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.

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.

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.