Last year McDonald’s set up a panel of high-profile over-achieving moms. Their latest version

appears to be drawing from the ranks of the everyday customer.

In a bid to convince health-conscious moms that its food is nutritious, McDonald’s says it will bring the group of mothers fully inside the company. The moms will visit restaurants, processing plants, orchards and test kitchens.

Beginning June 20, the moms will keep an online journal for roughly three months about what they see – and how they feel about it. The journal will be posted on the McDonald’s website and, the company hopes, read by other moms. McDonald’s insists it will have no input on what the women write.

…

McDonald’s dubbed the program Mom’s Quality Correspondents. The moms were picked from 4,000 applicants by Arc Worldwide, a promotions specialist.

They aren’t being paid, though McDonald’s pays for their travel. They got laptop computers for the program that they will be allowed to keep.
…

The women will be journaling – not blogging – says Starmann, meaning consumer responses to their comments will not be posted on the site. But the six mothers are free to respond to consumers or to post comments on other blogs, she says. They also will appear in videos at www.mcdonaldsmom.com.

There’s a really interesting public discourse going on in Gilbert, Arizona, regarding the Perry Branch Library’s decision to do away with the Dewey Decimal System in favor of a bookstore-like system of organization. Peruse the comments below the article for 3 pages of heated, fascinating dialogue!

Here’s one of my favorite excerpts from the discussion:

And also with RFID, who is going to bother searching for a book when they can look up the book on a wiki, hit a button and get a robot to bring it to them where ever they are sitting.

• 2007 Ford Fusion on Yahoo! Autos
  A new Ford TV ad uses extensive quotes from this consumer review site. Are consumers the new endorsers? No JD Power, no Car and Driver, but the posters (not the expert industry types) from Yahoo Autos.

• How Japan Sees America
  A parodic map from a videogame, but a grain of cultural truth?

I’m here in Richmond, VA for another few days of fieldwork. I haven’t quite processed the time in Seattle (and let alone the photos from KC) and here I am on the road again, turn the page. Our hotel is in a combination of industrial and motel strip, directly across from the economy lot for the airport. The main floor of the hotel smells like humid flatulence.

And here’s a closed 7-11, as I pulled in, the local cops were there flashing lights and getting out to talk to someone in another car. There are two Waffle Houses within sight of each other. Interesting area.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a free day tomorrow, so I’ll be off to explore the city. I am entirely unprepared for that, of course, since I planned to be busy minute by minute. We’ll see how it goes.

• Restaurant theme: birth control
  “Cabbages and Condoms” is a small chain of restaurants in Bangkok that funds AIDS awareness, population control and other spermy causes. In lieu of after-dinner mints, they offer rubbers.

One of the highlights of Kansas City was the chance to check out Cabela’s, a hunting/fishing/camping superstore. Although it’s chock full of animal killing products (and animal killing accessories), it manages to (in that way that the hunting community has always done) reframe this as pseudo-conservation and love for animals. The awe-inspiring amount of taxidermical displays feels like a trip to the national history museum, but the outdoor grill right next to one of the displays reveals the true nature of the endeavor. Lots of surprise and general challenges to my own perspectives made for a fun visit.

Here is a flickr set of my photos.

A couple of little cultural tidbits about cars and car users in India. Param writes

the cup holder, that’s now there almost by default in the newer Indian cars, is hardly used for keeping coffee or any other drink for that matter. This is one of those classic examples of how you blindly re-use a concept from the West and include it in your design it in a different country. And what people actually end up using it for in India is, keeping some currency/change or keeping your mobile phone.

and USATODAY tells us that

the head of BMW Asia says the defining characteristic of Indian consumers is their desire to buy every available feature.

“What the Indian consumer wants is the latest technology, and in the premium car segment, they’re looking for a fully loaded car,” Linus Schmeckel says. “They don’t like to be seen as second-class consumers.”

A friend sent me this link to artist Mark Luthringer‘s website. Check out this exquisite visual cataloging of modern artifacts in the Ridgemont Typologies section of the site.

Mark Luthringer, Taillights

• Can We Agree What an Insight is?
  A quick conversation between some market research folks. Some neat comments in the last 1/3 around emotion.