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.

The videogames most packaged-goods marketing execs grew up were first-person shooters (you gun down enemy warriors, giant rats, evil ogres) like Wolfenstein, Doom, Marathon, and Duke Nukem.

In the 1990’s, the graphics of these games seemed great. But they feel like kindergarten sketches compared to the eye-saturating imagery of current action games like Crysis, Metro 2033, Mass Effect and Just Cause. Why does this matter?  Because (as we all remember) hours and hours of staring at a game screen affects what the non-game world looks like.

New food, beverage and personal products packages concocted for the teens and twenty-somethings of today look great to product managers and test well enough against existing products.  But we suspect that they seem pretty flat to the young consumers they’re aimed at.

What would win a “gnar” from the lips of a shredder? Visual intensity and complexity beyond anything on the shelf (or in the store) would probably work.

Need inspiration? This image from noor khan trucks might jack up your design director:

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.

It’s not a comfortable question for NameLab, but there’s  enough weight on the “no” side of the scales to make it necessary to ask.

Today’s 30+ adult has spent maybe 15 years using the internet to learn about everything from sex to laundry detergent. These are the core consumers we all chase after.  Their attitude toward laundry detergents is converging on “there’s not enough difference to justify a premium price for a specific brand”.

Shoppers aren’t abandoning brands wholesale.  Even among savvy consumers, comfortable familiarity moves the orange Tide package from the shelf to the shopping cart.  But most packaged goods marketers face steady consumer migration to store brands and generics.  While the shelf view is pretty, all the fish seem pretty much the same.

This doesn’t seem to be a temporary effect of hard times.  It showed up in segment research in the 70′s; grew some in the 80′s; accelerated in the 90′s; and shows no indication to slow down in this century.   It’s not merely a U.S. market phenomenon.  At NameLab, we don’t have access to data to suggest it’s worldwide, but we’ve observed similar consumer behavior in Japan.

Because defensive strategies are the order of the day, you find more and more national brands at far-less-than-retail prices in Wal-Mart, Costco and other discount retailers.

Offense would be innovation.  Not “new lemon zest” in soap products, but meaningful new features and radical product ideas.

Package goods isn’t dead, it just needs a few companies like Apple to get consumers interested in brands based on important new products.