ChasNote

Cory Doctorow is out with his new book too, Little Brother. What a week for readers who want to take their favorite online authors (like these) into the battery-free zone!

Heather Armstrong, author of Dooce, has published her first book, a collection of essays (two contributed by Heather) called Things I Learned About My Dad. Congrats, Heather. I look forward to digging in to what, I’m guessing, will be the first of many books of yours I will read in the years to come.

The collection includes essays from some of my other favorites (and, full disclosure, FM partners) as well: James Griffioen from Sweet Juniper, Doug French from Laid-Off Dad, Alice Bradley from Finslippy and Maggie Mason from Mighty Goods.

Marketing has two functions, when you boil it down. One, to remind you to buy stuff you need (voice-over-IP phone service) or could imagine needing (Ginsu knives). This is direct-response marketing, and it often features a limited-time special price to lend urgency to that reminder.

The other purpose is to convince you to buy something you don’t really need but your desire for it somehow gets the better of you. This is brand marketing.

When it works — when a company creates a compelling brand associated with its wares — you begin to want stuff because to buy, wear, drink, drive, eat or smoke the variety that carries a particular logo makes you feel more complete. Taller, smarter, more compassionate, sexier and the rest.

Rob Walker, who writes the Consumed column for NY Times Magazine and the Murketing blog, calls this the Desire Code. His new book “Buying In” explores how and why it works — and it works, apparently, on just about all of us. “The fundamental tension of modern life,” he says on page 22, is this: “We all want to feel like individuals. [Yet simultaneously] We all want to feel like a part of something bigger than ourselves.” Ramones t-shirts and Viking stoves, it turns out, help us bridge that divide. And it’s often the symbols (brands, logos and ideas) rather than the products themselves that perform the magic:

“Sales of skateboarding ‘hard goods’ — helmets and wheels and actual skate decks — totaled around $809 million. But sales for T-shirts and shoes and other ’soft goods’ brought in much more, around $4.4 billion…. It has become possible to participate in the idea of skateboarding without actually skateboarding.”

The book publishes in early summer, but chapters are available online at Random House.

Burned out on Oprah’s Book Club? Us too. So we’ve started our own book group here at FM. Our selection for Q1 2007: Joseph Jaffe’s Join The Conversation.

From Page 29:

“Whereas [old marketing] puts the brand on a pedestal and expects consumer to worship it, covet it, aspire to it, and ultimately take a subservient position to it, [new marketing] asserts the opposite: that the brand must fit into consumers’ lives.”

While you’re waiting for you copy to arrive, you should be reading Jaffe’s site, Jaffe Juice.

Vance Packard’s 1957 classic critique of advertising, “The Hidden Persuaders,” is being republished with an introduction by Mark Crispin Miller — just time for election season. From the NY Times Book Review:

“What’s surprising is the degree to which we’ve all become sophisticates, engaging in our own Packard-like critiques of consumer culture without changing our habits. We know we buy irrationally; we just don’t care. We imagine that the ‘manipulators’ at J. Walter Thompson or BBDO play only on the fears and hopes of desperate consumers who aren’t as ‘conscious’ as we are (in which case it’s hard not to admire the ingenuity of the advertisers), while we ourselves are smart enough to decide when to give in. On the last page of ‘The Hidden Persuaders,’ Packard had to acknowledge the paradox: ‘When irrational acts are committed knowingly they become a sort of delicious luxury.’ We seem to enjoy both knowing that ads are hustling us and choosing to be hustled.”

From Media Week.

“Like much else in the digital world, Google stands at the center of this shift, Horan said. The ability to use search engines to find information means a more meritocratic media world, where a smaller advertiser or publisher can compete with larger companies on the basis of relevance. A car shopper, for instance, uses search to find information and considers a variety of sources rather than turn to a single trusted brand, he said. Intent-driven media also means a blurrier distinction among content, commerce and community, he said. As an example, Horan pointed to Nike+, the running system and social network that blend product, branding and service.”

I’m wondering if Horan read Battelle’s book.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, it’s small groups of hipsters in the East Village that start the trends that become national phenomena. In the book business, it’s a humbler, less fashionable set — leaders of small reading groups — that launch best-sellers (see NY Times).

“Increasingly, authors and publishers are tipping their hats to the power of 8 or 10 or 12 women (and usually they are women) sitting around a dining room table, dissecting their particular book of the month, then spreading the word to their friends. Along with ‘The Kite Runner,’ the successes of ‘The Memory Keeper’s Daughter,’ ‘Water for Elephants,’ ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ and ‘Kabul Beauty School’ have been credited to the early and continuing support of reading groups.”

It makes sense then that other large brands — such as Johnson & Johnson are investing in marketing to small groups of evangelists.

My friend Alex Frankel is out with his second book, Punching In. (His first, Word Craft, is also worth a read, if you’re interested in how products get named.)

In Punching In, Frankel joins on with the “brand armies” — the platoons of rank and file front-end staffers — at UPS, Starbucks, Gap and Apple Stores to better understand how brands express themselves through the uniforms, trained behaviors and scripted speech of their entry-level employees. From the introduction:

“The new ‘retail environments’ and ’store experiences’ that increasingly surround us and draw us into daily interactions demand more of workers than the mechanical work that [19th Century industrial theorist Frederick Winslow] Taylor studied to develop theories on work efficiency…. Beyond studying workers’ movements, some companies had come to study their minds, to find better ways to win them over, to make them believers.”

For brands like Starbucks to capture the premiums they charge, they need their retail employees to convince us that the premium is worth it; service brands need to start their brand marketing efforts right there in the HR department.