Tom Fishburne: this one time at Brand Camp

calon wen

We just started buying our milk through a new offering from a small Welsh dairy cooperative called Calon Wen.  They now sell their milk in film pouches that you drop into a sturdy plastic milk jug designed to fit into the fridge door.  It used 75% less packaging than regular milk jugs (many of which don't get recycled).  It'll be interesting to see if this catches on (it's just in a regional test at the moment) and it's always hard to get consumers on to a new "system".  Still, it's a nice improvement in a category that doesn't see a lot of innovation.

Also, I liked seeing the dual language of Cymraeg (Welsh) on pack and on the web site.  At the next April fool's day, I'm going to put in a phony package brief to our creative team requesting dual English/Cymraeg packaging.

natural evolution of products

I took my four year old daughter to the Natural History Museum recently and we had an entertaining chat about evolution.  As you can imagine, she had some very funny questions.  And she's convinced her little sister might be a little more closely related to a monkey than she.

Anyway, it got me thinking about branded products, and how most product evolutions have to do with margin improvement rather than better performance.  Consumers may not notice one round of cost-cuts, but over time, the reduced product quality can get really obvious. Why is it that cereal boxes never close properly after you open them once?  My guess is that that little "advance" caused a 0.4 point margin gain at some point in the 90's. But, oh how irritating to consumers.

Of course, continuous margin improvement taken to an extreme gets hit by Darwinism too.  Not from a pack of hyena.  From a pack of private label - which actually seems to be getting better over time.

big knit

A real cool, offbeat promotion from innocent.  Every year since 2003, they recruit people to knit little woolen hats for their smoothie bottles.  You can find these special hat-wearing smoothies for a limited time at Sainsburys.  The funds then go to a charity called Age Concern to help elderly people during the cold winter months.  Last year, over 230,000 hats were donated and put onto smoothies, resulting in a £115,000 donation.  Much more fun that clipping boxtops or sending in yogurt lids.

popina

I'm seeing popina at organic shops all over London right now.  It's a great range of high-end biscotti, brownies, and tarts.  Very simple, but feels very artisanal.  I like their tagline of "food artistry from the soul."  Founder Isadora Popovic started popina by selling at London farmer's markets.

bourne

Pretty cool interactive promotion to launch the Bourne Ultimatum in London.  StreetWars is a watergun assassination game, where 160 Londoners have signed up to hunt and evade each other for the next 3 weeks.  Everyone who signs up gets an assassination target, including name and work hours.  They then stalk their target and try to soak them before they get soaked themselves.  Last assasin standing.

bladerunner

Kind of an offbeat product benefit that made the London news this week.  This innocent looking light blue hoodie is made by a company called Bladerunner.  It's actually made out of Kevlar, the same material in bullet-proof vests.  May sound hokie, but it did the trick for a local teen who was mugged at an ATM.  What a testimonial.  This story is all the advertising this little company will ever need. 

when marketers dream

This week was a big cartoon milestone for me.  My email subscriber list for Brand Camp surged past 3,000.  Really exciting.  When I started Brand Camp, I just emailed it to the 30-odd Associate Marketing Managers in my class at General Mills, and the list has just grown on it's own since then. 

This cartoon was inspired by the perfectionist zeal marketers have for aspects of our brand that most consumers never notice, particularly minor packaging details.  I once spent much of an afternoon at a photoshoot of black raspberries for our packaging debating whether or not to photoshop out the little hairs on the raspberries.  I never knew that raspberries were so hairy, but they really are (particularly enlarged on a flatscreen monitor).  Anyway, this turned into a fairly heated debate in the studio (purists versus aesthetists) and we eventually photoshopped them out.  But, I sure felt silly telling my wife how I spent my day, and she reminded me that consumers would never know one way or another.

It got me thinking what a dream it would be if people really noticed and appreciated all of the crazy lengths we go.

ducduc

I met David Harris at a dinner party last night, one of the founders of ducduc, which makes high design children's furniture out of eco-friendly materials.  They frame it as a "new aesthetic for a new generation." Imagine if bugaboo made furniture.  Super-stylish stuff for the yummy mummy.  They made their debut at Design within Reach a few years ago.  Another great example of style meets substance.  Here's one of their takes on a crib.

 

bambu

In the same vein as my post on remarkable, bambu creates well-designed products from renewable materials, mostly with, you guessed it, bamboo.  I like the direct linkage to renewable materials, but using contemporary design so that there are no tradeoffs.  I also like their handy-dandy description of the benefits of bamboo.

rocking chair test

I've been slow to keep up my blog and cartoon lately.  I was a bit swamped organizing our showing at the innocent village fete this last weekend.  I'll put out a posting on that soon, because it was a lot of fun.

In the meantime,, here's something cool I found with a new t-shirt from howies.  I just love their description of the Rocking Chair Test.  How much better than "inspected by QA checker #86".

Actually, I love this whole mini-story.  What a straightforward and human approach to talk about sustainability..

And, I certainly feel better when I wear the t-shirt.