staff is not like me and thee. Au contraire, they are writers capable of producing an aperçu like this one, posted yesterday on The Moment, the Times fashion section's Twitter stream:

Marc Jacobs was very Gloria von Thurn und Taxis and Diane Brill, first time at a punk debutante ball in the late 80s East Village.

For full credit, you must identify and explain the cultural significance of (a) Marc Jacobs, (b) Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, (c) Dianne Brill, (d) punk debutante, and (e) late 80s East Village.

Crack the code, and you too could be blowing backwards—through the unemployment line if not the carwash—in red leopard leggings.

Photo from Getty Images, at Fashion Week Daily.