The subject involves a forged Apple event invitation, and I found the depth of analysis contained within the comments to be fascinating, if slightly…well, let’s just leave it at fascinating.

Put it this way: when people start talking about the invitation’s kerning, or how the stars in the background are “ugly”, or even how the choice of words is “NOT Apple-like”, well, that shows just how deep “teh Design” runs over at Apple and how discerning some of its customers are. Talk about a brand!

Now all we need are NON-design types using that language and we’ll have a real revolution on our hands.

The car you drive sends a powerful message about who you are and what you think about the world. Hybrid drivers take pride in letting other drivers—especially those behind the wheel of gas guzzlers—know that getting from point A to point B doesn’t have to lead us to an uncertain environmental and economic future.

The article has several other points: your choice of vehicle can be tied to national security, political partisanship should be a non-issue regarding hybrid car use, and hybrids are only a partial solution, among others.

While none of the points the article raises are particularly new, I find it interesting that Businessweek is choosing to publish this kind of article, considering it’s more of a mainstream news source.

Ms. Parisi compares writers’ rooms to gyms. In both, a large group of people share the same equipment. And, paying for membership helps writers take their commitment to writing seriously, she said, and gets them “off of the couch” and onto the literary StairMaster.
As Ms. Manghnani, who writes short stories, explained: “If I’m at home working, people don’t respect that that much; they call or text or e-mail, or make arrangements to have coffee. But if I’m at a place that sounds legitimate to other people – a library or a writers’ room – they don’t disturb me as much. No one calls you at the gym and says, ‘Lets go have a burger.’ ”

I really like this analysis of commitments. People paying money to prove to themselves that they are serious about their task, and the appearance of that commitment to others: do they respect it and encourage it? I suppose it’s as much about the public perception of your status as it is your actual status. You could be a complete faker or even just someone who is coasting along, but a membership affords you a certain amount of respect and heads off some questions which might otherwise be asked. You might be writing or you might not be. But the point is that you’ve entered into a mutual agreement of sorts with others regarding the meaning of your membership. It’s a symbol.

Perhaps it’s even a brand. But in this case it’s one with a clause: you have to write to belong. Once we consider time in this equation, then it’s clear that if you’re a faker, or you’re not really working, you will lose your membership. (A gym, on the other hand, is all too happy to let you aimlessly wander amongst the machines and weight stacks for as long as you want, provided you keep paying your membership dues.) So the brand in this case is one which becomes coveted because it has real meaning. Anyone can buy a certain pair of sneakers given enough money. But not everyone can be part of a writer’s room, because you are required to participate, contribute, produce. The agreement you make with the brand and your participation in its realization and fulfillment is a critical part of the brand’s meaning. A self-policing process is required to ensure its continued integrity.

The other part of the article which caught my attention:

...playwright Kirk Wood Bromley, a member of the Brooklyn space, says he finds the atmosphere bracing. “I think writers get jazzed by writing in a room with other writers,” he said. “Writing is a very competitive art.”

I think the same applies to designers in close confines…

[The Food Standards Agency] confirmed that it was recommending the food industry to put red, amber and green warning signs on processed foods to indicate high, medium or low levels of fat, saturated fat, salt and sugar on ready meals, pizzas, breakfast cereals and sandwiches.

Tesco, one of the major supermarkets in England, has refused to implement the system, as have several other food manufacturers. (As an aside, doesn’t the phrase “food manufacturer” sound odd? Does a baker manufacture bread?)

What I find interesting is that the reason for their refusal lies in something simple, as the Telegraph article points out:

The industry hit back, claiming it had “listened to customers” and that traffic light labels were “confusing”. They “demonised” food because consumers would read a red light as “don’t eat this”.

The food industry has a point. First, complex problems generally can’t be summarized within a simplistic model. As Fabio Sergio was telling us in this last Applied Dreams: “Simplicity, not simplistic” Second, I’d agree with their assessment of the warning label, although I think the information the labels impart is important from the perspective of the shopper. I for one would like to know if I should eat one sandwich instead of another, but of course the companies which manufacture these foods don’t want you to buy something else…

It would seem that the food industry would do well to look at the car industry for examples of how innovation leadership can reap rewards. Of course like many things that’s easy for me to say and much harder to do. But unless we start thinking about making some serious changes to our infrastructure (energy, transport, food, etc.), we’re going to have some problems in the future.

The EPA testifies that the Civic hybrid gets 49 mpg in city driving and 51 on the highway. But those numbers are rarely achieved. To get mileage in the high-40-mpg range requires gradual acceleration, timid cruising speeds, and cautious use of the throttle. Suffer a short lapse in concentration or accelerate immoderately, and fuel economy will suffer. Fact is, to do this right, you will drive more slowly than you ever have.

Not exactly the way to sell hybrids to the go-fast crowd.

Car & Driver magazine has a point when it comes to the numbers, though.

Producing an accurate gas-mileage evaluation is so difficult that most folks don’t think even the federal government can do it.

So if people don’t can’t have faith in the accuracy of the gas-mileage numbers, why do they buy hybrids? Shouldn’t the reality of hard results taint the ostensible value of hybrids? Well, as Car & Driver points out (in 2004, mind you):

Wearing a Toyota Prius has become … a sought-after badge among the greenies…

Via a Salon.com article, via a treehugger article, I ended up at a site containing an interview with some researchers from UC Davis who researched the real reasons why people buy hybrid cars.

I think the question journalists are asking is, ‘Do hybrids save money?” It’s the wrong question. A more basic question to ask is, “Do people who are buying hybrid cars really care about saving money?” The truth is that everybody likes to save money in the abstract. But we found in our research that saving money is not the primary motivator for buying a hybrid vehicle. Some people might think about hybrids as ways to save money. Those are not the types of people who are buying these types of vehicles.

As with the Wal-Mart and Prius dichotomy I mentioned earlier, people don’t buy Priuses for pragmatic reasons. Rather, the interesting point that the researchers bring up is the idea of storytelling.

In an increasingly market-based society, the things we buy are more and more a part of representations of who we are. And cars are incredibly important symbols of who we are, in large part, because cars are so mobile and so many people see them everyday.

Also, I think our identities are constructed as narratives. And we’re always looking for new elements for those narratives. We’re comparing the stories we have about ourselves today to older stories and to ideal stories. In those comparisons, we’re looking for either new ways to either advance the storyline we like, or change the one we don’t like. The idea of what a car means can be one of those important story elements.

If Honda or Toyota or others who are selling and marketing hybrid cars understand this motivation, it could explain why they jumped into the hybrid market even though the technology is still relatively unproven and there are definite questions about the long-term implications (what to do with all the batteries, for example). In short, we’re talking about conspicuous consumption with a message.

The wikipedia definition of conspicuous consumption:

Conspicuous consumption is a term introduced by the American economist Thorstein Veblen, in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). The term is used to describe the consumption of expensive goods, commodities and services for the sake of displaying social status and wealth. The term is generally reserved for those forms of consumption that are motivated by societal factors and is not used to describe impulsive behaviours associated with personality disorders, such as binge eating or compulsive spending. [my emphasis]

It seems to me that people are picking out the brands and products whose values they believe best reflect the story they want to live and display to others.

This got me thinking. Is there a way to leverage this behavior that enables people to display socially-aware information? I think there’s a connection between this concept of conspicuous consumption and the idea of personalized personalization.

(N.B.: This post is chronologically incorrect, as I was working on it prior to the personalization of personalized information post but wrote the post on personalization in the interim.)

Even Toyota’s rivals acknowledge that the company’s head start gives it an advantage.

“They were there first,” Larry Burns, GM Vice President in charge of research and development, said while in Tokyo for the Tokyo Motor Show, which opens to the public Saturday. “That’s an advantage to have had real experience with real customers.”

In addition to the technology lead and the public perception and branding lead, there’s a very important component of customer experience related to having new technology in the field first. It’s kind of like experience prototypes, in that you can refine your products more quickly and surely when you receive direct feedback. Other car manufacturers, such as Ford, who are observing on the sidelines may think they have an advantage in that Totyota is doing all the hard work which Ford can later reap the benefits of, but the reality is that Totyota is also building a relationship with customers in the process. And I’d wager that those relationships will be just as valuable as the other advantages (technical, financial, market, etc.) Toyota is gaining on its competitors.

The obvious question is, do the costs outweigh the benefits? And there are plenty of good reasons to argue that they do; that the total cumulative impact of Wal-Mart on the fabric of society is negative. But the unfortunate reality is that few minds are going to be changed by one-sided reports that do not even begin to acknowledge the very real reasons that people have for shopping at Wal-Mart—or the responsibility that those shoppers bear for what kind of changes are wrought in their local communities.

In the Salon.com article Why do people buy Priuses?, the argument is that people want to communicate an image of green citizenship to others.

For a majority of the owners surveyed, the purchase of a hybrid is not motivated by fuel-saving concerns. The real incentive is one’s own image as a responsible green citizen of the world. The symbolic effects of hybrid ownership are at least as powerful, if not not more so, than the functional reality.

Because their concern is not just about self-image—it’s also about communicating an image to other people. Prius owners know that their purchase of a hybrid isn’t going to make the air they breathe any cleaner or solve U.S. dependence on foreign oil, and hey, it might even have some environmentally negative consequences for the world, if those big nasty hybrid batteries turn out to be hard to dispose of somewhere down the line. But at least in the sample taken by the U.C. Davis researchers, hybrid owners are hoping that by making a statement in favor of environmental responsibility, they can convince others to join the hybrid movement, and that somewhere down the line, real change will ensue.

If I were to extrapolate further meaning from these two articles, it seems to me that they encompass the extremes of pragmatism (money) and idealism (convincing others to change their minds). The question is whether those extremes are mutually exclusive, or can be ameliorated in some way. Clearly, they are two very strong forces in society today. For the people who are concerned only with price, what would it take to change their shopping habits?

Or, as I’ve mentioned before, is this an issue of education levels? Or perhaps even class? Of course there are some people who are not in a position to focus on anything other than price. Changing the way the market functions is thus the responsibility of people who have flexibility in their spending.

On other thing. It occurs to me now that in questioning the responsibility of people shopping at Wal-Mart, the analysis of “saving money” could very well fall short in describing the true motivation. Could it be that people who shop at Wal-Mart gain just enough disposable income to make themselves feel better? Is shopping at Wal-Mart as much about class aspiration as it is about the actual monetary savings?

As I’ve mentioned before, public perception plays a critical part in the march towards more sustainable practices. However, companies like Chevron need to remember that talk only gets you so far: at some point they need to act, and in their actions we will be able to determine whether or not they truly mean what they say. As ClimateBiz points out:

But others say the friendly “letters from Dave” approach is a classic case of corporate greenwashing as Chevron attempts to shore up Big Oil’s threatened power base with calculated public relations language. Some environmentalists argue the effort and investment would have been better spent cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

I’m somewhat undecided on the last sentence. On the one hand, yes, a lot of money could have been spent on improving internal systems and efficiency measures and the like. However, consider that spending money on raising public perception is in itself an investment. On the one hand it is critical in the overall scheme of sustainability that lots of people understand the issues at stake, so general education is a good thing. On the other hand, now that the public is becoming aware of these issues, it may begin to punish those companies which it doesn’t think are participating in the issues it is concerned about. Simply put, companies cannot remain silent on these issues any longer.

But talking the talk will get companies only so far: the true test remains when we see which companies actually walk the walk.

As the FAQ asks:

What spurred P&G to launch this product now?

The answer:

There has been an increase in the consumer usage of cold water for washing in recent years. The incidence of these cycles has reached a point where a consumer need and business opportunity presented itself.

So what is Tide doing? They’re marketing their detergent around energy efficiency and financial savings.

Reduce Your Warm Water Costs
Every time you turn the water temperature dial on your washing machine to “warm,” you might as well start writing a check to the energy company. Did you know 80-85% of the energy used to wash clothes comes from heating the water?

When you wash in cold water with Tide Coldwater, you can actually save up to $63 a year.2 That’s equivalent to an average cell phone monthly price plan3 or your bread supply for nine months.

And just think how good you’ll feel knowing you’ve done your part to save precious energy!

And of course using cold water helps your clothes last longer.

Now, what’s interesting to me is not the specific ecological qualities per se, especially considering it’s still a detergent that’s not ecologically friendly (unlike Seventh Generation products, for example). Rather, the interesting part is the branding strategy.

They can’t talk about the ecological benefits of their detergent directly, not considering the ingredients used in their entire line of products, but they can talk about other issues that people care about, such as energy savings and money. (They’re actually running a sweepstakes right now which promises a year’s supply of their detergent and $1,500 towards your utility bill.) For example, Tide says that their Coldwater detergent saves you money because:

The product will not require warm/hot water which needs to be heated by a home hot water heater.

Does this mean, then, that customers are more concerned at this point about energy savings and money than they are about the chemical composition of the products they’re using? In some ways, this makes sense, because people can directly translate saving energy into money savings. But how can you translate the chemical composition of a detergent into meaningful or relatable terms? Is this purely an issue of science education? Or is there some way to make this information accessible to others?

Yes, the only thing inside that box, aside from more packaging and bubble wrap, was that bottle of lotion. The iPod is there for scale.

Now, I know there is probably some argument within industry for shipping a relatively tiny bottle of lotion in a relatively gargantuan box, and that such an argument would probably fall along the lines of economies of scale and money. While the price might be right, in the end the customer is faced with a wad of bubble wrap, packaging for the lotion bottle, and a huge box. All of which is going straight into the trash, unless they have the inclination to repurpose or reuse the packaging. If this big box goes straight into the trash, its effective use-lifespan is somewhere on the order of days (depending on how long the shipping company took to deliver the package). Seems like a bit of a waste to me.

Perhaps more to the point, think about the perception the customer has of this company and its practices. Does “excessive” pop into mind? How about “wasteful”? Even if they’re there for just a moment, does a company want those words associated with its business practices? Will its customer be annoyed about having to throw away this garbage?

What about the shipping company? If they knew that their precious cargo space was being wasted on what amounts to air, would they be especially happy? Sure, it means more trips and deliveries for them, but it also points to inefficiencies: how many more packages could they have shipped in one trip had this package been smaller? More trips and more deliveries mean more fuel costs, more vehicle maintenance, more potential overtime for employees, and so forth.

I’m not sure that a thorough analysis of the true costs involved in shipping this bottle of lotion would be especially helpful in determining whether or not to use a large box or a small box. One might discover that it truly is better to use a huge box to ship a small bottle of lotion. Or one might find that a small or huge amount of money could be saved by using a smaller box. Or one might find that shipping a bottle of lotion doesn’t make as much sense as transmitting the recipe for the lotion for production somewhere closer to the customer.

In the end, what’s just as important is the customer experience. What happens if a customer thinks one company wasteful and another company frugal? My thought is that as people become more frugal, as gas prices rise and the cost of living increases, they will become more likely to notice the kinds of incongruities exemplified by this box and its contents.