Virginia Postrel has written a wonderful NYT piece about the meaning of wires.  She writes:

One of the best places to find wireless glamour isn’t in ads for
high-tech products. It’s in images of stylish lamps in catalogs for
companies like Crate & Barrel and Chiasso. Whether through careful
composition or a little digital magic, the lamps seem to have no cords.
Like bills piled on the kitchen counter or muddy footprints on the
floor, the utilitarian realism of electrical wires would break the
spell of domestic perfection. Glamour’s grace is the art that conceals
art… What is truly glamorous about wireless technology is the fantasy that it requires no wires.

Is it possible to tell an authentic story made up of little lies?  I’m not so sure… a good story, maybe, but authentic, no.  Perhaps I don’t need to be told an authentic story to get me to buy a lamp or a laptop, just a good one.  I wonder.

Alex Pang of IFTF tells this charming tale of brand fractalness:

"At Stanford Shopping Center yesterday, we walked by this fine retail establishment.

Apple Store, Stanford Shopping Center, via Flickr

As we passed, my son (who’s three) shouted, "HEY! THAT’S THE IPOD STORE!!!"

Update, 28 April 2005: This morning I asked him, "How did you know the iPod Store was an iPod store? Did you see the iPods in it?"

He said, "No! It looks like an iPod!"’

He’s right.  It does look like an iPod.  When you’re doing this fractal brand thing right, everyone knows it.  Especially three-year-old, precocious design critics.

A few months ago we were talking about Scoble’s observation to the effect that any marketing website without a RSS feed should be flushed down the toilet. 

He’s right, and here’s why:  synthetic fables created by ad firms simply can’t compete with honest, soulful stories told direct to you and me from another human being.

Case in point:  if you’re a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers, do you feel more soulfully connected to the brand if you read this or this?  The answer is clearly the latter.  Why?  Because RSS combined with authentic, human content signals a new paradigm of marketing communications.  The brands and people who will succeed in this new paradigm are the ones with real stories and the guts to tell them without the mediocrity-inducing filter of marketing "professionals".  Good marketing takes guts.

John Maeda of MIT’s Media Lab wrote a delightful post about meaning and design, and how deep meaning can be embedded into a designed offering.  And as he tells the story, meaning can even be designed into something as mundane (yet vitally important) as a restroom door:

There is nothing more powerful in the visual vocabulary of an artist than the power of establishing contrast.
Anything big and fat appears bigger and fatter when placed next to
something flaccid and skinny… Thus the contrast
between the Mens Room and Ladies Room at The Plaza Hotel reaches epic
proportions in this architectural statement that doubles as a political
statement of old… Nothing could be appreciated in a simpler way than these
gilded restrooms of New York City.

Chew on that stew of thoughts for a moment: how could you use the concept of contrast as a way to embed helpful, behavior-shaping information into your next design, be it a website, a camera, or a flower vase?  I love Maeda’s notion of contrast because of its all-encompassing nature; it demands that one consider all the levels of design that create meaning: visceral, behavioral, and reflective.

Tap this one into your calendar: come May 26, Seth Godin will grace the pixels of metacool to talk about (among other things) his new book All Marketers are Liars.  This appearance is courtesy of the Business Blog Book Tour.

Since I’m a market-centric kind of guy, please let me know what topics, issues, themes you’d like to see Seth address (if he wants to) during his metacool sojurn.  I’m all ears. 

Until then, check out Seth’s blog about the book.

Earlier this month I pondered the existence of the Bu’wicked Special in Polyphony’s GT4 video game, and whether this was an intentional product placement by Buick or just a happy accident.

Ford gets it.  They played an active role in placing the new Mustang in GT4 (and also the Ford GT, which is an integral element of GT4’s branding).  In a recent Automotive News story, Killol Bhuta, assistant marketing manager for the Mustang, said, "One out of every four Mustangs we sell is
to an individual under the age of 34.  Chances are very
good they are also game players".  Myself, my first test drive of the Mustang came in GT4. 

What are all the virtual places where your offerings could live in order to help people understand your brand?

$600 jeans?  That’s the power of reflective design

As my good friend Alex pointed out to me today, "How could these guys NOT start a cool company?"

The dude with the Superman "S" on his chest is Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia.  You know the rest of the story.

How much of your organization’s brand is in you?  And vice versa?  Patagonia still vibrates in sync with every fiber of Chouinard’s body.  That’s brand fractalness — I think if you’re doing things right, you are your offerings, and your offerings are you and everyone else who produces them and adopts them into their own lives.

First things first: this is not a post about cars.  This is a post about good marketing.

Do you know this car?  Not the make of car — it started life as a vanilla 1962 Buick — but this car, which its owner/builder calls "Bu’wicked"?

Chances are you don’t, unless you own a PlayStation 2 and are an avid player of Gran Turismo 4.  But there are millions of video gamer ten-year-old kids who positively worship this car, even though it’s a Buick.  Why?  Because it’s fast fast fast fast, and stomps Jaguars and Corvettes and Porsches around the world’s (virtual) racetracks like nobody’s business. 

But how, you may ask, does a crazy old Buick hot rod wind up parading around a 21st century video game?  Chalk it up to a clever promotional strategy on the part of the producers of GT4, who awarded its builders, Ted and Sue Richardson, the honor of having their car digitized and placed in the game after it was awarded Best in Show at SEMA last year.  In the game, the car ends up looking like this:

Gran Turismo introduces cars and brands to kids and young adults who don’t own cars.  In many ways it’s the ultimate marketing sampler machine — play hard for a while and you’ll have the (virtual) money to buy and drive any car on the planet.  It made the Subaru WRX and the Mitsubishi Evo into total cult cars in the US even though they weren’t yet sold in this country.  So when those cars were finally introduced here a few years later, they sold like hotcakes.  I’d wager very few marketers think of video games as part of their promotional mix, but the smart ones are already out there using them to tell authentic stories about their products. 

Is some clever Buick brand manager ultimately behind the GT4 Bu’wicked?  I doubt it, but if I were a marketer trying to put some luster back into that brand, I know what I’d be doing, and it has nothing to do with big, expensive magazine ads.

The Counter Counterfeit Commission