Long live the Mason jar

The New York Times yesterday featured an article on Mason jars. It was an article that ties very closely to our recent research on Millennials and the handmade movement.

Ball (a brand of Mason jars) has seen interest in its brand explode recently, with more than 500,000 Facebook fans and a Pinterest-like website.

And big companies are leveraging the symbolism of Mason jars as well – the article describes how Red Lobster and 7-11 have both incorporated plastic versions of the jars into their product offerings as a way of attracting Millennials. (The 7-11 Slurpee Mason jars and accompanying hipster mustache straws are a particularly unique approach).

Baby branding

Jennifer Barba from ZMET Global Partner Frame Consulting in Mexico City has passed along an article that says a lot about our culture -- specifically, the intersection of technology and modern parenting.

It describes how many parents are establishing "digital trust funds" for their infants and toddlers.  This involves setting up email accounts, domain names, even social media accounts for their children.  In some cases parents are even tweeting in their child's voice as a way of establishing their kid's personal brand at an early age.

What are the marketing implications of this?  And, more importantly, do you think this affects a child's ability to form his/her own identity and grow into an independent person?

Deep Dives on Millennials

The latest issue of Olson Zaltman's newsletter Deep Dives features insights from a ZMET study on Millennials and a market researcher's guide to implicit techniques.

Scratching an itch

The New York Times highlights a potentially brilliant use of consumer insight by the Ohio Lottery.

Its new campaign focuses not on the excitement of winning but on the joy of scratching.  The Ohio Lottery discovered that for many players, the emotional payoff comes not from winning (although certainly everyone wants to win) but rather from the physical act of scratching off the instant tickets.

The ad agency's account supervisor provides the example of one person who keeps several instant tickets in his wallet, so that when his day gets stressful he can take out his ticket and a coin, start scratching, and escape for a moment.

Lyin' eyes

As Groucho Marx once said, "Who are you going to believe?  Me or your lying eyes?"

From the Wall Street Journal, a new paper published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences calls into question whether we see what we think we see.  (Try this cool test to assess yourself).

It's alive!

The future may well be here.  The Wall Street Journal explains a phenomenon that it claims could be the next big thing in advertising -- chatvertising.

The chat service Kik (which is extremely popular among teens) has begun employing chat bots that enable users to have actual conversations with brands.

Right now the number of brands using the service is small and the conversations are, by design, somewhat rudimentary.  However, there is no reason a chat bot could not be designed so that you could converse with a brand in the same way you would talk with a friend.

A bot could serve a customer-service function (and probably do a better job than this guy) or could be a tool that helps a brand bring its personality to life.

Happy Beer Time

This seems like a particularly appropriate item to share on a Friday.

It is a clever new social media campaign from Carlsberg called "Happy Beer Time."   Bar patrons can add time to a running Happy Beer Time clock  by snapping an Instagram and tagging it appropriately.

It enables you to extend happy hour for the entire bar and also publicize your whereabouts to your friends, so perhaps they will stop by and join you.

The "new" Airbnb

Although Airbnb has grown wildly successful in a short period of time, they are not standing still.  The company just rolled out some powerful new brand messaging.

It is all about community and belonging (the Deep Metaphor of Connection) rather than about the nuts and bolts of renting rooms and serving as an alternative to hotels.

They also have an interesting new logo, which they hope will become a meaningful badge for the brand, much like the Nike Swoosh. And they have overhauled the Airbnb web experience, as discussed here.

Selfishness, deceit, and greed

Today we share an article from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management about the perils of strict quantitative thinking.  It is headlined, "Are Bean Counters More Selfish?"

As the article states, when we describe someone as being “calculating,” that is seldom a compliment. Indeed, a study suggests that people who take a purely quantitative approach to decision making are more likely to act selfishly or unethically.

The researchers suggest that while we should not ignore “the numbers” when we make a decision, we also need a trigger to ensure that we are considering the social consequences of those choices.

The malleable me

Those of us who speak more than one language can have more than one personality.

This stems from a column in The New Republic in which its senior editor tells readers he stopped speaking Hebrew to his young daughter because “My Hebrew self turns out to be much colder, more earnest, and, let’s face it, less articulate. In English, my natural sensibility is patient and understated.”

This is not unusual. A number of studies have shown that people can wear different personalities depending on the language there are speaking.

Obviously, there are implications here for the importance of context and whether there really is such a thing as a “true self.”

The happiness blanket

Here is another one that might invite the "cool or creepy" question.  It is British Airways' happiness blanket.  It features fiber optic sensors that can "read" your emotional state.  If you are tense, it turns red.  If you are content, it is blue.

The goal is to help flight attendants monitor passengers' emotions and  adjust the in-flight experience in real time -- including, for example, the level of cabin lighting and the timing of meal service.

Will this technology help next winter when you are stuck on the tarmac at LaGaurdia for 2 hours and boiling mad?  Probably not.  Right now, it is just an experiment.  But it seems like an interesting step toward improving air travel, which too often is a downright dreadful experience.

Creepy or not?

In the news today...the latest Facebook firestorm. As part of a collaboration with researchers, Facebook apparently altered users’ News Feeds to measure the effect those changes would have on the emotional tenor of users’ posts.

As it turns out, according to the paper, which was just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the effect was small but statistically significant. So the results are informative about the impact of emotional contagion.

But what is drawing the headlines are the ethical ramifications of the study design. Is it cool for Facebook to manipulate people’s News Feeds in this way? Even the Princeton psychology professor who edited the study admits, “I’m still thinking about it and I’m a little creeped out, too.”

Are you?

Do you chew gum? You might be cool

Here is a clever piece of  research on how people perceive you if you are chewing gum.   (Note: This “research” was conducted by a gum manufacturer…so take it for what it is worth. If nothing else, it is a compelling thought piece.)

I’ve always thought that certain people who chew gum (like certain people who smoke cigarettes) look incredibly cool. If this video is to be believed, I am not alone.

On the other hand, I never smoke and rarely chew gum. On the other-other hand, I’m also not incredibly cool.

The next step here would be to figure out why, exactly, these people have such favorable impressions of the gum-chewers. What is it about the physical movement of the mouth or the cultural meaning of gum that is driving these perceptions?

Magical marketing

Here is a MediaPost Q&A with George Newman, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at Yale School of Management.

Newman’s research suggests that where a product was produced has an impact on how people perceive it. In other words, a Godiva chocolate made in the original Godiva plant in Brussels is perceived as being more authentic than one made in a factory in Pennsylvania.

Factories are unconsciously perceived to have auras, and that aura can magically attach itself to the products originating from that plant.

As Newman explains, if you are a company with an old factory you might think about highlighting that factory in your communications. (As long as your brand has a good reputation, that is. Otherwise, no one cares where your products are made.)

Our managing partner, Jerry Olson, also wrote about magic and contagion in marketing in a 2011 issue of our newsletter, Deep Dives.  You can read it here.

The hits from coast-to-coast

Casey Kasem died this weekend. (For those of you outside the US, he was a radio DJ who hosted a wildly popular syndicated Top 40 countdown show for many years).

Kasem’s legacy is interesting on a couple of levels. For one thing, he was, in today’s terms, one of the original content curators who highlighted the “best” of various musical genres.

Moreover, he was able to hold people’s attention and tie these rather disparate forms of music together because he was a great storyteller. Whether you liked ballads or rock or dance music, he told tales about the songs and the artists that everyone could relate to.

Two retrospectives on Kasem summarize his place in American culture particularly well – one from the Philadelphia Daily News and another from the New York Times.

And if all this is too heavy for you and you just want a laugh, I recommend the tirades that Kasem’s poor, beleaguered producer surreptitiously recorded -- Snuggles the Dog and the full blooper collection. (Make sure there are no kids within earshot).

Risky business

A column from the New York Times about the biology of risk.

The author has studied London traders and found that the more volatile markets are, the less risk those folks are likely to take.

He goes on to make the counter-intuitive suggestion that the US Federal Reserve could curb stock bubbles by being less transparent about short-term interest rates. If the financial community was less certain about what the Fed was going to do, perhaps they would become less likely to take the kinds of risks that drove the world economy into recession in 2008.

Even if you are not an economics wonk, there is a lot of good fodder in here to help you think about your own perceptions of risk in various contexts and how you manage your reactions to those threats.

When a Cheeto isn't just a Cheeto

Some Friday fun courtesy of Instagram, and this great example of top-down processing.

A Cheeto is a Cheeto is a Cheeto…until you click on each of the pictures and read the caption. Then everything changes. Enjoy!

Nature vs. Nurture

Jerry Zaltman passes along an article from the University of Chicago Magazine.  It is a feature story on philosopher Jesse Prinz and his take on the nature vs.nurture debate (along with an interesting little back-and-forth between Prinz and noted evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker).

Prinz contends, among other things, that emotions are hard-wired in us but how we display those emotions is governed by culture.  For example, even the heroic warriors of ancient Rome experienced fear -- but culture dictated that they react to that fear differently you or I might.

Lots of stimulating food for thought in here.

The Reykjavik Confessions

Richard Smith from our ZMET global partner, BDRC Continental, sends along this interactive BBC story about a murder case in Iceland.

It is a fascinating read, and is a great example of memory distortion at work. The police investigators essentially browbeat a group of innocent people into confessing they committed these murders – although the evidence suggests they clearly did not.

In fact, even today, 40 years later, these folks still question whether they really might have been involved in the crimes, even though they have no memory of it whatsoever.

Man up

Here is a blog post from David Measer of Crispin Porter + Bogusky about what he calls “The Changing Face of Masculinity.”

He uses examples from the past week in sports to illustrate three prevalent archetypes of American manhood:

• The Neanderthal • The Bro • The Revolutionary

As the author points out, most of us men (although we might have a little of the Bro and Neanderthal archetypes in us) are quite nuanced. In some ways, it seems that this probably has been the case but in 2014 it seems more acceptable even for jocks to show their more sensitive, cerebral side.

Advertising and media, though, seem to be still trying to catch up. Lots of ads still play off the “dumb dude” stereotype. Are there any brands that are leveraging insights into this more nuanced version of masculinity?