Why Pinterest Should Be on Your Research Radar Now.

Oh savvy marketer, of course you’ve heard the scuttlebutt about new social darling, Pinterest. You’ve already heard that the online pinboard phenomenon just won the Crunchie for the Best New Startup of 2011.  You’ve already heard about the site’s “crazy, crazy traffic and growth.” 8000% in one short year.

You’ve heard about those sweet purchase-power psychographics — all those happily addicted Pinners, 80% of them women ages 25-44, who are spending an average of 14 minutes daily pinning like mad.  Growing the site organically by passing along hard-to-nab invitations.

And the Big Brands, especially retailers like Nordstrom, Whole Foods, and Lands’ End, who are jumping on board this thriving new platform. You already know the tantalizing details.

But your question remains: What’s in it for me, for my brand? Why should I take the time, head count, and budget to expand across yet another social space, especially when Google + and Tumblr are also growing in significance for marketers? Why should I bother?

Here’s why:   Pinterest is an unprecedented opportunity to get up-close-and-personal with your customers. It’s Customer Research as it should be.

While Pinterest clearly didn’t plan to be an astonishing new Digital Ethnography tool, the site is the most intriguing opportunity for marketers to go native that’s come along in decades.  At the core of ethnography is the study of culture — notably  the meanings individuals give to objects, people, events, and experiences.  Ethno actually comes from the Greek word ethnos — meaning folk or culture.  Graphia means writing.

From where I sit, a veteran market researcher with a trusty trendkit at my side , Pinterest is the epitome of our folky digital culture today. Marketers can essentially go native each time they visit the site.  Each board is a collection of what’s meaningful to the Pinners, along with graphia type responses:  Likes, Descriptions, and RePins.

Unlike traditional qualitative research, the methodology or structure is not owned or even necessarily guided by the researcher. We’re merely dropping in;  observing the customer in their native environment.   Call it a digital upgrade of those venerable Focus Group projective techniques — Vision Boards, Mood Boards, Treasure Maps. But even better, Pinterest is iterative. All those Pinners are vividly evolving their boards with every sticky minute they spend per day on the site.

Imagine watching your customers’ wishlist-style boards, all those wants, needs, and desires, as they’re mapped out in gloriously colorful detail. All those aspirations presented authentically and beautifully. Living scrapbooks of your customers’ life designs.

Pinterest is an exciting opportunity to:

• Conduct digital ethnography
• Discover new category/industry/style trends — what pins are most popular
• Study your brand’s Competitive Landscape (visually + response)
• Find new Influencers (many “existing” Influencers are already pinning but new, and perhaps different persona, are are emerging)
• Explore/test new themes, ideas, product development
• Crowdsource product development
• Name Generation.
• Imagine the deep insights of combining face-to-face Focus Groups with Pinterest Digital Ethnography.

Hope to see you on Pinterest soon. I’d love to help get your brand up and Pinning.  If you need an invitation, email me at: hello@guruofnew.com or @guruofnew

The Hatch Network Launch: The Hottest Invitation in Town

The R-word has Event Planners shaking in their Prada boots. Not only has attendance slumped but registration has turned into a logistical nightmare, as attendees wait until the last possible moment to sign up.

Unless you’re Hatch, that is.

The Hatch Network’s Launch event is coming up on May 5th — Cinco de Mayo — a day traditionally booked for Dos Equis and lime. And yet, weeks before the event, more than 150 women have already registered, eager to hear what Hatch Founders, Alison Covarrubias and Claire Fontana, have to say about their Business Education Network for Women Entrepreneurs.

So if you’re one of those event procrastinators, you’d better not chance it this time. Rumor has it that Claire is personally making each and every quesadilla. Who’d want to miss that?

Trend 3: The Return of Girly Glam.

Last year I noticed that women were once again proudly displaying their breasts.

No, I’m not gay and no, I’m not some kind of pervert. My world has simply been so permeated by the ‘business casual’ of faded jeans, indy-band T-shirt and scruffy runners or the Dockeresque chic of Mommalution uniforms that the mere sight of curve-hugging fabric and plunging necklines was a smidgen of a shocker. Yet second-skin tops and stilettos were suddenly everywhere, along with the enthusiastic return of fishnets.  Photographer Monica Michelle is swamped with bookings for Boudoir sessions while ‘Bliss Pleasure Party’ entrepreneur Chrystal Bougon can barely keep up with demand for lacy lingerie and sexy toys.

At a Girls in Tech event in San Francisco, my fellow panelist the bodacious author Sarah Lacy, was mobbed afterwards by fans who were as likely to have questions about her fab boots as her fab book.

In May, Sex and the City smashed all box office estimates. We saw it at a theater in Santa Monica that was sold out from the first showing straight through midnight. Glam girls lined up in their Jimmy Choos, giggling with their own Samanthas, Charlottes, Mirandas and Carries. It was full court femme power, and I realized that girly glam was not just a budding trend but was in full lush bloom.

Several recent ethnography projects have yielded an emerging Persona — the Girly Green or the Glam Green, if not quite the Sexy Sustainable. This intriguing psychographic is as apt to be interested in Day to Night Barbie as she is a non-toxic ingredient. Can we have sparkle and shimmer and wrap it all up in natural green tea and shaved ginger? Can we have a Girls Night In, with organic spa smoothers and fragrant Lush balls melting in the tub? Can we forever lose the image of Berkeley granola ‘crunchies’ in Birkenstocks and replace it with the ‘sexy, smart green living’ of new site EcoStiletto?

Fashionista sites like Style Hive, the 44-million-unique viewers per month strong Glam Media, and runner-up, the Sugar Network,continue to morph into Internet power players. Even newcomer BettyConfidential, initially positioned as a forum for women across many life stages, has reinvented itself with uber-girly stories about lipstick, sex and harem pants.

And then there’s Project Runway, the hit reality show that made sewing machines and tape measures sexy. “Fashion is the new food” declared one publication. Icon Tim Gunn chimed in with ‘It’s crack. It’s addictive.” Ratings continue to rise with each successive season.

So does all this girly glam mean that voila! women have finally achieved so much equality that we can now afford to literally let it all hang out? That women no longer need to dress or behave like men? That we have choices — every permutation of chic from chictini to Hillary’s custom pantsuits to Sarah Palin’s much ballyhooed booty from Saks?

Some thoughts:

For Marketers:

• Make no assumptions.Just when you thought that those 82 million Moms with their 85% of US purchasing power are marching into stores lugging their big green eco-purses, you may discover they’re actually clutching Kate Spade’s shiny new thing and tottering on their Naughty Monkeys, thanks to Zappos’ 400 employees’ persuasive customer service tweets. 
• In the early days of the Internet, we could get away with creating one persona –e.g. ‘Abby’ aka Mrs. P&G. No more. Women are schizo, splintered and trying to have it all, if only for as long as they can get a babysitter.
• If you had a solid Social Media Research program in place, along with an evolving Social Media strategy, you wouldn’t be wondering what this trend means. You’d know.

For The Rest of You:

The generations that grew up on the Marlo Thomas mantra Free to be you and me are doing just that.

Guru’s Note: If you’ve enjoyed this excerpt, stay tuned for my upcoming book, the trend guide: Rock Your Future.

Is THE GLOW PROJECT Going To Be Bigger Than THE SECRET?

Is the GLOW Project with its movie, magazine and sold-out events the next phenomenon?  Bound to be bigger than The Secret?

The site explains the GLOW this way:

How is it that some women are wildly successful, while others, with the same relative education, experience, passion and goals for success, struggle? We all have the same amount of hours in a day, yet some are able to accomplish so much more. What is it that they do so differently? What is it that they possess that is unique? What is it that makes them GLOW?

There is a powerful essence inside of every woman—a critical ingredient that only women possess. When realized, nurtured and expanded, it becomes the key to true happiness and success. You deserve happiness, fulfillment, and the opportunity to achieve wild success. STOP what you are doing. Take a breath, and connect with your GLOW.

“You gotta GLOW, girl.”

Guru’s Note: There’s an amazing group of women powering this potential phenomenon. They’re not just inspiring, they’ve got life, business and intellectual capital galore. And how serendipitous to launch just as our world is falling apart. Women are the ones who are going to have to clean up the mess. As always. We’d better figure out how to GLOW.

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Mad Men and Their Equally Mad Women

So tomorrow night, Maternal Instinct founder Kat Gordon and I are talking about “Marketing to Moms” at the annual Synergos Series sponsored by The Hayden Group in Palo Alto:

Our presentation just happens to jibe with the much-awaited opening of Season 2 of the hit AMC series “Mad Men“.  As a veteran of the ad business — albeit many moons after this TV series takes place — I am fascinated by this brilliantly detailed view of the ad agency world Kat and I were once so immersed in, and even more fascinated by the State of Women (and Moms) in 1960.   Mad Men highlights women in the workplace but also takes us home to suburbia, to the realm of the 5:31 commuter train, where Betty and her perpetually pregnant buddies blithely shun the local divorcee, reign over birthday parties, cocktails, straying hubbies and vibrating washing machines. All while balancing a Lucky Strike between their Fire and Ice’d red lips.

Nearly 50 years ago, women were sharply defined by their men, especially these Mad Men, who created the pop culture and the products that in many ways, enslaved both office wives and housewives.

Today with the sheer force of 82 million Moms (and growing, with a new boomlet showing up in census polls) plus the power and the preferences of our pocketbooks, we’ve managed to turn the ad world and everything else topsy-turvy.

In the year 2008, women are setting the trends and woe unto advertisers who don’t get The Triple AAA’s:

• Acknowledge
• Appreciate
• Authenticity

In this millennium, we’ve got spaces for moms that Betty Draper could not have imagined even after a pitcher of Daiquiris.  In London, private clubs like Maggie & Rose and Cupcake Mom, offer mothers a place to convene and relax, where they’re welcome to come and go as they please, 7 days a week.  Maggie & Rose, based in chi-chi Kensington, features play areas and offers children’s lessons in art, cooking, dance and more, as well as a weekend movie club and birthday party services. Parents are catered to with a comfortable and (importantly) quiet café (with wifi access, natch), as well as seminars and access to a a concierge-style service with well-researched info on nannies, tutors, schools, holidays, etc.

 Cupcake also aims to provide a grown-up but child-friendly environment but especially for pregnant women and new mothers. In addition to an organic café, Cupcake also offers personal trainers and a spa. The top floor of the club, where the spa is located, is a “baby-free zone” and features treatments tailor-made for pregnant women and new moms, from the “Cupcake in the Oven Massage” to the “Mermaid Wrap.” Cupcake also plans to install a sleep pod for much-needed powernaps, and will offer a concierge service to help busy moms complete their to-do lists.

In New York, there’s Citibabes, the club in Manhattan that offers high-quality services and activities both for children and for parents, all under one roof. The big A — acknowledgement — here is clearly stated by the founders:
We all know that having young children can do one of two things for new parents: it can make them feel isolated or it can bring them together. Our ultimate goal is to build a community for New York families that fosters a sense of identity and fellowship among its members. We also hope that families will appreciate the security and privacy of Citibabes, so that they may feel at ease while their children play freely inside the club—as if it’s a second home.

In the Mad Men era, not only would these special Mom-friendly places not exist, but the need for them would not be acknowledged, either by the Mom herself or by the business world.

Check back for more new Mom trends– and tune into Mad Men for a real education on how far we’ve come.