Ralph Lauren Polo announced that it would be expanding more aggressively in China, opening 10-15 stores a year beginning soon. The company cited the flat U.S. market for luxury goods and conceded that it had a long way to go capturing greater market share in China. Said a director of China-based marketing research group: “I don’t think they did a very good job at positioning and store development for the China market, and they also probably were hit fairly hard by piracy. The problem for Polo, people don’t know what’s real and what isn’t.†But isn’t real-or-unreal what Polo is all about?
Monthly Archive for August, 2009
Pursuant to item below about commercial exploitation of greeniness, faithful reader Yale Hollander sends this piece of further inanity, snapped presumably with his phone camera in or around St. Louis. And in case you’re wondering, the vehicle was not a hybrid.
I don’t know about you but I’m close to choking on how assorted brands and stores are befouling the cultural environment with bizarre attempts to out-green each other. A good example is this video featuring a environmentally friendly hotel suite, brought to you by Lexus, with a little product-placement help from Benjamin Moore paints:
This piece in the Financial Times offers sufficient evidence the advertising agency as we’ve known it is dead. Expired. No more.
Thanks to the Web this may well be the golden age of satire. YouTube and other sites are brimming — not remotely the right word to capture it — with spoofs ranging from brilliant to painfully stupid. Adam Sacks’ dead-on take on an iPhone commercial isn’t riotously funny but it’s awfully well done:
The Global Post carries an interesting report not only about the global marketing of fast food but about how traditional foods from hotter climates are naturally infused with anti-microbial spices (they taste better than that sounds). In any event, locally adjusted menus offered by the full range of dreadful American fast-food chains are big and getting bigger in every corner of the globe. For example: “Domino’s pizzas come topped with squid in Taiwan, black beans in Guatemala and feta cheese in Greece. In China, Kentucky Fried Chicken sells rice congee, while Col. Sanders in India woos vegetarians with offerings like the Chana Snacker, a chickpea burger topped with Thousand Island sauce.”
I’m not a coupon clipper, never have been, but now coupons routinely arrive by cell phone much as text messages do. Sweet. But though I check my stocks, view box scores, make dinner reservations, spend nearly waking hour texting and e-mailing, take the occasional photo, issue self-interested messages via Facebook or Twitter, download music, use a GPS app to find my way out of the woods, listen to Internet radio, maintain personal and work-a-day calendars, seek product information on things I want to buy, watch videos, and countless other things using my phone, I have no more interest in clipping digital coupons than I did when they were carried in store circulars or the newspaper. Maybe somebody could tell me why –Â is there consumer-behavior shrink in the house?
Though I never tire of buying books, I do get tired of shlepping books around, especially now that I go back and forth between New York and Chicago at least once a week. So a few months ago I bought a Kindle. And for a while, needless to say, as you hear this all the time, I was enthralled with its lightness of being, the ability to obtain a book at a moment’s notice, etc., etc. Now that the novelty’s gone, though, I’m coming to hate the Kindle experience: hate the clunky typeface, hate the balky buttons, hate the fact that there’s no book smell, and find myself having a difficult time finishing those books, even airplane books, I like (such as David Benioff’s City of Thieves). But Jeff Bezos, and probably many of you, couldn’t care less about what I think of the Kindle — so here’s what David Byrne thinks of it, which is not all that different from how I think of it.
In case you missed the news last week, CBS is inserting thousands of little video players in an upcoming issue of Entertainment Weekly. Go on, try and zap those with your Tivo.
Renegade anthropologist Grant McCracken, who makes an important cameo in Shoptimism, on why Whole Foods’ John Mackey wound up in the rotten veggie bin with his attack on Obama’s health care proposal.
