November 24, 2008
06:46 pm | 2 recommendations | Be the first to comment
Fourteen years, $13 million, four producers, and three studios, and all we got was this bottle of soda? Well, that and the much-anticipated, maybe-it’s-never-coming Guns ‘N Roses release. We’d earlier raised an eyebrow over Dr Pepper’s announcement that if Chinese Democracy hit shelves in 2008, the soft-drink company would give every American a free can of bubbly. But when the album arrived at Best Buy yesterday, Dr Pepper’s website indeed urged thirsty rockers to register for a coupon redeemable for a free 20-oz bottle.
“We never thought this day would come,” said Tony Jacobs, vice president of marketing for Dr Pepper. “But now that it’s here, all we can say is: The Dr Pepper’s on us.” Waiting four to six weeks for a coupon to arrive in the mail is bummer enough, but the site’s server has crashed repeatedly in the last two days, as diehard GNR (and/or Dr Pepper) fans flood the site. Here’s hoping it takes fewer than fourteen years to quench our thirst.
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November 21, 2008
02:03 pm | 3 recommendations | Be the first to comment
Did you hear those squeals echoing across the nation last night? Thousands of diehard Twilight fans poured into theaters at midnight, eager to watch the first film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s uber-successful series about a teenage girl (played by Kristen Stewart) who falls in love with a vampire (Robert Pattinson). Meyer’s four-book series has sold more than 17 million copies to date, and, yeah, we’ll admit we’re part of that tally. We’ve copped to looking forward to the movie’s premiere, but the film has received some seriously mixed reviews. Turns out: Tweens and teens just don’t care what the critics think.
Some 1,100 showings have already sold out for this weekend, and 600 midnight showings were booked solid. Fandango reports that Twilight is now No. 7 on its all-time Top 10 Advance Ticket-Sellers List (beating out Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Spider-Man 3, and Sex and the City). And 83% of Fandango ticket-buyers said that they plan to watch the movie more than once.
That’s good news for Summit Entertainment, which scooped up the film in 2006 after Paramount Pictures’ MTV films made a brief and shoddy go at an adaptation (oops). Some predict the $37 million film could pull in as much as $69 million this weekend, which would help cement Summit Entertainment’s rise to the major leagues. No surprise, then, that the company recently acquired the rights to the three remaining novels in the series and hired Twilight screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg to tackle the next two films. Wonder how early those pre-sale tickets will go on sale.
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October 29, 2008
08:31 am | 3 recommendations | Be the first to comment
Throwing sheep and swapping vampire bites? Not so much. But early this morning, business-networking site LinkedIn unveiled its new developer platform, loaded with apps aimed at wooing the buttoned-down crowd to its site more often.
“We pay a lot of attention to the mode that people are in when they visit LinkedIn,” said Patrick Crane, vice president of marketing. “LinkedIn isn’t a time killing application; it's a time-saving application. They're in a problem-solving mode.”
Rather than open up its platform, as Facebook has done, LinkedIn is introducing eight new internal- and partner-created apps that have been tailored to the office. New offerings include shareable reading lists with Amazon, business-travel tracking with TripIt, and presentation publishing with Google and SlideShare. LinkedIn is targeting small- and medium-sized businesses, its most active users, with a file-sharing app from Box.net and a secure “workspace” app from Huddle.net, which allows co-workers to collaborate in a virtual space.
“LinkedIn has been very successful in its revenue model,” said Jamie Templeton, vice president of platform products. “The focus now is on providing more to our clients.” How fast new apps are offered depends on the quality of submissions, he said.
The private company, which has 30 million members and has been valued for as much as $1 billion, reported a profit last year, with a revenue model split between corporate sales, subscriptions, job listings, and advertising. Its new apps, which are free to users, offer additional revenue possibilities through premium subscriptions (on Box.net and Huddle.net), retail (Amazon), advertising (TripIt and SlideShare).
“Is this a new business line in itself? No,” Crane said. “But are we providing a lot of utility for the 30 million professionals? Yes. And that activity and utlity will bolster the other four ways that we do make money.”
Testing the new apps in beta mode earlier this week, I was impressed. The interface is intuitive and the offerings smartly tailored smoothly functioning. Still, a critical mass is necessary to make most of the apps genuinely appealing in the long term.
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October 23, 2008
05:02 pm | 3 recommendations | 1 comment
Why one brand takes off and another tanks remains mostly a mystery, with half of new brands and 75% of individual products failing in their first year. That’s frustrating news to the folks that spend more than $117 billion in marketing in $12 billion in market research annually in the U.S.
In Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, out this week, global branding expert Martin Lindstrom skips consumer surveys and focus groups and instead takes a peek at consumers’ brains. His multi-million dollar “neuromarketing” study, in which magnetic resonance imaging scanners measure brain activity in different areas of the brain in fine detail, is the largest ever conducted. And Lindstrom dishes up the results, alongside a buffet of past research, with clear writing and deft reasoning.
Here, our favorite studies and their big-brand implications:
Mini Cooper’s Unexpected Associations
It’s neither the horsepower nor compact design that most attracts consumers to BMW’s Mini Cooper. When scientists measured brain activity of people as they looked at images of the Mini, they found an area of the brain that’s stimulated by faces “came alive.” “You just wanted to pinch its little fat metallic cheeks,” writes Lindstrom. And if you’re BMW, you want to tweak your ads to goose that subconscious link.
Coke’s Emotions vs. Pepsi’s Taste
In a blind taste test more people prefer Pepsi to Coke, but when consumers know what they’re drinking, most prefer Coke. What gives? In addition to the ventral putamen, an area associated with appealing tastes, scientists registered brain activity in the prefrontal cortex when subjects knew they were sipping Coke. It’s an area responsible for higher thinking and it was likely pulling up all sorts of positive memories and associations, “the sheer, inarguable, inexorable, ineluctable, emotional Coke-ness of the brand.” So the “two areas of the brain [engage] in a mutual tug-of-war between rational and emotional thinking” and Coke wins by a landslide.
Nokia, Shhh
To determine if a signature sound—like Microsoft’s start-up musical notes—makes a brand more attractive than an image alone, doctors took fMRIs as people listened to branded noises and watched logos. Several areas in the brain lit up when both were played together, indicating the combination is more pleasant and longer-lasting than either alone. Yet one brand, Nokia, showed almost the opposite effect. A closer look at the ventrolateral prefrontal cortices (part of the brain’s circuits that process emotional information) showed that the ring triggered potent negative associations (a shrill sound in a silent movie theater, perhaps?)—so strong, in fact, that they overrode the positive response people felt when they saw the silent Nokia logo.
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April 22, 2008
10:59 am | 2 recommendations | 1 comment
Given the ubiquity of the all-beef patty and the global spread of the golden arches, one can be forgiven for struggling to imagine America before the burger. In The Hamburger, out April 22, New York magazine food writer Josh Ozersky traces the origins and obstacles of a sandwich that—more than apple pie or hot dogs—defines the nation’s diet and forever shaped the American business model. “The hamburger—compact, standardized, and mass-produced, coming at the world as an irrepressible economic and cultural force—matters because of the infrastructure created for it and how it changed the world,” Ozersky writes.
Into his grinder go bits of history (the sandwich’s sloppy evolution from chopped Hamburg steak to all-beef burger atop a soft, golden-brown bun) and market-shaping innovations (Bill Ingram’s custom White Castle spatula, that flattened burgers into the mass-produced patties we take for granted today and boosted business by allowing one flipper to efficiently handle more burgers on the grill). The very franchisees who allowed McDonald’s to dominate the fast-food landscape were the same independent-minded entrepreneurs who bristled at Ray Kroc’s innumerable rules. Yet their corporate-bucking inventions have gone on to become some of McDonald’s biggest sellers—the Big Mac and the Egg McMuffin, to name just two. Wendy’s square patty was meant to suggest nonconformity and homemade hamburgers; Burger King’s Whopper was introduced at the whopping price of 29 cents at a time when most all burgers cost 15—yet it dominated the big-burger market for almost 20 years before McDonald’s fired back with the Quarter Pounder.
As the book’s chronology approaches the present, Ozersky’s pace quickens, and though his analysis is no less sharp, his confidence in our attention span seems to flag. A deft dissection of R. Crumb’s and Harold & Kumar’s additions to the burger canon leaves us craving additional moments of pop culture analysis. And as a food critic, he must have more to say on the haute hamburger trend (DB Bistro’s $120 foie-gras-and-truffle burger, anyone?) than the scant pages afforded here. As a whole, The Hamburger is a quick, nuanced and—all right, we’ll say it—juicy read, if slightly on the lean side at only 133 pages. Like a good burger, it hits the spot.
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