For the culturally inclined, a recession is very intriguing because of how much it shakes up people’s everyday lives – not just economically but culturally. I remember reading a few years ago about a study (which I was unable to find by googling, sorry) that stated that when the economy is good, clean cut and more androgynous men (think Jude Law or Johnny Depp) become more desirable to women, but when the economy goes down, burly and more masculine men (think Hugh Jackman or Russel Crowe) become more favorable again. I guess this has to do with a sense of security or people being drawn to more traditional values. Either way, I find stuff like this fascinating, and I’m keeping my eyes open for any news like this.

What else is the down economy inspiring? Well, Salon.com is reporting that some women are almost eager skip to Brazilian waxes at beauty salons in a down economy. Some are going to let the hair grow back, to some, as said in the article, “It’s back to shaving in the shower for me.” Regardless, women being ready to cut back on spending on something that at first thought feels quite intimate is intriguing. What else? As common sense would dictate, people are going for more alcohol rich boozes because of the recession. Also in the article, wine traders are dumping their inventories when strapped for cash, and people are gobbling up the steals. Does the recession change the way we see and consume alcohol on a cultural level, or is this just a pragmatic shift? My guess is on the former. Look for escapist boozing up to be featured more in popular culture.

Of course, as a recession brings about great change, it also brings great opportunity. In fact, some brands, especially lower end brands, welcome the downturn, because it offers them a chance to get ahead. Who knows, maybe we’ll even see a hipster or two in Wal-Mart? Karl Long states that the recession will bring forth an age of frugality, which could present a real opportunity for people-centered design. Also, check out his list of socio-economical shifts he predicts, and think about the cultural changes they could usher in.

The first Finnish Carrotmobbing event was held successfully in a bar called Juttutupa (“Chatter Lodge”, freely translated) this weekend. The event grossed over 6000€ in extra profits for the participating bar, and half of that will go to investments to make the bar more energy friendly. All in all, the first Carrotmob was a resounding success.

What I think has been missing from all the articles on Carrotmob is the WHY, as in why this kinds of things appeal to people. In a very short time, Carrotmob Helsinki’s Facebook group has attracted nearly 5000 members, a remarkable feat. But what drives people to initiatives like this?

Every now and then you will read politicians cry out that young people are no longer interested in politics (as it’s defined) in Finland and that this is a “crisis” of epic proportions. Just today Finland’s main newspaper Helsingin Sanomat reported that “in 2030 under 50% of people will vote in county elections”. Not only is that an asinine prediction to make 12 years in advance (what did they do, draw a regression line from the current voting numbers? did these people also predict the rise of 1960s radicalism in the mellow 1950s?), but also so missing the point. What most politicians and other pundits fail to realize, that it’s the definition of politics that’s in crisis, not the youth.

Being politically active means more than just getting of the couch every two years to drop a piece paper into a ballot box. I think it’s astounding that the Baby Boomers, who themselves were so rebellious and active in shaping their way of doing politics (especially in universities), fail to see that younger generations want to find their own way of political activism – just like the Baby Boomers back in their time. Why should they get to be rebellious and daring in politics, where as “we” have to follow the path they laid out for us? Today’s youth engage in politics via graffiti, squatting abandoned houses, buying ethical products and donating to organizations like Amnesty International or Greenpeace, and spreading “causes” on Facebook. Members of Generation Y, the Internet generation, see the world’s problems as global, and the three major Finnish parties can’t provide credible answers in this regard. Also, special interests and consensus politics don’t really appeal to young people, who obsess over authenticity and idealism.

Of course, the powers that be are also doing a great job of alienating young people on issues they DO care about in modern politics. Tommi Uschanov had a great accord in his provocative book “What’s wrong with the Left?” (In Finnish) how a total lack of understanding and involvement in copyright and proposed internet censorship legislation (I won’t go into details here but let’s just say that it has been rather awful) left many young people feeling even more disconnected and outright disregarded in preparation of the laws. Also, keep in mind that Baby Boomers are by far the biggest generational segment in Finland and they are grossly over-represented in parliament, so it’s no wonder topics that concern young people don’t pop up too often.

All of this of course leads to a fair amount of tension and cultural fodder for counterculture. The youth have always rebelled against the establishment, but the way the establishment has failed to understand how young people are reshaping the way politics are made and disregarded the young in issues important to them has only made this tension stronger. This is where initiatives like Carrotmob strike a major nerve: they don’t have ANYTHING to do with party politics, they are authentic and accessible.

Of course, pretty much immediately after the first even was over the murmurs started that the it wasn’t “done right” (the participating restaurant used the money on new coolers, does that count as green?) or that the event got too much hype. Like I said, it’s damn hard to do politics with a group of people that are obsessed with authenticity.

I must admit, I’m not personally a fan of the idea of saving the world through consuming MORE, which in many ways this is. But I guess Carrotmob does a lot more good than harm.

This came out on top with a rather hefty percentage of the total votes (33.8%):

Now, I’m not going to argue taste and say that the one I voted for was any better. But it’s pretty safe to say that the winner is and was the safe choice. The vanilla of postcards.

I guess most people like bland, they don’t like the ordinary challenged in any way. The other postcards did not look like postcards, so they didn’t get the votes. But where they lacked in postcard-likeness, they made up for in originality. And in my opinion, they told a better story about Helsinki than the winner. Then again, a cynic might say that the blandness is spot on in its truthfulness. Maybe the majority of the people really are just that, bland?

Kauppalehti: Hesburger’s turnout twice that of McDonald’s, more profitable too
Kauppalehti: PlayStation 2 game overall sales trump next gen consoles

The first one relates to me living in Helsinki. In Helsinki, there’s a general dislike towards Hesburger because of their campy advertising and I guess some people in Helsinki still haven’t forgiven them for buying Carrols, a Helsinki-based hamburger brand. But as the number show, Hesburger is reining supreme in the fast food world in Finland. It’s sales are mostly driven by the populace outside of Helsinki – especially through its partnership with gas stations. But you’d never guess it by walking in downtown Helsinki. There are more McDonald’s restaurants (which are generally more populated) and McDonald’s advertising is more prominent everywhere. But the numbers tell a different truth about the balance of power between the two brands.

The other one is a reminder to look beyond newness and hype. The next gen gaming consoles (Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii) get all the media attention, but the reality is that the “ancient” PS2 is still the top seller in Finland. Of course, given the choice I guess anybody would rather be the brand manager for PS3 than PS2, but unless you see the product’s life cycle all the way through, you’re not going be profitable.

Reality can be quite humbling sometimes.

It’s a fair point. The only small brand I’ve featured in this blog was Gym Jones and the only Finnish brand has been Nokia. But the thing is, I don’t think Finland has that many brands that could qualify as iconic brands, at least in the sense of portraying an identity myth. One reason is the size of our market and our relatively late industrialization, but another reason is that we’ve been notoriously lagging in the grand art of marketing. The only brands I could think of when chatting with Mikko were Marimekko, Iittala and maybe Ivana Helsinki, and with each of them I have a hard time conceptualizing an identity myth that could be clearly identifiable. Marimekko probably comes closest with its timeless and unwavering design (as Mikko said), but as said, that in itself doesn’t make for an identity myth yet.

An iconic brand?

However, when I got home I remembered a great example of cultural branding in Finland that my friend Viola had in her master’s thesis. It’s the case of Karjala (Karelia), a Finnish beer brand. As this (Finnish) Wikipedia page shows, Karjala’s sales were modest in the 1960s until the Soviet ambassador Andrei Kovaljov stated that its nationalistic imagery and name were insulting to the USSR. This created a nationalistic movement that boosted the beer’s sales immensely. Karjala got swooped up into the national dialogue and became a key and credible prop in culture, although not by its own doing (which might often be even for the better). People even had a saying in those days: “Let’s bring Karelia back, even though it’s one bottle at a time!”

Fast forward to 1994 and the beer brand decided to start sponsoring the Finnish national hockey team, and when the team won the hockey gold medal a year later the brand saw significant increases in its sales. Karjala had dipped into its heritage of nationalistic pride and gotten lucky, yet again, with circumstances that were out of its control. One could argue that any beer brand could have done the same, but I feel that the key issue here was Karjala’s nationalistic heritage, that had lived on since the 1960′s onwards. Another brand might’ve seen a small increase in sales, but Karjala saw massive gains thanks to their place in Finnish culture. It goes without saying though, that Karjala should look to reinvent its myth, I doubt that the nationalistic angle from the 90s is still resonant with culture, but that’s a whole other issue.

Karjala continues to leverage its place in Finnish culture

I also somewhat disagreed with Mikko that American culture and European culture (and Finnish culture for that matter) are so different that you can’t necessarily take from American cases examples and try to apply them here. It’s true that nearly all of Douglas Holt’s work is based in America, and I’m sure that it gives the theories a distinctive flair. But popular culture has been converging for a long time now, and the Internet has only accelerated this trend. We same a lot of the same memes, anecdotes and stories with our American counterparts. And as Joseph Campbell has shown with his work, idenitity myth as are universally identifiable. I’m sure Finland has its own versions to, for example, the American “man of action” myth, one example that immediately springs to mind is Koskela, the mythic character from Väinö Linna’s books.

From the article (in Finnish, sorry):

Yläsen mielestä Yhdysvallat varsinkin sellaisena, miksi Hollywood sen klassisella kaudella kuvasi, oli Suomen kaltainen, herroja kunnioittamaton raivaajakansa, joka oli oppinut tulemaan toimeen omin avuin.

“Sä et tyrkytä apua, koska kaikilla on samat edellytykset, kaikki pärjäävät itse.”

So it seems that Finnish and American culture might have more in common than previously thought.

It’s also very important to note that in many ways America could be seen as a testing ground for branding, because their consumer culture is so much more saturated in terms of choice and amount of advertising compared to us. I’d also argue that this leads to a higher “consumer literacy level”, as I had argued in my thesis. So in effect, America consumer culture is paving the way for European brands.

As some of my readers (a total of three, no doubt) might know, I’m doing my master’s thesis in modern branding strategies. Of these, what speaks to me the most is Cultural Branding, which is championed by Douglas Holt. Cultural Branding is about creating iconic brands through myths that “solve” societal anxieties and speak to people’s most inner needs of belonging and self-identity. Cultural Branding is about managing brands as cultural objects that convey meaning in time. Brands are very much a part of our culture and vessels of our zeitgeist, very much like books and movies are. A coke bottle from the 1950s has a lot of cultural meaning attached to it, just like a VW Beetle from the 1960s, just to mention a few examples.

Cultural Branding calls for brand managers to become cultural anthropologists: looking for anxieties that stress people in their everyday lives and searching for tears in society that need repairing. To me, this means looking for the human elements that speak to people in new products, marketing campaigns and cultural phenomena. And this is what my blog is mostly going to be about. I’m trying to become more active in analyzing big cultural trends that surround us and advancement in new tech and social media, and look for that elusive “human factor” that makes or breaks the appeal.

I also fiddled with the layout a bit, which I freely admit sucked before. I’m still looking for that perfect banner image and making small corrections here and there. So it’s a work in progress…

BTW, I’m gutted that I forgot to include this link by ReadWriteWeb on hyperlocal information. It’s a good read, check it out.

I hadn’t actually thought of this as a real problem until I interviewed Margit Sjöroos for a project a year ago. She’s a brilliant woman behind the Stress Free Area concept. When I met with her (along with two members of my team) she wanted to have a sit down in Tony’s Deli, because she says it’s the only place that is even somewhat stress free. As we were talking, she was constantly pointing out good and bad things in the restaurant’s decor and acoustics. At the time it was fascinating, but it has turned to be somewhat of a curse as well: I can’t help noticing the stress factors in all of the bars or restaurants I go to now. Spot lights, bad acoustics, the overuse of red, noise levels etc. Sometimes it can be too much and I just don’t feel at home in certain bars anymore. Nolla is good example of this. They crank up the volume at around 21:00 and after that it becomes almost impossible to socialize normally.

My roommate told me that the latest addition to the Helsinki restaurant scene Bar Cuba suffers from the “it ain’t too loud!” syndrome as well. Too bad. Helsinki needs a bar where you could chat away until the wee hours of the night but with good background music and the right kind of crowd. Please tell me if you can think of any.

We went there yesterday with Sami and our good friend Tuija. The weird thing was that there was nobody there when we arrived, we got the wall all to ourselves! We played around for a while, but to me the interface doesn’t work as smoothly as in the video, but it was still very Minority Report-esque. Maybe the lighting conditions were a bit bad or something. But if you’re around Lasipalatsi be sure to check it out!

Finally a city project to get excited about!