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Cool Books Tupperware Unsealed Earl Tupper invented Tupperware out of “a black rubbery waste product of the smelting process,” but it was Brownie Wise who figured out that retail was not the place to sell his innovation, reports Mark Lasswell in a Wall Street Journal review of Tupperware Unsealed, by Bob Kealing (7/30/08). In 1937, Earl was a failed tree surgeon who decided to start a plastic-molding business. A sales rep from a plastic-molding machine company mentioned to him that the company “was saddled with tons of polyethylene” and that if Earl “could figure out something to do with the mountain of gunk, he was welcome to it.” Having noticed that polyethylene “didn’t give off an odor and resisted damage from acids,” Earl supposed it “might be useful for making food-storage containers.” By 1947, Earl had a patent and a name for his innovation, “Tupperware.” However, Tupperware didn’t do well on the retail shelf, “because shoppers weren’t sure how it worked.” Enter Brownie Wise, who started selling Tupperware via “parties,” in her home and soon became Earl’s biggest customer. Earl recruited Brownie to build a party network, and eventually abandoned retail sales altogether. Brownie was so successful it made Earl jealous. He fired her and purged her from the company’s history, shortly before selling Tupperware to Rexall Drug Co., for $16 million, in 1958. Iron Fists Hitler, Mussolini, Mao and Stalin were the ultimate masters of branding, argues Steven Heller in Iron Fists, as reviewed by Christopher Benfey in the New York Times (8/4/08). Steven does offer this disclaimer: “A popular brand of frozen food or laundry detergent is not forced down the consumer’s throat with an iron fist,” he writes. But he also suggests that “the design and marketing methods used to inculcate doctrine and guarantee consumption are fundamentally similar.” Steven posits, for instance, “that Mao with his ‘Mona Lisa smile’ and Lenin with his proletarian cap, functioned much the same way as ‘trade characters’ like Joe Camel or the Geico gecko, putting ‘a friendly face on an otherwise inanimate (or sometimes inhumane) product.’” Similar to “modern corporate competitors, these leaders borrowed freely from one another, with Hitler taking the straight-armed Roman salute from Mussolini and Mao adopting Socialist Realism from the Soviets,” he notes. He also points out that three of the four dictators — Mao, Mussolini and Hitler — “considered themselves artists and eagerly participated in marketing their brands.” Ironically, and obviously, each of these “four regimes ended up suppressing individual creativity as a threat to the total control they sought. When the regimes fell in turn, their brands were retired.” The Way We’ll Be Pollster John Zogby re-badges the Millennial Generation as the First Global generation and warns, “If you can’t market successfully to this amazing crew, find another line of work,” reports Janet Maslin in the New York Times (8/11/08). John says this in his new book, The Way We’ll Be, in which he “sees tectonic shifts in American attitudes” and uses some surprising questions to get at his insights. For starters, there’s his “wooly mammoth” question, in which John asks people whether they would favor bringing the wooly mammoth back from extinction. He finds, perhaps not surprisingly, that liberals tend to like the idea while conservatives do not. But John’s real interest is in those First Globals, who clearly align themselves with liberals, moderates and independents where wooly mammals are concerned. But the question — even more than its answer — points to John’s view of the future, at least for marketers. “The truly prescient...marketing team, he argues, would be paying more attention to granular micro-precincts (i.e., “sports fans, pet owners, international travelers, early risers”); shopping destinations (Wal-Mart vs. Target); and secular spiritual attitudes than to categories that mattered in the past.” He also thinks the First Globals, because they are connected by the internet, will “usher in a new era of sanity, substance and citizenship.”
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