Food Tool for the Week: Niches
by Tysha Shay

Today, there aren’t many industries in the U.S. that can claim near double-digit growth, but bottled water has been one of them. And, according to Beverage Marketing, the value-added category is expected to double in the next five years.* With a category this hot, niches are where opportunities for growth lie.

Check out these two niche innovators:

Fortifido - The “first-ever fortified water for pets with real functional benefits.”

Charles Calise, director of innovation for Cott Beverages Inc. North America (which is the manufacturer of Fortifido), said that “as a company, we look to make sure we stay innovative and ahead of the curve…and we know that trends in the pet category quickly follow trends in the human category.” So there you go. All the cool dogs will be lapping up Fortifido this summer. Now if they could just invent a cap that doesn’t require thumbs to open.

Activate Drinks – Vitamin-enhanced waters that don’t get mixed until the consumer is ready to drink them.

Working on the premise that vitamins loose their potency in water over time, Activate Drinks are packaged in bottles featuring an innovative cap, in which the vitamins and other supplements are stored separately to protect their freshness. With a twist of the cap, the ingredients are released into the water.

* Source: Springwise.com & Ad Age

Food IQ is a Marlin strategic partner that understands consumer consumption influencers and applies them to make your business future-ready. They’ve also got a pretty darn interesting blog.

To be honest, we haven’t figured out yet exactly how the game should work. But here’s what we have figured out through countless hours of methodical research.

1. Yngwie Malmsteen, 80s hair-rock badass and pioneer of the neoclassical/eurometal/ three-headed-dragon-defeating guitar movement, hasn’t changed his wardrobe essentials since 1984.
2. Evidence of this can be found in the Tour Photos section of Yngwie’s site, with pics as recent as 2008. Yes, there are a lot.
   
3. The Open-To-The-Navel Puffy Shirt and Way-Too-Tight Black Leather Pants combination is extremely potent, musically and most likely otherwise. A wardrobe malfunction on this guy could wipe out the entire front row.

So…how to make a game out of this?

You could go the easy route, head to the site with your friends and simply take a drink every time you see Yngwie wearing what we like to call his Fingertap Armor. (Not recommended for liability reasons.)

Or you can take the long hard slog approach: Scour the site looking for the one or two times Yngwie is caught sans uniform. It’s like Where’s Waldo with a lot more sweat and hair (and sweat).

Either way, enjoy the Malmsteen.

We’re proud to announce that our sister agency, deep, has caught the roving eye of Graphis with its wonderfully art deco Perugina Dark Hot Cocoa posters. Getting recognized by Graphis is no small feat, and our collective Marlin hat is off to design director Steve Krone for his worthy work. We mean it when we jealously mutter “you suck” under our collective Marlin breath.

We’d also like to point out that deep has a spankin’ new website, reachable here, here and (why not?) here. Lots of fun stuff, including our favorite: an open letter to apathy. Nice job, deep ones.

But hey, we’re not just sitting on our butts here at Marlin. Por ejemplo, check out our somewhat new layout for Notchweiner! Kendall Schlichting created the colorful header and judiciously guided the hand of this Notchweiner author toward a design template that is reasonably legible and non-goofy. Huzzah!

“I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.” —Stephen Hawking

Earth Day, today, is usually an opportunity for the following fun time happy parade of:

• Companies latching onto Earth Day (or say, Earth Week, like this blog!) and telling us just how darn much they care about our planet
• Website after website bombarding us with so many “Here’s How You Can Save The Entire Planet With A Seemingly Insignificant Action!” tip lists that we become paralyzed into doing absolutely nothing (Green Sex? Are you kidding me?!)
• And well-intentioned organizations telling us just how destructive mankind is

There’s not much that can be done about that first point, aside from companies like Green Seal keeping marketing monkeys like ourselves somewhere near the truth. It’s the other two that can really start getting you down.

We are drowning in green data. And if a near-infinite amount of Green Commandments (even Moses got it down to ten) it isn’t enough to immobilize you, a great deal of those imperatives are contradictory. Witness the current version of the chicken-or-the-egg question that came out of Home Depot’s Eco Options: which is less destructive to the environment, the plastic paintbrush because it doesn’t use wood, or the wooden paintbrush because it doesn’t use plastic? Sounds like a riddle you’d ask a giant killer robot to short circuit its logic board.

Or maybe that’s just us.

That’s probably just us.

Out of this year’s eco cacophony, we came across one article that truly did give us hope, that helped us find a little meaning and comfort in the duality of freakin’ everything. It was in this week’s Sunday Times Magazine, an article by Michael Pollan entitled, simply, Why Bother? Rather than step on any more of Mr. Pollan’s insights, we’ll let you read the article yourself.

And when you’re done reading it, we invite you to finish our little post with another thought from one of our planet’s brainest brains.

“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”
— also Stephen Hawking

Today, a little blatant promotion for one of our clients. Starbucks and Conservation International have created a donation campaign for Earth Day that offers Starbucks customers a chance to support the planting of trees in the coffee-growing region of Chiapas, Mexico. More carbon dioxide emissions come from the burning and clearing of forests than from all of the world’s cars, trucks, SUVs and trains combined. And while no one knows exactly the best way to save the entire world, planting trees instead of slashing and burning is pretty much unequivocally good.

And ok, so they’re a client, so we have to say something nice, right? Not necessarily. We like to think we’re independent thinkers here (thus the whole non-joiner thing). Plus, approximately eight people read this blog … hardly a grand opportunity for client bootlicking.

The fact is, we’ve met people inside Starbucks directly responsible for their sustainable actions around the world — environmentally, socially, economically — and we are impressed. It’s easy to take broad, pissy potshots at a brand this big, this polarizing and everpresent, but the truth is that behind this global-sized brand there are people-sized people. And they are honestly passionate about doing things the right way. Sit down across the table from them and it’s palpable.

Plenty of smaller coffee companies are doing wonderful things in terms of sustainability and fair trade, but none have the reach or impact of Starbucks. For example, last year Starbucks purchased 20 million pounds of Fair Trade Certified™ coffee, making them the largest purchaser of Fair Trade Certified™ coffee in North America. However, these purchases only made up roughly 6% of Starbucks total purchases of green (unroasted) coffee for 2007. (Why Starbucks doesn’t purchase 100% Fair Trade Certified™ coffee is an interesting, but slightly longer, tangent we won’t take here.)

Green is a responsibility Starbucks takes very seriously and, especially in our often cynical business of sloganeering, it’s pretty refreshing to work with people this dedicated to something good.

Today, we were going to talk about how Marlin just switched to PureClean for our janitorial services (who use Green Seal Certified™ cleaning products and focus on reducing the environmental impact while keeping our offices all sparkly), but then we realized we could do that all in a simple parenthetical phrase. Topic accomplished. Moving on!

Our friends over at FoodIQ just sent us an interesting article (ne press release) from Hotels Magazine about the debut of ECOLICIOUS at W San Francisco. Apparently, it’s an “eco-fun” “organic-chic cocktailing” happy hour, complete with original “eco-friendly drinks” and “organic bar bites.” And, if you couldn’t tell already from our egregious use of quotation marks, we’re just a wee bit skeptical of how green all this really is.

Admittedly, it’s not a bad idea. They’re trying to take green into more chic territory (though they’re certainly not the first people to figure that one out) and they’re owning their version of green: how much more W could green get than ECOLICIOUS? And they are serving green-friendly things that are organic or eco-friendly or biodynamic (what?). But our faux green radar started going beserk when we read this sentence:

Guests will be encouraged to have fun with the ECOLICIOUS themed cocktail hour, by showing up with eco-friendly tips to share with others, wearing sustainable clothing, or reusing their cocktail glass each time they enjoy a new beverage.

Ok, “showing up with eco-friendly tips to share with others?” “Wearing sustainable clothing?”

Shenanigans, W.

Shenanigans.

Have a great weekend. We’ll be back with a much more positive attitude (and more Green!) on Monday.

To quote Adam Sandler quoting Madonna who was not quoting Imelda Marcos but rather channeling Marilyn Monroe: “We are living in a material world, and I am a material girl.”

And when we material girls/boys want to do something good for our material world, what do we do? We buy it. Environmentally friendly products and services are, of course, incredibly popular now. And with that booming eco-market comes plenty of eco-posers.

If you believe all the advertising — luckily, most of you don’t — every company in North America is single-handedly saving the entire planet several times a day, at least. (By the way, did you hear about our universe-saving automatic toilet fans?!) Every ad is screaming green. Every product has some kind of spin that lets it claim a small, hopefully profitable chunk of the environmental movement.

Some products and companies actually are doing right by their claims. Some are simply trying to cash in on the latest consumer trend. It’s called greenwashing, though we find that the term “lying” works well enough and saves us from inventing yet another unnecessary compound adjective-verb thingy.

So…how to tell green friend from green faux? The answer is, proudly and not coincidentally, one of our clients here at Marlin — Green Seal.

Green Seal develops standards and provides certification for environmentally responsible products and services. In fact, Green Seal is the largest independent certifier in North America and, with the market’s rush to green itself, they’ve really come into the national spotlight. Check out this recent clip from The Today Show.

Green Seal offers consumers some much-needed reassurance on the accuracy of green claims, and gives responsible companies a little well-deserved credit for doing the things they’re doing. We (here at Marlin) have recently begun working with Green Seal, developing a complete brand strategy, updating their logo and now working on a video project to introduce Green Seal to the masses. Though, with 1.7 million hits on their website last month, it seems the masses are getting clued in pretty quickly.

Tomorrow’s GreenWeiner? Taking Out The Trash!

ADDITION: One of our clients at Starbucks just forwarded us this perfectly timed article on Ad Age about consumerism and Earth Day. Great read!

Whenever the issue of climate change or global warming (or whatever you’d prefer to call it; I call it “Thomas”) comes up, talk invariably turns to emerging nations like China, countries diving headlong into their own pseudo-industrial revolutions under the ever-watchful eye of the Information Age. And that talk is rarely flattering.

So it was refreshing to hear this piece on NPR Monday night, examining how China is trying to balance explosive growth against heavily leaded skies.

One side note: A companion bit of commentary to this story is from an expat currently living in Shanghai who was truly shocked at the idealism and can-do attitude of the Chinese people she’d met. She compares this to what she perceives as current American pessimism (and past American can-do-ism). Interesting perspective.

Tomorrow (speaking of can-do attitude): Green Seal Certified

Let’s talk about toilets.

As a result of a near-disastrous exhaust fan fire in the Marlin ladies restroom, we now have automatic, motion-activated lights and fans in both restrooms. This cuts down on the possibility of fires breaking out unnoticed on the weekend, but it also has the very green side effect of reducing Marlin’s overall energy consumption. The lights and fans aren’t running 24/7, which means we save approximately 43 billion kilowatts of energy every single day. (This number is in no way “true” or “accurate” or “verified” in any way imaginable. But the auto lights do save energy.)

Now, any time you feel the need to visit Mrs. Murphy, there’s a good chance you will be greeted with a momentarily dark restroom. Yes, a little disconcerting. But then the lights and fan will flicker to life and stay on for, we’re told, fifteen minutes. Should you be detained relatively motionless in the restroom for more than your allotted fifteen minutes, the lights will go out. So a word to the, um, slow-moving. We suggest you either speed things up or bring some sort of elongated waving device (a glove on a pole?) into the stall with you … for god’s sake do something to keep those lights on.

The only real downside to this? Some Marlinites believe fifteen minutes of exhaust fan just isn’t enough to handle certain bathroom events. Scary but true.

Tomorrow: China!

In yet another thundering blow to Bad Furniture everywhere, IKEA has decked out an entire train in Kobe in wonderfully modern style (though we do wonder if commuters were required to assemble all this stuff every morning). Granted, IKEA was also promoting a local store’s grand opening, and pretty darn smartly, but we like to think IKEA is simply another loyal foot soldier in the War On Bad Furniture. Threat Level: La-Z-Boy!