From a new book, Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things, by Ellen and Julia Lupton: “Design has psychological as well as mechanical functions….An ordinary toilet paper holder can instill feelings of security, freedom, and restraint in addition to keeping the clean roll off the dirty floor.”
Monthly Archive for July, 2009
There’s a section in Shoptimism devoted to the vast, murky world of counterfeit goods and knock-offs, and about how consumer attitudes towards fake range from principled refusal to buy all the way to insufferable boasting about getting great deals on not-the-real-thing. Most counterfeit products, of course, speak for themselves: they simply try to pass for genuine. Those who sell fake goods, or sell products that closely mimic known labels, don’t typically advertise the connection between the genuine and the imposter. In an interesting recent legal settlement, the web site Overstockjeweler.com agreed to issue an apology and award cash remuneration to a gaggle of top designers — David Yurman, Cartier, etc. — for invoking their brand names, as in “inspired by Tiffany.” Seems to me that coming clean this way is preferable to simply misleading everybody.
You’d think the nation could reflect soberly on the “teachable moment” scheduled to take place later today at the White House: the president, Professor Gates, and Officer Crowley sitting down to patch things up over a cold one. Not so simple, now that beer marketers and PR lobbyists have weasled into the picture. One guy, see, he likes Red Stripe; another, see, prefers Blue Moon; and then there’s the Prez, who’ll be quaffing red, white, and blue (and tasteless) Bud Light (not that Budweiser is American-owned any more). The brewhaha is reported — half-seriously — in today’s Wall Street Journal.
Anyhow, should the president need to break the ice, he might choose to screen this subtly racist (but funny) Bud Light spot — produced for the Super Bowl but never aired:
Reverend Ike, flamboyant apostle of material prosperity, is dead at 74. Here’s the Times’ obit. Ever true to the core mission, the late preacher’s web site requests that mourners send cash in lieu of flowers.
Overlooked (until today) throughout the 24/7 Michael Jackson coverage (seems like years ago) was ad man Phil Dusenberry’s memoir, Then We Set His Hair on Fire (without question one of the great book titles of all time).
The following ad message popped up on my Facebook page, laser-targeted on account of the college I went to. It’s my own fault: I joined the network. Privacy? What privacy?
NY Dental Spa offers Ivy League alums with PPO dental insurance a professional whitening, cleaning and exam for only $1. Click now!
Not a simple question, not when you consider “psychogenic” needs, i.e. consumables we don’t need to survive but believe we “need” for emotional reasons. The Pew Research Center regularly conducts surveys on the matter. Here’s some recent polling:
“From the kitchen to the laundry room to the home entertainment center, Americans are paring down the list of familiar household appliances they say they can’t live without….
“No longer do substantial majorities of the public say a microwave oven, a television set or even home air conditioning is a necessity. Instead, nearly half or more now see each of these items as a luxury. Similarly, the proportion that considers a dishwasher or a clothes dryer to be essential has dropped sharply since 2006.”
(a) Business magazines
(b) Shopping magazines
(c) News magazines
(d) Hobby and self-improvement magazines
(e) None of the above
A fascinating and undoubtedly under-covered story about the demise of Detroit: the loss of historical archives. Whatever happened to our love affair with the automobile?
In Shoptimism, I write extensively about the raging spread of viral marketing and product placement in movies, TV, and every other imaginable medium. Now comes word of a new high, or low, depending on what side you’re on : studio marketing folks working on the summer dud, “I Love You, Beth Cooper,” actually paid a high school valedictorian to promote the movie during her commencement address.
