It seems like a little side article in this week’s Adweek, but it caught my attention.
Mark Dolliver reported on the findings of a “Buy American” study recently completed by AdweekMedia/Harris Research. The survey indicates that although there is an ever-present interest among US consumers for American-made products, there is a definite drop off as you get into the younger demographics. As Mark reports:
Younger consumers are less susceptible than their elders to a made-in-America sales pitch. Thirty-nine percent of the survey’s 18-34-year-olds said they’re more likely to buy a product when an ad emphasizes that it’s made in America, vs. 60 percent of the 35-44-year-olds, 68 percent of the 45-54s and 74 percent of those 55 and older.
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Intersting news breaking this week about the use of mobile phones in the US. Apparently, like much of the rest of the world, a majority of Americans now carry their cell phones with them “at all times” – even inside their homes. This coming from a study released this week by Knowledge Networks.
In other parts of the world, where the hard wiring required for phones for the past 100 years ran up against ancient buildings, incredibly dense populations or remote locations, mobile phones were often adopted as the appliance of choice for people who wanted to stay in touch. The distribution of phones in countries like Japan and Germany lead phone companies in those countries to adopt a later, more versatile standard for mobile communications – resulting in an explosion of SMS and other mobile communications streams.
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Posted by Mike Bawden under Much Ado About Marketing
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Polaroid, that once proud brand of “instant” photography is still alive and kicking – as an international brand of digital photography. The Polaroid web site features palm-sized, instant photo printers, digital frames and the like. They’ve re-positioned the brand to be all about the technology.
But someone has hijacked part of the brand equity they left behind though, and gone retro with it. In fact, Poladroid has released a computer application that takes your old-fashioned, digital pictures and makes them sooper-cool, Polaroid-esque images.
According to the Make The Logo Bigger blog:
This is pretty damn cool. Poladroid is a desktop app that takes any digital image you have and converts it into the classic look associated with the brand. While it probably uses Photoshop algorithms to create the effect, you don’t need no stinkin’ Photoshop—just drag and drop a photo on the app and watch it slowly convert like a real Polaroid™ image. (My before and after test.) They also have a Flickr group to upload images to.
It’s fun, if not particularly useful. But for 40-somethings like me, it’s a worthy 15-minute diversion on a workday and an interesting use of what remains of Polaroid’s brand equity.
Of course, I’ll have to wait until the Windows version is released. Poladroid is only available for Mac-heads at the moment.
