aesthetics of joy

Several things have conspired to get me thinking about the joy of spinning these last few weeks. First there were Kate Spade’s joyful pinwheels, free for the taking and adorning the outsides of their New York shop windows. If any brand out there has embraced the aesthetics of joy and run with it, it has to be Kate Spade. Recent campaigns and store visuals have included cheery colors, hula hoops, polka dots, and artist Rebecca Ward’s colorful striped tape installations — whether by intent or intuition, they have a feel for visual elements of whimsy and delight.

The pinwheel idea seemed particularly clever to me because of its interactive component. Because they were offered up free to passers by, they tended to pop up in all kinds of places. I have one on my desk from the Soho store, which is a few blocks from my office. I have another at home (below), brought to my birthday party by a coworker (photo adorned by late night graffitoists).

In fact, Kate Spade had a contest encouraging people to send in pinwheel sightings, which were then tweeted, resulting in sweetly surprising images like this:

And this:

And then, in the subway recently, among a bag ladies prized possessions, I spied:

There’s a nice visual for me in the idea that the pinwheels are like seeds blown off a dandelion, scattered to the wind. And in fact, they do resemble the seeds with their long stems and wind-philic tops. The wind is of course the critical element in the pinwheel, a form of negative space (or force) that completes the design. A still pinwheel is an elegant thing, maybe even delightful, but it’s the almost-magical spinning movement that brings out the joy.

As I was pondering this, I received an email from a reader about a piece I’d missed in the NYT arts section, entitled, “Junkyard Poet of Whirligigs and Windmills.” A delicious headline if ever one existed, and the piece did not disappoint. The “junkyard poet” in question is Vollis Simpson, an accidental artist who at 91 is still making extraordinary sculptures from fan blades, propellers, and other scrap metal.

Originally a farm equipment repairman, Simpson began making things from scrap as a hobby, but has lived to see his work become highly regarded in the art world. This quote, in particular, struck me because it notes the universality of the emotion triggered by the spinning movement:

…he went to work, eventually coming up with a 55-foot high, 45-foot wide, three-ton whirligig of whirligigs that now towers outside the museum. Built atop a sign pole salvaged from a gas station, topped by a bicycle rider, cats and angels, and incorporating oil filters, milkshake canisters and waffle-iron parts, it prompts incredulous grins from passing tourists and draws locals to watch its wild spinning during thunderstorms…

…In Ms. [Rebecca Alban] Hoffberger, who has become a major figure in the national movement to champion the art of the self-trained, he found a “rabid fan” (her words) who once brought two busloads of his relatives up from North Carolina to admire his masterpiece. She calls Mr. Simpson one of the “true visionaries,” whose wit and genius for color and balance never fails to move people.

“You put one of his freshly painted pieces, moving as he designed it, anywhere in the world, and people will stop what they’re doing and stare and smile and say, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” Ms. Hoffberger said.

I have to give the NYT a little bit of a tough time here for not including a video slide show with this. Fortunately, we have YouTube to let us get a sense of these things the way they were meant to be experienced (minus the wind in your hair feel and the grassy aroma).

Lots of joyful things spin — Ferris wheels, Merry-go-rounds, tops, dogs chasing their tails. When it’s experienced physically, there’s something about the movement, the way it disrupts our balance and creates a transient loss of control, that triggers an unconscious sense of freedom. When it’s experienced visually, it becomes a display of unseen forces (centripetal, mostly), that is enchanting — I’m thinking here of tops and gyroscopes, spinning children and the undulating skirts of dervishes. I wonder, too, if there isn’t something happening with our mirror neurons that makes this a vicarious pleasure, that as we watch there is a part of our brains that feels it is spinning too, which leads to that visceral soaring feeling and Duchenne smile.

The wind adds another layer, another unseen force to the mix that makes pinwheels and whirligigs feel delightful. As humans we are used to power being emitted by things we can see — a hand or a motor — but the mercurial fluctuations of an invisible wind make things seem to be moving by themselves. Depending on the  other elements of the design (color, form, texture) and its context, this can be spooky (Hitchcock-esque) or, as in these examples, it can feel magical and joyful.

Images: policeman image and girls with pinwheels, via @katespadeny. Vollis Simpson images, Jeremy Lange for NYT.

NYT: Junkyard Poet of Whirligigs and Windmills

It’s not really lemonade season at the moment, but Seth Godin has a nice little parable on his blog about business and joy as told through the classic child’s first business. One is a garden variety lemonade stand, with the usual reconstituted beverage served for just a dollar in a Dixie cup. The other is run by a little girl making lemonade from scratch for the love of it, offering it for free but leaving a jar for tips. As he describes this second stand,

The whole time that’s she’s squeezing, she’s also talking to you, sharing her insights (and yes, her joy) about the power of lemonade to change your day. It’s a beautiful day and she’s in no real hurry. Lemonade doesn’t hurry, she says. It gets made the right way or not at all. Then she urges you to take a bit less sugar, because it tastes better that way.

….

Finally, once she’s done, you put $5 in the jar, because your free lemonade was worth at least twice that. Well, maybe the lemonade itself was worth $3, but you’d happily pay again for the transaction. It touched you. In fact, it changed you.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the transformative power of joy — the way a single moment of delight can shift the course of your mood and your day. A joyful moment can have ripple effects, in the way you treat other people, the things you notice in your environment, the paths you choose to take, the interactions you have with objects and people. Joy can transform space — making it feel more open or more intimate — and it can transform time, shrinking so that your delight spills over its boundaries.

The idea that lemonade could change you sounds silly at first. But in this case lemonade is a conduit for the sharing of joy. It is a craftsperson’s joy distilled into an aesthetic experience for a consumer — to experience, and to pass on.

{via @swissmiss}

When I read about Blu Dot’s Real Good Experiment on the Dwell blog, I was intrigued but skeptical. The premise sounded novel — leave 8 25 chairs on the streets of New York City and track them to see what happens — but the whole thing could get seriously gimmicky. With all the unconventional marketing strategies that have popped up in the last few years, there’s a shadow vocabulary emerging to describe the many thinly described efforts at self-promotion. Documentary film is usually code for “long-form ad.” Blog is often a chatty version of a press release. And experiment is typically some kind of product placement via sponsored flash mob. Call me jaded if you will. But a lot of these things are long on self-congratulation and short on sincerity.

So of course I groaned when the video opened with the question “What is good? What is goodness?” in a precisely articulated upper-class British voiceover. I don’t know, but I’m sure, you, lady, are going to tell me, and I bet I can buy it for just $129. So I was pleasantly surprised by the cut to the chair on the back of a motorbike, and by the direction the film took from there. Overall, there’s a high ratio of entertainment value to sales pitch in Blu Dot’s Real Good Experiment video. There is so much whimsy here in the placing and tracking of the chairs, and especially in the delicious subversion of market research language (PUNCOs and INCOs). The categories themselves are actually quite joyful, terminology aside, because they are inclusive. For the purposes of the experiment, Blu Dot segments the world into Potential Unidentified New Chair Owners (PUNCOs) and Identified New Chair Owners (INCOs) and there’s a wonderful universality in this view. No one is ruled out as a potential customer, as the post-hoc interviews make clear. There is no microtargeting, no psychographic profiling, no questionably ethical manipulative strategy. Just chairs and bottoms that go in chairs, all the same and yet all completely individual.

Of course, there’s also joy in the surprise, and with this Blu Dot cleverly tapped into a native ritual in the New York rhythm of life: streetside scavenging. New Yorkers are used to seeing all kinds of things on the streets, but a new designer chair is still a delightful rarity, an implausibility.

I also find joyful all the talk of value in the video — how one man never likes to see a usable thing thrown out, or how another is already talking about giving the chair to his son when he no longer needs it. Joy is recurring, and this streetside recycling we engage in is a way to renew joy, taking one person’s used up experience and turning it into a starting point for another.

Finally… don’t you think it’s refreshing to see good design in real people’s homes? It’s a pet peeve of mine that design is always photographed in such overstyled environments. Of course your chair looks good in a white room with a Saarinen table and three perfect peonies next to it. What wouldn’t look good there? It was an act of courage on the part of Blu Dot, and great faith in the design, to release it into the mismatched, messy, well-loved homes of strangers. It doesn’t happen to be my particular favorite chair, but you can’t deny that the chair comes out looking good — crisp, vibrant, and versatile — in the wide range of homes in the video.

Correction: I’m sorry, I believe it’s actually 25 chairs. I wonder if they all found an INCO..?

If you manage to let your fast forward finger slip from the DVR remote for one second this holiday season, you’re practically guaranteed some joy. I haven’t had much time for TV lately so I’m sure I’m missing about 90% of the joy-filled ads out there, but even the few I’m getting show “joy” penetrating just about every industry.

Hyundai is offering more comfort and joy with their holiday sales. Walgreens is exhorting you to “find your joy” in one of their drugstore aisles. And Kibbles ‘n Bits is weighing in on the question of whether animals have emotions, offering to give your dog “more joy.” These are the ones I’ve managed to catch — have you seen any others?

In some cases, these are just holiday ads, one-offs that use the word joy as a proxy for keeping in tune with the season. In other cases, marketers are using the holiday timing to launch a joy-based positioning for the brand that will endure after the holiday season. It will be interesting to see which ones linger and which ones fade. My hunch is that on balance the joy-space will be a lot more cluttered come January/February than it was in September before the holiday madness started.

I don’t know what to make of this strategy, really. Branding is in large measure about differentiation. Why launch a new positioning at a time when everyone else is going to be saying exactly the same thing? I guess I’ll have to hold this critique until the new year, when we see who is holding fast to their joy taglines. In the meantime, unless you’re a scrooge, you may as well enjoy it. Joy seems to have dollar value this season, with lots of pre-Christmas sales. It doesn’t hurt to be in a good mood as you wander the aisles with the last-minute throngs!

Happy joy-finding!

Nice mention of AoJ in this post on Brandchannel about Toyota’s creation of two new flower species that absorb nitrogen oxides and take heat out of the atmosphere. The two flowers, variants of the cherry sage and the gardenia, are planted at Toyota’s headquarters in Japan. Designed to highlight green improvements to Toyota’s manufacturing facilities, the flowers are an interesting marketing move and a great example of a joyful gesture. It may be “joywashing meets greenwashing,” but it’s hard to be skeptical when it just makes you want to smile.

{image: crossmage}

On Friday I had a post up on Brandchannel about a new initiative by Coca-Cola as part of their Open Happiness campaign. Coke is sending a trio of bloggers around the world for a year to “uncover insights about what makes people happy.” This latest installment in the soft-drink joywashing trend is notable for its intensity and scope — it’s not just an ad campaign, but a constant, year-long push spread over a range of social media platforms.

I think it’s an interesting idea, but it does grate on me to see Coke portray a brand-ambassadorship as a joy-finding mission. These kids are going to be spending barely a day in each country (206 countries in 365 days), barely enough time to exhale, much less derive meaningful understanding (or “insight”) into what makes people happy. But of course this isn’t an ethnographic exploration, it’s an exercise in generating brand stories — warm fuzzy narratives where Coca-Cola is a star character, if not the hero.

More interesting than the supposed happiness insights Coke’s floggers will uncover are the spontaneous interactions outside of Coke’s intentions that will undoubtedly occur along the way — the things that cannot be planned for or factored out when traveling in such unpredictable parts of the world. I don’t think this experience will deliver earth-shaking new insights into emotion, but I think it will illuminate moments of generosity, hope, selflessness, good humor, and compassion that will surprise us. For that reason (and perhaps a little vicarious living), I’ll be watching.

Brandchannel: Coke sends bloggers on an “Open Happiness” world tour

Last week I wrote about Microsoft’s new ads using a cute little girl and “happy” imagery to sell Windows 7. And now I’m seeing cuteness everywhere. Bunnies, puppies, cats in dresses — it’s all over the marketing world. It’s interesting to me that it’s both high and low, not just a mass market phenomenon. United Bamboo’s 2010 calendar, for example, features cats in miniature copies of dresses from the line’s latest collection. Given many of these dresses are retailing in the $600-800 range, it’s clear even the premium world thinks it has something to gain from cutevertising.

On the canine side of things, Modcloth, a vintage and indie fashion site, use their mascot Winston to promote their eyewear line to comic effect.

But not all furry things in ads are promoting expensive dresses or fancy shades. These guys just want you to make a “sweet million” with the New York Lottery:

I don’t know how long this trend will sustain itself, but it’s certainly fun while it lasts. What’s next? A Karl Lagerfeld kitten? Piglets selling cosmetics? Birds chirping out a car company jingle? Guinea pigs extolling the virtues of Viagra? Well, that one might in poor taste…

{United Bamboo + Modcloth examples via Refinery 29}

With its latest ads, Microsoft is hoping that some tooth-aching cuteness will make you forget all about the nightmare that was Vista. We might quibble with the logic, but the execution is hard to fault. Kylie’s cute, and I can’t help but giggle when that music comes on and the cat with the marshmallows flashes on the screen with the words, “snappy and responsive.”

A few weeks ago, Virginia tweeted me the question: “What is the relationship between cuteness and joy?” It’s a question I’ve been pondering for a while now. My theory on the subject is still evolving, but in short, it’s based on the fact that we have a visceral, positive reaction to children and childlike things, even those that are not related to us. This is adaptive, of course, because raising children requires sacrifices of a society, not just a parental unit, and so a natural affinity and protective instinct towards children protects the species as a whole. (Chowing down on a few of your neighbor’s hatchlings might be ok when you’re a crocodile with 70 eggs, but with us low-yield humans this kind of behavior is evolutionarily unwise, not to mention socially unpopular.) The assertion that we have an innate positive reaction to children is supported to some extent by research by Morton Kringelbach in his book The Pleasure Center, in which non-parent adults show greater activity in a region of the brain associated with emotion and reward when viewing infant faces than when viewing adult faces.

How does this translate to cuteness? Many cute things are defined by abstractions of neotenized (juvenilized) qualities: big eyes, round cheeks, proportionally large head, and prominent forehead. You would think abstractions would be less effective at evoking our emotions, but actually the reverse may be true, due to something psychologists call the peak-shift effect. Evidently the brain recognizes features made more salient through amplification and distortion even better than the real thing. This is why caricatures are so easy to recognize and so compelling. Cute things are like caricatures of children, distorted by the overemphasis of certain childlike proportions and features. Compare the big-headed Bratz dolls with Barbie, and the features of any stuffed animal with the real thing to see how this abstraction plays out. You can also see abstraction of childhood in cute movements, such as the wobbling of Weebles, which mimic an unsteady toddler. And perhaps we will also find the same to be true for sounds, as children’s voices are higher in pitch than adult voices, and have a less regular cadence.

Maybe Microsoft is hoping that by associating Windows 7 with all this cuteness, there will be a halo effect of protection and tenderness towards the operating system. I’m not sure but it could work, at least in the short term until the emotional impact of daily use takes prominence. Emotions are curiously non-directed, and though they are triggered by one object, the feelings are often transferred or ascribed to another. Microsoft is also shrewdly and not-so-subtly tapping into something else here, which is the cute photo and video forwarding meme (epitomized by sites like Cute Overload) which consumes significant bandwidth on most social media platforms. So it’s not just an innate emotional programing this type of ad appeals to, but also a cultural moment.

At the end of the ad, Microsoft promises “more happy” is to come. Very curious to see what that will look like, and whether Windows 7 actually incorporates any aesthetics of joy into the design of the software itself.

I’ve written about tilt-shift (where real-life scenes are photographed or photoshopped to look like tiny models) before, but I’ve never seen anything like this before: a stop-motion tilt-shift video of a day at Disney. The scale shift is so charming and really captures the magic!

{via @deepglamour}

Quick! Name the car you think of when I say “joy.”

…VW bug? …Mini Cooper? …BMW?

This new BMW “joy” positioning is being rolled out so softly it’s hard to tell where it’s going yet, but so far it feels like there’s a disconnect between the BMW people know and love and the BMW the brand is selling.

In “The Making of The Story of Joy” video, a behind-the-scenes look at the hero ad for the new campaign, an unidentified BMW rep is quoted as saying:

You buy goosebumps and you buy smiles and you buy adrenaline and you buy speed and you buy stories and experiences and emotion and it makes me smile even thinking about it. And that’s joy, and that’s what you get when you buy BMW, and it’s what the brand has always been about.

Really? Because I thought BMW was always about the cold metallic awesomeness of German engineering. For three decades, BMW called itself the “ultimate driving machine,” a positioning that reinforced ideas of performance, quality, speed, and luxury and kept the focus firmly on the vehicles. A quick browse of BMW’s brandtags is all that’s needed to confirm the clear understanding that rewarded such consistency of message across the company’s design and communications for all those years.

It’s unclear whether the change had an impetus or is just change for change’s sake, but evidently BMW’s brand managers felt they needed a more emotional positioning. They’ve encapsulated this idea in the new tagline “sheer driving pleasure,” which actually feels like a very appropriate evolution from “ultimate driving machine”: symmetrical to the original, with a more emotional and evocative tone that focuses on the response (pleasure) rather than the stimulus (machine).

All good so far. But from pleasure to joy is a much bigger leap, and a less credible one for this very masculine, mature brand. Pleasure is intense, sensuous, and thrilling; joy is childlike, whimsical, charming, cute, and sweet. Heart-racing pleasure makes perfect sense as emotional territory for BMW to own; the sweetness of joy feels like a force-fit.

Which is how it seems in these ads. In the “Story of Joy” ad (still Europe-only, for the moment), the voiceover describes joy as “efficient, dynamic, and unstoppable,” which makes the brand feel about as emotionally arousing as a FedEx truck. In an effort to inspire passion, the ad shows a BMW festival, a little boy surrounded by toy cars in his bedroom, and a bunch of drivers happily “joy-riding”. It does make you smile. But none of it has the humor of most VW ads, the odd charm of the old Sheet Metal Saturn ad, or the irreverent emotional punch of Mercedes nostalgia ads (like this one). BMW gets closer to joy’s quirky sensibility with the just-released “Jump for Joy” ad; but unfortunately this flies the furthest off the mark from the sleekness, aspiration, and power the brand is known for.

There’s no question that BMW is brand with enormous equity. They were probably right to pursue a more emotional tone in their marketing, but at this early stage it’s just not clear they hit upon the right emotion. In pursuit of joy, are they trading something more valuable?

Today I have guest post up on Brandchannel about the Paul Smith + Evian collaboration. I did a short post here about this earlier in the week but hadn’t really formulated an opinion about it yet. I’ve been turning it over in my mind all week and trying to figure out exactly why I find this to be such a striking and significant partnership, despite the blasé reception it’s had from the blogs.

You can read my take over on Brandchannel, but the gist of it is that I think it represents a remarkable shift in aesthetic values for bottled water, and an interesting example of an emergent tendency towards aesthetics of joy being used in a premium context.

I also think water’s blankness makes its packaging a particularly interesting cultural barometer. Water is the ultimate commodity. Product differentiation is nearly nonexistent, so the packaging become the prominent driver of the story. Because of this, water packaging trends tell us a lot about the underlying cultural mood. That mood right now is hungry for some relief from the strictures of responsibility that come from our down economy and damaged environment. It’s not a desire to shrug off that responsibility entirely, but for moments of joy that give us a bit of release, lightheartedness, and hope.

I find the video has a twang of insincerity when Smith talks about his long history of drinking Evian. Designers do things for the money every day; I’d rather that tacit understanding than a disingenuous justification. Nonetheless, it has some beautiful words from him on the design and his inspirations. I particularly like the way he says, “My whole life is about being childlike. Not childish. Childlike.” It’s an approach that obviously really resonates with me.

Happy Friday, and have a great weekend!

Xx Ingrid

I didn’t realize the MTA was putting joyful messages on the backs of metro cards but I think it’s a lovely idea. At least if people can’t be bothered to bin their garbage, the rest of us can get a momentary boost!

I’m really enjoying this redux of the City of Melbourne identity by Landor Sydney. Some permutations remind me a little of the Andy Gilmore piece I posted last week. I especially appreciate that Landor shared the grid so we can see how they constructed the system. It’s a nice way of allowing one mark to express itself in different ways, bringing in lots of color and vibrancy without losing cohesion.

From an aesthetics of joy perspective, this sort of “theme and variation” identity makes a lot of sense. The theme keeps the whole thing recognizable, while the variations trigger a constant sense of surprise and anticipation. And it makes very good sense for a city, which is going to be applying the mark to everything from street signs to parking tickets. This is something people are going to be seeing a lot; it wouldn’t take long for them to get sick of a dull mark. Overall, I think it has a really great energy.

While I’m on the subject of animated cuteness, I was a little surprised to discover the whimsical Hermés corporate website while doing some research yesterday. I expected a typical luxury brand website — staid, self-aggrandizing, and a little up itself about its heritage, craftsmanship, prestige, etc.. What I found was something entirely different, a website that brings the brand’s story to life through charming, beautifully illustrated little vignettes.

The usual topics (history, design, inspiration, materials, craft, lifestyle) are all covered, but in surprisingly novel ways. The story of a bracelet’s design is told through an animated line drawing. The iconic scarves are shown in a grid of real people who have sent in photos of themselves wearing them. The dozens of shades of ties are shown gorgeously styled like trees in a forest. Some sketches are just silly, like the orange Hermés boxes that self-assemble into a plane, or the wallets whose zippered pouches open and start chatting with each other like mouths. Others are more serious, like the somber, read-aloud description of rolling, the method by which scarves are finished, which takes more than 6 months to master.

I was particularly moved by one sketch in particular, which likens the noises of the Hermés workshop to the sounds of an orchestra. For a designer, craft is music, and the sounds of fabrication trigger a sense of joy at the rhythmic cacophony that is creation. In the app, clicking on each instrument adds another workshop sound to the mix, until with speakers cranked you feel the bliss of being surrounded by craftspeople, each absorbed in the melody of his own making. You can turn the instruments on and off, playing around with trying to figure out how they’ve chosen which tool marrys with which instrument. It’s a small miracle to me that no self-promoting text accompanies this joyful little toy, and it gives me a wonderful new feeling of admiration for a brand I once thought of as elitist and unsoulful.

You could probably waste a lot of time on this site, which I’m sure is exactly what Hermés intended, but you’ll probably leave in a good mood. Happy exploring!

Hermés corporate site

Happy weekend, everyone.

Before I sign off, I just wanted to post this short item on the Brooklyn Flea’s scavenger hunt. I love this idea. They post a couple of photos of items on the blog, and if you find one of them, you get to keep it for free! What a clever, playful way to increase traffic and get people to check out vendors they might normally bypass, without making them feel like it’s being pushed on them.

Enjoy your weekend. I’ll be out and about in Miami for a few more days, swishing my feet in the sand and spending some time with my family. I hope wherever you are, you’re doing something fun!

Who will win this summer’s battle for the title of Joywashiest Soft Drink?

On the one hand you have Coke, with its a ragtag assortment of musicians giddily opening happiness on a made-for-radio corporate-sponsored singalong. On the other you have Pepsi, joywashing its way into the lead in Canada with an effervescent (and slightly frightening) website determined to convince you that dancing birds and suns with sunglasses are the next best thing to mainlining the beverage straight to your forearm.

Upon arriving at the Pepsi Canada “Joy It Forward” website, you are first advised to “See the Joy” and then to “Pass it on,” with the Pepsified, Obamaesque O-replacements smiling at you like the millenial equivalent of the peace sign. It’s not hard to see the joy, being as everything is dancing at you in that toddler-on-a-sugar-high sort of way, and the word joy happens to be appear about once in every five words on the home page, slightly more frequently than on this joy-obsessed blog.

There are many appealing little gimmicks on the site. You can check joymeters that tell you, among other things, how many days are left in summer, how many mentions there are of joy on Twitter, and how many people at Pepsi Headquarters are “hugging it out.” At 9:19 last night that figure was 827,033, more than 4 times Pepsi’s entire global workforce, which prompted me to wonder when and where they do all this hugging. (I’ve worked with some Pepsi people in the past and they struck me as very normal people. I don’t remember an inordinate amount of embracing. But maybe they don’t hug consultants? Anyway, I digress.)

The site also offers a number of silly games, such as a staring contest, a bubble blaster, and a strangely addictive game where the goal is to inflate helium balloons without popping them. The liberal use of tried and true aesthetics of joy — bubbles, balloons, childhood games, etc. — brings a reflexive smile to your face. They do wear thin, but in that sense they’re very much like soda itself. Sweet, refreshing, uncomplicated. Not everything needs to be a deep, multisensory experience.

Yes, it’s over-the-top saccharine, but I give them points for execution. This is what Trident’s A Little Piece of Happy should have been, but unfortunately fell short of. The games are simplistic but well-designed (no Orisinal, but still enjoyable), the Joymeter widget interface is playable and fun, and the integration with social media is decently handled for a mainstream brand. The “Joy Now” button, found on the interactive Joymeters page, is a gem, producing a different infectious stream of laughter at each click.

A tiny but important gripe for me is the glaring TM screaming “I OWN THIS!” over the coined word JOYGLES. Aggressive TMing is anti-joy, a reminder of our me-first, legalistic society, an unwelcome reminder that this moment of pleasure isn’t brought to you by the Pepsi in the can you know and love, but by Pepsico (TM!) with its quarterly earnings and profit margins and corporate BS. Hovering over this otherwise cute nonsense word, it’s like an irritating little mosquito you just want to swat. In the 2000s, this behavior of TMing everything in sight looks a lot like a dog marking its territory — ok for a dog, but impolite verging on unseemly for the rest of us.

That gripe aside, I think it’s wonderfully self-aware joywashing, and actually is appropriately on-brand. Who has license to be this absurdly camp if not a soft drink? I much prefer this approach than a pretense to some higher meaning. Like the HFCS they sweeten the beverage with, it’s fake, sweet, and a little nauseating. But if it’s not your whole diet, what’s the harm?

If the Joywashiest Soft Drink title were a packaging competition, however, I would have to say that Coke is the clear victor, mostly for that Weber grill-inspired can (2nd from right) that is just charmingly, gorgeously summer. For me, that can says Open Happiness 1000x better than some cloyingly chipper extended pseudo-jingle.

Finally, one footnote on the Coke Open Happiness campaign.

The Coca-Cola name in China was first read as “Kekoukela”, meaning “Bite the Wax Tadpole” or “Female Horse Stuffed with Wax”, depending on the dialect. Coke then researched 40,000 characters to find a phonetic equivalent “kokoukole”, translating into “Happiness in the Mouth.”

So maybe we own this whole happiness-marketing race to a lost-in-translation moment? I don’t know, and I have to say, I don’t really care. It’s still summer, for 10 more days at least, and I’m savoring the last sips of this free season and the cheery glow of its over-the-top joywashed marketing.

A rainbow is a pretty easy path to joy. This one involved a fair amount of work, piecing together all the appropriate hues in Pantone swatches, but the “Wow” payoff was virtually guaranteed.

I find the wide view really extraordinary. It’s like a pixelated projection, a very clever play on the digital nature of a Pantone rainbow, almost like a Photoshop add-on. The rainbow is actually more materially tangible than a real rainbow, yet viewed this way has the same textural filminess, the same unreality. I know it began as an ad stunt, but for me there is a profound and subtle comment in here about tangibility in the crossover between the digital and analog worlds.

Photos: Wandaaaa
Via Core77

I don’t know if some animated characters can make reading emails and making calls into a “Joyful Adventure,” but LG Australia certainly hopes so. The website for their GM730 smartphone features games in which personified apps get together to catch flying emails and do “playful multitasking,” whatever that is.

Looking at the graphic above, it’s clear they’re trying to harness elements of joyful aesthetics: the tiny claymation cupcake village, friendly color palette, cutesy language, and glimmering phone. It’s a Childhood aesthetic, designed to trigger playfulness and nostalgia. But the whole thing is just a gloss on what’s presented as an otherwise ordinary smartphone. The characters, with charmingly original names like “Dialing,” “Contact,” and “Office,” do nothing to highlight unusual features of the phone. They’re just the standard apps, often the ones you wished worked better. Seriously, Dialing? Is that even a feature?

The TV ad takes the Childhood aesthetic a step further, with puppets whose style clearly references The Muppets and a brightly-colored set that echoes Sesame Street. Another device from Sesame Street used in the ad is the intermingling of puppets and people. It all combines into an aesthetic designed to stimulate our nostalgia and bring a halo of joy to the phone. The ad ends with the line “Joy. Now in a smartphone.” spoken by a V.O. with a laugh in her voice and spelled out in a friendly, rounded typeface.

But despite the frenzy of action in the ad, nothing suggests this is any different than any other smartphone. Why will this phone, in particular, make me so happy? Answer the question, and it’s a legitimate claim. But until the emotional claim is backed up with benefits, this represents another great example of the increasingly common, increasingly global advertising phenomenon of joywashing.

Thanks Ben, for the great tip.

I would like to drive around in a car called the “Utopian Turtletop,” wouldn’t you?

That was just one of many names that emerged from a brief but joyful collaboration between the writer Marianne Moore and the Ford Motor Company in 1955. Ford approached Moore for help with naming “a rather important new series of cars” and though the names she suggested were all passed over, they still delight. Wouldn’t a “Pastelogram” be nicer to drive than a Focus? Doesn’t a “Fabergé” sound cushier than a Fusion? Ok, to be fair, perhaps the delicacy implied by that last one  doesn’t bolster the crash test rating claims, but surely all of them are better than “Edsel,” the name eventually chosen by the Ford execs.

I love the idea that poetry can lend levity to product naming. Naming in the automotive industry has become beyond bland. In the past few years or so we’ve moved away from the dull, corporate neologisms like Altima and Innova towards peppy party words like Jazz, Beat, and Fiesta that are just begging for exclamation points. They might be more upbeat, but they’re still pretty mundane. Collaboration with people who are used to using language in more joyful and flexible ways would take product manufacturers out of their comfort zone — and that could be a wonderful thing.

NYT: Poetry in Motion via @deepglamour
Image: Old Car and Truck Ads

Today I was interviewed about “joywashing” by Virginia Prescott live on New Hampshire Public Radio’s Word of Mouth, a show about trends and culture. The interview was great fun — I love talking about joy in its many forms, and especially its rise in popular culture.

You can hear the segment online here after 3pm today. And here are links to the ads from French’s, VW, Clorox, Trident, and BMW discussed.

Previous joywashing posts on this blog include one on Clorox and one on Trident, in case anyone’s looking for a more in-depth discussion of the phenomenon.

One point I didn’t have time to make in the interview that I want to add. . . Unlike greenwashing, joywashing doesn’t present a dangerous threat. I meant what I said when I indicated that an abundance of joy in marketing probably is a good thing, and certainly won’t hurt anyone. But that doesn’t mean it’s right for every brand. Not all products should be marketed as joyful products. And this glut of good vibes will definitely make it harder for any one brand to stand out.

Marketers run a very real danger of poisoning the well by jumping on the joy-wagon without backing up their advertising claims with product design or service gestures. Like any major cultural shift, the rising tide of optimism has the potential to be an opportunity or a threat. For those marketers that realize people are looking not just for sugar-coated messages but for uplifting products and services and experiences throughout their lives, the joy wave presents a good opportunity to leave a deep and powerful impression on their customers. Or it could be a fast-track to being perceived as inauthentic. It’s all in what you make of it.

Thank you to NHPR and Word of Mouth for inviting me on to share these thoughts with their listeners. Have a joyful afternoon!