6 Words That Define Your Product

I came across a post today that “Hemingway was challenged to write a story in only six words.” He came up with, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Even alcoholic misogynists can have their brilliance.

If you can whittle your brand, your product, your image, your career, even you down to 6 words, you can get a better grasp on who or what you really are. I’ll give you examples from my life:

Progressive Design Apparel (PDA): Colorful, creative, happy place to work.
Promotional Products: Used wisely, best bang for buck.
Bella apparel: Soft and cute; everyone agrees 100%.
Alo apparel: Bella’s great, moisture-wicking exercise line.
UltraClub organic T: Softest organic T, unbeatable price point.
Dri-duck endangered species hat: Soft, organic cotton; adjustable and pre-embellished.
Myself: Forever student; sometimes funny; always honest.

How would you tell your story or the story of your product in 6 words? I’ll do a few more to get your wheels turning:

GM: Crumbling giant, epitome of corporate incompetence.
Starbucks: Grew too fast, lost reality grasp.
Windows Vista: Over delayed, under functional, software bust.
iPhone: Hyped marketing; new AT&T contracts frustrate.
Global warming: People pretend to care; do nothing.
Chinese Democracy: Axl’s unfinished masterpiece? Axl’s big joke?
2007 New England Patriots: 18 and 1, perfect season choke.

Now your turn…

Where Do Super Bowl Shirts Come From?

By now, you’ve probably seen Giants Super Bowl XLII Champions shirts. The Giants had their parade yesterday in New York and unless I’m the only one on the mailing lists of places like Champs, Eastbay, Dick’s, etc. you probably got an email trying to sell you one. You’ve probably wondered where all the shirts come from. If I had to guess, you probably think they come from a third world country where people get pennies on the dollar to hand draw each shirt in 30 seconds.

The good news is that’s not actually the case. Now, I am not a higher up in Nike, Reebok, or Adidas so I can’t tell you where all the shirts come from. But I can tell you some good news. Lots of those shirts come from right here in America. The company I work for, Progressive Design Apparel here in Indianapolis, not only does promotional products but also screen printing and embroidery. We do custom work, where you come in tell us about your needs and design apparel that meets your needs and contract work, where a company sends us product (shirts, hats, jackets, anything) and we either put their artwork on the product or we create the artwork and put it on the customer supplied apparel. Some companies do only one or the other kind of work, but we do both. One is only better than the other depending on a business’ goals.

Anyway, back to the Super Bowl shirts. As I said, many are produced by normal Americans like you and I. Actually, as a point of specification, the manufacturing of a t-shirt is usually not done in place like Indianapolis, rather the decorating. So the blanks may be made in Honduras, for example, but printing them with a Giants Super Bowl XLII Champs design is done here Indianapolis. At PDA (Progressive Design Apparel), the guys who print shirts are Dave and Jonathan (you can see the whole team here). So last week a truck-load of shirts were shipped into PDA and on Friday after the last job was done, the Super Bowl shirt screens were set up. (I’ll explain screens another day.) On Sunday after the game—which ended about 10:15 p.m. Indianapolis time—the crew came in and setup the Giants on the press. They put the first shirt on and let it rip.

Our shirt capacity is around 1,000 shirts an hour, so assuming at that time of night there’s no loss of efficiency you can easily figure out how long it took for our guys to pump out the 3,000 shirts we did. Aside: That’s actually a smaller number than in previous years, because for example last year when the Colts won, there was a greater need for shirts in the immediate Indianapolis area. With the teams being in New Jersey and Massachusetts, clearly demand isn’t as high if it’s a Super Bowl win by a team within a few hundred miles of here—which is actually a large number since Indianapolis is located within an 8 hour drive of roughly half the U.S. population. I didn’t get a chance to ask because everyone who came in on Sunday night got Monday off and yesterday they were back to working hard, but they probably didn’t get home until 1:30-2 a.m.

There you go: most Super Bowl shirts come from normal, everyday guys right here in (as Ned Flanders would say), “that space between New York and L.A. called ‘America.’” Actually we do more than just Super Bowl shirts; I remember seeing at least 3 of the NFL playoff teams getting printed here, plus I know I’ve seen a handful of NBA shirts done in the past few months. Who’s your favorite team? You may be wearing one of our shirts.

Super Bowl XLII Ads – Interesting Connections

I think it’s only fair to state the following upfront before I discuss the interesting connections I found in the Super Bowl XLII ad ratings: I’m not a big fan of commercials. I’ve reached the point in my life, where I am not easily influenced by the use of a celebrity, vulgarity, or humorous punch line in a commercial. Unless a company has a new product or service or an existing product or service has been significantly improved, I just want to fast forward through the commercials on my TiVo. That said, I appreciate that commercials keep me informed of new products, services, or features I wasn’t already aware of. More importantly, I appreciate the fact that commercials keep my suspiciously high cable bill from being astronomical.

For some reason, people have decided that commercials they’d normally walk out of the room on or fast forward through are worth watching on one occasion: the Super Bowl. Because the Super Bowl carries the largest viewing audience of the year, advertisers spend a lot of money just to buy the time slots for their commercials; up to $2.7 million for a 30-second ad this year. Keep in mind that doesn’t include the cost of making the commercial, just the time spot to air it in.

Super Bowl history is full of blowouts. With that in mind, if advertisers want to be seen, they know the key is buying a spot before the game gets out of hand. The past few years have seen close games, but a blowout can happen any given year; so for companies that buy multiple spots, they need to prioritize which ad goes in which spot. The USA Today’s Ad Meter, which rated all 55 ads, results show some interesting connections:

• Out of the 10 most popular ads, only 1 was aired after halftime.
• A 4th quarter ad didn’t make it into the top 13 or bottom 12.
• Eight of the bottom 12 ads—including the 6 worst—were aired before halftime.
• Movie promos accounted for spots 17, 33, 35-37, and 52.
• Commercials blatantly using the “sex sells” idea came in spots 23, 44, and 48—interestingly enough the one with the least clothing (the Victoria’s Secret commercial) ranked highest.
• Commercials promoting responsibility, i.e. for a hybrid SUV, parents to be aware of prescription abuse by teens, and buying products that result in money being donated to fight AIDS, pulled in spots 51, 54, and 34, respectively.
• Five of the top 10 rated commercials involved animals in one form or another.

As always, feel free to comment. Did you see any interesting trends or connections in the USA Today data?