Why I Waited in Line for a $20 Plate of Boiled Onions

on jumping the hurdles on the road of authenticity

Posted 2010-08-11 14:15 in branding, business, culture, experiences, human nature, marketing, postmodernism


I spent last weekend in a place called Door County. People from all over the upper Midwest travel to this area of Northern Wisconsin for its natural beauty, bucolic charm, and for something called “fish boils.” A fish boil is exactly what it sounds like— a dinner consisting primarily of two pieces of boiled whitefish, served alongside a couple boiled potatoes and a couple boiled onions. In the world of Door County, this remarkably simple set of unseasoned (with the exception of salt) ingredients dunked into hot water can run you upwards of $20 per person. What’s more remarkable is that people come in droves, cash in hand, to get a taste of the famous Door County fish boils, which in description does not sound all that appetizing.

It’s hard to understand why people are so eager to shell out what seems like a lot of money for inexpensive food that could easily be prepared at home. After all, it really does not require any level of culinary expertise to boil food. It’s also worth noting that despite the ease with which a total novice cook could boil a dinner, boiling is probably one of the least popular forms of cookery. And, I should add, I’ve met exactly zero people who have confessed that they crave eating whole onions cooked in any manner, much less boiled.

One of the first things people will tell you about fish boils is that it isn’t so much a meal as it is “an experience.” This is hard to dispute on account of the pre-dining ritual that occurs as a central part of the Door County fish boil. A large kettle filled with water is heated by fire as a group of diners stand around and watch. A so-called “boilmaster” ceremoniously dumps onions, potatoes, fish, and salt into the bubbling brew. After 10 minutes of heating, kerosene is thrown onto the fire, causing the fire to momentarily flare up in a visceral and visually arresting manner. The rapid increase in heat causes the mixture in the kettle to boil over. Apparently this flushes the fish of its oils (it’s unclear to me why eliminating the oils is a good thing, but the raging fire is fun to watch). The food is then taken out of the water and served.

When probed about it, an employee at a small town visitor bureau confessed to me that people who live in Door County area don’t eat fish boil, and many have never even tried it once despite the fact that outsiders came from hundreds of miles away to get it. Some locals who have eaten fish boil, I was told, did it under the pretense of “doing that touristy thing” in order to understand what the hubbub was about. These revelations do not come much as a surprise.1 Lots of places have things they are famous for that only outsiders appreciate. When I lived in the Bay Area, I found that hardly anyone who had lived there for any period of time had spent an afternoon riding cable cars, going to Fisherman’s Wharf, or riding the boat to Alcatraz. Consigned to being tourist elements, these things are almost entirely out of the psychic purview of the average Bay Area denizen (except when relatives come into town and want to see them!).

Nevertheless, there are good reasons why certain things become famous. Just as the cable cars of San Francisco are unique, the fish boils of Door County are also unique. And it’s not just that these things are unique; they actually factored into the traditional cultures of these places at one time. They are sold as authentic expressions of regional culture. The fish boil was a tradition of Scandinavian settlers of Northern Wisconsin, and as you might figure from a meal of boiled onions and fish, this tradition was born out of extreme poverty and lack of food availability. It had long fallen out of common practice in the area, except for events like church fundraising dinners (again, a context where frugality was a virtue). It was only after a businessman who owned a place called the Viking Grill decided to package it and market it to tourists in the early 1960s that it gained popularity, and moved from the province of outdated tradition to that of the tourist trap, entirely bypassing the possibility of being a normal food for normal people living in the region.

What is fascinating about all this to me is how easy it is to get people to implicitly believe they can’t have the “real” experience without consuming certain things:

If you didn’t see the Pyramids, you didn’t really go to Egypt. If you didn’t see the Eiffel Tower, you didn’t really go to Paris. If you didn’t experience a fish boil, you didn’t really go to Door County. These sorts of hurdles extend far beyond simple tourism in half-serious cultural truisms that we’ve heard repeatedly. Some examples:

Here, specific acts of consumption, through various means (sometimes deliberate acts of marketing, sometimes through more obscure mechanisms), become socially-mandated pre-requisites for entry into an entire category of human experience. At that point, to partake in the consumption category without partaking in the specific consumption pre-requisite almost becomes an act of fraud, or perhaps worse, alarming ignorance.

As denizens of a post-modern world, seeking out authentic experiences is an all-consuming pastime, but what’s truly remarkable is how we’ve been trained to collect proof of our authentic experiences in the form of photographs, souvenirs, and artfully retold stories of our times spent doing things in these exotic environments. If you ask me, the reason why Door County visitors go to fish boils has nothing to do with people wanting to try boiled fish per se; it’s about wanting to experience an authentic tradition, which serves as an insurance policy against the possibility of doubts being raised (possibly by oneself) about whether one actually went to Door County. Not went, really— went went.

1 Something about the way this tradition has been marketed in Door County literature has the feel of a “tourist trap.” For starters, it seems awfully expensive for something that is supposedly a tradition actively practiced by locals— especially when the foods involved are inexpensive and cooked in a manner that should be incredibly cheap. Also the fish boil comes up way too frequently in literature about Door County, as if a concerted effort is being made to hype up the fish boil as something really special, a sort of anachronism whose bygone quality defines Door County as a whole. People talk about San Francisco sourdough and New England clam chowder and New Orleans Po’ Boy sandwiches, but despite the historic import of these foods in regional tradition, they aren’t employed as central metaphors in nearly every single piece of literature about these places. And then there’s the highly ritualistic aspect of the fish boil. The fact that it is an event that diners are specifically asked to make reservations for and told to come 25 minutes early to witness is unusual. It transforms a solitary meal into a community event, just another dinner into a highly photograph-able spectacle, one that is be easy for people to showcase to their friends at home. The roaring fire— itself a genuinely quaint symbol of an authentic retreat from modern life— couldn’t but help in this context.

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The Symbolic Value of a Beer

how much meaning is embedded in a single beverage?

Posted 2009-07-31 11:03 in branding, culture, marketing, politics, postmodernism


The so-called “Beer Summit” occurred today. The premise of this meeting between Barack Obama, Henry Louis Gates, and James Crowley— a Cambridge police officer— was the culmination of a lot of recent speculation about latent racist attitudes, profiling, and the state of race relations in America. The event hinged on an incident in which Gates was trying to get back into his house after apparently being locked out, and being challenged by a white police officer for appearing to be breaking-and-entering. Allegations about police making assumptions about black men committing crimes were made and it soon turned into the subject of a national debate.

But Obama, ever the diplomat, invited the parties over to the White House garden for some beers (one each) and a bit of mano-a-mano discussion. A lot could be said about the political nature of this event, but what I’m interested in is what apparently the media made a big fuss about: the beer that each individual was going to choose to drink at this event.

It’s fascinating that a single beer could be so embedded with symbolic meaning. This is the nature of the post-modern world, in which many brands are reservoirs of symbolism and fit so prominently into the public’s schemas about social groups. As I mentioned in a previous post, David Foster Wallace once commented that he’d read books in which a character’s personality could be succinctly conveyed simply by naming the brand of T-shirt the character wore. That’s how much meaning we associate with certain brands. Thus, it was a matter of apparent great symbolic import what beer these gentlemen were having on this momentous occasion.

Gates, a Harvard professor, chose a Samuel Adams Light, while Crowley chose a Blue Moon (with an orange slice). Obama, ever the epicurean (what with his much-ridiculed taste for arugula), chose Bud Light. This invites the question of why, if you were the ostensible leader of the free world, you would ever choose a Bud Light. Maybe I’m more of a beer snob than I realize, but of all the world’s beers I could choose, Bud Light would be somewhat at the bottom of my list. Perhaps I am being a bit presumptuous here, but it seems highly unlikely that a man of Obama’s stature and taste would voluntarily choose a Bud Light if given unrestricted choice.

But of course, we have to think about the symbolic value of his choice. Bud Light is the best-selling beer in America, and has been since 2001; apparently it accounts for a massive 22% of case sales in the United States! It carries with it so many symbolic, populist overtones. It’s what any blue collar American would drink. Not like that elitist, hoity-toity microbrew stuff, and especially not one of those foreign beers that wasn’t brewed on our shores.

According to a Republican strategist quoted in an article from Bloomberg, Obama is “trying to send a message that he’s an average American… [He could] complicate that by making an exotic choice, or an import, or too expensive.” Indeed, imagine what the news sources would say if he drank, say, a Heineken, a Sapporo, or a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. He was already skewered by Fox News’ Sean Hannity for asking for Grey Poupon at a diner several months ago.

There is a rather unexpected complication to Obama’s choice, however. Budweiser was sold to the Belgian company InBev back in July 2008, making Bud Light not quite an American beer. Sure it’s brewed here and it’s a traditionally American brand, but it’s no longer owned by an American company, so perhaps it can’t be viewed as wholly American as say, Coors.* Nevertheless, I think most Americans probably still view Budweiser as a culturally American beer and don’t really know much or care much about the location of the headquarters of the huge international beverage conglomerate that owns it.

Bud Light, viewed strictly on symbolic terms and with the intent of being an uncontroversial choice for a nation who, during the 2004 presidential election was inexplicably obsessed with choosing the candidate who one would most like to have a beer with, was a good selection. It’s a best-seller, has no particular subculture attached to it, and is sold pretty much everywhere. It’s hard to beat that. As Al Ries, an Atlanta-based marketer told Bloomberg, “Leading brands tend to be a very safe choice for a politician because, in a sense, they’re saying to the public, ‘You picked it, not me. I’m just reflecting your choice.’”

Interestingly, little commentary has been made on Crowley’s choice. The police officer was easily the most blue-collar fellow at the table, and chose what is probably the most “elitist” beer (if such a concept can be meaningfully applied) in terms of popular conception. Most people likely have not even heard of Blue Moon as it is the type of beer that is typically served in “uppity” and yuppy-type hangouts, not roadside dive bars. In reality, however, Blue Moon is rather surreptitiously brewed by Coors, though they do not advertise this and do not have the Coors name listed anywhere on any Blue Moon products. The company (rightly) assumes that the Coors name will reduce the brand equity of this macrobrew masquerading as a microbrew.

Gates’ choice was a sensible one; he lives in Cambridge, just outside of Boston, and he chose a beer that is brewed in Boston, perhaps a symbolic nod to his affection for the area despite his recent conflicts.

All in all, somewhat interesting choices made by all three gentlemen. I would, however, have loved to hear what kind of public commentary would have been made had Obama chosen the ultimate in a confounding beer with multiplex meanings: Pabst Blue Ribbon. Is he kowtowing to rednecks? Bikers? Hipsters? Cheapskates? In a perfect world, he would have chosen it, and it would have been a wonderful and puzzling mystery to unravel.

* You could tell that around the time of the sale of Anheuser-Busch to InBev that the company got kind of nervous about how its customers might perceive this traitorous act of selling out a quintessentially American brand to Europeans; they responded by creating and heavily advertising something called Budweiser American Ale, repeating the world “American” many times in the ads to reinforce the idea that this was a American drink.

Further reading:
1. The Bloomberg Article
2. “How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding” by Douglas Holt

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The Business of the Hyperreal

the ubiquity of imaginary places

Posted 2009-04-13 18:18 in branding, epistemology, experiences, hyperreality, postmodernism


At one of the big casinos in Las Vegas, you’ll find an elaborate scene that perfectly captures the beauty of Venice. There, you can sit aboard a slow-moving gondola with your sweetheart, while a mustachioed Italian man quietly ferries you from dock to dock. All the while, the gentle aroma of Ciabatta bread wafts through the air, and the warm sound of a concertina drifts through the background. The entire experience is one that perfectly reconstructs the feel of Venice.

The only thing is, if you went to the actual Venice, you would never have an experience like this. You can ride a boat in the real Venice, but it won’t be romantically quiet, there won’t be the smell of Ciabatta bread, and Rossini won’t be playing. Instead, it would smell like bilge, the ferryman will be hurrying to get you to your destination because he can make more money if he gets more passengers, and the only sound you’ll hear is the sound of water splashing all over your clothes.

Yet, despite this apparent artifice, you can identify this scene as Venice. It’s impossible to mistake it for anything else. This scene in Las Vegas recreates the idyllic, popular conception of Venice, the Venice that resides in our minds. This Venice is a place that does not exist in real life. It is a composite of pieces of our collective consciousness. It’s all the things we’d expect to see, hear, smell, and sense in Venice, but which don’t really coalesce in this way when you’re actually there.

This concept is known as hyperreality. It’s such a strange concept, but it’s one we’re all intimately familiar with in some way, because hyperreality has been sold to us in so many ways, and on a daily basis. Disney World has been described as the ultimate expression of hyperreality— and it’s one of the first vacation spots that many children around the world go to, and it creates many people’s impressions of other countries. Some of our most enduring perceptions about what romantic relationships are ‘supposed’ to be like and the way we’re ‘supposed’ to act in them stem from the way we’ve seen them in movies. The way we think women are supposed to look (including such things as ideal weight and flawless complexions) are rooted in heavily-touched up photos that have little to do with reality, but everything to do with a reconstructed, idealized reality.

The reason I bring all this up is that the other night, I went to a bar that I had never been to before. The moment I walked in, I felt like I had been transported somewhere else. The decor was somewhat anachronous; there were antique-looking green Victorian style chairs arranged around dark, ovular wooden tables, the walls were filled with bottles of obscure beers and liquors I’d never heard of before, the wood-framed bar looked like it was from another era entirely. The ambiance generally reminded me of what I imagined a somewhat upper-crust English pub would be like in the 1950s, where corpulent, monacled gentlemen might tease their handlebar mustaches and puff away at their tobacco pipes while perusing the Sunday Times.

We see places that try to re-create themes from popular consciousness somewhat frequently. Think of T.G.I. Friday’s, a corporate restaurant chain whose walls are covered from top to bottom in weird, rustic nostalgia that manages to both capture the oddest fringes of Americana while presenting it all as a completely normal and commonplace series of images (when was the last time you ate dinner next to a 20ft long wooden swordfish wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball hat— besides the last time you were at T.G.I. Friday’s, that is?). Oddly, this forced aesthetic of post hoc historification and semiotic mythmaking is comforting for many people. But that’s a particularly extreme example; I’ve been to plenty of Mexican restaurants that try to simulate the experience of being in small-town Mexico with the aid of huge murals; townscapes replete with children playing in the street, lifesized buildings painted on the restaurant walls, and pastel-colored senoritas standing on flowered balconies and under large arched doorways.

But something unsettled me about this bar I was at. There was a shaggy green carpet underfoot (which incidentally is not the type of flooring you typically want in a crowded bar), and the place had the musty smell of genuine antiquity. This place, it seemed, really had been around since at least the 1950s (a notion confirmed by the menu).

And then it struck me what had been bothering me. The sum total of my lifetime experience with these sorts of themed pubs had been with re-creations and remodeled versions— never with the real thing. And now, here I was at the real thing! My impression— and expectations— of what a place like this was supposed to be like was based entirely on hyperreal simulacra of it, pieced together from such places as spy movies, books, television shows, and other themed establishments. When you see the “real” version of a hyperreal place, I tend to think that you’re not really prepared for it because it has a way of defying your rather unrealistic expectations of it— which creates the very bizarre problem of something authentic ostensibly lacking authenticity.

If your image of something is based on an idealization of it, how can the real thing ever hold up? An idealization usually means that the gaps are all filled, the blemishes smoothed away, and the diffuse themes that define a place or idea are effectively condensed into a consistent, concrete, and easily digestible series of images; such simulacra allow you to imbibe prevailing themes very quickly, where by contrast the “real thing” typically takes some time for your mind to synthesize into a overarching gestalt.

The implications of this are curious. What does this mean in a world filled with images— manipulated, editorialized, and spread across the globe through various digital channels? These images will form our impressions of the world around us, whereas in the past, our own experiences were what defined our understandings of the world. Will everything we ever see in real life from here on out be a replication of something we’ve seen in a movie first? Which is the real when the fake is our first experience, and hence the first real to us? And what does all this mean to our interpretations and expectations of reality and our interactions with the world and our peers?

And now that I step back a bit and reflect on my experience at the bar, I have to face an unusual epistemological question: how do I know that this place I was at was a “real” bar that was essentially unchanged from the 1950s?

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Authenticity is Hard to Come By

but we like it when we see it

Posted 2009-02-25 07:36 in branding, business, human nature, marketing


A song like the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” would never come out today. Well, at least not in the way we know it. It’s not the charming, perhaps quaintly theme of high schoolish-infatuation that makes it unusual so much as the production. Recorded for the Beach Boys’ Party! album, it features a lot of off-key singing, missed cues, laughter, and an all-round lazy production. Ordinarily, this would be considered a disastrous performance and the master tape for this recording would be locked away in some vault so no one could ever hear it. But instead, it reached #13 on the Billboard charts in 1965 and remains one of the Beach Boys’ most iconic and loved songs.

These days, it’s not uncommon to hear about artists and producers recording and re-recording hundreds upon hundreds of takes to get everything just perfect. But in my opinion, there’s something missing from recordings that are too clean and polished. They might be technically flawless, but they tend to miss something— the human element.

Some of the best drummers in the world don’t keep a perfectly steady beat. A perfectly steady beat can be made by a machine, and you can tell immediately when a machine is doing it— not necessarily by the sounds themselves, but by the mechanical playing style. The human mind can recognize that sort of level of sterility, and we intuitively understand that good drummers swing.

In art as well as business, I believe that people do not, as a whole, respond with giddy approval to perfection that doesn’t seem honest (that is, refined to hide flaws that should be there). And by that, I don’t mean that people want service providers to screw up, or they want their products to be defective. What I mean is that people don’t want things to pretend like they are something that they’re not. While the providers of these products and services often want perfection, and spend a lot of time and money on getting it, ultimately this process is useless if no one can relate to the finished product. Something gets lost in that process of refinement— uniqueness and authenticity.

Maybe people won’t hate you for your sterile product, service, or corporate image. But I think they’d love you more for your quirks. And I’m not talking about fake quirks designed to engender exclamations of how endearingly quirky you are (see: Juno, a movie littered with some of the most forced efforts in quirkiness I have ever seen).

It’s a question of authenticity. Can we believe you are who you are claiming to be? And moreover, is this image that you are projecting something that we actually want to see?



Further reading: All Marketers are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World, by Seth Godin

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Burger King's Confounding and Unconvincing Message

trust the guy who has no idea what he’s talking about

Posted 2008-12-21 18:08 in branding, business, marketing


The geniuses at Burger King’s ad firm have been deeply committed to their long-standing tradition of churning out increasingly edgy and attention-grabbing (read: disturbing and borderline offensive) commercials. The latest in its decades-old string of abominations is the controversial series of commercials it is calling “Whopper Virgins.”

Here’s the basic idea: Let’s take a Big Mac and a Whopper around to isolated communities around the world— communities that are steeped in their local traditions and largely unaffected by trends in globalization— feed them these sandwiches, and see what they prefer.

Many observers were aghast by the company’s use of tribal peoples to hawk fast food; BK’s apparent lack of compunction in traveling to remote areas of places like Tibet, Thailand, and Romania to film natives eating greasy Western-style burgers apparently reeked of exploitation and cultural insensitivity. Gee, who would have thought?

But let’s leave ethics aside for a minute, and think hard about what this ad’s message is trying to tell us: It’s saying that people who have never had a burger before prefer the Whopper. This, apparently, is supposed to make you feel confident that the Whopper is the superior burger. I find this an odd conclusion to draw.

If the Miller Brewing Company told you that they’d served a 21 year old kid who’d never had a drink in his life a Miller High Life and a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, and the kid chose the Miller, you’d probably wonder about their line of reasoning in stating that this shows Miller to be the better beer. In this case, the kid’s choice of Miller as the winner alone calls his judgment into question, but the fact that the kid has no experience in drinking beers should cause you to wonder about his qualifications in making a particularly informed judgment. In fact, you’d probably be a lot more convinced by the judgment of someone who had drunk thousands of beers over his life, including hundreds of different brands. A borderline alcoholic with a good job and a taste for la dolce vita might be a good choice. Why on earth would you trust someone who didn’t know what he was talking about? You’d be more inclined to trust a connoisseur, or at the very least, someone whose tastes resembled your own.

And speaking of people whose tastes are like yours, Burger King is soliciting the culinary opinions of people who whose cultural palates differ wildly from that of typical Westerners. Tibetans, for example relish Yak’s milk, whose smell alone would make most people in the U.S. nauseous. Do you trust their judgment in eating a broiled piece of meat smothered in western condiments like pickles, ketchup, and mayonnaise? Most of the aforementioned ingredients aren’t even available in Tibet. Why would anyone think they’d be good judges of what a Westerner might seek in a sandwich? Imagine if you were asked by a Chinese restaurant to compare the relative merits of their jellyfish entree with one made by the restaurant’s competitor. How confident would you be that you had any qualifications whatsoever to make an informed judgment? And how much credence should be given to your opinion, anyway?

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"We Don't Consider Ourselves a 'Green' Company"

the interesting back story behind America’s most-loved ‘progressive’ grocery chain

Posted 2008-11-12 07:39 in branding, marketing


I have an interesting update on the article I wrote earlier about Trader Joe’s. See the updates at the bottom.

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The Pleasant Green Illusion of Trader Joe's

why one of America’s fastest growing stores is not quite what it appears

Posted 2008-09-02 10:44 in branding, business, business models, consumerism, marketing, postmodernism, semiotics


I recently moved to Madison, WI, and found that my new apartment is just blocks away from Trader Joe’s, the perennial grocery store of choice of a group I will describe as “progressive yuppies.” Don’t get me wrong, I love Trader Joe’s. They have a somewhat interesting— if a bit odd— selection of food, low prices on alternative-lifestyle staples like Morningstar Farms Vegetarian Meats, Hummus, and Dr. Bronner’s Soap, and the staff usually seem engaged and friendly in a way that you rarely see in the bigger chains.

Yet despite these virtues, there’s always been something that I’ve found very curious and fascinating about the store given its primary clientele: they package the hell out of everything. I’m talking about putting often unnecessary plastic bags around nearly all their produce (which is, incidentally, prepackaged and shipped from afar), hard plastic shells around fruits and tomatoes, and things like individually wrapped biscottis inside yet another layer of paper bags.

The produce sections of standard grocery stores like Kroger and Safeway aren’t much better, but you can tell that there’s a lot less waste going on, on the whole. You can buy fruits and vegetables without using a plastic bag at all, but if you choose to use one, very thin plastic bags on a roll are offered. You can stuff your plastic bag with as much salad mix as you want. The bags at Trader Joe’s are much thicker, presumably so that they can ship without incurring damage to the contents of the bag, but they are sealed so that if you want 10oz of salad mix, you’ll be forced to buy two 5oz packages of the stuff.

Now, the interesting thing that I’ve noticed is that if you talk to people about Trader Joe’s, you will see that many if not most of its clientele view the store as being ‘environmentally sound’, espousing the values prioritized by the politically and environmentally progressive consumer, words like: organic, sustainable, socially-conscious, green, fair-trade, healthy, whole-grain, eco-friendly, and so on.

Strangely, as the store is able to capitalize on those concepts, there is little in the direct customer experience that should really suggest any of those things any more than any other grocery store. Not all of Trader Joe’s produce is organic or whole-grain, not all of their coffee is fair-trade, and not all of their eggs and meat are cage-free or free-range. Few customers know anything about what Trader Joe’s has to say about labor rights, politics, or environmental issues, but if you asked, I would bet they’d place them in the top 20% of American companies in all these categories. And yeah, they sell canvas bags, but they still bag your groceries by default in paper bags.

Yet both Kroger and Safeway both have sections dedicated to organic and whole-grain foods. Both also sell fair-trade coffee and free-range eggs and meat. Nobody considers those companies progressive in any way.

So what exactly is going on here? Why does Trader Joe’s get a free pass on environmental concerns and get to capitalize on all the standard jargon of the socially-minded left while the other guys are left to be viewed as the mainstream guys who don’t really give a damn about broader social concerns?

Part of it, I think, is that Trader Joe’s is a much smaller store than Kroger and Safeway. It’s a mere fraction of the size by volume, but they carry a similar variety of foods but certainly not the diversity of brands. And for that matter, many of the brands they do carry are not to be found in other grocery stores. They don’t, for example, carry Kraft Macaroni and Cheese or Tropicana Orange Juice. Sometimes such products are on their own private label brand (whose name changes depending on what product it is; their Mexican products are stamped with “Trader Jose” and Italian products have the ridiculous name “Trader Giotto’s” on them). They also carry an unusually large percentage of imported or apparently exotic goods. These don’t by themselves convey the aforementioned concepts, but these features do set them apart in the minds of the consumers, which is important.

Another part of it, while subtle, is the décor. Contrast the feeling you get while walking in the close, friendly quarters of the Trader Joe’s store with one you get when walking the cold, labyrinthine halls of Kroger. Contrast the warm wood paneling and comparatively low ceilings of Trader Joe’s with the stony white floors and high ceilings of Safeway. Notice the prevalence of baskets in the Trader Joe’s store, and the gargantuan supermarket carts elsewhere.

Also, and this is important, notice the clientele. There is a very obvious difference in who the typical shopper in each of these stores is. It’s impossible to tell without some form of surveying, but I would be extremely surprised if the average Trader Joe’s shopper wasn’t more educated, of a higher socio-economic status, with a higher disposable income, and a more liberal bent. But is it the store’s ostensibly progressive values that attracts this clientele, or does the store get its progressive image from the people who shop there? Certainly, there’s a feedback loop happening here, but it’s also true that there wouldn’t be such an attraction to these sorts of people without some compelling cause.

One possible cause could be that progressives are attracted to each other and teem into places where there are people like themselves, even in the absence of any gastronomical pretense. Possible, but I don’t find it very likely to be the root cause in the case of Trader Joe’s; after all, why would this trend begin in the first place? A more convincing reason for the progressive psychographic’s descent onto this store is its decidedly eclectic selection of food, where exotic foods like shitake mushrooms and shelled edamame are placed fashionably next to staples like baby carrots, and exotic Hollandic stroopwaffels oh-so-nonchalantly next to chocolate chip cookies. This post-modern melting pot of food is likely the central point of resonance at Trader Joe’s. After all, if we are to cull the messages from all the progressive radio stations, left-wing talking points, bumper stickers, and Bay Area street fairs, it is this very quality of “diversity” that presents itself as some kind guiding principle of progressive thought and which shapes the idealistic visions of progressive society. It is in this world that “diversity” in itself is considered a virtue, even in the absence of any dialectic.

Of course, diversity of foodstuffs is one thing, but where does the image of social consciousness come from? The household cleaners aisle, which is right next to where you’d buy “natural” toothpaste (do Poloxamer 335 and Propylene Glycol really count as natural?), doesn’t feature the usual allotment of chemicals like Ajax and Windex, but instead has products like all-purpose ‘natural’ orange cleaner made from degreasing compounds apparently found in citrus fruits, and mouthwashes with tell-tale signs of products that are trying to market themselves as ‘natural,’ muted brownish packages.

And speaking of muted packaging, it just might be that as a whole, Trader Joe’s packaging is of a more muted health-food store color than their mainstream rivals. With the notable exception of the produce section where colors like brown and white are not typically indicators of quality, the remainder of the store makes use of these earth tones in a manner not consistent of mainstream stores, where bright colors and fluorescence are used in packaging the same way that circus carnies shout and prod passers-by with their staccato brayings.

Trader Joe’s expertly weaves a tapestry that references all the signals that progressives look for and can relate to in their political identity, but much of the “follow-through” is only implied. But the store has called out so many of these reference points, that it creates the illusion that it’s all there—an illusion that many of the store’s patrons seem to appreciate as much as if it really were.

UPDATE (11/12/08):
I had an interesting encounter the other day as I was shopping in Trader Joe’s. In the seafood section, my girlfriend and I noticed that they were selling orange roughy. This particular fish is one that is listed as endangered, as it takes nearly 30 years for it to reach maturity— far longer than most commercial fish— and it has a long lifespan as well, often living up to 150 years. With the U.S. fishing industry hauling in about 19 million tons of the fish a year, and many of those fish being more than a hundred years old, it is not an exaggeration to say that this fish may be extinct within our lifetime.

Regardless, we were perturbed by the presence of this fish at this ostensibly progressive grocery store, and decided to talk to the management about why they are selling this endangered fish— at $6.99 a pound, no less. The manager was quite up front about it. “We don’t consider ourselves a ‘green’ company,” he said, obviously a little tired of once again having to answer to the legions of progressives that shop at Trader Joe’s, and explain why they stock items perceived as being unsustainable or hostile to liberal consumption ideologies. He continued: “We let our customers vote with their dollars about what we put on our shelves, and though I understand your concerns, we sell a LOT of orange roughy.” He tilted his head towards the sky when he said ‘lot.’

So there’s the confirmation. The idea that Trader Joe’s is a somehow progressive or green company is a total myth created by the brand’s phenomenal marketing— which is largely based on word-of-mouth.

See also: my followup to the discussion on endangered fish at Trader Joe’s.

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When in Doubt...

the process of blind belief

Posted 2008-08-22 13:25 in branding, business, consumerism, experiences, human nature, marketing


Here’s an experiment that I’ve personally conducted dozens of times, and it never ceases to give me a brief moment of insane pleasure. Next time you’re standing at a crosswalk and there’s traffic coming, just take a step into the street. Chances are, even if there are cars zooming by at a hundred miles an hour, all the other people at the crosswalk will follow you, lemming-like, to their deaths. Of course, the proper thing to do is to stop before anyone dies, but my point is that many people will instinctively follow your lead no matter how foolish you are. Sometimes this is because they choose to abide by the heuristic that someone who confidently proceeds couldn’t possibly be trying to kill himself, and therefore they are being effectively led and protected by this the decisions of this “leader.” Sometimes it’s because they were just too ignorant to notice the conditions of the road themselves. And sometimes it’s because they willfully discard any evidence of danger that may have presented itself because they doubt the veracity of their own thoughts.

This kind of thing happens all the time.

Human beings are creatures that doubt themselves a lot, and as a result they are prone to blindly following others. That’s why it seems like persons of mediocre intelligence can market their horrible ideas so effectively with their presence and apparent conviction, while people with really good ideas but poor presentation can’t get anyone to listen to them. Politics is an excellent example of this.

A politician who constantly repeats his assertions, even in the presence of strongly contradictory empirical evidence, can manufacture ‘truth.’

Here’s a phrase that might sound familiar:

Iraq possesses of weapons of mass destruction.

Politics aside, we now know this assertion to be false. Nevertheless polls still show that a statistically staggering number of Americans still believe that an invasion of Iraq was necessary. Why? Is it because these people have not read the news? No, it’s because the assertion made by the Bush administration recreated reality in such a way that it effectively supplanted and destroyed any evidence that violated its argument. Any incoming facts that may have called into question the assertion were discarded.

A recent roast of comedian Bob Saget featured a great routine by Gilbert Gottfried in which he repeats a phrase about how Bob Saget “raped and killed a girl in 1990” about 4 times with an increasingly dramatic air. Despite the fact that, in the context of the full sentences, Gottfried is actually saying that this incident didn’t happen at all, this shocking phrase is the one that really makes its mark on you.

Though this was in the context of a joke, it’s not unthinkable that such vivid repetitions of phrases actually hurt people in real life. People are routinely tarred with accusations of being rapists and murderers in the absence of evidence or despite their innocence, and are unable to revert to their former selves in the eyes of others. They will always be psychopaths to those who learned of them in a context that branded them with those epithets through infinite repetition.

An age-old adage from the advertising industry suggested that if you can’t make an argument through logic, use song. That’s one method, but if you ask me, the best way to manufacture truth is to just repeat something ad nauseum. The public’s internal BS detector will eventually shut off because they reach a point where their own capacity to question ceases in the face of nagging self-doubt. Tragic and sad, but alas, true.

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Dirt-Digging When Hiring Employees: Why You Shouldn't Do It

Unrealistic expectations, their limitations, and the dangers they promise

Posted 2008-07-28 08:12 in branding, business, economics, experiences, human nature, human resources, marketing, social networking


The New Reality
I wonder if there are going to be any viable candidates for anything in the future. The accessibility of information on the internet as well as the general ease for one to post information to it, especially at a young age, has led few curious and tech-savvy individuals from the internet generation to have clean, unsearchable online slates. If you’ve observed the behavior of 8-25 year olds recently, I think you will make the reasonable assumption that people of this age group comprise the lion’s share of Facebook’s 36 million users, and MySpace’s 73 million users, and have made their mark online in many other arenas.

And what kind of comments are these people posting on the internet, that would reassure potential employers of this person’s quality? Here’s one from a person I’ll call Ashley Pinsky, 15, from MySpace.

OMG i was so fukced up last nite lol!!!

Granted, this is an extreme example, but not an uncommon one. That offhand comment will probably prevent Ms. Pinsky from ever becoming president. And the nature of the internet is such that this comment may not be easy to find in the future, but it’s never going away. Someone who wanted to find dirt on Ashley Pinsky will find that comment 35 years later, no doubt. It’s not like it was in the good old days, where your exploits and comments could be geographically contained, or confined to the memory of a couple people who overheard your off-color joke in the privacy of your living room. We live in a world of YouTube, digital cameras, hidden recorders, live microphones, and ill-considered internet confessions.



The Problem with Vividness
But in the wise and out-of-context words of Marge Simpson, as long as everyone is videotaping everyone else, justice will be served. Right? Right?

Wrong.

One of the big concerns we should have is our tendency towards misleading vividness. The following is an example, and one that is intended intended as a convenient analogy, not a political screed.

Think about the difference between the respective presidential bids of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, in particular the controversies. We only criticized George Bush for his long history of alcohol abuse and coke-snorting, but we skewered Barack Obama for attending a church that appeared to deliver hateful sermons. Aside from the respective gravity of these apparent violations of character (the weight of them essentially created by the media), there’s one thing that separates them significantly: one was documented on camera and the other was not. We could watch Jeremiah Wright on endless loop, in vivid detail, cementing our impressions of his “hateful” church and its link to Obama.

The Wright tape was so visceral and immediate that it was hard for it to not make an impression somehow— even though it literally represented 2 minutes of the church’s decades-long history, and there was no further proof of similar activity. But all we heard about Bush’s years, possibly decades of hard partying and drug abuse was that he was reputed to be a former cokehead and alcoholic. We had didn’t have 2 minutes of videotape showing Bush snorting lines or stumbling around drunk or emotionally damaging his loved ones. For that, Bush didn’t have to own up to anything, while Obama had to do a lot of dancing around. Due to the vividness, the Wright issue seemed much more real and immediate than the other, so we pressed it much more, and it played a much larger role in our mental construction of Obama’s character.1

My point is not to get into whether these controversies themselves are important to examine in a presidential candidate; instead, I want to explore the economics of hiring techniques which involve the use of vividness and “dirt-digging” to establish character, and the lack of foresight that companies and our electorate may be unwittingly entering into by engaging in such practices that forcibly marry vividness with significance.



No One is Who They Appear to Be at Any Given Time
Our immediate instinct is to say when we find dirt on someone online, or in photographs, or in videos that we use these occurrences as evidence, testimonials to someone’s personality. Did you see that photo of him drunk at a bar? He’s a loose cannon. We can’t possibly trust him with our industrial equipment, or have our clients find out that (outside of work) he behaves in an unprofessional manner.

The problem is that we ascribe too much meaning to these words and images when they come from an unprofessional environment. First of all, it should not come to a surprise to anyone that people behave unprofessionally when they’re not at work. To expect that they don’t is an unrealistic and fairly ridiculous expectation that, when you think about it, demands far too much of someone who is only human. People are not their jobs. They behave themselves at work because they have to. At home and in their leisure time, they feel like they should be able to let loose and be themselves. After all, why should they be evaluated on behavior that does not directly and demonstrably affect the quality of their work?2

This leads me to wonder whether our apparent demands for a sparkling personal history is the result of us actually wanting to hire “clean” individuals for reasons of productivity or wanting to hire individuals who can at least appear clean so as to not horrify outsiders. The difference is that the latter acknowledges the imperfection of humans and settles for someone who can keep his indiscretions private, while the other wants us to be held to unmanageably high standards all the time.

In fact, I doubt seriously that there are completely clean people in this country, or the world. It’s just that much of our ‘dirty’ behavior occurs without documentation. I’m sure that if we all were being filmed all the time for everyone to see, there would be no one out there without some unsavory event connected to their name. If it wasn’t some frowned-upon activity like drug or alcohol use, it would be something else like violence, sexual indiscretion, off-color conversations and asides, shady business dealings, rude behavior, subtle racism, or anger management issues. And it’s not like these people are bad people; we’re talking about isolated moments that would appear damning if documented and replayed— moments that actually permeate all of our lives constantly.

Indeed, what man or woman would not appear foolish, controversial, unreasonable, or perverted if monitored 24/7 and edited to exaggerate the most sensational segments of his day (which is essentially what so-called HR background checks do)? Producers of reality television shows know this. They know how to work Final Cut Pro to make a normal girl seem like a raving bitch, a decent guy into an aggressive, misogynistic hothead, and a neurotic, socially-maladjusted lunatic into Simon Cowell.

Presidential candidates aren’t allowed the normal lapses of speech or judgment that the rest of us are afforded because everything they say is constantly being deconstructed by pundits and played 300 times in succession on news networks, giving every offhand comment a hyperreal, set-in-stone weight that the original probably didn’t have. Just imagine how you or someone you love might come off if every act or word uttered were subjected to the laws of television news overanalysis— every moment of frustration, giddy delight, or agitation there for the world to judge you with. People who have never met you are now basing their perceptions of you on a two second loop of you getting irate at the guy who cut you off on the highway, and it’s been playing all day and night, making you look increasingly psychotic with every repeat. It’s exactly what happened with Michael Jackson and Britney Spears and countless other celebrities, and it unsurprisingly drove them both to madness. It would most likely happen to you too.

Underlying this fundamentally unfair depiction of you is that while you may have lost your cool for that two seconds, you don’t get credit for the nearly 18 hours of collected calm that you exhibited. Nobody’s watching that part. Therefore, you are branded with the scarlet letter of being the psycho who flipped out when someone cut him off.



How HR’s Enthusiasm for Dirt-Digging is Going to Come Back to Bite It
So far, my point in describing all this is not to excuse occasional idiocy, bad judgment, or the appearance of foolishness, out-of-control behavior, or low ethical standards so much as to universalize it. Knowing that our past mistakes are out there and none of us are truly free from them, the only possible outcome from gross and commonplace hiring practices that seek to find our documented dirt is that candidates who are more undocumented (and therefore more unknown) than their competition are the ones who are more likely to get the job. How? Let’s look at these two potential candidates of equal qualification:

Mike — Online research finds that he admits to drinking and womanizing; is prone to occasional off-color jokes; was once arrested for indecent exposure 8 years ago.

Jeff — online research finds absolutely no information, damaging or otherwise.

In the split second you have to make this hiring decision, the chances are you want to hire Jeff. But consider this unsettling truth for a moment: After looking over their backgrounds, you feel more comfortable with the guy you know less about. In fact, it is the absence of information about Jeff that makes you feel unjustifiably secure about hiring him. You don’t know Jeff’s dirt, and therefore you mentally assume there is none. But as science teaches us, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The idea that ‘Jeff must be clean because we did not find any dirt on him’ is clearly false, but it does not stop our conscious mind from elevating him in comparison to Mike.

The problem is, you can almost never be sure whether that decision is justified or not because you simply do not have the information you need to make a legitimate comparison. As it turns out, Jeff might be a) a serial murderer that makes Mike seem like a great guy in comparison, b) an alcoholic with strikes against him just as bad as Mike, or c) a wonderful, clean-cut young man. You simply do not know which, and you continue to base your hiring practices on prejudices built on vividness: You read that Mike got arrested once and drinks a lot, so you now prefer Jeff.

This tendency should bother you; you are favoring someone who has only earned preferential status by information omission rather than information addition. Your lack of knowledge about this individual, who you have chosen after making a faulty comparison with another candidate whose vivid background rubs you the wrong way, might very well result in a poor hiring match for your company, or even a very damaging personality getting the job.

All of which doesn’t mean a lick of difference to you if the only reason you are screening for dirt is to keep up your company’s appearance with outsiders, which in this context, makes your hiring focus seem awfully misguided. Maybe I’m going out on a limb here, but I doubt outsiders give a damn about your employees unless they are dealing with them directly, which again comes back to the question of why you should care about anything your employee does as long as it doesn’t affect his work.



If I Shouldn’t Screen for Dirt, How the Heck Should I Be Hiring?
Hiring someone is a big decision. It can cost a large company between $80,000 to $1,000,000 in training and loss of productivity to bring in new people. It’s not easy. Yet, typical HR departments don’t invest much time or energy in hiring, and tend to do things in ways that are easy rather than effective. Really what they they need is something to judge character on. Ideally, they’d have all the same quantity and quality information about everyone so they could make accurate comparisons. But they don’t. Instead, they look at your resume, ask you some dumb questions, maybe call a couple references, and then search for dirt on you. This automatically— and unfairly— favors people who script their interview responses and who are either careful to hide their dirt, who haven’t gotten caught, or who are lucky enough to not have been documented. This is a very dangerous trend in hiring.

I think that the ideal, but definitely not the most convenient, means of hiring should involve the following:



1. Of course, this wasn’t the only issue that separated the two. There were obvious divisions of racism, classism, and religious fears as well.

2. This is not to imply that we should allow bad behavior at work; order obviously needs to be maintained in a professional environment. It’s just that we need to accept that for most people, there’s a division between work and home, and one that hardly anyone wants bridged. After all, as I mentioned in a previous post, we are different people depending on our environment. Our receptivity to different stimuli differs in different places, which is why we don’t feel compelled to drink at work, but that same beer seems enormously inviting the second we step out the door.

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The Ultimate Gen-Y Cultural Touchstone Contest

“What binds us is what we stand witness to” (reprise)

Posted 2008-07-23 04:27 in branding, experiences, marketing, unanswered questions


Let’s try something different for a minute. You are among 10 contestants competing against each other in a game for a prize of $1,000,000. The object of the game is for each of you to choose a single cultural touchstone— a book, movie, song, event, etc. (like for example: Harry Potter, Jurassic Park, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, or Woodstock) to be revealed to a group of 100 Gen-Y’ers (born 1976-1990), who are then asked to provide more details about your choice (explain the plot, hum the tune, describe it, etc.). The contestant with the most recognized touchstone wins.

What do you choose? Post your choice in the comments section (but don’t look at mine first!).

My choice (highlight the black spoiler box to see):
the theme song from Super Mario Brothers (Level 1-1)

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