May 2009 – Page 2 – Ben Casnocha

PepsiCo has been trying to rebrand the Pepsi, Gatorade, Tropicana and Mountain Dew products. How's it going? Try this: "It represents perhaps the largest and most cavalier destruction of brand value we will ever see," says Grant McCracken, in his excellent analysis of what's gone wrong.

Peter Arnell, the Pepsi man assigned to the Tropicana orange juice rebrand, described his job thusly:

The objective was very, very clearly laid out. We needed to rejuvenate, reengineer, rethink, reparticipate in popular culture.

Here's McCracken:

But let's look at what Peter Arnell…thinks this means. His first act of office, apparently, was to embark upon what BusinessWeek calls a "five-week world tour of trendy design houses."

This is where he went searching for culture? In design houses? Dude.

Classic. Spending time in design houses instead of spending time with your customers.

Tropicana rolled out a new design for its orange juice container — the old design on the left, the new design on the right. Consumers were furious and sales plunged 20%. It's since been pulled from the shelves.

McCracken goes on to playfully mock the hip design types who think reparticipating in popular culture means just being "cool" and for ignoring the emotional needs of the 99% of the population who do not wear black thick rimmed artist glassses:

If you want to "reparticipate" in popular culture, well, you have your work cut out for you. Going to design houses, that's a good idea…. And then, well, really, why not get out of the design houses into the lives and the homes and the kitchens of the other Americans?

The problem is simple. When Arnell thinks design, he thinks cool. When we ask him to redesign a Tropicana package, he's going to bless it with notions of cool now circulating in his own and other design houses.

The trouble is that culture is only marginally about cool. Cool may be the most active, the most talked about, the most flattering part of culture, but it is also a relatively small and evanescent part of culture. Let's call it 20%.

When you are told to put the brand in touch with popular culture, touring design houses won't do it. Really, what you want to do, Peter, is talk to the owner-operators of this culture, Americans…living by the millions…out there…

Peter, here's the thing. It's not about you. It's not what you think is hip and happening. It's not about cool. It's not about New York City or design houses or startling images of the future, or breathtaking mastery of the design vocabulary, or breakthroughs that reinvent the brand.

It's about Americans at their breakfast table.

Bottom Line: For entrepreneurs everywhere, it's about the customer. It's about the customer. It's about the customer. Tropicana "branding experts" were wandering the halls of hip design houses instead of sitting at the breakfast table with Americans who at the moment are hurting for cash and craving stability and familiarity.

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May 21, 2009

Does Travel Narrow the Mind?

Travel8 Comments

Does travel narrow the mind?

First consider Emerson:

Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home.

Then Chesterton:

… There is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like. This is not meant for nonsense; still less is it meant for the silliest sort of nonsense, which is cynicism. The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion. On the contrary, it is rather an inner reality. Man is inside all men. In a real sense any man may be inside any men. But to travel is to leave the inside and draw dangerously near the outside.

Andrew Sullivan summarizes:

The proper conservative resistance to travel is not, therefore, a blinkered resistance to the new; it is an understanding that we have never fully absorbed or understood what we already know; that the places we love are still mysterious, and understanding of them should never be mistaken for simple familiarity. Seeking new superficialities at the expense of familiar depths is a neurosis, not an adventure.

I find the above ideas fascinating but unpersuasive. As one of Sullivan's readers writes, "Inward and outward journeys are simply not opposed, and to pretend that they are in order to adhere stuffily to the superior excellence of the inward journey is just irritating."

I've found that travel can awaken the inner journey. Some of my most contemplative thoughts have come while sitting on a bench in a foreign land, looking around and recognizing nothing, and retreating inward like one runs inside from a cold day for a cup of hot chocolate.

For a final, different take on the value of travel, here's a unique David Foster Wallace footnote from his Gourmet magazine piece on lobsters:

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way.

My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all.

To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful:

As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

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May 20, 2009

The Quarter Life Crisis

Careers20 Comments

The term "quarter life crisis" refers to the personal and professional angst of some of today's twenty-somethings.

Last month Eye Weekly published a good overview of the phenomenon and wrote:

Unrelenting indecision, isolation, confusion and anxiety about working, relationships and direction is reported by people in their mid-twenties to early thirties who are usually urban, middle class and well-educated; those who should be able to capitalize on their youth, unparalleled freedom and free-for-all individuation. They can’t make any decisions, because they don’t know what they want, and they don’t know what they want because they don’t know who they are, and they don’t know who they are because they’re allowed to be anyone they want.

In other words, it is a "crisis" that afflicts a privileged slice of the young adult group: the introspective urbanites who have the time and energy to wallow in their introspections and contemplate deeper identity issues; the people who can financially afford to think about what they love to do versus what they have to do. As this older Financial Times piece put it, the quarter life crisis is when highly educated young people are paralyzed not due to "lack of opportunity, as may have been true in the past, but from an excess of possibilities."

With generational proclamations it's important to ask whether a so-called "new" phenomenon is in fact new to the current moment or instead something all people of a particular age have experienced over the years.

I do think today's flavor of youthful existential angst is new. First, the generation in question, Gen Y, might be the most ass-wiped in history. We are called the self-esteem generation because of the way our Baby Boomer parents have coddled us: anything is possible, we are all uniquely gifted individuals, so on and so forth. This can result in expectations out of whack from reality. More young people today than ever before say they expect to be millionaires by age 30, as just one example. What follows monstrously unrealistic expectations? More intensely felt disappointment and confusion.

Second, the idea of an excess of possibilities is true in a real sense — we have grown up in a world of unparalleled peace and prosperity — but also in a newly magnified comparative sense. Today, if you're 24 and online, your sense of what's possible from a how-to-live-life perspective is limited by the bounds of a boundless internet. Sure, when you read newspapers from all over the world or follow blogs from people doing amazing things your arc of vision is broader than whatever is happening on your cul-de-sac. But this also means you can compare yourself, in vivid detail and in real-time, to whomever is at the top of the game you happen to be playing in. Possible consequence: feelings of inferiority, envy, slowness (there's always someone younger who's done more and read more), stupidness, loneliness ("Everyone has it figured out but me").

Neither article offers very good advice for those suffering from quarter life malaise. The FT piece says young people should just grow up. The Eye Weekly piece says, “If you feel you’re in crisis, this is a great opportunity to draft a five-year plan with steady concrete goals to help you get to where you want to be. Anyone can transform their life in just a few years.” Which is delightfully unhelpful advice. It goes on to say, "Growing up may be hard to do, but in the end, the gains outweigh the losses… In other words: it might just be time to grow the fuck up."

Ah, growing the fuck up, a great American pastime. One gets the sense that to grow up for these authors means to relinquish those lofty dreams and accept that you are a selfish piece of shit whose life is going to be unremarkable — which is to say your life is going to be like most people's lives, and to aspire for more is cute in that youthful idealistic borderline-precocious sense but "grown-ups" know it's is just needlessly stress-inducing; grown-ups know the Cold Hard Truth is that the secret to happiness is low expectations. Grown-ups, they would probably say, know that you should not try to find your calling and just find a stable job — that way you'll have a life during the evenings and weekends.

My own highly unqualified musings on careers and life strategy for the twenty-something years have piled up over the past five years: that people should adopt a centenarian life strategy (you're going to live till you're 100); embrace your 20's as the odyssey / wandering years; expose yourself to bulk, positive randomness; travel as much as possible; don't do what you love, do what you are; choose jobs based on the people more than company (reach out to heros); de-emphasize long-term plans or goals; default to 'yes' to avoid later regret; perhaps embrace uncertainty; see virtue in shade over light; work on your ping-pong backhand.

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Here's an old NPR commentary of mine on the weak collective consciousness of Gen Y, and so why we should be careful about generational generalizations.

(thanks to Charlie Hoehn for pointing out the article and Cal Newport for brainstorming parts of this post)

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May 18, 2009

Quote of the Day

Quotes1 Comment

“SpongeBob is one of the greatest believers in the American dream in all of children’s entertainment. He’s courageous, he’s optimistic, he’s representing everything that Mickey Mouse should have represented but never did. There’s even something Jesus-like about him—a 9-year-old Jesus after 15 packets of Junior Mints.”

— Greg Rowland, a branding consultant on the moral influence of SpongeBob Square Pants, the children's toy and cartoon phenomenon in America.

I saw this quote in the latest issue of The Atlantic. The article from this issue that everyone is talking about is Joshua Shenk's piece on happiness. Because it is based on 70+ year study it is being treated more seriously than your garden variety self-help article on this topic. Here are two of the most interesting paragraphs:

But why, he asked, do people tell psychologists they’d cross the street to avoid someone who had given them a compliment the previous day?

In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

Here's Will Wilkinson's take. Yes, solid relationships are the key to happiness, but it's not so simple:

Vaillant points out that even the most “mature” strategies for adapting to disappointment, injury, or failure can strain our most intimate, sustaining relationships. And the reality of relationships over time tends to call for defenses that can threaten relationships. A positive, outgoing person may love freely and easily, but then become shattered by betrayal. Then what do you do? Steel yourself for the possibility of future pain by keeping some part of yourself private and out of the way? But then what have you done to your capacity to be nourished by intimacy and love? A lifetime of rich relationships is not easy and therefore neither is the best kind of life.

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May 17, 2009