Branding the man: why men are the next frontier in fashion retail

Taykey, Inc. is a research firm with a trends-based technology that unlocks real-time consumer insight on what people are feeling and thinking about brands. Founded in 2008 by Amit Avner and Itay Birnboim, Taykey has recently secured $9 million in Series B funding from Sequoia Capital.

Taykey’s key players boast high-level backgrounds with the Israeli Defense Ministry. Co-founder Amit Avner began programming at age 10. In short, this isn’t your ordinary demographics research firm.

Case in point, Taykey worked with Pepsi to drive awareness and participation for the “Pepsi Refresh Project. ”In the first two days of a targeted Facebook campaign, Taykey engaged over 17,000 relevant consumers. In another Facebook campaign, this time for Pepsi’s Lipton Brisk brand, Taykey generated a 200% increase in engagement in just two days.

So are traditional advertising agencies using the wrong research to power their campaigns, and is the internet and social media still not being tapped for data in the right way? We spoke with Taykey’s CEO Amit Avner about the future of branding and the next step in consumer insight.

BP: With Taykey’s view on the (diminished) power of demographics, does that include the methods used by traditional advertising agencies?

AA: We simply believe that targeting based solely on rigidly defined demographics is an outdated way of advertising. We target based on interests and trends, so instead of targeting 20-30 year old females in New York (hoping they’re interested in Lady Gaga), we’ll target people who are talking about trends that we have found also relate to Lady Gaga, and continue to find other interests that relate so that we don’t exhaust audiences and are always discovering new, relevant audiences.

BP: The social web has become so incredibly fractionalized, what is the future of navigating consumer affinities towards brands?

AA: Navigating the social web requires brands to constantly keep their ear to the ground for consumer preferences. We utilize a complex algorithm to continually measure online conversations from all over the social web, making it a simple process to find everyone who is discussing a topic that relates to a brand and serving them a relevant advertisement from that brand.

BP: Luxury brands are still highly resistant to innovating social media. How would Taykey be able to service such a client?

AA: It’s all about the clients, even luxury brands are starting to accept that today’s world is social and online, and they want to be a part of it. They are working with companies like Taykey (and others) to continue reaching new audiences.

BP: In my opinion, most traditional web advertising loses impact over time and doesn’t authentically connect with customers. How is Taykey changing that?

AA: That’s exactly what Taykey believes as well. We seek to continually discover new audiences by following trends in real-time –- we call this “unlocking the flock.” People move in flocks online, jumping from one topic to another, so by predicting trends of the flock, we are able to place relevant ads in front of a steady stream of new audiences.

BP: There are several new, what I call “social shopping” apps out there — one, called Pose, just launched this month. How do you see them coming into play in terms of social media advertising?

AA: It would depend on how the information is gathered for social media advertising. Taykey is 100% privacy-safe, which means we don’t tag or cookie people.

BP: What is the biggest mistake most brands make in managing their online presence?

AA: Thinking that by just “buying ads” with no content, or value to the customer, they will get user attention and win business. Having followers is fine, but you must build a community for them to attain true value.

Learn more about Taykey at www.taykey.com.

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If you’re like me, you might have done a double take when you noticed that your local Walgreens had suddenly become a grocery store. Well almost.

Rows of fresh fruit, sandwiches, salads, and even sushi are now on display only a stone’s throw away from the cough syrup and toothpaste. What began as an experiment roughly a year ago is now set to include nearly all of Walgreens’ 7,545 stores.

In a nod to the idea of a pharmacy and “wellness,” the graphics and signage in their new grocery sections are in shads of green, with imagery of fruits and vegetables and the words, “Eat Well.”

In an interview with Bloomberg News, Bryan Pugh, vice president of merchandising is quoted as saying, “We won’t get our customer every day on the way home, but if we could get 50 percent of our customers one day a week on the way home, that would do wonders for our sales.”

So does it confuse the brand or simply expand on the idea of the brand? I’d say it’s a fairly natural metamorphosis. Walgreens has nurtured customer expectations that “we have everything.” In recent years the range of good available at their stores has included televisions, radios, and even a sewing machine. Is Walgreens benign? Well nobody in retail is doing it for a hobby, and when you put Walgreens beside a fast food restaurant, which would you rather have in your neighborhood? Case in point, consider the fact that fast food outlets have long been criticized for taking over  many low-income neighborhoods, supplanting the corner groceries and creating an “addiction” to high-fat, high calorie foods in minority communities.

My guess is that customers might be surprised or even confused at first but will move seamlessly into making Walgreen’s their one-stop neighborhood store. While they probably won’t do their serious grocery shopping here (well, some might), the market share Walgreens gains is considerable when you factor in that many stores have extended hours (until midnight) and fill a void once held by 7-11 back in the day.

Case in point, in Asia 7-11 is a powerhouse, offering everything from dim sum to Dimetapp, and many even double as a post office. In one 7-11 I saw in a village in Taiwan, Johnny Walker Blue Label and French wine were also available.

Walgreens isn’t far behind. Last December Walgreens rolled out a private label collection of wines in 1,500 locations.  A Chardonnay with that sushi?

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Picking through bits and pieces of the past has been a longtime hobby of mine. Things of great or little value, beautiful or ugly all manage to offer some sort of inspiration for the work I do.

Coco Chanel once said (and you can imagine how it sounded, all hoarse and nicotine stained), “He who insists on his own creativity has no memory.” That’s another way of saying that it’s not easy being original. But many designers and commercial artists turn to the past for inspiration, a time when design felt somehow more fresh and vibrant than the self-conscious, krazy glue approach used by some in appropriating the detritus of the past. Hello Lady Gaga.

Thrift stores and vintage shops can provide a haphazard appreciation for the world of commercial design: the decorative, the utilitarian, and the obsolete. At one time, someone somewhere was inspired, innovated an idea or concept, and executed it into a finished object. Some of those designers became famous. Many are forgotten.

I was at one of my favorite vintage stores the other day and a woman in her late seventies passed me, slowly scanning the random objects scattered high and low like a strange collage. Here we were, two different generations, each looking out into the darkness of our own pasts and remembering ever so vaguely, a place in time when many of those objects before us actually mattered.

We mark time as much by experience and the lines on our face as we do with many of the objects around us. Those things we keep long beyond their necessity are often simply markers of a simpler, more innocent time.

American “antique” stores in particular are experts at selling us our pasts — objects with little real value beyond that they remind us of something. These shops are chock full of kitschy mementos like Shirley Temple dolls, heaps of table linens, potato mashers, or piles of Ladies Home Journals. In other words: junk.  Here: a telephone that once heard thousands of conversations from 1967 – 1992 until it was summarily dismissed for something… cordless. There: a collection of ashtrays from Las Vegas motels, or a ViewMaster with slides of Yosemite.

It’s no secret that designers are constantly using fragments of the past to inspire their current creations. Some are more liberal than others. Prada has been criticized for essentially “copying” vintage textiles a bit too closely. Others, like home furnishings icon Jonathan Adler has been even more aggressive in his nod towards a Pat Nixon-Country Club aesthetic. Nevertheless, consumers continue to gobble up modernist-inspired pieces for their playful nostalgia.

Which is why the website, How to Be a Retronaut (www.howtobearetronaut.com) is a bizarre but fascinating trip through time with esoteric bits of ephemera that have been randomly discovered and offer a visceral glimpse into the past.

Like a 200-year-old love letter is discovered in the upholstery of a French armchair.

Or a pristine set of photographs of London’s Piccadilly Circus in the 1940’s, in sparkling Kodachrome (R.I.P.) In this case, the site allows one to zoom and soar through the photos as if we were there. It all looks so fresh and new like it was yesterday, the people on the streets, the cars and traffic. A moment in time when everyone was busy being alive and moving forward.

As we look: back.

One entry is a stranger-than-fiction moment. Filmmaker George Clarke claims that a 1928 clip from the premiere of Charlie Chaplin’s “The Circus” reveals a woman who appears to be talking on a mobile phone. He suggests that she must be a true Retronaut — a time traveler (watch the clip here.)

Photography makes up the bulk of How to Be a Retronaut but they are not just ordinary vintage photos. They are moments in time when no one was looking. People conducting their lives unselfconsciously (hardly what we see today.)

One of my favorites is a recently discovered collection of photographs taken at American suburban shopping malls in 1990. They are so candid and ordinary that you can’t help but be a voyeur (to learn more about these photos, go to www.kickstarter.com.)

The site also features pictures of forgotten places such as hospitals, schools, and amusement parks. Overgrown and ramshackle, they invite us to imagine the lives once lived there.

A website which devotes itself exclusively to such places is www.abandoned-places.com. Creator Henk Van Rensbergen began photographing his discoveries at age 20. I’ve been following his work for almost ten years now and am always drawn to his remarkable work. His specialty seems to be old hospitals and insane asylums, but he also captures my other favorite, old airports.

If that’s your idea of a vacation, then I recommend Abandoned and Little-Known Airfields (not much of a title, but there’s no room for mistake), http://members.tripod.com/airfields_freeman/

This is site is a good deal more nerdy than artistic, but there are some fantastic photographs of many commercial airfields, weed-choked and definitely forgotten, but still able to capture the lost romance of travel.

And like any time traveler, isn’t that what we’re all ultimately searching for?

 

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