Marketing Values (not!)

“The urge for good design is the same as the urge to go on living”
- window display for Design Within Reach

A high end furniture design store in Manhattan’s Flatiron district stenciled this quote from a famous designer on their display window (see pic below).  I passed by it late on a Saturday evening.  A homeless person was huddled below the sign, creating a mini encampment in the freezing midnight air.  Visible from the sidewalk were bed frames on sale for just over $2,000.

Next to this design store is Fish’s Eddy, a housewares store that was displaying a stenciled plate of a floorplan, complete with “servants quarters”.  The store was papered over to look like it was the victim of the recession, when in fact the faux bankruptcy look was being used to simply promote a sale (see pic below).  This is an establishment that looks at recession and oppression and sees marketing opportunities.  Earlier that same day my daughter and I stumbled upon a favorite restaurant with a tax seizure sign posted on its windows.  The restaurant looked as if it had been abandoned just as the waiters were setting the tables for dinner.  “It’s like everyone was vaporized, like in the movies”, she said, sounding incredulous like the rest of her uneasy recession generation.

The novelist John Galsworthy wrote, “Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem.”  I wonder if the marketing folks at Design Within Reach thought at all about the homeless and the millions of panicked households worried about “survival” when they stenciled the windows.  It must not have occurred to Fish’s Eddy that using the trauma of foreclosure and bankruptcy as a marketing gimmick might be, well, mean.  And the nostalgia plates with the floorplans that include “servants quarters”, especially in our Obama era of “hope and change”, must be targeted at those whose lives and legacies are not marred by class oppression.

Even before Bono’s (Red) campaign, everyone in the field of “buzz” was buzzing about the importance of values marketing.  The problem is, you’ve got to have a handle on some values worth celebrating if you are going to try and use values for your own marketing gain.  Bono’s got his eyes squarely on the elimination of AIDS in Africa.  The Design Within Reach exec’s must be looking inward at their own profit margin.  CEO Ray Brunner brings in about $1.2 million each year in compensation.  Among his directors is branding consultant Hilary Billings, co-founder of Red Envelope. The magazine Fast Company described Billings as someone who “mastered the art of creating “lifestyle brands” – products and services that forge an emotional connection with customers.”  Billings points to three factors that define a “lifestyle brand”: it makes life easier, it makes your world more stylish, and it is an orchestrated strategy that is fully formed at a brand’s launch.

The problem may be that marketing the luxury lifestyle needs to be redefined.  Or perhaps, thinking more radically, does the luxury lifestyle itself need to be reconsidered?  The idea of a $2,000 bed frame being “within reach” may be more symbolic of pre-recession excess than a reflection of smart brand management.

DWR’s stock price has plummeted from $4.50 last May to about $0.66 today.  The company is considering options like merger or sale.   So it may be that the company is thinking of its own death when it compares survival to furniture design.

Be A Man

“Manhood” is back in.

Yesterday on the McLaughlin Group, journalist Monica Crowley summed up the Republican opposition to Obama’s stimulus package this way: “The Republicans rediscovered their manhood”.  This follows weeks of Illinoic Gov Blagojevich-induced rage about taking his lumps like a man, as expressed by Illinois State Senator Dan Cronin,

“It’s somewhat cowardly that he won’t take questions.  If he had something to say, he should have come down here like a man and faced the music.” The “manhood” sentiment is littered across the media world.  Today columnist Susan Antilla of Bloomberg gives advice to fallen financial giants, “So suck it up, be a man…”

This branding of “man” only begs the question, in opposition to what?  Be a man, not a squirrel?  Of course the opposite of acting like a man (a good thing - brave) would be acting like a woman (the wrong thing - cowardly).  And that can’t be good news for feminism.  California Governor Schwarzenegger doesn’t mask his insult to women – he has repeatedly used the term “girlie men” as a way to define the right kind of male behavior, as in “…if they don’t have the guts, I call them girlie men”.

The glut of “manhood” references have started resurging with new vigor.  But the backdoor insult to women remains largely unchallenged. Crowley’s generation hands the language down to younger generations of hopeful pundits.  A psychology student at UC Santa Barbara writes today in the school newspaper, “Steve Pappas, could you please grow a pair, be a man and accept that you lost the election?”

If women get gender branding advice, it’s usually about being a “lady”.  Entertainer Steve Harvey has jumped into the “lady” versus “man” advice with his new book, “Act Like A Lady, Think Like A Man”.  Harvey postulates that men are most comfortable being recognized in the role of provider and protector.

I have a favorite picture of my son at the beach (see below) standing at the water’s edge.  I wonder what he is imagining for himself.  It would be helpful if, when I turn on CNN in our living room, he wasn’t hearing sexist stereotypes about what it means for him to be a  man.

The Stalk Market

Winnie and I attended the buy-nothing-day protest in New York yesterday.  This was after reading headlines about a Wal-Mart worker who had been trampled to death in Long Island by unruly bargain shoppers. I had recently re-read the much publicized story of Addie Polk, a 90-year old victim of predatory lending that resulted in foreclosure, who shot herself in her bedroom as the sheriff knocked on the door on the day she was to be forcibly removed.  Our credit culture has gone too far awry to be an armchair critic.

Winnie and I found the buy-nothing-day protestors at Barnes & Noble on Union Square.  The idea is to take one day – “Black Friday” – and boycott consumerism.  At first we weren’t sure if we had found protestors or a holiday marching band.  We were standing right in front of Starbucks, half a block from the protest, when we clearly heard their chants about the rot of a consumer-crazed culture.

But I was very thirsty.  I have been taking extra asthma medicine and suffering the side effect of dry mouth.  I am hooked on iced chai latte from Starbucks.  I said to Winnie, you probably want to wait for me on the sidewalk, right?  She didn’t say anything, only raised her left eyebrow.  I don’t know why people promise things they can’t control, like promising Winnie I’d be back in a sec when in reality I had no control over how long it might take to assemble my drink.  But I had promised to be quick and so became very stressed when the Barista collaboration begin to break down.

A couple minutes in to waiting for my order, the buy-nothing-day protestors in green santa hats descended on Starbucks. Baristas in green aprons begin chasing a few protestors around the store, who were offering leaflets to the confused coffee drinkers.  A huge crowd converged on the sidewalk directly in front of the door, chanting and ranting.   The remaining Baristas behind the counter began making nervous errors, like rimming the drink with chocolate instead of caramel and forgetting the whipped cream altogether.  I thought that customers should just grab whatever drink was offered to them, given the radically altered circumstances.  But they were stubborn, continuing to insist that the Barista’s fix the mounting drink errors.

Wow, I thought, I am being protested.  By Winnie.  I’ve been protested before, but never by loved ones.  Once the Young Republicans at Chico State protested a speech I had been invited to make about affirmative action.  The protest leader wore a Hooters shirt and held a sign that read “Reverse Discrimination Sucks.”

My iced chai latte was half made but stuck behind a long line of errors.  Protestors were now making speeches in front of the huge glass Starbucks panes and I could see news cameras.  I decided to take pictures of the protest, from the vantage point of a protestee (see below).  The security-prone Baristas told me to cut it out.  I told the other protestees who were waiting for their corrected drink orders that we were not supposed to be consuming today.  One of them rolled their eyes but nobody said anything back.  I had to wait on the sidewalk in front of Starbucks until the entire protest crowd had moved along to their next target before Winnie reappeared.  “You protested me!”, I said, cupping my iced tea between my gloved hands. “Yes”, she smiled.

Even in such dire economic conditions that a trip to the dentist has become a coveted Christmas present, the country can’t resist overspending.  We find ourselves caught in Starbucks, purchasing a $3.35 tea that can be created for a few cents in our own kitchens, even when our hearts are with those who are fighting the corrupt underbelly of the consumption propaganda campaign.

The tenuous distinction between promoting excess consumption for “good”, like to prop up the stock marketing, and consumption for “evil”, like trampling a Wal-Mart employee and then grumbling about the store being closed, is a weak barrier between order and chaos.  Credit is branded as honorable – a high credit score lands you access to jobs and money, and a low one reveals you as a suspicious character.  Everyone wants credit, even though it is credit itself that has thrown families out of their homes and cars and has propelled the nation into an economic sinkhole.

I am grateful that in a moment of either prescience or sheer luck we committed, from the earliest days, to build a firm that did not rely on credit.  Camino PR grows at the pace that the marketplace demands.  We seek out the most frugal solutions to even the thorniest challenges (check out Pablo’s excellent blog about open source solutions).  We work simply, so that our drag on the earth’s resources is minimal.

One weekday afternoon my kids claimed to have no homework, so I assigned them an essay on the Wall Street meltdown. Not surprisingly, the kids had no confidence that the adults could pay back the bailout we’ve just gifted to corporate America. My 6th grade son proposed in an essay titled “the Stalk Market Crash” that each household contribute $200 to a debt relief fund, so that his generation could have the money it will take to fix the economy. If you consider that there are almost 115 million households in the country, he created a plan that would generate a $2.3 trillion savings account for bailout relief.  It would require each of us to contribute roughly the equivalent of 60 iced chai latte’s from Starbucks.  Not a bad idea.