We saw these kawaii decals for sale in Tokyo. According to the in-store display, they are intended for mobile phones and iPods, but could go on anything.
I was amazed to see the familiar and consistent visual brands of Marvel superheroes so dramatically localized, reflecting the Japanese kawaii (“cute”) aesthetic by infantilizing Wolverine, Spiderman, and the Hulk.
In The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
and The Substance of Style we learn about the dramatic increase in choice for so many products and services, why that is, and what it means to our experience with those products and services.
But let’s not forget that things go other way as well. Like the banana convergence I blogged about before
, apples are a paradox of limited choice.
The United States was once home to more than 10,000 named apple varieties, but nowadays it’s hard to find more than a handful, even at farmers’ markets.
Although theories like those authors put forward (and I’ll throw in the Long Tail too) are useful lenses to help make sense of out what we see there often completely opposite gravities occurring simultaneously. But hey, culture is a complex beast, isn’t it? Because both of the contradictory trends are indeed true.
A couple of months ago I spent a couple of weeks in London on-site with a client, meeting with different players and learning about how they did things, and how they were using the products they were developing.
This company is in the finance industry which has a pretty specific culture: high energy, male dominated, very social, very competitive. I was there as an outsider and I was obviously an outsider…strangely dressed, from “Silicon Valley” (one person I met with revealed that they had been anticipating my arrival by referring to me as Silicone Man, because, in part, they didn’t know my name), and of course asking a lot of ridiculous questions.
The trading floor (essentially rooms with rows of desks that have 3-6 monitors each) has a very hierarchical culture. For example, the young guys run out every day and bring back food for the other guys. One day I was working on the floor during lunch; the team I was with asked me if I wanted lunch, so I placed an order with two young traders from France, as they went out to Wagamama (or as they called it, Wags).
When the food arrived, one of the brokers noticed me with my bucket of noodles and announced to everyone “Hey, Steve is having lunch on the desk! Now he’s really and truly one of us!”
Being overtly included is always touching; I was struck by the power of the shared dining ritual (which in this case was simply the ordering, then we all sat at our desks with our computers and ate and worked) to delineate that inclusion.
I responded by announcing that one of the tools I use in my work is participant observation. “Oh…” he said, “We learn something new every day!”
is trying to do some of what we looked at last year with CultureVenture.
An interesting new report from Ernst & Young found that there continues to be enormous enthusiasm among investment firms around the world for initiatives and investments in the BRIC markets, “but that only about 29% of deals are completed because executives are not visiting the countries and learning about the local cultures,” according to a recent article in the New Yorker.
We urge our clients to educate themselves about and immerse themselves in the markets they are trying to understand. To help with this, Social Technologies will host a series of Futures Expeditions to Brazil, Russia, India, and China over the next two years.
They’ve taken a bigger risk by committing to the research before they’ve got the clients signed up, but they are also offering a one-size fits all solution. I am sure there will be learning, but I’d still prefer to offer (and participate in) a custom venture.
Today’s NYT magazine included a letter written in response to How Do you Say ‘Got Milk’ en Espa?±ol? (about Hispanic advertising).
Giving catchy names to particular demographic segments is one of advertising’s oldest tricks to make the craft seem “scientific”. But why spend time defining the characteristics of each segment if it turns out everybody is a mix of all of them -“a Straddler . . . with certain Learner/Navigator undercurrents”?
Agreed. As I’ve written before, personas are user-centered bullshit.
The other day we went to JumpSpace for a JumpTalk by Chuck Darrah about the work featured in his (along with James M. Freeman and Jan English-Lueck) new book Busier Than Ever!: Why American Families Can’t Slow Down
Busier Than Ever! follows the daily activities of fourteen American families. It explores why they are busy and what the consequences are for their lives. Busyness is not just a matter of personal time management, but of the activities we participate in and how each of us creates “the good life.” While numerous books deal with efficiency and the difficulties of balancing work and family, Busier Than Ever! offers a fresh approach. Busyness is not a “problem” to be solved-it is who we are as Americans and it’s redefining American families.
Chuck gave a compellingly accessible talk peppered with stories from their in-depth fieldwork (like something about of Albert Brooks’ Real Life, they spent a huge amount of time with these families, becoming unavoidably involved with their lives. So different than doing “an interview” as is typical in consulting work).
He handed me a copy of the book, so I’ve got some reading to do, but some cool themes/behaviors he told us about (and this is my scribbly documentation and doesn’t necessarily fully represent their work)
Ultimately, Chuck told us, it’s not about time, it’s about activities.
Meanwhile, a story that struck me a few weeks ago referred to a study (funded by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, as was the Darrah et. al work above) about convenience food.
the researchers saw that convenience foods weren’t used as a time-saving substitute for the same dish made from scratch. Instead packaged foods offered a way for families to eat more elaborate meals than they would normally have time to prepare.
When families did cook from scratch, they ate simpler fare — like one-pot meals or stir-fry. In the end, dinner took about a half-hour to an hour to prepare, whether it was made from scratch or with convenience foods.
…
The study showed that meals with little or no convenience foods took 26 to 93 minutes to prepare. Meals that used a lot of convenience foods took 25 to 73 minutes to prepare. While convenience foods were time-savers on very elaborate meals, overall, there was no statistically significant difference in total preparation time.One difference that emerged was “hands on” time — the amount of time people spent slicing, dicing and stirring foods. Using convenience foods shaved about 10 minutes of hands-on time, but it didn’t make any difference in how quickly the food got to the table.
The study authors noted that the biggest time savings of convenience foods may be at the grocery store, where it’s faster to grab a frozen entree than to collect six separate ingredients to make the same dish from scratch. Grocery-shopping time wasn’t measured in the study. The average American spends about 22 minutes in the grocery store and shops about twice a week, according to the Food Marketing Institute.
Convenience foods also helped cooks offer a greater variety of dishes; cooks who made dinner from scratch offered three or fewer dishes. One family made a simple meal of sandwiches and edamame, using bread, cheese, greens and salmon and tomatoes. That meal took about a half-hour to prepare. Another family had a six-dish convenience-food meal of microwave barbecued ribs, macaroni and cheese, prebagged salad, bagged dinner rolls and a cookies and ice cream dessert. That meal also took a half-hour.
David Denby deconstructs Knocked Up and the entire sub-genre he calls slacker-striver romance. He considers American culture over the decades and how relationships between the sexes were depicted on screen during those different periods.
Apatow has a genius for candor that goes way beyond dirty talk-that’s why “Knocked Up” is a cultural event. But I wonder if Apatow, like his fumy youths, shouldn’t move on. It seems strange to complain of repetition when a director does something particularly well, and Apatow does the infantilism of the male bond better than anyone, but I’d be quite happy if I never saw another bong-gurgling slacker or male pack again. The society that produced the Katharine Hepburn and Carole Lombard movies has vanished; manners, in the sense of elegance, have disappeared. But manners as spiritual style are more important than ever, and Apatow has demonstrated that he knows this as well as anyone. So how can he not know that the key to making a great romantic comedy is to create heroines equal in wit to men? They don’t have to dress for dinner, but they should challenge the men intellectually and spiritually, rather than simply offering their bodies as a way of dragging the clods out of their adolescent stupor.
The next issue of Ambidextrous Magazine features an article (PDF link) that I wrote about my Museum of Foreign Grocery Products.
Update: link to the article fixed
As Japan prepares to switch to a jury system, the government has been running mock trials to expose people to the idea. There’s a big cultural challenge, though.
“I think there is also the matter of how much he has repented,” one of the judges said. “Has he genuinely, deeply repented, or has the defendant repented in his own way? What’s the degree? I mean, some could even say that he hasn’t repented at all.”
Hoping for some response, the judge waited 14 seconds, then said, “What does everybody think?”
Nine seconds passed. “Doesn’t anyone have any opinions?”
After six more seconds, one woman questioned whether repentance should lead to a reduced sentence. “The way the defendant expresses himself and such, it could be viewed as someone who’s not good at it,” she said. “So there’s no way for us to know what is the degree of repentance from how he has repented in his own way.”
I’m reminded of our work with consumers in Japan; we got a lot of warning from people about what kind of answers the Japanese wouldn’t give us. I was somewhat nervous that things would tank entirely, but in fact, an open-ended conversational approach (with lots of follow up) worked out very well. The two situations (trials and design research sessions) are completely different; we didn’t represent the state, for one thing! Still, there’s a cultural layer to this story that many will no doubt recognize.
A new commercial for Trojan condoms depicts
women in a bar are surrounded by anthropomorphized, cellphone-toting pigs. One shuffles to the men’s room, where, after procuring a condom from a vending machine, he is transformed into a head-turner in his 20s. When he returns to the bar, a fetching blond who had been indifferent now smiles at him invitingly.
CBS and Fox rejected the ad.
A 2001 report about condom advertising by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that, “Some networks draw a strong line between messages about disease prevention – which may be allowed – and those about pregnancy prevention, which may be considered controversial for religious and moral reasons.”
Good example of cultural construction. A product provides a basic set of functionality, but the meaning associated with that functionality rests outside the product itself. The users, and to a large part, society in general, construct that meaning. And so the stories we are allowed to tell about the product are determined along those lines.
I also liked this part of the story:
“With a 75 percent share of the market, we can prioritize growing the category and increasing overall condom usage,” Mr. Daniels said. “Right now in the U.S. only one in four sex acts involves using a condom. That’s dramatically below usage rates in other developed countries. Our goal is to dramatically increase use.”
We know what stomach share is, but what do the marketers at Trojan call their version?