Love the Bubble

A German design firm has created temporary design space that is a plastic, inflatable bubble. This is just one of Raumlabor of Berlin's new strategies for coming together in an urban environment. The firm's mantra is "No Trust. No City." Mintel reports that a bubble has already made it to a Manhattan event. We're sure to see more bubbles in unexpected places (Right next to or under Cgo's Bean would be fab).

Reminds me of the planning conference several years ago, when Adam Morgan (Eat Big Fish) presented the idea of brand pulsing. His idea: brands can own a "pulse" or differentiate from the prevailing pulse of the category leader. "Bubble" was one of the pulses he spoke about, relevant for categories where protection is the key benefit (baby food, insurance). Or for brands where bubble is a key attribute (effervescent beverages). Something I have always wanted to play with for a brand.... I'm sure there's a bubble waiting somewhere in my future.

Foto: (c) Rainer Schlautmann

Time Out: Today's Working Girls and Guys

MOMA is having a retrospective of Mike Nichol's movies. I know "The Graduate" will go down as one of his masterpieces, but I would put "Working Girl" right at the top too. Both movies are perfect time capsules of 20somethings "going to work" cultures that were in a state of flux. Maybe it's the perfect time for Nichols to write and direct a new movie that captures (for posterity) the culture of today's 20somethings. It could be a Nichols' 20something trifecta I would label: Drop Out, Break Out, Time Out.

Clearly, there's another cultural flux and the meaning of work going on with 20somethings today. This week, Yankelovich announced it is fielding a new study on Millenials and the impact of the recession. Today, Richard Roeper tweeted from the U of Illinois that he wanted to yell out, "There are no jobs!" And this afternoon, I bid goodbye to Matt, a 20something art director , who resigned to go biking in Europe (Jenny, another 20something, took off in January for a New Zealand sabbatical). A headline what's going on with 20somethings today? How about "Time Out."

But, for fun, let's time travel back to the the 1980's with Working Girl (video trailer). Ladies climbing the ladder of the go-go era of biz to "Break Out." Then go back to the 1960s and "Drop Out." Following is an excerpt from the NYTimes interview with Mr. Nichols that tells a cool story about the ending of "The Graduate."

Mr. Nichols is a great believer in the single big idea, the controlling metaphor or idea that defines a picture — the notion that Benjamin in “The Graduate,” for example, is on a conveyor belt, just like his suitcase. But he is also like a psychoanalyst in that he trusts a lot in the unconscious. The point of all the preparation, he said, is to get to the point where you’re surprised. And, he added, “You want to keep doing it until you get to the thing nobody could have planned.The famous ending of “The Graduate,” for example, came about because as it came time to film the scene where Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross get on the bus, Mr. Nichols found himself growing unaccountably irritable.

“I told Dustin and Katharine, ‘Look, we’ve got traffic blocked for 20 blocks, we’ve got a police escort, we can’t do this over and over. Get on the bus and laugh, God damn it.’ I remember thinking, What the hell is wrong with me? I’ve gone nuts. The next day I looked at what we’d shot and went, ‘Oh my God, here’s the end of the movie: they’re terrified.’ My unconscious did that. I learned it as it happened.”

Source: Mike Nichols, Master of Invisibility By CHARLES McGRATH, NYTimes April 10, 2009

Dump those old segmentation studies right now

John Quelch, professor at Harvard Business, believes marketers need a new lens to view their customer segments. That traditional segmentation studies should be considered obsolete for the times.

Why? The length and depth of this recession. It's changing buying behaviors in ways that were not seen in previous downturns. Quelch believes a more relevant way to segment for these times should be based on emotions and behaviors related to the recession. His study at Harvard revealed four consumer types for today:

Slam on the Breaks: These consumers are devastated by recession, a lost job, or know someone who has lost job. They saw the meltdown of their 401K, and are now buying nothing but the necessities.

Pained but Patient: These are the optimists, looking to the longer-term, they are adjusting short-term buying behaviors. They look at the essentials, like basic food products and toothpaste, and ask if there’s a way to save a little money. They are the folks moving from organics to non-organics or to private labels. They may decide to indulge less in treats (in less quantity or frequency). When it comes to postbonables (durables), they are hiring someone to repair to get another year or two of use. (just read that cobblers are seeing big increases in biz). They are cutting back on expandables (like vacations).

Live for Todays: Skewed to young, urban singles, they haven’t saved much money yet so they haven’t lost much. They will carry on with fun-oriented lifestyles, unless they lose their job.

Comfortably Well: They have a financial cushion to see them through recession, carrying on as normal but not exhibiting (or hiding) their ostentatious consumption to avoid the label of “well-off.”

Quelch's segmentation framework categorized types of purchases into: essentials (food and personal goods), treats, postponables (eg, durable goods) and expandables (eg, vacations).
Danger for marketers: the longer the recession, the longer time consumers have to create new, habitual buying behaviors and not revert back to their old buying patterns.

Source: Harvard Business Review, April 2009 and video interview with Professor John Quelch (illustration from HBS website).

Edible Advertising

Made entirely of chocolate, this London outdoor sign bills itself as the world's first chocolate billboard. It was consumed by passersby in just three hours. Great example of a marketing trend that's been talked-up a lot in the past couple of years: Synesthesia.

Don't wash, Swash

P&G is test-marketing Swash, a line of clothing "fresher-uppers." The line was developed to capitalize on behavior predominantly seen among the college crowd: pull some dirty clothes out of the laundry and wear them. Swash promises to freshen, deodorize and take out the wrinkles.Packaging is reminiscent of energy drinks. There's a mainstream opportunity to ride the trends of the trendy bed and bath market too. Imagine the merchandising potential at unexpected places like the Pottery Barn, Anthropoligie and Williams Sonoma home.

www.swashitout.com/swash/en_US/index.html#/home

New media concept: Statusphere

Brian Sollis, Silicon Valley PR principal, believes media behaviors are being reshaped by the bit-sized, real time status updates of Twitter, Facebook et al. Statusphere (shorthanded from Status Update Sphere) is driving behavior that favors the micro response vs. long form conversation (i.e., blogs). I can relate! I haven't written my blog in days, yet I've been tweeting and updating my FaceBook status everyday! The impact of Twitter in particular is mind boggling. My colleague, Stephen Riley, attended this year's SXSWi and said it's amazing to stop and think that Twitter wasn't even talked up at the conference just the year before.

Sollis writes:

"As the social Web and new services continue the migration and permeation into everything we do online, attention is not scalable. Many refer to this dilemma as attention scarcity or continuous partial attention (CPA) - an increasingly thinning state of focus. It’s affecting how and what we consume, when, and more importantly, how we react, participate and share. That something is forever vying for our attention and relentlessly pushing us to do more with less driven by the omnipresent fear of potentially missing what’s next. We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time” and I’d argue that many of us are spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities."

Source: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/10/are-blogs-losing-their-authority-to-the-statusphere/

Digital Natives: Squeezing 23 hours out of every day

New research from the UK on youth and their digital lives reveal that the act of communicating, in and of itself becomes a form of entertainment or "commutainment." Research found that technology is "invisible" to young people, who are not even comfortable using mainstream tech terms we marketers take for granted, such as "widgets." Even though the study is among UK youth, there are similarities to what we see in the US.

But here's what the researchers say that's so very Jack Bauer:

"Today's restless young person manages to indulge in 23 cumulative hours of activity in every 24 hour day - engaging in up to five activities simultaneously. While this degree of multitasking is only made possible by digital technology, the implication is that (counter to current thinking) a single integrated device with one screen is probably insufficient to meet their complex communications needs - which could entail watching clips, talking, texting and surfing the internet simultaneously."

For more, go to http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/keeping-real-offline-communications-key-connecting-digital-genera