Sixty years ago, Henry Kaiser painted a slogan that’s been quoted in innumerable marketing texts on his fleet of cement trucks - “Find a need and fill it”. All us new product guys live by Henry’s creed. If it doesn’t fill a real need, it won’t last in the competitive arena of a retail store.

Some of us are better at finding an important unfilled need than others. Of all the new product guys on planet Earth, probably the best is Steve Jobs.

Consider the iPad.

For decades, computer marketers have considered most consumers as ignorant halfwits who find computers “too hard”, and thus won’t buy one or won’t learn to use one they’ve bought beyond email and web surfing for racy snaps of Anna Kournikova.

Blessed with an intuitive interface that anyone with fingers can operate, the iPhone blew through the smart phone market like Sherman marching through Georgia

The iPad implements the iPhone OS on a more powerful CPU and a larger touchscreen.

Out there in plain sight for all of us to see (but only Steve Jobs to recognize and exploit with a new product) was the fact that most consumers don’t want to figure out how to format a website, install a printer driver, upload files, jazz up presentations with animated slides, deal with spyware, or navigate arcane word processor menus.

Most consumers want to sell a house, read a newspaper, make a restaurant reservation, display a medical record, watch a movie, organize a party, pay a bill, see a video of the kids, send a message to a friend, and maybe sneak an occasional peek at Ms. Kournikova.

That the iPad does all of this with the simple, intuitive iPhone interface makes computer dinosaurs like Adobe and Microsoft whine (“no Flash graphics, no background processing”, etc.) and whimper in fear.

Lack of obscure features like background processing and Flash graphics won’t deter the up-to-now excluded majority of consumers from choosing a device that connects them to the entertaining and useful electronic nervous system of the planet - and is closer a toaster than a computer in operational complexity.

Bravo Steve!!

For a more sophisticated exposition of this idea, read Future Shock at:

http://speirs.org/

So you’re gonna launch FiberPuffs to health-conscious moms. A breakthrough breakfast cereal in kid-friendly flavors - Maniac Mango and Kinky Kiwi. Tested well - the research guys love your top-box numbers.

The agency proposes a tv blitz - $12 million over 3 months - a big enough share-of-voice to insure awareness, recognition, and comprehension among gatekeeper moms and their little darlings. Good strategy? Not in 2010.

Somebody (maybe the New York Times) recently calculated that there’s more information in a week’s NYTimes than the average person would have encountered in a lifetime 100 years ago. Someone else (probably Google) estimates are an average of 1.1 billion searches a day on Google in the first weeks of 2010.

Share-of-voice? No matter how you spend it, your $12 million disappears into our information-dense environment like a box of FiberPuffs poured into the ocean.

Fundamentally, NameLab is a new products business. Thus we get to see a fair number of plans and watch a fair number of new product launches. In between, we talk among ourselves about what works, what doesn’t work, and why.

We don’t propose that old-style media are terminally irrelevant. Or (gasp!) that new product launches are impossible against the tsunami of information the average consumer is engulfed by. (No new products equals no product name projects - which equals no room service dinners in New York, Dallas or Cincinnati.)

We do predict a resurgence of P.O.P. That’s right, Point-Of-Purchase! Maybe not the cardboard displays and motorized hopping bunnies of 50 years ago. But rather than trying to be heard in the chaotic communications maelstrom of today, setting up in the breakfast cereal aisle makes a great deal of sense. Hmmmm - that FiberPuff Bunny might be just the thing…

As consumers’ willingness to pay a premium for a preferred brand or flavor or product feature decreases in response to hard times, the number of brands and varieties on supermarket shelves is contracting.

A manufacturers’ decision to pull a brand is driven by the fact that each brand and SKU adds production, inventory, distribution, and marketing costs to the entire product family.

And, of course, Darwinian retailers have always weeded out weakening sellers.

Must a company that has invested in brands and varieties in expectation of future profits simply abandon the goodwill (consumers’ willingness to buy what’s inside the box because of expectations triggered by what’s on the outside of the box) its hard dollars have bought?

Not necessarily.

It may be possible to merge brands or combine varieties within a brand, adding some-to-many buyers of one to the existing consumers of the other.

Careful identity tactics and implementation strategy based on insights into how and why a brand lives in its retail context can preserve some of that invested capital in larger sales volume for the surviving brand or varieties.

For the company, the consumer, and (some would argue) our resources-depleted world, using the current down cycle to simplify your offerings by merging brands and varieties seems worth serious consideration.

We’re not jumping on the Tiger-Woods-is-a-bad-guy bandwagon. Tiger didn’t shoot anyone, snort coke, steal his aged mother’s retirement fund, or sponsor dog fights.

Handsome, successful, and famous - i.e. with all the opportunity in the world - he had sex with women outside his marriage. Something like half of American husbands occasionally do that, and in Tiger’s shoes we suspect that the other half would be sorely tempted.

In the parlance of agent-scripted apologies, Tiger “made mistakes” - but in our opinion, the more costly mistake is depending on any celebrity endorsement to promote your brand of packaged goods or services.

Endorsements are a creatively simple, easy-to-sell-to-the-client substitute for the more difficult task of engagingly and effectively conveying quality, performance, or features.

But does the fact that Tiger recommends a Gillette razor convince many consumers that it’s sharper or more durable? Are consumers glued to their tv sets because Tiger Woods is shaving?

In the early days of advertising, interest in a celebrity was reason to pay attention to the ad. Dinah Shore’s voice got Americans to listen to Chevrolet radio spots. But in these media-saturated times, it is absurd to think that consumers pay attention because a celebrity is in the ad.

On the other hand, will Tiger’s dalliances materially diminish a corporate executive’s expectations of Accenture’s consulting efficiency? Probably not.

But like politicians and preachers, corporations want primly proper public images. So Accenture divorced Tiger faster than Alpo would have canned Michael Vick had he been their spokesman.

Embarrassing? Sure it is. But the real problem with endorsement marketing is that it’s a poor substitute for the hard work of research and creative execution that produces genuinely effective advertising.

Remember the good old days when tv networks and local stations limited commercials to 2 minutes per half hour. You watched the program. You watched the commercial that paid for it. Seemed fair.

Remember the bad old days after that? Broadcasters jammed as many commercials as they could sell into each hour with no regard for the quality of the viewing experience.

In response, our TV remotes clicked through the spectrum. Not great, but better than putting up with yammering pitchmen. VCR’s taped sports events and program episodes so we could fast-forward through the commercials.

Sure programming the VCR was work, but we consumers slogged through it because excessive advertising had destroyed the entertainment value of tv.

And then came TiVo, the device that freed Americans from the cacophony of tv advertising.

Which brings us to the internet. Just like the greedy, short-sighted broadcasters of yesteryear, ad-supported websites have crammed pop-ups, rollovers, banners, and track-throughs (an annoying new ad format) into every page view.

The text we’re trying to read wanders in thin rivers and awkward blotches down the page. Newspaper sites are particularly egregious…but everybody else is right behind.

Wretched excess has led to another breakthrough ad-killer. Thanks to David Pogue, the New York Times Technology Editor who named it “the single best tech idea of 2009”, we discovered Readability.

It’s a simple applet you add to your bookmarks toolbar. In an instant, it removes all ads, presenting a clean, clear, pleasing page view customized to your eyes and tastes. It’s free at: Readability - An Arc90 Lab Experiment

Here’s an excerpt from Mr. Pogue’s piece and a link to the entire article:

The single best tech idea of 2009, the real life-changer, has got to be Readability, a free button for your browser toolbar from lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/.

When you click it, Readability eliminates everything from the Web page you’re viewing except article text and photos. No ads, blinking, links, banners, promos or anything else.

You wind up with a simple, magazine-like layout, presented in a beautiful font and size (your choice) against a white or off-white background (your choice).

You occasionally run into a Web page that Readability doesn’t handle right — no big deal, just refresh the page to see the original. But most of the time, Readability makes the world online a calmer, cleaner, more beautiful place.

State of the Art - The 5th Annual Pogie Awards for the Year’s Best Tech Ideas - NYTimes.com

If you’re selling services like insurance, car rentals or muffler repair, your corporate name is a critical element of business identity - the “trustworthy source” from whence those services flow and the implied executive desk where “the buck stops.”

If you’re selling packaged goods, your corporate name is more important to you (as the brand name of your employer’s securities it affects the value of your options grant) than to your customer.

There are exceptions, of course. Exxon is a 10-mile high laser-lit obelisk of trust and quality in gasoline. By historical dedication to pickles, H.J. Heinz is a valuable brand name of vinegary delights.

But when the guys on the top floor suggest adding “Concatenated Products Inc.” to the front of your toiletries product labels, they’re not intending to sell more cologne - they might hope the added exposure will jack the price of the stock or, more likely, they don’t have a clue about branding, packaging or how to find the men’s room on the third floor.

Other aspects of corporate names are discussed in this well-reasoned article from the business pages of New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/business/29proto.html?_r=1&src=twr

Since it appeared in 2006, we’ve admired the name of the mobile phone ad distribution company Admob.

The word embeds the company’s concept (mobile phone advertising) and echoes a whimsical social use of mobile phones, flashmob.

Conceived in 2003 by Bill Wasik of Harper’s Magazine, a flashmob is a group of people assembled for a few minutes at a public place (the first flashmob was at Macy’s ninth floor rug department); sometimes in odd costume (everybody wears a red beret); sometimes behaving oddly (everybody chants a verse in Icelandic); sometimes just there, mute and unmoving.

Many more onliners know about flashmobs than have actually taken part in one, but the word and the idea are widely comprehended and generally admired.

So, when Admob appeared, we were mightily impressed with the name. It’s in the news now (late in 2009) because Google has just bought Admob for $750 million.

The company’s technology is probably great, and young consumers already conduct many of their e-transactions on iPhones and the like. But at NameLab, we like to think that the great name added to the price Google was willing to pay.

Theodor Seuss Geisel was an impressive man - intellectual, political activist, author.

Returning from Oxford University to New York with a young wife in 1927, he learned advertising and marketing on Madison Avenue, writing copy and slogans (Quick Henry, the Flit!) for clients like GE and Standard Oil.

As Dr. Seuss, he wrote children’s books that displayed a remarkable grasp of the Siamese twins of identity marketing, language and creativity.

Realizing that children are entranced by language, his books featured echoic titles like The Cat In The Hat and Horton Hears A Who along with memorably neologistic characters like The Grinch and The Lorax.

Every name development company’s library ought to include a full set of Dr. Seuss’s books.

And every marketing textbook should feature a chapter on Geisel’s masterpiece The Lorax, a character he created to defend Truffola Trees and the fanciful creatures who live in them.

A greedy manufacturer is cutting the trees to feed a factory to turn them into a consumer product called Thneeds until, when the last tree is cut down, his business collapses - leaving a disintegrating factory, smog, and barren ground where the forest once flourished.

The Lorax was published in 1971.

1971!

If only we’d listened…

Freebies must be an effective tactic to lure and motivate shoppers in these difficult times. At our local retailers, it seems like every second aisle features a free sample table.

A stroll through Whole Foods provides a nice light lunch.

And it’s not just supermarkets. At a local mall, a cookware store hands out little cups of shave ice; a toy store gives balloons to little consumers; a large drugstore has 5 or 6 sample sites dispensing cosmetics, packets of dishwasher soap, and two competing brands of coffee.

This seems to be a newly substantial retailing trend that brand managers have to consider. Because the cost of such sampling (labor and product) comes out of the brand’s marketing coffers, there’s less money left for advertising.

Good idea (if they try it, they’ll buy it)?

Bad idea (cheapens the brand, reduces media budget)?

It’s unclear to us, but it’s happening.

A company called Debranded Home offers consumers the option of “de-branding” household products - replacing the brand labels with white-on-clear vinyl labels that say shampoo, hand soap, catsup and so forth.

It’s an interesting and sophisticated idea.

Because the squeeze bottle, sprayer, pump, or other handy package is a large part of what makes the branded product desirable, why not remove the Neutrogena label and refill with generic hand lotion?

Economical? Sure it is, but there’s more to it than that.

Many of today’s consumers, seeking simpler products, may prefer the aesthetics of quietly informative labels rather than bright, aggressive brand graphics on a bathroom shelf.

Something to think about when reviewing those red, green and orange embossed foil labels for your new home products line…

De-branding labels are sold at the NotCot, website - a goldmine of odd and/or avant-garde consumer products:

http://www.notcot.org/