This is a collection of observations, anecdotes and ideas that exercise and excite us at Studio Staufenberger.
If you want to get in touch, you can reach us at john at staufenberger dot com.
In between making suits and the occasional bit of work, I recently contributed an article to Brand Strategy magazine.
It sets out a view of how fashion works, and the implications for non-fashion brands wanting to move into that space.
The style is a bit clunky - need to work on that. But it makes sense, I hope. You can download it here.
No doubt prompted by coverage here at The Repository, none other than The Wall Street Journal recently ran its own story on the fixed-gear bike phenomenon.
In addition to the usual blather, it includes an interesting aside about the profit margins for fixies. Apparently, the fixed models that the major manufacturers are beginning to produce are roughly 5% more profitable than your regular road/mountain going bike. And the margins on these are already pretty healthy at around 25% to 30%.
Which just goes to show how important this new fashion dimension is to any market, bike or otherwise. The fashion dimension makes the market less price sensitive.
(Original WSJ article is behind its paywall, but can be found pastebombed on the Cycling Plus forum here.)
Prompted by comment elsewhere, Team Staufenberger have been re-reading our tatty old copy of Stephen King's 1974 Planning Guide and its unofficial companion: a Jeremy Bullmore speech to a conference of Kraft bigwigs in 1972.
We see the two as related because the subject of the Bullmore speech is one of the many topics that the Guide covers, namely a stimulus/response model of advertising. This is fairly standard stuff these days, but the way both King and Bullmore talk about it suggests it might be a useful guide when thinking about this year's hot-topic: consumer generated content. As Gareth over on Brand New points out, there's a difference between genuine co-creation (consumer response to brand stimulus) and an aspiring ad creative/film-maker/musician's self-promotion.
And on a less serious note, we also had what might be descibed as a Jerry-hits-Tom-with-spade moment: we were sagely observing (bottom of page 6 of the Planning Guide) how it could have been written in 2006 (tech advances making product improvements short-lived, retailer-power squeezing manufacturers and so on) and then...
Blam!
...at the top of page 7: our grocery shopping is now self-service. Where once we were served by a man behind a counter who would recommend what to buy, we now have to decide on our own. Things have certainly changed on that count.
There's also a point that Captain Complexity will no doubt appreciate: an ad, as a stimulus, is a combination of all aspects of the communication including "pictures, movements, symbols, tone of voice" and more. Which sounds very similar to the idea that execution can be strategic: "We wanted to make decisions about fonts, colours and vocabularly part of the upfront strategic conversation." (Full text of the Honda paper available at the apg.)
Anyway, for those who want to have a read for themselves, you can download them here:
(If anyone has any objections to these being available here, drop us a line)
A rather interesting article by John Naughton on The Observer, referencing - amongst numerous other things - Neil Postman's theory of a media ecology: that each medium is an organism that interacts with other media organisms to create a ecosystem of entities in Darwinian competition.
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