Cool News

RIP: Cool News (1998-2016)

Tim Manners — Mon, 04 Jan 2016 10:01:41 +0000

Dear Readers: It started innocently enough, one sunny Tuesday morning, without any forethought or planning. I had awakened early — at about five — for no apparent reason. Okay, stress, probably. Picked up the papers and a few news items caught my eye. In the quiet of the six o’clock hour, I wrote some notes about what I saw as their significance and emailed the scratch to maybe two-dozen of my closest friends in marketing. That’s how Cool News began, on April 3, 1998.

Today, on January 4, 2016, it comes to an end, as all things must pass. It’s time to move onto something new. I have started Brand X Ventures, a network of leaders dedicated to identifying and exploring the challenges and opportunities of the brand experience (every opportunity to make or break the brand promise). BXV generates intelligence on how to optimize the brand experience via research and analysis, as well as confabs during which brand-experience leaders connect, share knowledge and identify critical issues for further study.

I have also started a new blog, The Brand X Journal, which will carry on in the spirit of Cool News, but try to bring something different, as well. Please take a look and subscribe to receive email updates if you’d like. There’s a form on the page. Either way, thank you so much for reading Cool News. It has been the heart and soul of my life’s work for a very long time and will always be so. Thank you, thank you, thank you … and may all your news be cool! ~ Tim Manners, editor.

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Saffronomics

Tim Manners — Thu, 31 Dec 2015 10:01:50 +0000

Saffron is so prized it can cost more than cocaine, reports Elaine Sciolino in The New York Times (12/30/15). Indeed, in Europe, it can cost about $10,000 a pound. Because of this, saffron “has spawned a trade rife with the kind of deceptions and distortions typical of of traffic in … illicit drugs: cheap substitutes, diluted shipments, false labeling.” The disorder is now such that “scientists and saffron experts have banded together to form a movement they call ‘Saffronomics,’ dedicated to better “production and marketing,” and to establish purity standards.

Saffron’s magic dates back at least as far as Cleopatra, who “took saffron-infused baths to enhance her allure. Alexander the Great used it to heal the wounds of battle.” In Iran, which produces some 80 percent of the world’s saffron, it is widely viewed as “an antioxidant, an antidepressant and a culinary weapon against Alzheimer’s, cancer and degeneration of the eyes.” Cracking down on fake saffron is largely “driven by a conviction that such an extraordinary product deserves to remain authentic and pure.”

Fraud detection ranges from “simple spectroscopy to more complete DNA investigations” to determine whether it has been dyed or otherwise compromised with fillers. In Iran, the only test that matters is that the saffron was grown “in the Khorasan region of Iran,” and its “blend of soil, topography, climate and water.” The Fahri family has grown saffron for generations, and carefully packages it “in long red-yellow strands … to prove it has not been tampered with.” The Farhis also say that the “red pistils give flavor” and the yellow stems “add perfume.”

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Lafley’s Curve

Tim Manners — Wed, 30 Dec 2015 10:01:34 +0000

Procter & Gamble is trying counter-intuition to revive its Olay brand, reports Serena Ng in The Wall Street Journal (12/29/15). Olay is a beauty-care brand, where the norm is to rely “heavily on new product rollouts for sales growth.” Olay had been on that track, having “vastly expanded its product range and added premium-priced moisturizers and skin treatments that were comparable to products typically found in department stores.” This worked for a while, as sales tripled between 2000 and 2010.

Over the past five years, however, Olay’s US sales “have declined annually … according to Euromonitor International.” “Olay simply got too big and too complicated, and from the consumer’s perspective it wasn’t clear what Olay was anymore,” says Stephen Powers of UBS. Kat Blakeslee, a longtime user, agrees: “I started getting confused when they came out with many different products with different names,” she says.”Sometimes I would just walk away without buying anything.” So, now, P&G is cutting “one-sixth” of its Olay offerings to focus n anti-aging products — although cutting back on the choices has its risks too.

“Women like to try new things, so innovation is very important,” says Fabrizio Freda of Estée Lauder Companies. In addition to streamlining its Olay portfolio, “P&G is also working with retailers to rearrange shelf displays.” At some Walmart stores, for example, certain Olay creams “are now showcased in display boxes on small pedestals,” department-store style. P&G CEO AG Lafley comments: “Consumers only spend very few seconds in front of any given shelf … They’re trying to deselect as fast as they can, and they just can’t do it.”

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The Jet Set

Tim Manners — Tue, 29 Dec 2015 10:01:20 +0000

At Jet.com, employee happiness is seen as the key to growth, reports David Streitfeld in The New York Times (12/27/15). Jet is an e-commerce startup valued at “more than a billion dollars” and “employee happiness” starts with “free food … Red Bull in the refrigerator,” as well as “four months of parental leave, unlimited vacation and an ownership stake that could be worth a lot.” It is also based on employee contracts written in “casual language” and transparency in how well the company is doing and how much co-workers are paid.

Empowerment is another happiness factor, so Jet gives its employees leeway to make their own decisions, although their choices can be overruled by superiors. Workers are also free to go to work for competitors and take co-workers with them. Jet conducted a survey, called the “Happiness Pulse” to gauge the effects of such policies on employee joy, which about 500 of its 900 employees completed: “Two thirds of them said they viewed Jet favorably. Only four percent had a negative opinion.” The worst score was for “work-life balance.”

The expectation is that the greater the happiness quotient among employees, the more productive they are. Andrew Oswald, a British economist, says research confirms that this is a reasonable expectation. Lower turnover tends to help the bottom line, too. Jet reports it is doing well, with two million customers and “its first $2.5 million revenue day” in mid-December. Whether happier employees translates into happier customers may be in question, as Jet left some 500 customers disappointed by shipments that missed the Christmas deadline.

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Impatient Design

Tim Manners — Mon, 28 Dec 2015 10:01:07 +0000

Some hospitals are trying to improve patient experiences without patient permission, reports Natasha Singer in The New York Times (12/27/15). Unlike clinical drug trials, which require the knowledge and consent of participants, experiments with patient procedures at medical centers can be covert. Such tests typically involve “patient experience design, healthcare technology and data tracking.” These can be ideas intended to improve the patient experience, but they also can be designed to “safely shorten the recovery time” and send the patients home more quickly.

The Josie Robertson Surgery Center views itself “as a laboratory for continuous improvement, a place where doctors, nurses and staff will be encouraged to rethink standard practices and try new techniques to improve patient care.” Among its innovations are “plastic tracking badges” that pinpoint incoming patient whereabouts, so they don’t have to wait in like to check in. Instead, coordinators can come to them. The controversy is that patients usually are not informed when they are subjects in tests to streamline their post-operation experience. “It’s a learning lab for new systems,” says Dr. Brett A. Simon, an anesthesiologist at the center.

“It’s clearly a blurry space,” says Nancy Kass of Johns Hopkins, adding: “It doesn’t matter if it’s quality improvement or research.” While the experiments may yield important innovations, “it seems remarkable that administrators … have yet to pioneer an innovative system for transparently communicating their improvement endeavors to patients.” Dr. Simon admits it’s a work in progress: “We do want to communicate the things we are doing that are new and that improve the patient experience without making them feel alarmed or that they are experimental animals,” he says, while noting he doesn’t yet know how to do that.

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Retail Clutter

Tim Manners — Wed, 23 Dec 2015 10:02:54 +0000

Shoppers like a cluttered store but aren’t likely to admit it, writes Paco Underhill in The New York Times (12/20/15). The evidence is that the “more stuff in the aisle and the more promotional the environment the higher the sales … The more crowded, the greater the reward for ‘treasure hunting’ shoppers looking for an exclusive bargain.” Ironically, “the aspirational spaces we all long for in our homes — clean, uncluttered … are completely at odds with the stores we shop in.” What’s more, if you were to ask shoppers if stores are too cluttered, most would say they are.

That’s because of the difference between what shoppers say and their actual behavior. This, along with “the success of austere Apple stores,” has led some retailers “to believe that consumers are more likely to purchase when presented with a cleaner experience and fewer options.” This can work out well for stores like Apple or H&M “because they have one brand to sell, rather than competing brands and displays.” It didn’t work so well for Walmart, which reportedly lost about $1 billion in revenue when it tried to clean up and streamline its stores.

Shoppers do tend to perceive cluttered stores as “cheaper,” which may or may not be the retailer’s intent. The promotional clutter tends to prompt shoppers to pick up and discard items as they move through the store “as they find something else they like better.” So, while clutter does increase sales, it also increases labor costs” of returning the clutter to the shelves. The challenge for retailers, then, is to draw the line between “offering stuff to be discovered” and stuffing their stores. For shoppers, it’s not letting the clutter follow them home.

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Dynamic Profits

Tim Manners — Wed, 23 Dec 2015 10:01:13 +0000

The price-value ratio is more of a moving target than ever, reports Jack Nicas in The Wall Street Journal (12/13/15). The concept of dynamic pricing is nothing new; airlines, in particular, have adjusted prices based on demand as far back as the 1980s, with hotels and rental-car companies later following their lead. In 1999, Coca-Cola experimented with “raising its vending-machine prices on hot days … but retreated after customer backlash.” Of course, dynamic pricing quickly spread to e-commerce with the rise of the Internet.

Today, you can’t go to a zoo without paying a premium during prime time, and in Dallas, Texas, highway tolls change “every five minutes depending on traffic. Kohl’s Corp. uses electronic price tags in 1,200 stores to change prices for busy and slow times.” Dynamic pricing is a major feature of ride-sharing, be it Uber or Lyft: “On busy nights like New Year’s Eve, fares can soar to $500.” Lyft changes prices as a way “to lure more drivers onto the road.” A car dealership “in North Carolina is testing electronic tags that alter prices based on competition online.”

This usually works out better for sellers than buyers. Economists say that “consumers pay more as a result” of dynamic pricing, on average. Although consumers sometimes try to resist dynamic pricing — as Major League Baseball fans did five years ago when certain teams introduced it — they tend to get used to paying more “based on factors such as date, opponent, weather forecasts and seats remaining.” Peter Fader of Wharton says fans now expect this. “Now pretty much every one of them is doing it routinely, with a remarkable lack of backlash,” he says.

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Hollywood Awakens

Tim Manners — Tue, 22 Dec 2015 10:02:03 +0000

Hollywood has figured out that what people want is “old-fashioned filmmaking,” reports Brooks Barnes in The New York Times (12/21/15). Exhibit ‘A’ is the new Star Wars film, The Force Awakens, in which director J.J. Abrams relied “less on computer generated imagery and more on constructed sets.” The movie also has a clear storyline. “The studios finally seem to be remembering, after years of over-reliance on visual effects, that moviegoers like a story,” says Jeannine Basinger of Wesleyan University, adding that it can be a “familiar” or “serialized” story, but there must be a story.

With Star Wars, the story is both familiar and serialized, albeit with a certain twist in that the film’s lead character, Rey, is female in what has been (and still is) a male-oriented franchise. Rey, in particular, “made this franchise feel modern and much more appealing to women,” says Greg Foster of Imax Entertainment. That said, an estimated 58 percent of the audience of the film’s opening weekend was male, and “63 percent … was 26 or older.” The film’s weekend take of $238 million blew away the previous record, set in 2012 by The Hobbit, coming in at $87.5 million.

Disney Studios is further credited with masterful marketing, using “its vast empire — theme parks, television networks, an online video studio, consumer products, video games, cruise ships — to promote the movie.” The studio also managed to time “the surge of advance hoopla to crest just as ‘The Force Awakens’ arrived in theaters.” Disney plans four more “Star Wars-related” movies, and to keep stoking the nostalgia engine with the Indiana Jones series. Other studios are following the pattern, with Jurassic Park movies, King Kong vs. Godzilla and Superman vs. Batman, among others.

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Brown Christmas

Tim Manners — Tue, 22 Dec 2015 10:01:26 +0000

“Half a century later, ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas‘ is far more than a quaint historical artifact,” writes Stephen Lind in The Wall Street Journal (12/21/15). “The slow and yet sublime story proves that purposeful characters and a simple aesthetic can beat fancy computer algorithms,” Stephen writes.”Free from gross humor or double-entendres, the show is a reminder that Hollywood need not reach to the lowest common denominator. A lonely kid who hears deep truths and is comforted by flawed but well-meaning friends is enough.”

When it first aired in 1965, the Peanuts special attracted about “15 million viewers.” It has aired every holiday season since, and this year pulled in an audience of seven million. This is all the more remarkable given that its “animation looks rudimentary by Pixar standards. The voice acting, performed by real children, isn’t exactly a Shakespearean triumph.” But Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, in collaboration with producer Lee Mendelson and director Bill Melendez, elevated “it to fit the paradoxical sophistication of ‘Peanuts.'”

The trio “scrapped the traditional laugh track and opted for a jazz score. To maintain the strip’s ethos of authenticity, they had children voice the characters and brought in a choir from a local church. Schulz insisted that they include a passage of scripture — Linus’s recitation of the the Gospel of Luke.” The television network brass didn’t see the feature until just before the airdate. They hated it, complaining about “the music and plodding animation,” not to mention the scripture. However, it was too late to change the programming schedule,” and the rest is Merry Christmas history.

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The Travel Bug

Tim Manners — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 10:02:58 +0000

Hi-tech is now enabling hi-touch in the travel industry, reports Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times (12/17/15). “A lot of companies pushed hard on the idea that technology will solve every problem, and that we shouldn’t use humans,” says Paul English of Lola Travel. “We think humans add value, so we’re trying design technology to facilitate the human-to-human connection.” Lola is an online travel agency, and Paul is a former chief technology officer of Kayak. He concluded that do-it-yourself, online travel booking isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Paul realized this after spending some time on Kayak’s customer service line and talking to a good number of frustrated users. “I tried to create the best travel website on the market,” says Paul. “But as good as we thought our tech was, there were many times where I thought I did a better job for people on the phone than our site could do.” Joe McClure of Montrose Travel says this reality is a boon to his travel agency. “There is so much information out there that people research themselves into a circle and they get confused,” he says.

So, they end up calling his agency for help. Digital “has also helped human expertise scale. Thanks to texting, human customer service agents can now serve multiple customers at a time. They can also access reams of data about your preferences, allowing them to quickly find answers to your questions. As a result, for certain purchases, the cost of adding human expertise can be a trivial part of the overall transaction … the commissions on travel are so good that Lola can afford to throw in human expertise almost as a kind of bonus.”

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The Writing Machine

Tim Manners — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 10:01:33 +0000

Robots are reviving the art of the handwritten note, reports Eilene Zimmerman in The New York Times (12/17/15). A company called Bond has “built its own writing machine, which can produce personalized notes for every customer.” The machine has a robotic arm “that can hold a pen, a paintbrush or a marker. The paper is moved around using static electricity … Customers can choose from a variety of handwriting styles, or they can have their own handwriting copied for $500.” The envelope is sealed with a wax stamp.

The company’s customer base includes “Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits, and small independent businesses like professional services firms and real-estate brokers.” Bond founder Sonny Caberwal says the service offers businesses an antidote to email, text messages and technology in general. “Companies spend $23 billion on customer relationship management tools to understand and have a more personal relationship with their customers. We are the physical implementation of that,” he says.

One Bond customer, a Fortune 500 retailer, reported an uptick in spending of $16 a month, on average, among customers who had received the “handwritten” thank-you notes, and also “returned 33 percent less merchandise.” Individual cards cost $3.50 each, “but for corporate customers with larger orders, the price ranges from $2.00 to $2.50 a card.” One customer, Saneel Radio of Finch15, says he readily admits to clients that the cards he sends are written by a robot, because it reflects that his firm knows “what is new and useful.”

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Men in Beards

Tim Manners — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 14:34:02 +0000

Men have mostly been clean shaven, except for “four great beard movements,” reports Daniel Akst in a Washington Post review of Of Beards and Men, by Christopher Oldstone-Moore (12/17/15). At least since Alexander the Great, “shaving has been the default mode of masculine style,” except during “second century Rome, part of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the second half of the 19th century. Otherwise having a beard was usually a way to make a statement by departing from the norm.”

The book notes “that in 1968, Fidel Castro’s regime barred facial hair for students at Havana University.” While we don’t know what Jesus looked like, he was “more often depicted as clean-shaven” in the “centuries after his death” in deference to “Roman sensibilities.” Later, in the Middle Ages, “he was portrayed bearded to humanize him while distinguishing the savior from those shown around him.” Roman gods were depicted as clean shaven to distinguish them from mortals.

Alexander the Great may simply have been too young to grow a full beard. Tarzan may have been portrayed as clean-shaven because “men of the 20th century were afraid of the ape within and worried about self-discipline.” Of course, “men grow beards for all kinds of reasons, including a weak chin, high testosterone or bad skin — not to mention the desire to look older or younger, more respectable, more worldly or more godly.” Or maybe they grow beards simply because they can.

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Ryan’s Whiskers

Tim Manners — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 14:30:17 +0000

House Speaker Paul Ryan says it’s just a “hunting beard” but that may not be the full story, reports Alex Williams in The New York Times (12/17/15). Shortly after his elevation as Speaker of the US House of Representatives — and following a weekend hunting trip — Paul Ryan sported a “neatly cropped stubble.” GQ called the new beard “the eye-roll-inducing equivalent to your father showing up to dinner on a skateboard.” The New York Post, however, said it made Ryan look less like a “frat boy” and more like the “top dog.”

Either way, the whiskers make Ryan the first bearded Speaker since Frederick H. Gillett (yes, Gillett), who left office in 1925. Beards arrived as political fashion in the US with Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and ended with William Howard Taft’s “extravagant handlebar” mustache in 1913. Thomas E. Dewey’s failed bid in 1948 is sometimes ascribed to his “cookie duster” mustache.” Dewey once said: “Any boy can become president — unless he’s got a mustache.” Al Gore grew a beard after being denied the White House in 2000.

Tammy Haddad, a former political director for MSNBC, suggests Ryan’s beard makes a political statement, giving him “outsider” image. She says “the beard shows that he’s not of Washington, he’s not part of the system.” Bernard Whitman, a pollster, says: “The beard makes him look cool and contemporary, which makes him more appealing to women, gays and millennials.” Ryan is saying only that he may keep the beard until he gets a “bow kill,” while also noting that his wife is letting him go unshaven “for a little while.”

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Database of Dreams

Tim Manners — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 10:02:19 +0000

Data can disappear along with the ways of life it documents, reports Evan Hepler-Smith in a Wall Street Journal review of Database of Dreams by Rebecca Lemov (12/13/15). The book centers on “the ambitious efforts of mid-20th-century social scientists to build a ‘capacious and reliable science of the varieties of the human being.'” This consisted of “an archive of human experience through interviews and tests and by storing the information on the high-tech media of the day.” That medium was “microphotography.”

Microphotography is just like it sounds: microscopic images printed on 3×5 cards. Developed during the Victorian era, it been used as a medium for carrier pigeons and as data storage by corporations. The premise of the research was that “the key to a universal science lay in studying members of cultures in transition between traditional and modern ways of life and rendering their individuality as data,” with Native Americans as the focus. Yet once the research was compiled, the data was lost.

With the obsolescence of microphotography, the records disappeared along with the cultures they recorded. The technology “at once rendered information accessible and, through technological obsolescence, potentially inaccessible. On microform media,’compressed and miniaturized, documents were both secure and in jeopardy.” The question is: “Might other totalizing data-collection projects suffer the same fate? This is one sense in which Database of Dreams is a ‘parable for our time.’ It is a memento mori for Big Data.”

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The White Road

Tim Manners — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 10:01:40 +0000

Porcelain has traveled a long road from precious to commonplace, reports Laura Miller in a New York Times review of The White Road by Edmund de Waal (12/13/15). At one time porcelain was so prized it was nicknamed “white gold.” Porcelain “is a ceramic made from a varying mixture of materials, the most indispensable of which is a whitish clay, kaolin.” It was first produced in China, “about 1,000 years ago” and was “created in vast quantities for the imperial court.” It took Europeans 400 years to figure out to replicate it.

Porcelain is at once both fragile and strong. It can shatter with “the sweep of a careless elbow,” but if unbroken “in a hundred years it will look as good as new — its colors undimmed, its whites snowy.” Its magic was initially reproduced in Germany “in the early 18th century” by “an urbane mathematician and a young, eccentric alchemist.” However, the first “true porcelain” was made in England, by William Cookworthy who “noticed that the clay in a nearby Cornish hill resembled the kaolin described in newly published letters from China.”

Around the same time, “Josiah Wedgwood, the potentate of English pottery … sent a factotum all the way to a mountain in the Cherokee Nation in the Carolinas to retrieve five tons of white clay.” Today, the once-precious “porcelain is now everywhere, not only in your kitchen (and bathroom), but also in your mouth … and used as insulation in electrical devices. It has become mundane.” It “embodies domesticity and aspiration and above all the dream of holding fast to what can so easily be lost in this merciless world.”

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Lillian Vernon

Tim Manners — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 10:02:33 +0000

The late Lillian Vernon had a “golden gut” for “knowing what women wanted,” reports Lynn Povich in a New York Times obituary (12/15/15). Her secret was simple: “I know my customer because I am my customer,” she said. Her approach was also innovative: “When she started, there were only huge books like Sears … that had every kind of merchandise, like a department store,” said Katie Muldoon, a consultant. “Lillian Vernon created a new retail market, catalogs with a theme: personalized products you couldn’t buy anywhere else.”

Personalization was a key feature: “Her niche was whimsical, low-cost items that could be monogrammed — at no charge — in days rather than weeks.” Frank Sinatra purchased monogrammed lint removers! Lillian’s hallmark was that she “traveled the world looking for distinctive products and sources long before the global marketplace had opened up.” Among her offerings were pieces “of Ming vases, fashioned into pendants and bracelets.” Each catalog opened “with a letter describing where she was traveling and what she had found.”

Lillian Manasche was a Nazi Germany refugee (who used Vernon as her last name because she operated out of Mt. Vernon, New York). She started her mail-order business from her kitchen table in 1951 with $2,000 of her wedding money. At its peak, the company — the “first owned by a woman to be listed on the American Stock Exchange — had “nine catalogs, 15 outlet stores, two websites, a business-to-business division and yearly revenue close to $300 million.” She sold the business for $60.5 million in 2003. Lillian Vernon was 88.

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One Grand

Tim Manners — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 10:01:06 +0000

A small bookshop in an old mercantile building aspires to be everything that Amazon is not, reports The New York Times (12/7/15). Called One Grand, and located in a “modern, yet intimate, 550-square-foot space perched above the Delaware River,” in Narrowsburg, NY, the aim is “to make bookselling more selective and personal.” Its founder, Aaron Hicklin, “debuted One Grand as a pop-up shop at the Whisper Editions bookshop at South Street Seaport.” The basic idea is to feature collections of books “handpicked by various creatives.”

“I approach people who, I think, practice their craft really well,” says Aaron. “They’re not celebrities so much as celebrated individuals who do what they do excellently. The books are a reflection of their development and their evolution. But they’re also just great recommendations.” Aaron asks them to make their selections based on the question: “If you were stranded on a desert island, which ten books could you not do without?” A companion podcast, Desert Island Books, “borrows its name” from the BBC’s Desert Island Discs.

The curators ones have included “Tilda Swinton, Michael Stipe, Lena Dunham and Edmund White … Each collection will have a limited run; every two weeks an older set will be rotated out and a new one brought in … There are plans for salons … where curators will read from their picks.” Aaron plans to line-extend into “in-room book selections at hotels, or perhaps book-concierge services on flights.” Aaron says his motivation is simply to engage “with people in an environment that I create and that reflects my sensibility.”

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Heartless Loyalty

Tim Manners — Tue, 15 Dec 2015 10:02:02 +0000

Less friendly brands may engender more enduring loyalty, reports Josh Barro in The New York Times (12/13/15). Social psychologists say “there are two broad categories of human relationships: exchange relationships, in which we trade for mutual benefit, and communal relationships, which are based on mutual caring and support.” Usually, a business is of the former type and people the latter. However, sometimes “companies try to blur the lines, insinuating themselves into your friend zone.”

This can be limited to advertising: “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there,” for instance. In other cases, companies go to great lengths to behave as if they are in a communal relationship with their customers. Starwood, for example, “befriends its very frequent customers by providing them more than points and free nights. It offers customized personal touches, seeking to show that Starwood doesn’t just value their business, it understands them.” The problem is that this kind of emotional connection can backfire.

That’s exactly what apparently has now happened to Starwood, as its pending acquisition by Marriott has caused a backlash among its most loyal customers, who feel betrayed, emotionally stranded. Here’s the thing: “Marriott has a rewards program that is, by direct measure of reward points, significantly richer than Starwoods.” However, it creates “a kind of retention that is surprisingly devoid of affection, adoration or good will,” says Youngme Moon of Harvard Business School. It is also unlikely “to bring anguish if things go sour.”

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Fandom Photos

Tim Manners — Tue, 15 Dec 2015 10:01:32 +0000

Online sales increase by about five percent for photos posted by consumers versus those posted by brands, reports Mark Scott in The New York Times (12/10/15). At least that’s according to Jose de Cabo of Olapic, which scans “social-media sites on behalf of luxury brands … hunting for personal photos that feature the brands … that could be used in marketing campaigns.” “There’s an army of fans out there for every brand and they want to be part of your world,” says Jose. “By embracing that, brands can build a stronger connection with consumers.”

However, “most luxury brands have yet to turn a growing digital presence into increased sales … Online sales still represent just six percent of luxury companies’ total revenues,” according to L2, which “tracks the digital impact of brands.” Only about “10 companies, including Ralph Lauren and Michael Kors, dominate this digital retail world, generating a combined 65 percent of all traffic to websites associated with the luxury industry.” While some are giving greater voice to their “fans,” others are enlisting “social media darlings and other celebrities.”

The brands do so even though the stars may not align precisely with the brand’s audience. The hope is that such alliances will give the brands both a broader and “more populist” image. “Each brand needs to strike a balance between exclusivity and inclusiveness,” says James Lovejoy of Brandwatch. Dior, for example, “joined forces with … Rihanna, whose social-media following is four times as large as that of the fashion label. Calvin Klein signed a deal with Justin Beiber,” whose Instagram following “is 15 times as large as that of the brand.”

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Grid City

Tim Manners — Mon, 14 Dec 2015 10:03:20 +0000

New York City’s street grid “leveled its social playing field,” reports David Freeland in The Wall Street Journal (11/12/15). Initiated in 1811, the grid “flattened highlands once ‘occupied by country estates.'” As Gerard Koeppel writes in City on a Grid: How New York became New York, this “filling of valleys with the rock and soil of the hills” had a leveling effect on the city’s classes. Not everyone was a fan of the grid, though. Henry James, called it the “original sin of the longitudinal avenues perpetually, yet meanly, intersected.”

James saw cities as “living organisms” that should not be planned but rather “grow from within & by experience & piece by piece.” He, and others, viewed the grid as “a bland exercise in utilitarianism that destroyed any potential for beauty.” The grid’s commissioners did indeed reject “the circles and diagonals of a city like Washington DC for a simple plan of straight lines and right angles.” The question is, why? And should the plan instead be admired as “a visionary and efficient parceling of land narrowly delimited by water?” Have you ever tried to navigate Washington, DC?

Apparently the commissioners — a committee of three men — were “overwhelmed by ill health, distance and other responsibilities” and “simply ran out of time to deliver something more creative.” The grid was easy and good enough, although it “devoted little area to parkland” (Central Park came along later) because the commissioners thought that being embraced by the sea would compensate for a lack of greenery. In any case, the city’s “rigidly pragmatic” design certainly “has not prevented New Yorkers from using it as a backdrop for more adventurous creations.”

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