Does permanent job loss mean that someone is no longer a consumer? In some cases the answer is yes: some people continue to spend as if they still had a job, and the inevitable result is eventual destitution. Once they run out of unemployment benefits, savings and credit, their purchasing ability decreases to the barest minimum provided by food stamps. I don’t mean to sound harsh, but this makes them rather uninteresting from a new product marketing perspective.

But other people may be quick to shed their biggest categories of expense, walking away from their mortgage and their car loan, allowing their medical insurance to lapse, and developing a new lifestyle that is well within their new budgetary constraints. They may couch-surf, take advantage of house-sitting opportunities or rent a spot at a campground by the season. For the cold part of the year, they may head south and, again, camp out. They may look for seasonal employment, do odd jobs for cash, or use their skills to repair or make and sell items for cash.

With their largest expenses gone, their disposable income may actually be higher. However, their needs and requirements are quite different, and since most product offerings target the settled, fully employed consumer, they are in some ways under-served. This is an area where new product development opportunities abound, and companies that gain a share of this growing market segment and build brand loyalty among this fast-growing consumer underclass will lock in a decade or more of profits and rapid growth. As a marketing strategy, it is not just recession-proof but actually recession-enhanced.

Club Orlov: Products and services for the permanently unemployed consumer

In a lawsuit filed Sept. 28 in Los Angeles Superior Court, Amber Duick claims she had difficulty eating, sleeping and going to work during March and April of last year after she received e-mails for five days from a fictitious man called Sebastian Bowler, from England, who said he was on the run from the law, knew her and where she lived, and was coming to her home to hide from the police. [...]

It turns out the prank was actually part of a marketing effort executed by the Los Angeles division of global marketing agency Saatchi & Saatchi, which created the campaign to promote the Toyota Matrix, a new model launched in 2008. [...]

Her attorney, Nick Tepper, said the Matrix campaign was similar to “Punk’d” a former MTV show starring Ashton Kutcher that featured celebrities being set up by their friends for elaborate pranks. Toyota’s marketers used the Internet to find people who wanted to set up friends to be “punked,” and Duick was set up by a friend of hers, he said.

Apparently it has something to do with this:

Saatchi & Saatchi’s lawyers are claiming she “opted-in” to the campaign with written consent. Her lawyer claims that “written consent” consisted agreeing to the fine print of an online personality test she took.

ABC News: Woman Sues Toyota Over ‘Terrifying’ Prank

(This is reposted from 2004)

These two quotes are by Edward Bernays, from Stuart Ewen’s PR!: a Political History of Spin

“[The term public relations] hasn’t only been misused, but people have used the name for press agents, flacks, publicity men or women, individuals who simply try to get pieces into the paper that are favorable to a client. Whereas, by my definition, a public relations person, who calls themselves [sic] that, is an applied social scientist who advises a client or employer on the social attitudes and actions to take to win the support of the publics upon whom his or her its viability depends.” (11)

“The job of a public relations counsel is to instruct a client how to take actions that ‘just interrupt… the continuity of life in some way to bring about the [media] response.” (14)

1. every Tweet has to be approved by legal.
2. you plan to use Twitter like a giant RSS feed,
3. you think using Twitter is a social media strategy
4. you think it’s a good idea to have someone tweet as if they are the president of the company.
5. you are not going to respond when people direct tweets at you.
6. you think paying for followers might be a good idea
7. you think all that matters on Twitter is getting a lot of people to follow you
8. you want to protect your updates.
9. you plan to track Twitter with Google Analytics
10. You think you can market to people with whom you have no relationship

Full Story: BL Ochman’s blog

A new study from Northwestern University offers precise electrophysiological evidence that such decisions may sometimes not be guesswork after all.

The research utilizes the latest brain-reading technology to point to the surprising accuracy of memories that can’t be consciously accessed.

During a special recognition test, guesses turned out to be as accurate or more accurate than when study participants thought they consciously remembered.

“We may actually know more than we think we know in everyday situations, too,” said Ken Paller, professor of psychology at Northwestern. “Unconscious memory may come into play, for example, in recognizing the face of a perpetrator of a crime or the correct answer on a test. Or the choice from a horde of consumer products may be driven by memories that are quite alive on an unconscious level.”

The study links lucky guesses to valid memories and suggests that people need to be more receptive to multiple types of knowledge, Paller said.

Full Story: Physorg

(Thanks Nova)

See also: Priming

I’ve always wondered if there’s a relationship between priming and advertising.

In the wake of the mercury in high fructose corn syrup making rounds this week, Johnny Brainwash has some info about the flacks trying to defend the good name of the corn refinement industry, as well as illuminating information about how they operate.

Full Story: dysnomia.us

Increasingly, small cameras are being embedded in video screens in malls, health clubs, and grocery stores both to determine who is watching and to customize what is displayed to the audience.

Small cameras can now be embedded in the screen or hidden around it, tracking who looks at the screen and for how long. The makers of the tracking systems say the software can determine the viewer’s gender, approximate age range and, in some cases, ethnicity — and can change the ads accordingly.

That could mean razor ads for men, cosmetics ads for women and video-game ads for teens.

And even if the ads don’t shift based on which people are watching, the technology’s ability to determine the viewers’ demographics is golden for advertisers who want to know how effectively they’re reaching their target audience.

While the technology remains in limited use for now, advertising industry analysts say it is finally beginning to live up to its promise. The manufacturers say their systems can accurately determine gender 85 to 90 percent of the time, while accuracy for the other measures continues to be refined.

The full article can be found here, but I was most interested by the links at the bottom of the article showing the players in this area:

Quividi: http://quividi.com

TruMedia Technologies: http://trumedia.co.il

Studio IMC: http://www.studioimc.com

I have three emotional principles in all my work. One is wonder, another is sympathy, and the third is critique. These are virtues of different disciplines that are generally not combined. Wonder we think of as a traditional scientific discipline or motive. It’s great to wonder at the grandeur and glory of the universe, the childlike wonder, the Stephen Jay Gould wonder, the Einsteinian wonder.

But there’s also the traditional historical virtue of sympathy, which is to realize that the world we live in really is kind of a moment in time when we have the entire history of the universe behind us that we can explore as well. And when it comes to human interpretation, it’s important to see the past the way the people saw it. So I’ve written two books on Nazi medicine, and the goal there was not just to condemn them, but to see how in the world they came up with those ideas and those movements and how they justified them to themselves. So we see them as full humans and not just scarecrows, so we can actually understand the depth of the depravity or whatever. But at least we see it honestly, and that’s a traditional historical virtue.

The third principle is critique, which is to realize that we’re humans first. If we’re cosmologists or historians, we’re at least humans first and then cosmologists and historians. We need to critique and show that there’s a lot of garbage out there, and we don’t want to be apologists for some horrific status quo where people are dying by the millions. And so we don’t just want to see things through other people’s eyes and we don’t want to just wonder at the glory of nature. We want to realize that there’s horrific suffering in the world and that we, as humans and as scholars, have a duty to do something about it.

Full Story: Discover Magazine

(via OVO)

Today, thanks to many Cif readers, the overall total raised for the Atheist Bus Campaign stands at a truly overwhelming £135,000, breaking our original target of £5,500 by over 2400%. Given this unexpected amount, I’m very excited to tell you that 800 buses – instead of the 30 we were initially aiming for – are now rolling out across the UK with the slogan, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”, in locations all over England, Scotland and Wales, including Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, York, Cardiff, Devon, Leeds, Bristol and Aberdeen.

From today’s launch, two hundred of the buses will run in London, because the campaign was originally started as a positive counter-response to the Jesus Said ads running on London buses in June 2008. These ads displayed the URL of a website which stated that non-Christians “will be condemned to everlasting separation from God and then you spend all eternity in torment in hell … Jesus spoke about this as a lake of fire prepared for the devil”. Our rational slogan will hopefully reassure anyone who has been scared by this kind of evangelism.

Full Story: the Guardian

(Thanks Josh!)

They were getting completely behind their product, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, by ramping up a viral advertising campaign that would draw the public into their show. With the right public momentum, the gimmick would have netted them some serious press coverage and ratings. But the project got snuffed when the writers’ strike hit. That pushed back the airing date of this mid-season finale episode, and Fox moved on. In their wake, they forgot to let on about it and left the hundreds of UFO-ologists spinning up hundreds of thousands of hours combing over the Drones evidence and tossing out their conjectures. [...]

Did Fox perpetrate the viral ad gone south, or did they take advantage of something that is out in the public domain and made it their own, risking possible legal issues?

Full Story: Jhoomba

(Thanks Trevor)

I did my Five potential business models for Twitter article without searching the web for other ideas deliberately, mostly as an exercis. So now that it’s done I’ve spent some time researching other ideas. Mostly the same old things: ads or selling the company. Here are a couple other ideas I liked:

Charge for having more than 1,000 followers

Charge for business use of the API.

I still like the payment system idea the best.

Twitter has famously decided to create a giant user base before even coming up with a business model. This is a hazardous plan, and one that’s earned them a lot of mockery. But one advantage to growing a platform, with an open API, first and retrofitting a business model later is the opportunity to observe how users use and hack the system themselves. Twitter has paid attention to how users use the system, such as using @ signs for replies and hashtags for topic tagging and implemented them into the system.

Additionally, hundreds of Twitter clients and applications have been built. Companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Apple have long looked to 3rd party developers for innovation. There’s quite an opportunity to steal implement some of the ideas already in use and build revenue streams from them.

I’ll start off with a couple of obvious ones that have been discussed, and move into less obvious, and in my opinion, more lucrative ideas.

Ads on search pages

This is something Twitter’s talked about doing before. Twitter is rightly cautious about serving ads on their pages, but they could probably get away with selling PPC ads on search results pages. They could build their own platform, or use someone else’s. If I were Chitika or Yahoo!, I’d be courting Twitter for this contract right now.

Premium services for business users

This is has been specifically mentioned by Evan Williams before. So here’s a”sub top five” of specific services they could offer.

1. Validated account names to prevent public embarrassment. Also, mirror accounts for variants on a name (ie, @exxon, @exxonmobil, @exxonsucks, @exxonrules, @XOM, etc.)

2. Cross posting – Allow users to post the same tweet across multiple accounts (ie, post to both @sergeybrin and @google at the same time). This can be done now with various clients.

3. Autofollow users who follow you. This can be done with bots, but it’s just one of those things that would be nice to have included in a premium package. This should be done across accounts as well (such as the @sergeybrin and @google example noted above).

4. Filtering. Let business users, who will be following thousands of people, trim their lists to read only who they want. This can be done with TweetDeck now but LiveJournal style filterting is sorely needed. (Really, this feature should just be added for free for everyone.)

5. Geo-locative services – Yes, the idea of sending a coupon to someone’s mobile as they pass a store is now cliche. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t money to be made doing it. Twitter should add some geo-locative features for GPS users eventually, and it would only make sense for them to allow opt-in location based promotions.

Premium services for users

This is my least favorite idea, mostly because I think it’s hard to convince consumers to pay for web services, especially when they can get these services for free. That said, there are some opportunities.

1. Charge for text message delivery. One of Twitter’s biggest costs is sending tweets out as text messages. There’s an opportunity to change this expense into a revenue stream.

2. Limit number of tweets per day, and charge for anything over. This will probably sound horrible to most Twitterers, but it could work out. Craig’s List charges for certain types of ads. This has the dual effect of creating a revenue stream while preventing abuse of the ad system. Metafilter charges $5 for a lifetime membership to keep out the riff-raff. So charging people a small fee before they can flood your Twitter feed with up to the second details about their laundry washing might actually benefit everyone.

3. Filters and protected tweets. Same as the possible package for business users. But again, I definitely think this should be free. Currently, Twitter only gives you the option of having all tweets hidden except to people you follow, or having all tweets visible to everyone. I’d like LJ-esque granularity here.

Professional services: license the technology to companies and government agencies

Twitter could build custom microblogging applications for businesses, and perhaps more lucratively, government agencies. Twitter’s use for emergency coordination and disaster relief is much touted – they should capitalize on this. They can offer secure microblogging services behind the firewall, custom tailored to an organizations needs. Competition: Laconica, an open source Twitter clone that powers identi.ca.

Digital payment system

This is my favorite: compete head-on with PayPal. There are a few PayPal competitors out there (ePassporte, Revolution Money Exchange, Google Checkout), but Twitter seems like the perfect platform for a payment system. There’s already a third party solution trying to do this: TwitPay. I’m not ready to hand my bank account info over to TwitPay, but I would to Twitter. If Twitter can make it easier to transfer money amongst users, and take a little off the top, this could be their killer revenue stream.

Crazy idea: Twitter could become a virtual free bank, offering their own digital currency that can be traded through Twitter. Give a certain amount of starting credits to verified users, and let the market determine the actual value. Hey, maybe if they limit the number of tweets per day they could make “tweet credits” tradable – a la cell phone minutes in Africa.

Related: Four other Big Brothers

(BTW, you can follow me on Twitter at: @klintron)

After Trevor Blake showed us Drone’s “Strange Craft” video, my girlfriend went digging for more information on the dragonfly drone UFOs. Here’s what she found out:

it started off as several videos and photographs in big basin, CA, lake tahoe, and alabama. two similar impressive and otherworldly crafts were supposedly seen by several different eyewitnesses. the main witness spreading info in the UFO community was a mysterious guy named “raji”. well, when more and more people tried to contact raji, he disappeared.

internet forums blew up as a guy named isaac started posting about the crafts, and supposed official CARET documents.

isaac’s info however, did not hold up against internet forum scrutiny. posters shared that the computer company alienware had announced a contest that required entrants to crack an alien code; and the code was the exact code on the CARET documents.

Full Story: surrealestate22

Hawkins’ ads featured simple questions like, “Why are you unhappy?” in white print against a black background, backed by edgy music supplied by Hawkins’ friends, and finally, a shot of the Dianetics book splashed against a volcano. The ads cost around $2,000 to make, yet within months of their first nationwide appearance, Dianetics made the New York Times Best Seller List for the first time since its initial publication in 1950″‘and a special commemorative edition of the book was printed to mark the occasion.

Hawkins estimates he made more than $200 million for the church in his 35 years of marketing Dianetics. Nevertheless, he ultimately paid for his success by being thrown out of the church in 2005. Now living in Portland, Hawkins is writing a book about his experiences in Scientology.

And boy, is he pissed….

Full Story: Portland Mercury

Kevin at Grinding looks at the connection between a new study on corporate logos and the connection to sigil magic:

The team conducted an experiment in which 341 university students completed what they believed was a visual acuity task, during which either the Apple or IBM logo was flashed so quickly that they were unaware they had been exposed to the brand logo. The participants then completed a task designed to evaluate how creative they were, listing all of the uses for a brick that they could imagine beyond building a wall.

People who were exposed to the Apple logo generated significantly more unusual uses for the brick compared with those who were primed with the IBM logo, the researchers said. In addition, the unusual uses the Apple-primed participants generated were rated as more creative by independent judges.

“This is the first clear evidence that subliminal brand exposures can cause people to act in very specific ways,” said Gr?inne Fitzsimons. “We’ve performed tests where we’ve offered people $100 to tell us what logo was being flashed on screen, and none of them could do it. But even this imperceptible exposure is enough to spark changes in behavior.”

Other than their defined brand personalities, the researchers argue there is not anything unusual about Apple and IBM that causes this effect. The team conducted a follow-up experiment using the Disney and E! Channel brands, and found that participants primed with the Disney Channel logo subsequently behaved much more honestly than those who saw the E! Channel logos.

Full Story: Grinding.

See also:

Marketing Without Tears.

Wikipedia: Priming.

Marketing Without Tears
A quick and dirty self-study course in marketing

This guide is designed people wanting to jump start a study of the occult arts collectively known as marketing. I hope to provide a set of cognitive tools useful for citizens, consumers, occultists, reality hackers, philosophers, activists, and business people alike.

In this case I’m using the term ‘marketing’ to refer to all the various communications disciplines applied by organizations of all types for the purpose of encouraging or discouraging certain behaviors (eg, companies wish to encourage the purchase of products, governments wish to discourage revolution).

If you want to study marketing, there’s no reason to keep your head buried in books. Most of us are surrounded by marketing. We can look at the world around us and find examples nearly everywhere we look. All we need to begin a study of the material is to learn how to analyze it.

There’s no reason you can’t begin this immediately. However, the following three books will be helpful in learning to analyze the marketing sphere.

PR!: A Social History of Spin by Stuart Ewen: This could almost be titled ‘The true history and secrets of the illuminati.’ This is a history of the practice of public relations and the discipline’s impact on society. Much of it is centers around the career of Edward Bernays, who provides many insights into the workings of corporations.

Coercion: Why We Listen to What ‘They’ Say: Douglas Rushkoff’s excellent overview of applied communications diciplines.

Savage Girl: a novel by Alex Shakar. Shakar deconstructs marketing and consumer culture (with a possible Deleuzian influence) with remarkable clarity, and tells one hell of a story. Pattern Recognition pales compared to this book.

One of Shakar’s own ideas presented in the novel is ‘paradessense,’ or paradoxical essense. For example, ice cream is both innocent and erotic. Coffee promises to be both stimulating and relaxing.

Reading these books and then spending the following months and years paying close attention to the marketing around you won’t necessarily substitute for taking real courses in marketing, or spending time working at marketing firm. But it’s an excellent way for a thoughtful person without much time to glean an understanding of the forces at work around them.

Further reading:

These two books on graphic design will illuminate your perspective of the visual components marketing materials:

Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams: A crash course in the fundamentals of graphic design. Once you’ve read this book, starting paying attention to the design of everything around you, as related to the principals in this book. Traffic signs, menus, pens, packaging, everything. What principals were applied in the design of these things? How could the design be improved?

Grid Systems in Graphic Design: This is essential reading on graphic design, if you can find a copy. This works at a much more structural level than Non-Designer’s, and will give you an even better reference point when analyzing design. I posted some brief notes on this book here.

For those interested in some practical marketing advice for small business owners, I’d recommend Guerilla Marketing Handbook and How to Market a Product for Under $500, but they’re a little out of date. Newer books in the Guerrilla Marketing series are probably more up to date, and their web site is useful.

Klintron formerly served as the marketing director for a successful health care start-up, and sometimes writes about marketing on his blog Klintron’s Brain.

This article originally appeared on Key 64.