Science author James Gleick (Chaos, Genius, Faster) recently published The Information, a history and analysis of the systems humankind has created to comprehend our world.

It’s a brilliant book (someone will eventually find another adjective to describe Mr. Gleick’s works) that includes Two Wordbooks, a chapter devoted to historical linguistics.  This isn’t the intellectually radiant heart of the book (that would be the chapter on memes), but as linguists it floats our boat.

Beyond wondering why it never occurred to any of us that there was a pre-alphabetized world (with sequential alphabets but without the idea of using them to organize lists), the chapter seems to bear upon the management of identity in packaged goods marketing.

It tells the tale of Robert Cawdrey, a village priest who published a book in 1606 “for the benefit and helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskillfull persons…whereby they may more easily understand many hard English wordes which they shall heare or reade in Scriptures, Sermons, or elsewhere…”

While this wasn’t the first book of English words, it was the first alphabetized dictionary.  The concept of organizing any list by notational sequence (a, b, c…) surely occurred to someone before Cawdrey, but this is the first recorded instance that has survived (via a single copy of the book in an Oxford University library).

Are we proposing that Dannon alphabetize its yogurt flavors in supermarket chill cases?  Maybe we are.

Gleick’s book is about the importance of information to human behavior.

Wine marketing is afflicted by weak information structure.  It’s clear that the chaos of wine identity drives consumers to other, more comprehensible beverage categories.

It seems impossible to us that the same eyes and brains won’t prefer a better-organized brand to a disorderly one.

Do you market soups? Detergents? Painkillers? Tampons?

Is your shelf of subtypes more clearly organized than the other guy’s?

Close to 20 million Americans practice yoga.

They comprise an interesting audience for packaged goods marketers…75% are women, 70% are college graduates, 45% have household incomes over $75,000.

Unless you work for Lululemon – a yoga-focused apparel maker/retailer with $600 million in 2010 sales and a capital value of more than $5 billion – why should you care about a quasi-spiritual exercise regimen?  The reason is danshari.

Danshari is a basic tenet of Mahayana Buddhism, from whence most yoga practiced in America springs.  (Zen Buddhists call the same idea wabi.)

Danshari is a simple idea – life is better with fewer material possessions.  Owning more than you need is not only irresponsible in a world strapped for resources, it causes unwholesome complexity in everyday life.

Danshari has emerged from yoga studios as a lifestyle trend.  Beyond yoga magazines, you’ll see it voiced in various ways in consumer magazines from Real Simple to Vegetarian Times.

In our contrarian opinion, danshari is a new products opportunity.

The phrase “danshari products” may seem oxymoronic at first glance, but a little contemplative thought (our office yogista recommends the padmasana position) may reveal a pathway to revenue-generating enlightenment.

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:

This wordless café sign in a stairwell on a Fukuoka alley may reveal an earthquake fault under Starbucks’ business model.

In Japan, as in America, Starbucks stores are so pervasive and consistent that they define the coffee urban experience.  That sounds great…at first glance.

A small café like this one is often a one-man operation run by a young owner who knows the young adult audience by being part of it.  Gaze at the sign for a moment and think about what the guy pulling espressos upstairs was thinking when he designed it.   Such a place doesn’t advertise.  The sign is its only way of attracting customers. What’s message did he choose to bring them in?

We think the sign says “not Starbucks” in no uncertain terms…and we suspect that this message attracts young consumers who think Starbucks coffee tastes fine but find the Starbucks experience boring because it is and (in their adult years) has always been the same.

In the café biz, Starbucks is a high-overhead retailer. They need a premium price to pay the rent.  Us packaged goods guys know that coffee is coffee – the price premium derives from the experience.

Our vote for the worst packaged goods branding is the wine category:http://www.namelab.com/blog/2009/02/the-worst-packaged-goods-branding-wine/, but premium coffee beans aren’t far behind.  Like the wine shopper, the premium coffee shopper is offered little useful information about how one brew differs from the next (half are “bright and lively”, half are “robust and full-bodied”).

Brand and type names are so obscure and packages are so unmemorable that it’s not that easy to grab another bag of the “pretty good one” you bought 2 weeks ago.

In our supermarket’s premium coffee section, you can pay anywhere from $8.00 to $25.00 for a pound of beans…but there are few cues as to why this bag is worth three times the cost of that bag.

In NameLab’s not-so-humble opinion, such marketing ineptitude drives a fair number of shoppers to the orderly, understandable, and lower-priced mainstream ground coffee shelves.

To exploit this mess, Starbucks has launched simple, meaningful, understandable Seattle’s Best packaging – numbers from one-to-five identifying “coffee levels” (punch, flavor plus other so far undefined qualities) – on the premium beans shelf. The new design’s large numerals and crisp, non-traditional colors leap out of the brown-dominated bean shelf array.

It looks like their idea is to persuade the shopper to “try the next level” – promoting exploration within the brand rather than from brand-to-brand.  Such exploration is also encouraged by the fact that they’ve made it so easy to find the one you bought last time if the new level doesn’t suit your palate as well as that one did.

Bravo Starbucks!  (You ever consider getting into the wine business?)

Retailing had a good long run.  It was fun while it lasted.  But it’s over.

A world where few purchases are made at physical stores?

Think about it…

-Consumers learn about products in great detail from manufacturer or etailer sites, with ratings, cautions, and opinions at increasingly wiki-like mass-input product info sites.

-The declining world economy (a long-term situation economists now call “the new normal”) is diminishing the scale of retailing.  For cost efficiency, there are fewer SKUs – soon we’ll have to make do with 30 styles of red stilettos rather than 300.

-Conspicuous consumption has become uncivil, our new lifestyle is “blending in” rather than “keeping up with the Joneses”.  To quote a line from a previous LabNotes: In this new pattern of social behavior,   profligacy has become…thinking hard here…what’s a word that combines “dumb” and “impolite”?

-Delivery systems like USPS, UPS, and FedEx have become more efficient as they’ve scaled up to meet home-delivery demand.

-Daily food no longer requires bought and stockpiled ingredients…these days it’s take-out, delivery, or eat at chain feed troughs.

-Complex, fast-evolving electronic products are far better suited to internet sales than retailing.  (Other than the Apple Store, part of a uniquely closed products and services ecosystem, mall electronics stores are fading away.)

-Mobile phones that transact with vending machines will cause those machines to proliferate.  Because every consumer will have a mobile phone, they’ll buy picture hooks, pantyhose and pajamas from a nearby machine.

-As retail margins and sales volumes have waned, corporate managers have been cutting costs: dimmer lighting, fewer window cleanings and tightening the wage and benefit screws on store employees.  So the register clerk you’ve waited longer to come face to face with is more likely to be the type of passively hostile, minimum-wage “sales associate” you’ll buy your next shoes at Zappos.com to avoid.

Now for the good part (for us brand pros anyway).  On the internet, your brand is the universal icon of what you are and what you sell.  Without the distraction of adjacent shelves of similar stuff, that icon is pure and potent on its web page.

Never has branding – especially the “good behavior” that underpins online brand value – been more important.

So the internet is disrupting conventional retailing structures.

Ho hum. So what else in new?

Infrequently, we stumble across something that demonstrates how our electronic nervous system can evolve a new business model that solves important problems for producer and consumer.  Better product, better distribution, and (we assume) a nice profit for those with the smarts and the guts to try something more complex than re-selling SuperBowl trivia.

The case in point is CleanFish Alliance – a company that sets standards for producing high-quality, eco-friendly “artisanal seafood” – helps members meet those standards; helps manage distribution; and directs restaurant buyers and quality-driven consumers to sustainable sources for these products.

It’s a new and important business model potentiated by the internet.

And no, we didn’t make the name.  Wish we had, though.  It couldn’t be better.

Have a look at their site at CleanFish Seafood:

As media advertising fades away, the value of a clearly defined brand grows.  In our not-so-humble opinion, McInhenny’s Tabasco Sauce is a paragon of clear, consistent, and forceful branding.

Launched in 1868 by Edmund McIlhennny, the product is a hot sauce made from tabasco peppers, a Mexican variety planted on an island in South Louisiana.  From the beginning, McIlhenny realized the value of brand identity. His first batch was sent to stores in cologne bottles from New Orleans warehouse.  The package remains unique and evocative:

This 19th century McIlhenny print ad is an icon of graphics arts education.  Imagine its effect as a point-of-purchase display alongside today’s bland supermarket labels:

As The Doors put it, been down so long it looks like up to me captures the current mood of consumers (and marketers) mired in recession.

But it’s not all gloom and doom.  Besides reducing the cost of a house for first-time homebuyers, a recession shakes geriatric calcification out of the joints of commerce.  Old companies and old brands bite the dust, making room (office space, factory space, shelf space) for young companies with new ideas.

Japan’s been mired in recession since a liquidity induced real-estate bubble (sound familiar?) imploded in the 80′s.  One result is that young people – denied the traditional salaryman’s path from university to corporation to retirement when companies stopped hiring – have launched wave after wave of fresh new ventures.

The streets of Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka glitter with inventive new restaurants, stores and services created by a generation of college graduates who, absent the recession, would today be bored middle-management bureaucrats.

A similar phenomenon marked America’s Great Depression.  In 1933, for example, entrepreneurs founded small ventures that grew into Ashley Furniture Stores, E&J Gallo Winery, North American Van Lines, Rockwell Collins, Rubbermaid, Ryder System, and Waldenbooks. Waldenbooks was a typical recession idea, started by George Hoyt as a low-cost rental library in Bridgeport CT.

Which brings us to giant frogs.  The back pages of Depression-era pulp magazines were crammed with “business opportunities for entrepreneurs” like:

The internet is today’s pulp magazine.  We haven’t googled “Giant Frog”, but…

Whenever we get to thinking we’re the smartest guys on the block, somebody comes up with an idea that we wish we had had.

In this case it’s a company called Solve Media. They’ve developed a system to replace that distorted letter sequence called a CAPTCHA that you must interpret and type in to prove you’re human rather than a bot in order to register at a website.

So, rather than squinting at:

You can be carefully copying out something useful and memorable like:

The slogan appears in the CAPTCHA box in display typography masking a non-visible distortion element that defeats the bots.  Carefully reading and typing the slogan is supposed to embed a meme somewhere in your cranial file of “important things to remember if I ever need to hire an identity consultant” – and we suspect that it does.

We assume that the company will soon be selling CAPTCHA placements to savvy internet marketers worldwide.

We didn’t even know that CAPTCHA is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart until we discovered all of this on the singularly informative Fast Company website:

http://www.fastcompany.com/1690163/effective-ads-to-replace-captchas?partner=rss