I’m featured in The Boston Globe (registration required) in an article about the cultural impact of IKEA.

Its prices are just one way IKEA is altering how America decorates
By Linda Matchan, Globe Staff | November 3, 2005

STOUGHTON — When the Swedish home furnishings giant IKEA opened its first US store 20 years ago, the country wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.

”An anomaly to furniture retailing,” concluded HFD, a furniture trade publication, in an article called ”The IKEA impact.”

”IKEA’s main strength is that it is selling hype,” one furniture manufacturer commented suspiciously.

Fast forward two decades, and it’s hard to imagine a home furnishings company that’s had more impact on design and home furnishings retailing than the anomaly called IKEA, which, as it turns out, has sold a whole lot more than just hype. Last year, IKEA’s cash registers rang up more than$2 billion worth of products, among them such signature IKEA items as an $80 Po?ng armchair; a $40 Billy bookcase; a $200 Klippan sofa; and the all-time IKEA bestseller, Glimma tea lights, $3 for a bag of 100. (Not to mention 371,041,280 Swedish meatballs, according to an IKEA bulletin dispatched Oct. 26.)
…
”To me it’s an amazing emotional experience when I walk through IKEA and see how much stuff I can get for under $10 — and these are all things I already own,” says Steve Portigal, founder of Portigal Consulting, a California firm specializing in research, design, and business strategy.

”And yet I find myself thinking, ‘This is a cool watering can,’ and then fighting the urge to buy seconds and thirds. The low barrier to purchasing things, and the ease with which you can buy more of something you already have, doesn’t make me feel very good,” he says.

A previous blog entry about a Wired cover article on Jon Stewart (not) reinventing television has been semi-quoted in Wired.
From my entry

Pretty good Wired interview with Jon Stewart and Ben Karlin. Wired, being Wired, is pushing these guys to say brilliant stuff about the future, about technology, business models being revamped, distribution channels being introduced, utter changes in how we watch and how they make. But Stewart and Karlin continue to resist, falling back on their stance of hey, we just make a show; we’re show makers.

From Wired’s Rants page

Who says Jon Stewart, America’s top mock journalist (and Emmy winner), can’t pontificate about the future of television? Well Ôø? Stewart, for one. The Daily Show executive producer Ben Karlin, for another. And our readers. “Wired, being Wired, is pushing these guys to say brilliant stuff about the future,” one noted, “but Stewart and Karlin continue to resist.”

Interesting to see it in the Rants section, next to letters to the editor. The implication is that the content they print there is stuff that readers have directly sent in to the magazine. Of course, I did no such thing. I posted my thoughts here, and Wired went and found ’em. Next time, let’s get my name into the magazine, maybe?

Steve Portigal
Portigal Consulting
Montara, CA

(just in case 🙂

My first real photo with my new Nikon D50 DSLR

Our Core77 article Shopping for Innovation: What you need to know before hiring a design firm is finally up – and nicely blogged by Bruce Nussbaum at BusinessWeek.com (among others).

Full story
Mr. Incredible and Elmo said they were taken into custody at gunpoint and driven in handcuffs by police car to the front of the Kodak Theatre. There they claim they were paraded on the Hollywood Walk of Fame before shocked tourists and other boulevard impersonators.
“We were leaving to get something to eat. We had our heads off and were walking about a block away to our car when they pulled up,” said Barry Stockton, 42, who was dressed as Mr. Incredible, wearing a red superhero costume topped with a huge, cartoonish head.
Donn Harper, 45, said he complied, tossing his bug-eyed, furry red Elmo costume head to the ground. “They jumped out of their car with guns drawn. With all of the crime in Los Angeles they pick on us?”
Stockton, of Ontario (San Bernardino County), and Harper, of Los Angeles, were charged with misdemeanor aggressive begging along with the “Scream” character, Bill Stevens, 54, of Hollywood. Police said the three were among those who had been warned that authorities were preparing to respond to growing complaints from boulevard visitors and merchants about the Tinseltown impersonators.
Some tourists have contended that they were harassed for failing to pay the costumed characters for posing for photos with them in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and the nearby Kodak Theatre. Some merchants have grumbled that the impersonators were scaring customers with menacing costumes, fake weapons and props such as phony snakes.
Los Angeles Police Officer Michael Shea said the impersonators — who make their own costumes or buy what they say are licensed suits on eBay — were summoned to a meeting last month at the Hollywood and Highland shopping center and warned that enforcement of solicitation and harassment laws was coming. Sixty-eight of them, many in costume, showed up.
Shea said Mr. Incredible and Elmo were brought back to the boulevard so others could see they had been busted. “Make no mistake about it — I wanted the characters to know what we’re doing,”

One of my favorite things to track down, foodwise, on a return trip to Canada, are milk drinks that are flavored like chocolate bars. They are amazing; they capture the exact taste of a specific chocolate bar in a completely different form factor. From a solid to a liquid, with the same mix of tastes. Last trip we tried the Rolo version.

It was as incredible as every other one I’ve tried. It tasted like a Rolo, but it was a liquid. I can’t stop repeating the superlatives and proclaiming the sensorial wonder of it all, sorry.

So it was cool to see that here in the US we’ve got a similar product available now.

Milky Way and Three Musketeers. We bought both but have only tried the Milky Way. It’s good, but not stunning. It has the flavor components of Milky Way, but they don’t replicate the bar experience.

I am hopeful to see this category of product here in the US, though. Maybe we’ll get more of ’em, especially if they can figure out how to get it right.

The Sneeze fantasizes, only to be sadly disappointed, about the scope of the new Mega M&Ms.

Last month we stayed in Calgary for a few days to attend the Calgary International Film Festival. We stayed at the 5, a newly remodeled hotel that used to be the Hawthorn. Most info about hotels in downtown Calgary referenced the Hawthorn, and we found the website through a redirect. The website seemed pretty nice.

Kinda cool design, palette, nifty logo. Seemed like they were doing the JetBlue/IKEA thing of taking a commodity and adding design and more thoughtfulness to the overall experience, and finding a way to charge less for it. There were photos of the rooms (not currently available on the updated website), descriptions of all the amenities (free WiFi, breakfast), and the price was good. We decided to stay there.

When we booked our shuttle from the Calgary airport, the woman behind the counter growled in an intense Scottish brogue “Yeah, that used to the Hawthorn, and before that the Prince Rupert. I was finally getting used to calling it the Hawthorn and they changed the name. What a stupid name!”

The shuttle drops us off around the corner from the front door (which is not exactly door-to-door service that we paid for, but that’s a complaint for elsewhere). It doesn’t look like it’s the Five.

It looks like the Hawthorn.

The front door, at least, is a little more clear what hotel we’re at.

Unless you happen to look up. Serious naming/branding confusion!

A few days later I find a card in the lobby. The card has the new brand scheme and reads, in part “Over the coming months, Hawthorn Hotel & Suites will transform into 5 Calgary Downtown Suites.” Okay, so this is an ongoing project. But the entire experience is confusing; it doesn’t suggest transition, it is just a mishmash of radically different brands. This card was sorta hidden; one had to be poking around to stumble across it. It’s the only place they acknowledge the transition; the rest of the time the hotel presents all this as if it’s normal. But really, it was just odd.

The room number says we’re at the Hawthorn.

But the apples say we’re at the five. Apples? They took the trouble to order brand stickers for apples, but they couldn’t change the door numbers? I was really surprised.

Finally, I was a total sucker for the website branding, like I said, expecting JetBlue. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was like when we’d visit a distant great aunt in an apartment building in Winnipeg in the 70s. It was seriously dated, and not well-kept.

The kitchen featured a stove from the Mesozoic era.

And really cheesy cupboards.

An access panel in the bathroom was old, dirty, and loose.

Not to mention this disgusting vent in the bathroom.

The living room was typical of the “suite” – outdated, poorly maintained. I think we found some remnants of painter’s tape from whatever remodeling they had done. Who knows how long it had been there.

Anyway, it worked out fine (although their free breakfast was disgusting and they never had enough staff or food to handle the traffic flow even on a weekday), but I was struck by how different the hotel experience was from what the branding had led me to believe – or what I had let myself believe based on that.

From Travel Agent Central

Air Canada will no longer offer customers free pillows. Instead, for a $2 charge, the carrier will offer customers a so-called ‘comfort zone’ kit that includes an inflatable plastic pillow and polyester blanket, according to media sources in Canada. Apparently, the kit is a pouch with pillow case, blanket and an instruction card on blowing up the pouch into a pillow.

I can’t help thinking of a prescient series of parody radio ads from the 70s somewhere in Southern Ontario (Hamilton? Toronto?) for Air Harold, where everything, including seatbelts, were extra.

This is such a messed up industry.

Grant McCracken offers up a provocative post entitled Brand theatre and the experiential brand, with some rules to create effective storytelling experiences

1. First, discover [and] obey the local culture. Use its favorite media.
2. Second, proceed as if less is more. Engage their detective work.
3. Third, invite completion. In this case, invite them to tell more stories.
4. Fourth, keep a small footprint (fewer reps better than more).
5. Fifth, practice brand murmur (aka brand diffidence). Don’t go crashing in there.
6. Sixth, engage theatrical resources. In a world saturated with mediated communications, there’s nothing quite like the real thing.) (Besides, we’re Elizabethans, too).