Usually, when NameLab coins a word, we’re paid by a client. This one’s on us.

We coined sociogenetics in a discussion about a packaged goods project we worked on several years ago. The brand guys and their marketing bosses just loved the product’s “better taste” and “sophisticated texture”.

The name was pretty good too (pride of authorship here) and ditto the package graphics (by a firm we admire). But it never got the “I’d buy it more than once” research numbers to make it to the shelves.

Maybe it failed because of human genetic variation.

For several thousand years, most ancestors of American consumers descended from a system where a large number of peasants labored long and hard to feed themselves, under the governance of a few families, warlords, tribal leaders and such - who lived a softer life by taxing the peasants’ meager production.

To quote the 17^th Century philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s description of the British working class in The Leviathan, “The life of a man, is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

We’re not all descended from the Brits, but in recent millennia, most societies consisted of many poor laborers and a few rich stiffs.

What does all this have to do with packaged goods?

For the hardworking poor, living on cabbage and root vegetables most of the year, a refined palate didn’t contribute much to survival and reproduction. (On the good side, because weaker peasants were weeded out by their harsh lifestyle, their descendants were hardier than the spawn of the rich.)

Over generations of breeding within their own social starta, the peasants got hardier (weak stock died off before reproducing) and the upper classes refined such qualities as intelligence and sensory abilities.

In the case of the new product that failed, we suspect that the sociogenetic inheritance of brand managers and marketing execs tends toward a more refined palate than the majority of American consumers (most of us, after all, descend from peasants who landed on our shores in search of better lives).

Taste, smell, and other sensory perceptions may thus materially differ between brand managers and the consumers they develop new products for. It’s just a theory. But (being name guys) we’ll glow with pride when the first scholarly article on Sociogenetics In Marketing hits the research journals.

What is money?

A case can be made for such definitions as: a medium of exchange; a unit of accounting; a convenient container of value; and, to a teenager of our acquaintance, “fun coupons”.

The evolutionary waypoints of money include shells in tribal cultures at least 5,000 years ago to specie (stamped coins) in Anatolia 2,500 years ago; currency (paper money) in China 1,500 years ago; private credit cards used in specific merchant transactions in 19^th century Europe; public credit cards first issued by Flatbush National Bank for use at many Brooklyn stores in 1946; and debit cards (emerged in several forms worldwide in the 1980s).

That evolution accelerated in the current decade of computers, mobile phones, and pocket electronic devices like the smartcard.

In the past 20 years, conventional banks have devolved from impressive buildings with formidable vaults to vestigial “money store” branches supporting widely distributed ATM networks.

In 2010, many young adults no longer see money as “cash” or even “plastic”. To a generation that interacts with the world via computers and mobile phones, money is electrons.

Money has been electrons for governments and banks and brokerages for 20 years. Each week’s $10 billion of new U.S. debt isn’t printed by clanking presses - it’s created, distributed, and employed as electronic transactions.

Because young consumers are parsecs ahead of the old guys who run governments and banks and brokerages, it’s no surprise that they’ve leapt from cash and plastic to electrons. Retail checkout, gas pumping and vending machine purchases via mobile phone are the fastest growing type (probably the only growing type) of consumer transaction worldwide.

Who wins? With 200 million users and operations in 190 markets, PayPal is the emperor of electrons.

Legacy transaction companies like Visa, MasterCard, Amex and big banks will be left in the dust.

A small company with a compelling new idea may yet dethrone them, but at this point, PayPall looks a lot like Google and Amazon - a first-mover economic juggernaut.

Social network sites are interbreeding and evolving so fast that it’s hard to keep track of what’s happening today, much less (as an efficient marketer must) be aware of what that world will look like in 6 months.

Here at NameLab we keep up via the Social Media Blog at thenextweb.com. Primarily directed at industry insiders and venture investors, the blog is not overly technical and is often highly entertaining (the current generation of social media startups crackles with intelligence and wit).

We follow it to keep track of how the technorati see the social media world today and how everyone else will see it tomorrow. Here’s the link:

TNW Social Media. Part of The Next Web Network.

As a symbolic identity intended to cause a specific consumer behavior, a holiday is a brand.

Nobody ever accused our government of being skilled at marketing (which in our opinion is as it should be), but its lack of consumer savvy is diminishing the motivational effect of holidays in America.

As we all know, a brand is made real by constancy. When you slap New & Improved on a label, you make sure that the package remains clearly recognizable as “the same shampoo I bought last time”.

The government’s brand management committee doesn’t get that idea.

Combining Lincoln’s Birthday (Feb 12^th) and Washington’s Birthday (Feb 22^nd) into Presidents Day (3^rd Monday in February) made economic sense (3-day weekends encourage consumption). But George and Abe were real people whose relevance every American learns in elementary school.

“Presidents” is an abstraction and in recent years not one to be admired for intelligent generalship like George or honesty like Abe. So Presidents Day is no longer a celebration of our history, it’s a 3-day weekend.

Labor Day is similarly devalued. For most Americans it no longer has nothing to do with the long, hard fight for a 40-hour work week and a safe, humane workplace. It’s a 3-day weekend.

Thanksgiving is a 4-day weekend devoted to overeating and tv sports.

Which brings us to Valentines Day. Because the overall concept of “a holiday” has been devalued, this treasured (by retailers) holiday gifting occasion has lost steam among consumers.

Not that sex has gone out of fashion, but the concept of a specific day to celebrate anything at all has been diminished by poor management of “holiday” as a brand idea. Mothers Day? Fathers Day? Christmas? All fading fast.

A brand is a fragile thing.

…the harder they fall. (Bob Fitzsimmons, a smallish boxer, 1899).

In our headlong rush toward global branding, we’re ignoring the obvious fact that while “big” suggests trustworthiness to consumers, big companies have so much exposure and so many moving parts that every one of them will likely suffer an embarrassing failure somehow, somewhere in the future.

Even a company like Toyota, obsessed with product quality and reputation as any on the planet, will have one of its moving parts fail and be trashed by sensationalist media in search of something, anything, to snatch a few eyeballs away from videogames and internet poker.

Considering this, a thinking marketer must question the wisdom of global brands.

A company is driven to global identity by the exigencies of raising capital, distribution efficiency, and the economies of scale in manufacturing. It’s a risk a corporate CEO has to take (not to mention the opportunity to drop an occasional ego-inflating anecdote about “our operation in Zimbabwe” over an expense-account dinner).

But a brand manager doesn’t have to “go global” in identity terms. It’s good for the ego, but the dollar payoff is moderate at best. Even if your chocolate-stuffed olives are named Wonkies worldwide, the major costs of branding - packaging and advertising - will still differ by country and language group.

Are the net savings worth the risk that when Wonkies finally achieve global domination of the confectionary olive market, a rare olive-specific salmonella will cause lurid symptoms in Wonkies-lovers in Chile and Argentina.

As headlines like Wonkies Mom Weeps Over Hideously Discolored Fingernails race around the globe, you might be wondering whether national or regional brands would have been a better identity strategy.

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