Canuckflack

Oh Galen Weston, you scamp. I admit, I was on the fence for a while. When you were appointed Executive Chairman of your dad’s company, I was naturally skeptical.

When your photogenic and cherubic mug started showing up in advertising for Loblaws groceries late last year, I questioned the wisdom of the move. After all, Loblaws is the home for President’s Choice, a wide-ranging white label brand that many consider a fundamental part of the Canadian identity.

President’s Choice isn’t just a success because of its delectable butter tarts, shortbread cookies, cheese trays, spreads and holiday train sets.

It’s the brainchild of Dave Nichol, a Loblaws executive who became synonymous with white label grocery products in the frozen North. Through sweat, blood, tears, market testing, brand development and millions of promotional inserts, Dave built the President’s Choice white label brand into a category killer for Loblaws.

But then you started playing with babies. Babies, man.

Let’s remember that Galen is the shining new star of a family ranked by Forbes as the #93rd richest in the world.

How is he gonna come across as personable, down to earth and a straight shooter?

Back in the 80s and early 90s, you knew Dave was simpatico. His ads were full of references to “working hard for you” and ” we’ve kept the same price as last year” and “my team” and “our family.”

Over the past few months, Weston has been working hard to put a personable and young face on the Loblaws brand. Personalizing the brand was first suggested over a year ago, by people like Mark Evans (read the comments, it’s one of those bitter but everfresh posts).

Weston’s clean face, tousled hair and open necked shirt have been pushing products that would appeal to the new and sensitive consumer. Organic baby food. Reusable shopping bags. Phosphate-free dish washing detergent. Apple crisp. Freakin’ apple crisp!

(Which, if you want to watch them, you have to dig into the Bensimon Byrne website under “current creative.” Because ad agency websites suck.)

And in the latest ad, Weston brought out the big gun - he ended the ad with “eh?”

“Clean dishes. And a slightly cleaner Canada. That works, eh?”

Normally, I would be all like “oh yeah? who are YOU to try the common and somewhat stereotypical colloquialism that has branded Canadians around the world?”

After all, eh is not a word to be wielded lightly by copywriters - unless in an excessively ironic manner.

But Galen Weston pulled it off. Bastard.

Good for him.

And I can’t just help myself. Here’s a Bob and Doug MacKenzie clip, featuring a lot of “ehs”:

Technorati Tags: Galen Weston, Loblaws, President’s Choice, grocery, eh, Canadian culture

In a puffy little piece, USA Today points out that quite a few international consumer chains are emphasizing their links to your local neighbourhood (neighborhood for you Americans):

- Tesco’s Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Markets
- Applebee’s
- Kelsey’s damnable appropriation of the Cheers theme song*
- Lowe’s - still a neighborhood store

It may just be me, but if your employees have to read a hundred page jobsite manual and order their pants from a central distribution facility, then you are not a neighbourhood company.

If your signage is designed and produced in another state or province, you’re not a neighbourhood company.

If your general manager is rotated through your store and/or region once every two years, you’re not a neighbourhood company.

Do you have to debate the real meaning of “locally grown”? Not a neighbourhood company.

Do you want a real definition of neighbourhood? Look no farther than Sesame Street. Who Are the People in your Neighbourhood, indeed.

Aside from that short period where Maria converted the Fix-It Shop into a Mailboxes Etc. franchise, I don’t remember a lot of characters complaining about their regional sales quotas or the “word from HQ.”

You remember the lyrics from that catchy ditty, don’t you? If not, here’s a short video, from back when Bob McGrath had sideburns and a spring in his step.

That clip is really quite old and inappropriate, actually: one of the people you meet is the neighbourhood news dealer.

*really, words cannot express how angry I get when I see the Kelsey’s ads overlaid with the theme from Cheers. It’s such a seminal part of my youth - and the development of television - that it would be like seeing the theme from M*A*S*H used for a national chain of funeral homes.

** In fact, if I was Kelsey Grammer, I might even think about a cease and desist order, since the link between his role on Cheers, the name of the chain, and the song are so in-your-face.

*** I’m that upset. Really.

Technorati Tags: Kelsey’s, neighborhood, neighbourhood, local, community, retail

For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why a brand manager would buy these ads. An ordinary woman, with ordinary if well-presented clothes, obviously standing in front of a false aisle of consumer goods, blatantly promoting a particular product - sauces, detergent, food.

The most direct comparison? Imagine the scripted pitch and rigid product positioning of an in-store sampling program, recorded with better lighting.

That’s Brand Power, the work of the Buchanan Group, which was featured in the National Post yesterday in an article called “Back to Basics.”

And here I thought Brand Power was a particularly Canadian program - but it’s obvious that audiences across North America and the Commonwealth are seeing one interpretation of the advertisements or another.

“… From a creative point of view the ad executions are awful, but mesmerizing. These are the type of commercials that are generally abhorred by agency brand strategists who spend months deciding on how to sell you breakfast cereal artfully.

“They are not ads that electrify you,” said Anthony Stokan, partner at retail consultancy Anthony Russell Inc. “They are very lame and uninspiring. But that said, they are highly believable because they focus on the essence of the brand and the products.” …”

Chris Clarke has made a strong, and emotional, argument in the past that Brand Power could be considered deceitful and misleading. I agree that the format is designed to appear informational rather than promotional, but I have never thought it anything but blatant advertising.

Meet Mike Holmes. He’s a contractor with a heart, who arrives to repair the mistakes and shoddy workmanship of other contractors. He’s also the host of a very popular show on Home and Garden Television here in Canada.

As you can see, Mike also had a clothing deal with Carhartt, the workwear company (I say had, because he now has his own branded clothing line. I said he was popular).

It’s the perfect alliance - the honest and forthright contractor, sporting rough and durable work clothes.

Trouble is, Mike likes showing off the guns, so to speak. Hammering nails. Cutting boards. Gesturing wildly at the blatant code violations and stunningly dangerous modifications made by the previous contractor.

No tats. No earrings. No leather wristbands or elaborate pendants.

As the picture shows, that means a startlingly genuine character is central to his program.

And no - THAT IS NOT A SPORTS BRO.

Technorati Tags: Carhartt, Mike Holes, HGTV, sponsorship, clothing

In-store television channels are not a new development, but I will grab an opportunity to riff on a tactic wherever possible. Kroger has just announced that they have built a television network (KTV) to serve the internal communications needs of their central division.

“… Each store has two servers with storage capacity and on-demand video, Kroger spokesman John Elliott said. Programs will include anything from quarterly financial messages from the company president to safety instructions for meat cutters …” (Rockford Register Star)

This may be some programming you could expect on similar channels:

• The 5 Second Rule and the Safe Handling of Meat
• Your 401(k) and Your Future: We’ll always have hours on the night shift
• Wax on, Wax off: Entry Level Jobs
• Channeling Bob Ross in Bathroom Decoration
• Creative Accounting in Determining Expiry Dates
• Our New CEO is Better Than Our Old One
• Cashier and Stockboy: A Story of Forbidden Love
• The Grocer’s Chiropractor: One Box Too Many
• How To Spot A Mystery Shopper
• My Barbie Oven is My CoPilot: a Food Sampler’s preparation guide
• Bleach and Ammonia: A Shortcut to the Cemetery
• How to Detail a Buick - your manager’s Buick
• That Market Analyst Is A LIAR
• One Lick Too Many: One night shift employee’s mastery of Guitar Hero 3 - and resulting unemployment

Technorati Tags: in-store tv, internal communications, grocery

Didja hear? The traditional enclosed mall is in decline. Apparently, someone told The Economist, because they’ve run a long piece on the original enclosed mall, Southdale Mall in Minnesota.

In Rise and Fall Of the Shopping Mall, we get the magazine’s well-written and comprehensive look at mall culture - especially as it developed under the imagination of Victor Gruen, Southdale’s architect.

“Gruen got an extraordinary number of things right first time. He built a sloping road around the perimeter of the mall, so that half of the shoppers entered on the ground floor and half on the first floor—something that became a standard feature of malls.

Southdale’s balconies were low, so that shoppers could see the shops on the floor above or below them. The car park had animal signs to help shoppers remember the way back to their vehicles.

It was as though Orville and Wilbur Wright had not just discovered powered flight but had built a plane with tray tables and a duty-free service.“

I thought that analogy was worth a mention, but there has been much more written about Gruen and his impact on the culture of North America. Ten years ago, the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages wrote about the “Gruen effect” and the “mauling of America.”
In a 1957 interview with the New Yorker, Gruen recognized that urban populations need common spaces (the precursor to the “third place”?) - and also fingered merchants as the guiding force in the development of North American culture.

… Mr. Gruen grumbled that “planning” has become a dirty word in this country. “Almost as bad as if Lenin had invented it,” he said. “The fact is no city was ever planned enough. Planned and replanned. Here in New York, we’re like a big family that’s all dressed up with no place to go. Wherever we turn, it’s jostle and bustle and frayed nerves and bad tempers.

In Detroit, six or seven thousand people make their way to Northland on Sunday afternoons. The stores are closed, so what are they doing there? Looking for open space. They window-shop and stroll through the gardens and sit on benches and soak up the sun and enjoy the fountains and sculpture.

What Northland teaches us is this—that it’s the merchants who will save our urban civilization. ‘Planning’ isn’t a dirty word to them; good planning means good business. Besides, any improvements they make are tax-deductible. Sometimes self-interest has remarkable spiritual consequences. As art patrons, merchants can be to our time what the Church and the nobility were to the Middle Ages.”

Well, fifty years on I would be willing to debate the value and quality that a merchant-based culture has brought to our society. I guess that’s what being po-po-mo is all about.

Ten years ago, the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages touched on the “Gruen effect” and the “mauling of America.”

In practical terms, it seems that quite a few cities commissioned Gruen to design new urban centres, but only cherry-picked his designs for pedestrian malls for actual construction:

“…Kalamazoo, however, adopted only the pedestrian mall from all the recommendations of the plan, as many other cities would do with their Gruen plans. Fresno, California would build a downtown pedestrian mall in 1964, based on a 1958 Gruen plan; Honolulu, Hawaii would also convert two blocks into a pedestrian mall in 1969, three years after commissioning a Gruen plan.”

Malcolm Gladwell wrote about Gruen three years ago (which I blogged about).
There’s also a book about the man, and how about an academic analysis of his work: “Victor Gruen and the Construction of Cold War Utopias“?

Technorati Tags: Victor Gruen, Southdale Mall, suburbia, pedestrian mall, retail, mall

Christmas Eve. Last minute shopping. Malls full of desperate shoppers. And it’s going to be parking hell. The Raleigh News & Observer describes some of the rude and desperate behaviour to be found at local mall parking lots, and provides some anthropological rough work on the types of drivers you’ll come across:

THE STALKER: This driver looks for a shopper loaded down with bags and follows behind like a vulture hungry for carrion.

THE ILLEGAL IDLER: This person parks in a fire lane, or a handicapped spot, and sits there with the engine running while a spouse ducks inside. If an idler is especially daring, he or she will use this time to change a baby’s diaper.

THE STAKEOUT ARTIST: Most hated of all, this person sees a pair of brake lights go red and stops, knowing that a fellow shopper is soon to leave. The worst stakeout artists will sit there for 10 minutes if necessary, blocking traffic for 20 other cars, while the fellow shopper loads 10 bags, a stroller and a grandmother into the car.

It’s the grandmothers that’ll kill ya. Often, you can’t see them lurking behind the shopping cart.

Technorati Tags: holiday, parking, mall

As we approach Christmas, we can harken back to when towns had local or regional department stores, each decorated in a particular style for the holidays. As the comments on a photo retrospective at Labelscar note, the retail landscape has now been Macyated.

As Canadians do more and more shopping at outlet malls in U.S. border cities, we’re increasingly leaving all but our underpants behind as we head home.

As we all debate climate change and the United States faces $4 a gallon gas, the Canadian Centre for Architecture presents 1973: Sorry out of gas. (Exhibition site, News Release)

Metropolis on the philosophy behind Rudy’s Barber Shop and Ace Hotels:

“…When I tell them it’s the handiwork of a Rudy’s stylist, neither one asks if I like the cut. Instead, they want to know if I enjoyed the experience, if I talked to other customers, if the vibe was good.

It’s obvious that what led Calderwood and Weigel into the business wasn’t an interest in hair. Rather, it was the idea of injecting new life into ritualized social interactions that intrigued them. “Wade used to fly back and forth from London and would see these barbers in Camden Market and Notting Hill where they’d just set up in the middle of the market and cut hair for the day,” Calderwood says. “And I used to live near Sig’s Barbershop downtown, this tiny old shop that’s never changed. I’d walk by it and think, ‘God, how cool would it be to buy that and get younger hairstylists to work there.’”

Need evidence that they’ve succeeded in creating an experience? Check out these Yelp comments about the original Rudy’s in Seattle.

James Surowiecki on how the web has affected how we shop:

“…the wealth of online product reviews and commentary has made the cues that stores use to shape shoppers’ perception of quality and value far less effective. This doesn’t mean that consumers are impervious to retailers’ tricks, and plenty of us shop the way Homer Simpson orders wine: buy the second-least-expensive thing on the list. …” (New Yorker)

Technorati Tags: mall, holiday decoration, Homer Simpson, Rudy’s Barber Shop, retail experience, outlet shopping

I’m lookin’ at you. Enjoy your clamshell packaging and seasonal wrapping, fella. ‘Cause Annie Leonard makes it clear that our consumer culture is heading us straight down the path to resource exhaustion and trash triumph.

The Story of Stuff is a 20 minute animation with on-screen narration by Leonard, explaining how weaknesses and manipulation at each step in the chain of production are producing toxic effects for the environment, workers, regions and customers.

Yeah, yeah. This sort of stuff is viewed with suspicion and animosity by most consumers in western economies. I certainly watched it with a jaundiced eye, what with all my economics training.

But my daughter was spellbound. Because her life does not depend upon an innate trust in the goals and motivations of a corporations. She does not feel the same sense of fear or unease at challenging the assumptions about corporate power and economic authority that underly popular understanding of our economic system.

So you should watch it as well. It has a good message, it’s a plain and clear piece of communication, it has a good beat and you can dance to it.

Oh - and try not to think of Steve Jobs, Apple and their six month product cycle when you watch the film.

Technorati Tags: Story of Stuff, sustainable, equitable, consumer culture, consumerism, planned obsolescence

Okay. I understand that, in Iowa and New Hampshire, the Presidential primaries are almost as important and somewhat as interesting as college sports.

I also understand that the major Presidential contenders spend years visiting the states  - over and over again.

And I also understand that many of the political activities in the early primary states (Iowa in particular) emphasize a voter’s ability to “take the measure of a man” through personal contact. (Like the Ames Straw Poll)

I can’t quite understand, however, why 35% of likely voters would choose to listen to pre-recorded campaign calls. Is their dinner-time conversation REALLY that boring?

Stats from Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Technorati Tags: robocalls, direct marketing, political campaign

Lawrence Metal Products hit a homerun. The makers of Tensabarrier, the flexible in-store “queue systems,” got a nice placement in Newsday.

Who knew you could spin a holiday shopping feature out of some basic information about the efficiencies of installing in-store guideposts and barriers?

It helped that the final story covered three hooks:

• business efficiency and cost savings
• customer frustration at long lines and poor cash placement
• a link to Curb Your Enthusiasm

That’s right. Money, emotion and celebrity. All in one tidy story about lineups in stores.

“…An episode of HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” makes the company’s case: To make up for a bad deed, Larry David goes to a store to buy his wife’s favorite perfume and finds two lines. He chooses one line and then jumps to the other because it appears to be moving more quickly. David gets stuck behind a woman sampling fragrances and is unable to buy the perfume because another man — who got on the other line, behind David — nabs the last bottle. David goes into a rant, asking why the single-line system isn’t used everywhere.

“We’ve proven that the fairest and most equitable way of queuing is the single corral, as Larry was demonstrating,” said Nick Byrne, vice president of sales and business development for Lawrence…”

Whoever media trained that man (or ghostwrote the pitch) gets a prize!

But there’s more: clear advice for retailers designed to increase sales on high profit items!

“…One of Lawrence’s British retail clients filled bowls fixed to a Tensabarrier with lip salve, tissues and playing cards and found that sales of those items increased 400 percent.

“A lot of retailers make the mistake of thinking that it’s just more retail space, but it’s not,” Byrne said. “They need to clearly display prices. It has to be an impulse-buy item, and there’s got to be lots of it.”..”

Packaging can be key to a consumer’s perception of a product. In some cases, packaging forms a substantial part of the product - like the greeting card industry.

I didn’t realize this, but the U.S. Postal Service charges a surcharge for mail that isn’t oblong or rectangular in shape. It seems that equilateral mail screws with their incredibly complex sorting system.

This surcharge is a major hiccup for greeting card manufacturers. Mail that doesn’t get identified at the sorting plant is delivered with a request for additional postage.

“… At Great Arrow Graphics … From 60 square cards for Christmas, Mr. Friedman’s silk-screeners are down to nine this year. Other greeting-worthy occasions have been fully oblongated: for instance, death. “Nobody wants sympathy cards returned,” says Mr. Friedman. “We don’t mess with sympathy.” In his sympathy line, only pet sympathy is still square…” (WSJ)

I hadn’t thought of this (mainly because it doesn’t happen in Canada). The handling of a sympathy card by the postal system effectively undermines the message and emotion being conveyed by the sender.

So - how much does a square card cost the Postal Service to handle?

“…When the machines fail, humans get involved — at a cost, Mr. Mazurkiewicz [the sorting plant supervisor] explained, of $52-per-thousand envelopes instead of $4.

Still, it’s extremely heartwarming to read the closing paragraphs of this piece, largely because I hold the same feelings:

“.. “I love that letters are touched by people here,” he said.

“It costs more money,” said Mr. Mazurkiewicz, but his guest had wandered off to gaze at a procession of postal trays spiraling upward on a blue conveyor. “The ballet of the mail,” Mr. Friedman said. He watched for a few more moments and then, with feeling, he added: “The post office really is a very beautiful organization.”

One final point: here is a question sent to the Greeting Card Association witnesses that appeared before a Postal Service committee considering rates in 2006:

“… Are you aware of any econometric studies pertaining to the demand for square greeting cards or the cross price elasticity between square and rectangular greeting cards that take into account the history or symbolic significance of the square? If so, please provide a copy of any such study.”

I’d like to see the answers submitted to that question. That would be the work of a very esoteric economist.

Technorati Tags: greeting cards, mailing, sorting, post, packaging

Remember the Age of Conversation? 103 authors from across the marketing, public relations, interactive media and community manager disciplines? It’s still on sale at lulu.com - but only for another week.

Gavin and Drew’s little idea has pulled in over $11k for Variety Village, but the idea is to expand the possibility of people coming across the book.
So, starting November 30, the book will be available on Amazon.com.

There’s a dirty little secret, though. The price will be going from $16.95 to $30. And you wondered how Jeff Bezos can pay for all those distribution centres and free holiday shipping!

Still considering a purchase? StickyFigure can give you a quick taste of many of the authors. Or you can read their blogs:
Gavin Heaton Drew McLellan CK Valeria Maltoni Emily Reed Katie Chatfield Greg Verdino Mack Collier Lewis Green Ann Handley Mike Sansone Paul McEnany Roger von Oech Anna Farmery David Armano Bob Glaza Mark Goren Matt Dickman Scott Monty Richard Huntington Cam Beck David Reich Luc Debaisieux Sean Howard Tim Jackson Patrick Schaber Roberta Rosenberg Uwe Hook Tony D. Clark Todd Andrlik Toby Bloomberg Steve Woodruff Steve Bannister Steve Roesler Stanley Johnson Spike Jones Nathan Snell Simon Payn Ryan Rasmussen Ron Shevlin Roger Anderson Robert Hruzek Rishi Desai Phil Gerbyshak Peter Corbett Pete Deutschman Nick Rice Nick Wright Michael Morton Mark Earls Mark Blair Mario Vellandi Lori Magno Kristin Gorski Kris Hoet G.Kofi Annan Kimberly Dawn Wells Karl Long Julie Fleischer Jordan Behan John La Grou Joe Raasch Jim Kukral Jessica Hagy Janet Green Jamey Shiels Dr. Graham Hill Gia Facchini Geert Desager Gaurav Mishra Gary Schoeniger Gareth Kay Faris Yakob Emily Clasper Ed Cotton Dustin Jacobsen Tom Clifford David Polinchock David Koopmans David Brazeal David Berkowitz Carolyn Manning Craig Wilson Cord Silverstein Connie Reece Colin McKay Chris Newlan Chris Corrigan Cedric Giorgi Brian Reich Becky Carroll Arun Rajagopal Andy Nulman Amy Jussel AJ James Kim Klaver Sandy Renshaw Susan Bird Ryan Barrett Troy Worman CB Whittemore S. Neil Vineberg

Technorati Tags: Age of Conversation

I won’t deny it - I read gossip blogs.

But only for the marketing leads!

Like Sean Kingston’s sharp Crayola 64 assorted crayon pack worth of bling.

It’s a must look! As always, I love the comments:

“…Wow, that’s all kinds of tacky. 64 to be precise…”

Dlisted also pointed me to Molly Shannon’s latest paid sponsorship - the opening of Charmin’s free public toilets on Time Square.

Here’s the subhed from the news release:

QUEEN OF THE THRONE: MOLLY SHANNON PERFORMS THE CEREMONIAL ‘FIRST FLUSH’ AT THE CHARMIN RESTROOMS OPENING

I desperately want to be nice. In the newsreel kindly supplied by Proctor & Gamble, Molly tells us that parents with kids will spend a lot of time during the holiday shopping season combing the streets of New York for a public toilet, and this will be a godsend for them.

But I just can’t get past the thought that her coat may be lined in shreds of toilet paper.

I can’t also help but notice that the news release notes she was accompanied by the assistant brand manager for Charmin.

If you were the assistant brand manager, would you consider participating in this promotional event as a step up in your career?

“Man, I really pulled this promotion together nicely! Not only did I open the public toilets on Times Square, I got to meet Molly Shannon!”

This is a point about corporate social responsibility, using consumer marketing and Canadian company Lululemon as an example. While consumers are willing to invest a fair amount of faith and goodwill in a company without proof of a detailed CSR plan, at the first sign of a crisis, they tend to look for evidence, independent testing and videotape of manufacturing facilities with happy and well-educated workers.

Which brings us to the upscale active wear chain Lululemon.

Seaweed or no seaweed? Health benefits from the product or no benefits? That’s the question the New York Times asked this week about a fabric called VitaSea and the products made of the fabric sold by the company. The newspaper (after a tip from a shortseller of Lululemon stock) had tested two of their products for presence of seaweed, as claimed. There didn’t seem to be any.

The company’s first response?

When asked about Lululemon’s product tags and the claims about vitamins and minerals, [Chip Wilson, founder, product designer and board chair] said, “That’s coming from the manufacturer. If you feel the fabric, it feels a lot different.”

And the quotes got worse:

Director for products and design. She said the company would test the fabric in the future.“We will be diving in deeper, so that our educators on the floor can answer those tough questions,” Ms. Schweitzer said. “Right now, we are relying on the mill and SeaCell’s information.”

That’s not the best of answers. Just ask Nike or Mattel how “the manufacturer is responsible” works as a rebuttal to criticism of product quality. Which must be one reason why Canada’s Competition Bureau got involved.

The company responded quickly, noting that they regularly ask an independent lab to test their materials and products, and that they did contain fabric derived from seaweed.

Still, you have to wonder why that fact wasn’t communicated to a BSD like the New York Times when they first asked. (a point Eric also brought up)

By the end of the week, the Competition Bureau had struck an agreement with Lululemon to stop making claims of health benefits for the fabric.

“Those claims have to be scientific and they have to be provable,” said Andrea Rosen, acting deputy commissioner of the bureau. “The onus is on the advertiser, not the government, to prove that the tests are adequate prior to making the claims.” (NYT)

Bob Meers, Lululemon’s CEO, issued a statement after the Competition Bureau announcement, noting that:

“In order to ensure the integrity of our product labelling, we are conducting a review of the therapeutic attributes described on all product hang tags.”

That seems to mean the score is product quality = 1, product attributes = 0.

Overall, their products are better made and more stylish than other active wear products on the market. Which means this contretemps probably won’t affect the company in the long term, since they continue to expand into the United States and abroad, winning converts and customers at the same time.

Technorati Tags: Lululemon, Chip Wilson, VitaSea, corporate social responsibility

When I was a kid, I lived overseas. My exposure to the marketplace was at the street and store level: in Milan and Hong Kong, the majority of retail stores fronted on a street.

In Hong Kong, there were very few malls, aside from China Products, a fantastic bazaar for consumer goods made in the PRC, and the mall found alongside the Kowloon cruise ship terminal.

Which is why one particular scene from the Blues Brothers left an impression: the car chase through the mall.

As Elwood and Jake Blues careened through the suburban indoor mall, all that ran through my head was: “all those stores, and indoors as well?”

“Disco pants and haircuts!”

“New Oldsmobiles are in early this year!”

Twenty seven years after their adventure, the Dixie Square Mall in suburban Chicago remains empty. And for some reason, even in Canada, people prefer pedestrian malls with outdoor areas.

Well, except in February, when it’s cold.

You’re like me, aren’t you? You look in the fridge, and all you can see is a package of frankfurters. Hot dogs. Sausages. Processed meat in a casing.

What to do? You can’t handle another hot dog. Not even a Coney Island special. Not a Chicago Style. Not a Detroit special. A New England Coney Island?

What about a refreshing meat bunny? Or perhaps you’d like a little meat trunk on your elephant?

It’s been around for a while, but Nippon Ham has a novel way of promoting the purchase and consumption of their Winny brand hot dogs - detailed instructions on how to carve them into a variety of animals. Like these instructions for making that adorable meat bunny.

The guys at Finding Japan even filmed their effort to make the little elephants.
All that’s missing is the soft velvety bed of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese (Kraft Dinner to us Canadians)

You MUST visit I am an American, and I eat Hot Dogs. And Fat Dave’s Hot Dog Adventures.

“…And from the moment we opened the front door, we all agreed later, we knew we were in trouble. The very young woman at the desk had the anesthetized air of a Barneys salesgirl who had languished too long in Belts.” (NYTimes)

That’s from Alex Witchel’s column of September 26, about a visit to a New York restaurant. I can imagine the look, the attitude and the atmosphere around that young woman, can’t you?

A really meta-meta-meta moment: Luke Burbank, one of the hosts of NPR’s Bryant Park, really felt that an interview with Sigur Ros, the gifted but notoriously distant band from Iceland, went badly. Very badly.

That’s because it did. It was painful. Why would Burbank have booked the band? Because a public relations hack called him up and suggested it. That’s right - this train wreck was recommended to him.

Maybe Burbank just didn’t prep well enough. I’m a suburban dad from Canada, and I knew Sigur Ros were a hard interview. Just take a look at this excerpt from an interview in the Guardian - from 2005:

“…On their astounding new album, Takk … , titles are back and most of the lyrics are in Icelandic. This spirit of glasnost also animates their interviews, which were once a barren tundra of single-word answers. In 2001, one journalist came away with just three usable quotes, one of which was “Yeah, yeah”. They’ll still admit that, given the choice, they would never talk to the press. “It would be nice, yes, if that was possible,” says guitarist and keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson. “That’s something I used to talk about, but I’m getting older and,” he laughs, “weaker. I used to be really sceptical about these things and not really trust anybody.”

Or maybe the flack had recently seen them give good interviews. The evidence seems overwhelmingly negative. They are not an “up with people” band.

As part of his process of repentance and healing, Burbank then brought in a music journalist to help him evaluate and dissect what went wrong with his earlier interview with the band.

It’s clear that the original interview did not make good radio. Jancee, the journalist, is blunt in her assessment of the interview and offers some brief insight into the process of interviewing musicians (like the suggestion, late in the video, that a sock puppet could interview David Lee Roth). Still, some of her commentary is amusing:

“I really do zero in on the drummer. Look at his yearning expression, it’s saying “ask me a question. I’ll answer it. I’m friendly. Over here!” … And really, the other band mates, they really will be puzzled, then they’ll be upset and then they’ll kind of jump in, usually, after a while.”

Jake McKee pointed to this NPR piece and held it up as an example of “turning that frown upside down.” When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Take the critical energy being directed at you, and turn it into a learning experience.

I agree that this is an interesting way to respond to criticism and defuse the situation. He was even-handed in his assessment of his own performance, as well as that of the band. Unfortunately, I found the technique just a little too coy: running a display-in-display critique of his own interview, with the help of a colour commentator.

All that was missing was the Madden Telestrator.

****Added feature: one commenter on the NPR blog suggested Tom Sndyer’s 1980 interview with Johnny Rotten as far worse. I don’t know if I can agree: at least Rotten was engaged and animated.

Technorati Tags: NPR, Bryant Park, Sigur Ros, interview techniques

Yeah, yeah. Radiohead released their latest album on the net.

Others - bands, good solo artists, bad solo artists - have done it before.

“Radiohead’s true genius move here was cashing in on the leak.”

That’s from a comment over at Stereogum.

Technorati Tags: Radiohead, e-commerce, online sales, music

Kevin Smith, in Toronto to “whore out” his new book, thinks Canada’s retail sector is bush league:

“…Yet for all his affection for this country (“I dig the socialized medicine and the crime statistics”) and his Canadian pals (including Jim Jackman, former producer of DeGrassi: The Next Generation) , he’ll never live here, thanks to its anemic retail sector.

“You want to choose from 30 different kinds of peanut butter, you get your ass to America,” he writes. “You want to decide between, say, three? Oh, Canada … . When I hit the food store, I need variety, bitch.” … (Globe and Mail)

On a sliding scale from “spawn of Satan” to “merely incompetent and possible malicious” - where do Google and Microsoft fit in? It’s an over-the-top comparison, but it’s amusing.

“… The new, perhaps-even-creepier model for world industrial domination is one where Google will amass a vast and detailed up-to-the-moment chronicle of customers’ innermost thoughts. Producers won’t need to profit by force-feeding narrowed product choices onto customers via industrial might a la Microsoft. That’s because sellers will know consumers psychology so intimately that they will be able to efficiently trick them into buying the worthless junk.

In cold war terms, Microsoft is 1970s Soviet bread lines. Google is the KGB propaganda and spying machine...” (San Francisco Weekly)

We’re forever searching for a way to effectively communicate the relative risks of an activity. What about the clear contrasts presented in a Risk Characterization Theatre data map?

200 cha