Welcome to the KPC blog! Here you’ll find fresh commentary on all things marketing and research, from historical anecdotes on marketing and research to the latest in advertising today. If it strikes our fancy, we’ll be blogging.

Those Silly French

I've just returned from a week in Paris with my sister-in-law and two cousins. Four girls, a very centrally-located hotel, and several digital cameras. We came back with a lot of good material. And a lot of shoes.

I'm sure that I'll never spend enough time in Paris to stop being amazed by a few things: the fact that wine costs less than Diet Coke, that French women don't seem to get blisters (that they don't get fat doesn't actually amaze me, considering how much they walk), and that the line between very public advertising and pornography is so, so blurry.

This ad for French underpants was plastered all over city bus stops. It is really more funny than sexual (sloggi?)...but it is also just about the tamest thing you see on the streets.

From my barely-French-speaking perspective, it definitely seems as though French marketers take a more simplistic, almost 50s approach to advertising, latching onto "sex sells" without looking much further. I'm sure I'm wrong about this, and the ads are nuanced in a way that I can't understand as a cultural outsider...but that certainly is how it looks when a stroll down the Boulevard de Madeleine turns up more lingerie ads than there could possibly be lingerie companies in the entire world.

Ah, the things I didn't learn in my undergrad international relations classes...

Research that "Matters"

Slightly snarky title...only because I feel a little guilty about posting about iPods when I've spent so much time reading about the effects of Hurrican Katrina. This isn't really the place for Katrina posts, though, and it is the place for iPod posts.

And today is a big day for iPods, with the new Nano making it's debut. Today's also the day that I read about this research study of just over 1000 iPod users. Turns out that most don't really max out their iPods...they're not storing anything even close to 10,000 songs.

So, then, why do they insist on buying iPods instead of less expensive mp3 players that might even better meet their needs? Because they're snobs, of course. Because they're buying the style and the brand - not the function.

While I read the article, all I could think was: exactly.