When we’re taking a breaks from the salt mines of naming, we often cruise the latest posts on Vimeo - an international repository of short clips by animators and videographers ( http://vimeo.com/ ).

The interesting thing about Vimeo is that much of the best visual imagination springs from places our clients never consider for creative sourcing.

If you’re in tv production, Vimeo is already in your bookmarks file.  As a marketer, it may not be.

If you’re charged with promoting cars or electronics on tv or internet, have a look at Pipe Plant, ( http://vimeo.com/29841219 ), a 3-minute clip by Russian videographer Sasha Aleksandrov that could radically alter how you see what your viewers see.

When most adults see a teenager with earbuds in her ears, we assume she’s bopping to a band with a name like Pink War Machine or Artichoke Not Be.

A chance conversation with a high school counselor offered a different view.  Students turn out to be regular listeners to literary audiobooks, particularly “secondary writings of authors they encounter in English lit. classes.”

After a midterm book report on Moby Dick, a kid might download Typee from the iTunes Store.  After The Great Gatsby, maybe Tender Is The Night. Not for class credit, just for entertainment or enlightenment.

Why doesn’t she buy or borrow a print copy or an e-book?  Because she has to sit to read, but she can listen on-the-go.  Other than pale, pudgy videogame addicts, American teens run, walk, ride and otherwise move around a lot.

The gender of our subject noun of isn’t arbitrary.  Our counselor friend sees iPod literature is mostly “a girl thing” in high school, but believes it becomes more gender-balanced in college.

Is there a useful marketing insight somewhere in this?  We think so.

In our experience, more than a few advertising and marketing people see the teen audience as brain-dead zombies who require a loud noise and flash of light to get them to notice the dancing acne medicine package on the screen.  If you watch a reel of teen-focused ads, this “Hey dummy!” tone often comes through.  We think a lot of the kids are smart enough to be offended.  Smarter than the marketers perhaps…

In a recent business discussion, we encountered the phrase: “the poverty of American packaged goods art” – so obviously true that nobody in the group commented, much less objected. New products folk don’t talk about it much, but the soft drink, beer, snack, bread, and prepared foods packages that define our craft (think Coke and Pepsi and Bud and Wheat Thins and Campbell’s) are as visually exciting as smog.

America may be the 900 pound gorilla of packaged goods, but compared to the visual imagination of such contemporary products as iPhone tiles, bicycles, and online games), it looks like the packaged goods gorilla lost interest 20 years ago.

A problem? Only if you assume some hot young marketing team in (for example) Baltic Europe will notice our lethargy and convince management to launch in your category here.  Might be a while.  Then again, might not.

Forgive the cliché, but we see it as an opportunity.  If you think about it, all cans of Pepsi or all boxes of Wheat Thins don’t have to be the same.  Without diminishing the brand (which, to a generation that explores the world as text on a screen is a word rather than the PMS color of the paperboard box), the package can be startling, stimulating…different!

Would young consumers buy a 12-pack of beer or a box of crackers because the package art changes?  Not if the change were merely color or typeface or (spew!) a New New New banner.  But brilliant illustration – art for art’s sake – maybe so.

These snippets of art that would grab the consumer by the frontal lobes are clipped from images on what has been called “the richest source of book-related illustration in the universe”.  It’s a website that contains thousands of illustrations – and every one of them is more interesting than anything your design team has ever proposed.

The site’s had several names over the years, but is now 50 Watts.

In addition to monitoring design, development, packaging, testing, pricing, promotion and distribution, the Product Manager has a role that we rarely think about – defending the product from debasement at the hands of the bean counters.

We thought about it recently when one of us bought two new Toyota RAV4s to replace two aging Honda CR-Vs.  We don’t mean to pick on Toyota here.  Their product system is typical of auto manufacturers – but these cars are the real life example we have.

With tens of millions of owners, Toyota is a hugely valuable brand name in the fundamental sense of brand function; the brand you last bought is the default choice for the next purchase.  Considering the profit involved in a car sale, Toyota brand equity must be worth tens of billions of dollars.

Like a can of peas, a car is a physical object.  Your most recent experience of the actual object affects your perception of the brand more than all the commercials you’ve seen from the beginning of time.

When some bean counter proposes saving a few tenths of a cent by reducing the average number of peas per can from 156 to 148, the can-of-peas product manager defends the integrity of his product by pointing out the value of its brand equity.  Whether he wins or loses, he’s there to fight for his product.

Toyota is famously focused on squeezing every last cent out of component cost and every last minute out of assembly time to maximize profit.  If some purchasing guy can save a nickel on a flimsier aux input jack, there’s no RAV4 product manager to argue with him.  The cheap jack goes into the car and the purchaser (us in this case) has to jiggle his iPod cable to achieve a decent connection every time he gets into the car.

If some industrial engineer proposes to cut a few cents in materials or labor on attaching a heat shield to the exhaust manifold, there’s no product manager to object, so some of the heat shields rattle like one of ours does.  Sure the dealer will fix it (the service manager knows just where the problem lies), but it’s a nuisance for the buyer and a blemish on the brand.

If a purchasing guy can save a buck on battery, alternator or ignition electronics at a small cost in reliability, there’s no product manager to pound the table and ask: “Are you nuts?  The core of we’re selling is reliable transportation!” Thus the battery of one of our two new Toyotas slowly goes flat over a couple of weeks of typical use (the service manager recommends that we be sure to drive it every day).

Ours are small but annoying flaws. You’ve read a continuing stream of news stories about more dangerous failures and subsequent recalls. It’s sad for marketing professionals like us to watch a once-great brand like that be debased.

Next time you pass a product manager in the hall, smile and wave.  If you think about it, he or she protects your brand and your livelihood from the fate of Toyota.

Condos being built In North American cities today average about 600 square feet.  In some places, the average new-build unit is closer 500 square feet.  Few industry analysts expect this trend to reverse in the foreseeable future.

What’s going on (and how does it affect marketers)?

Young couples are crowding into cities. The young are mobile, and suburban housing tracts have become unattractive dead zones.  Competition for urban digs has raised the price of a square foot of condo.  But it’s more than price.  They simply don’t need the space.

Bookshelves? Magazine racks?  Replaced by an e-book reader.

CD/DVD storage?  Digital files live in a laptop, pad, smart phone, or “the cloud”.

Television?  That flat screen is just a moving picture on the wall. With network tv circling the drain of irrelevance and cable tv looking as tired as wired phone service ten years ago, the tv set as a dedicated appliance will probably disappear altogether.

Clothes?  With the demise of specialized office attire, closets can be smaller.

Foodstuffs? Cooking from scratch has been zapped by microwaves and take-home meals, so food storage and kitchen appliance needs shrink.

Downstairs from that 600 square foot condo you’ll find a garage with one parking space for every two or three or four units.  This dramatic reversal of the traditional one-space-per unit standard marks the confluence of zoning strategies to diminish urban traffic congestion; reduced utility of personal vehicles in cities where businesses don’t provide parking; and a perception among young people that a owning a car is ecologically immoral and fiscally irrational.   Public transport and internet-mediated car-share services will do just fine, thank you.

It’s obvious why residential downsizing matters.  With less room for “stuff”, it’ll be harder to sell stuff.

Clearly a boon to the planet, but maybe not so good for annual bonuses.

In packaged goods, we expect The Law Of Unintended Consequences to lead to a painful result (the new flavor replaces a long-time steady seller on many store shelves).

Much to the surprise of food marketers in Asia, a higher-margin, higher-frequency condiment segment sprang from a “green” campaign to reduce the footprint of products like sauces and salad dressings.

Manufacturers introduced concentrated gel forms of traditional sauces and dressings in squeeze tubes alongside traditional water-based forms in glass jars.

The smaller and lighter tubes deliver the same amount of active flavoring ingredients as the jars while saving on transportation costs, shelf space, and home storage.

Initial sales were good, especially to younger consumers.  The big surprise is that repeat sales rates are impressively better than those for the traditional products.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that many young people squeeze the gel straight from the tube onto sandwiches, crackers, musubis, or whatever because they prefer the flavor intensity of the concentrated form.

Although young American consumers have taken to extra-intense chip and dip flavors, concentrated gel forms of sauces and dressings haven’t (as far as we know) appeared in the U.S.A.

Hmmmmmm…

Got your smartphone handy?

If it’s equipped with scanning software (nearly half of all smartphone users have downloaded one free scanning app or another), point the phone’s camera lens at the QR code to be magically transported to a website featuring insightful commentary on contemporary marketing.

Quick Response codes are an exploding direct-to-consumer channel for selling, couponing, viral marketing, and, among the young urban technorati, hooking up. (“His QR t-shirt took me to his Facebook page, don’t you just love it?”)

Think of a QR code as a paper hyperlink. Think hard. This one’s not an if it’s a when – as in “When did those guys start using QRs to coupon against us?”

Is it just our reaction, or has the current wave of beer commercials devolved to the troglodyte level?

Whatever the brand, the spots are bar or party scenes in which the driving creative idea is: “You don’t drink Bud Light?  You’ll never have sex or move out of your mother’s garage.”

Research driven?  God help us all if that’s the only way to sell beer to American men!

We think it’s creative fatigue – a polite term for “the brand manager doesn’t know any better so why should we bother to think”.

In other countries, agency creative departments seem less fatigued.

We admit that it’s not a fair comparison because this Sapporo commercial is a two-minute CGI production for the internet.  Interweaving computer game themes, brewing, manly legends and contemporary lifestyle, it blows away young male beer buyers.

YouTube – Sapporo Beer C#191B7F

We all learned in kindergarten that “it’s good to share”.

Converging ecological, economic and social motives underlie “collaborative consumption” – a term Rachel Botsman coined in What’s Mine Is Yours for a new trend with seismic implications for marketers of many goods and some services.

Consumers of all ages are using the internet to share cars (whipcar.com); sports gear and power tools (snapgoods.com); dressy clothes (swishing.com); parking spaces (parkatmyhouse.com) and even a place to crash for a few days (couchsurfing.com).

In the 1/31/11 issue of The New Yorker Patricia Marx’s The Borrowers describes a mixture of bricks-and-mortar and internet businesses offering short-term use and/or passing-on of everything from designer handbags to children’s toys.

Because in most cases the sharer is paid a fee by the user, business gurus write all of this off as a way to turn your inventory possessions into pocket money. As Bill Clinton put it, “it’s the economy, stupid!”

But to us it looks like more than that.

Consumer sharing has the flavor of a rejection of the reckless consumption of the past 3 decades.  Not only do sharers feel smart for renting a weekend’s camping gear for $20 rather than buying same for $200 – or earning $20 tax-free bucks out of that tent, pack and sleeping bag in the garage – they feel good about conserving the planet’s resources their transactions.

Consumer sharing also has the scent of an emerging social media category.  Making a friend online is easier when you have something in common.  Being willing to share, posting offers online, and the experiences you have in sharing are fodder for online socialization.

Craigslist.com is the father of reuse and sharing (maybe ebay.com is the grandfather); its booming progeny may well change the dynamics of manufacturing and marketing.

The hottest new packaged goods category in the second decade of this century is energy drinks. For any marketing pro who’s just returned from an extended research assignment in North Korea, energy drinks are 80 to 320ml containers of sweet caffeine-laced fluids, many featuring a fashionable adjunct ingredient like acai, ginseng and/or gingko biloba.

In Japan, where the category originated more then 20 years ago, many brands feature heroic doses of B vitamins as well as caffeine (we suspect the FDA stands in the way of that strategy here).  Combining high unit price and very high volume, energy drinks are a huge business in Japan where this year’s hot product, Yunker Fanti, sells out its daily deliveries at ¥1600 (about $18) per 50ml bottle.

There are more than 30 brands on U.S. supermarket, convenience store, and drug store shelves. The volume leader is the Austrian-made soft-drink style 320ml  Red Bull.

5-Hour Energy, a made-in-Michigan Japanese-style 80ml brand (with an FDA-tolerable dose of B vitamins) is growing awareness and market-share.

Many of the brands in the field are cleverly named.  What’s strangely anemic are the package graphics. Selling the exciting promise of a jolt to relatively young consumers, package designers have been kept on a surprisingly short leash.

If we were product managers in the category, our package would look more like this illustration from an old German-language edition of Walter De La Mare’s ghost stories: