PSFK recently released an analysis detailing there thoughts on the Future of Retail. The document outlines, with examples, how an ever increasing world of web enabled mobile device users are helping shape a new "shopping experience" both in and out of the store. We highly recommend checking it out to help map your retail marketing strategy.

The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is reviving a campaign that first launched in 1954. They are using the same agency, the same basic layout, even the same photographer.

The original Ogilvy & Mather print ads caused a buzz because they featured a beautiful, artsy photo accompanies by copious amounts of text. (One of the original ads ran almost 1,000 words!)

But the new campaign is not intended to work on nostalgia. As it was 50 years ago, Puerto Rico is a diverse land with many attractions, and a verbose, visually rich campaign seemed to fit the bill. A new media-rich website mirrors the ads' appearance.

The campaign has just launched in New York. Not sure when it'll make its way to Milwaukee or Indianapolis.


Top: one of the original ads. Bottom: one of the new ones.

If this kind of thing is going to become a trend, boy, are we in luck. With over 40 years' experience, Meyer & Wallis literally has hundreds of great campaigns we could resurrect! Now we've just got to convince all our clients that that fits their retail marketing strategy.

Just kidding. The campaign for Puerto Rico looks pretty nice, though.

I like beer. In fact, Meyer & Wallis likes beer. While our intake falls far short of the kind you see on Mad Men, we've been known to wrap up a busy workweek with a round of ice cold "art supplies." Clever, we know.

And it makes sense, too. Meyer & Wallis started over 40 years ago here in Milwaukee — home to four nationally recognized breweries at the time: Schlitz, Pabst, Blatz and Miller.

But where are they now? Schlitz has just recently returned to brewing in Milwaukee, but is owned by Pabst, now headquartered in Illinois. Blatz is being brewed once again by Miller, but Miller has merged with Coors, and, you may remember if you follow marketing blogs like this one, has moved their marketing headquarters from Milwaukee to Chicago. Yup, of the original four independent, local breweries mentioned above, not one remains. The largest domestic brewery left in the US? Sam Adams.

Now I'm sure these breweries have good reasons for merging and moving as they have, and I'm also sure that product quality, not profit, remains at the top of their lists. (Wink.) But how have consumers responded to the mass production of beer that's happened over the last few years. Well, have you been in a Whole Foods lately?
 


Sure, there's a section for your Big Name Beers, but a gloriously massive amount of space is devoted to smaller, local, craft beers. Why? Because they taste better. Because they manage to get something right that the bigger breweries can't.

What does this have to do with Meyer & Wallis?

There's this assumption that bigger is better, even with Ad Agencies. Bigger means more resources, more talent, more sway. Or so it seems at first. But really, when it comes to Ad Agencies, bigger means that your account is only one of dozens. It means if your ad budget isn't in the tens of millions, your campaign gets crafted by inexperienced interns. It means you get to pay for all that a big agency says they have at their disposal, while getting none of the personal attention required to leverage those benefits for your brand. To revive the metaphor, it'd be like paying $5 to drink a bottle of Schlitz when you could have a bottle of Lakefront East Side Dark Lager for $3.50. You haven't heard of it? It's delicious.

Meyer & Wallis is a small, independent, local ad agency with offices in Milwaukee and Indianapolis. We aren't owned by another company. We have relationships with the media going back decades. Our experience in retail marketing management is second to none. Our UK style account planning approach means every campaign is carefully researched and and planned and executed by the same team of people, utilizing a proprietary planning process. We come to know the unique needs of each of our clients as only a small agency can.

So if you're sick of the watered-down taste of your current ad campaign, and yearn for the full-bodied, unique flavor that only comes from a local agency, give us a call. We're the ad agency that made Milwaukee famous.

Ok. I am NOT easily offended. Or at least I don' think I am. Anyway, this recent Microsoft ad has been pulled in response to an inundation of complaints. And I have to say, with it's repeated depiction of vomiting and not-subtle-at-all suggestions of pornographic fetishes, I think it's safe to say that this spot crosses the line from provocative to poor taste.

Don't believe me?




So what's Microsoft's strategy, anyway? Do they have one consistent message they're trying to get across? What's the message of this spot in particular? "Use our browser to keep secrets from your spouse"? Incidentally, there are a handful of other browsers that already have this "private browsing" feature, so Microsoft isn't even making a unique claim here. Honestly, what were they thinking??

My best guess is that Microsoft sees Apple — its main competition — as elitist and expensive, and thinks that if they market to the less sophisticated Joe Normals of the world, they're getting to some customers that Apple hasn't gotten to yet. But you have to wonder if Microsoft considered all the people they might offend with this spot. What about them? Won't their negative impression of Microsoft somehow hurt the company?

Why do I feel like I'm thinking about this harder than Microsoft did?

A funny/clever/witty/edgy ad gets people's attention. But the point of good advertising is not just to engage consumers, but to engage them and then deliver a message. The idea for the set-up in this Microsoft spot took precedent over carefully considering what they had to say. The only point they sell about their browser is a weak one, so the payoff of the spot is weak. And instead of remembering it at the end of the spot, most people, it seems, just remember being offended.

Offensiveness. Nah... that's not a sound retail marketing strategy.

Whole Foods added its one millionth follower on Twitter. So what, you say? This makes them the first retail brand to do so. How did they build such a monstrous following? Buy tying in a promotion to following them on Twitter, of course. If you still have any doubts that Twitter can be a viable retail marketing tool, perhaps you should read the rest of the story here.

Now that our nation's Independence Day is out of the way, your thoughts have probably turned to upcoming events throughout the rest of the year. Like the rest of summer, for example. If you're real Type-A, maybe you're already planning your Labor Day celebration. Maybe.

Then again, Sears and Kmart would like you to know that now's the perfect time to get ready for Christmas.

That's right.

Yesterday, 372 Sears stores put out a limited selection of Christmas gear. Also, Sears.com and Kmart.com launched dedicated Christmas areas on their websites.

No need to check your calendar — Christmas still falls on the 25th of December this year. It's just that sales are slow right now, and retailers all over are losing money. Sears and Kmart know that holiday shopping is a relative sure thing, so they've decided to start letting people make holiday purchases now. They've also reintroduced the layaway program: start slowly paying for your Christmas stuff today, and take it home by December. Sears and Kmart supplement their summer sales, and you get that herd of festive sheep you've always wanted. Everybody wins!

Considering the flack retailers (and radio stations) seem to get each year with the competition to be the "first" to market with Christmas stuff, this is a bold move, indeed. I suppose desperate times call for desperate measures, but is this really the best way to increase revenue in a down economy? Aren't Sears and Kmart essentially stealing from their future revenues? It seems to me that the soundest retail marketing strategy would be to make the most of every retail season, not borrowing from future ones. That's robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Maybe what they really need is to call one of the most experienced retail advertising agencies around. And clearly, I'm not talking about Young and Rubicam.

Read more about this story here.

A few weeks ago, I wrote on this blog about the growing number of "older" users on Facebook. All of a sudden, the fastest growing demographic on the site that used to be exclusively for college students had become adults in their 40s and above. Facebook has clearly been tweaking their feature set and user interface to be — how do I say this? — more approachable to the computer skill level of, say, my mother. Facebook probably thought this was great news; they've been trying to figure out how to make more money through advertising, and adding a new demographic certainly can't hurt.

Right?

Well, looky here:



Look at the growth broken down by "Current Enrollment," at the bottom of the chart. Turns out, kids of all ages dislike having their parents and grandparents commenting on photos of an evening spent bar hopping, or reading their "wall," or, God forbid, friending their friends. In it's effort to be all inclusive, Facebook might have alienated the demographic on which it built its business. And if the kids leave, will the parents stick around?

We've often worked with retail clients who are convinced the only way to grow their business is to please everybody they can possibly reach. But that's just not possible. If you try to be everything to everybody, you're going to wind up spread too thin and you risk losing any kind of discernable identity. Our favorite retail marketing strategy is to identify a client's key strengths, and directly target the consumers who'd be most interested in those strengths. Why direct your retail advertising toward consumers who, based on their needs and preferences, really wouldn't chose your store over the one they already prefer?

In their bid to appeal to everyone, Facebook may see a new startup do to them what they did to MySpace not long ago. Sometimes, it's best not to please everybody, as long as you can be okay with that.

Chart found via Read Write Web.

There's been a fresh wave of line extensions amid this recession (Kentucky GRILLED chicken, anyone?), but that still doesn't mean it's a good idea. While reason would seem to dictate that if your category's business is shrinking, you should expand your wares, sound retail marketing insight dictates otherwise, as this excellent article over at Ries' Pieces articulates. Check it out.

Though we're but a local Milwaukee ad agency, we've had several supermarkets as clients over the years — located throughout the midwest and beyond. You could call retail marketing one of our core competencies.

Anyway, many of them offer private label brands along side the local and national ones. As private labels are less expensive by nature, the recession has caused many to consider them. And a new study indicates that 91% of people who have recently switched to store brands because of the economy think they'll make the switch permanent.

WOW.

now if only supermarkets actively advertised their private labels.

When it comes time for us to dream up a retail marketing strategy for your brand, our precise and painstaking brainstorming techniques have not been made well-known. And that's intentional. Sure, everyone knows we like to "think inside the circle." But what does that mean???

Well, the secret's out.

You know how you sometimes get the option of what kind of advertising to watch on hulu.com? That's permission marketing. Ever sign up for an email newsletter? That's permission marketing. Do you subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog? That's permission marketing. Ever heard of the term "Permission Marketing" before? That's Seth Godin, whose book by the same name was first published 10 years ago today.

Before Google, high-speed internet or email marketing were really on anyone's radar, Seth saw a future cluttered with information and advertising messages, and imagined consumers opting in to the offers and messages most appealing to them. Now, permission marketing is a driving force behind almost every "new" idea in marketing, as evidenced by the examples above. To an extent, figuring out permission marketing will mean ensuring the success of your company's marketing strategies for the foreseeable future. And Seth knew that before almost anyone.

You can still go to his book's original site, permission.com, and download the first four chapters of his book for free (which, by the way, his publisher thought was a crazy idea. And yet, he's sold millions of copies of his book).

Meyer & Wallis has extensive experience with permission marketing. We've managed several email marketing campaigns, customer loyalty programs and the like. If you'd give us the permission, we'd love to talk more about it with you today!

Design by Committee:

Stories are flooding the internet of consumers who look right past this container in their search for their beloved Tropicana Orange Juice, consistently mistaking it for a generic store brand. Why? Because it looks like a generic store brand. I'm sure the Arnell Group (the group also responsible for Pepsi's new logo) has plenty of research to suggest that this packaging had broad appeal in focus groups. Vanilla has broad appeal, too. Because it's vanilla.

Whose idea was this? One guy? An entire design team? What do you think they had in mind — current Tropicana consumers and the product they'd come to know and love, or expressing their own ideas about branding via their clients? (Remember the new Pepsi logo?)















Design by Strategy:


This is one of several packaging designs we did for one of our clients, Palermo's pizza. They're a family owned business based right here in Milwaukee, and they make some of the finest frozen pizza money can buy. (And I'm not just saying that. It's good.)

Their pizza is good because it's based on generations-old family recipes from Italy.
What other regional frozen pizza company can make that claim? Probably not a one. So we wanted their packaging to reflect their unique offer — frozen pizza that tastes like authentic pizzeria pizza because it actually is. So the packaging is imbued with subtle, rustic Italian imagery. Nothing groundbreaking, really. Just stubbornly on target. We wanted the package to really suggest the taste of the product and the ethos of the company that makes it.

And what happened in both of these examples? Well, sales of Palermo's Frozen Pizza have pretty much been steadily up since. More than any other regional frozen pizza maker. They've launched in new markets and introduced new pizzas. (There's even reason to suspect other manufacturers have tried to copy their packaging layout and color scheme.) As for Tropicana, they've pulled the new packaging in favor of the old, familiar carton we'd all recognize. That was an expensive experiment!

Here at Meyer & Wallis, we don't just do retail advertising (although you should hear the radio spots we've done for Palermo's). We're also a graphic design company. We're media buyers. And we're good at all this stuff. We won't run an experiment on your brand. Instead, we'll leverage our 40+ years of experience to achieve exactly what you need us to. That's how we roll.

Sometimes you build market share by taking it from the other guys. At other times, however, your potential market may remain largely untapped. This almost always happens at the introduction of entirely new products — like the television or the iPod — when almost all of your potential customers would be first time buyers. But recently, a cunning retailer realized it was happening right under his nose with a product almost as old as civilization itself.

Winemaker E&G Gallo did some research on behalf of Food Lion, and found that 75% of Americans find the wine department at their local supermarket completely overwhelming. And since the remaining 25% of savvy shoppers accounted for 68% of total wine sales, Food Lion realized this was a market that had real growth potential. So they and E&G Gallo conducted some research and developed some in-store merchandising designed to educate and empower their shoppers. The result? Wine sales are way up, of course!

Sometimes the best solution to a problem is the most obvious one. But how come no one with shelves and shelves of wine thought of this before? Because sometimes the most obvious solutions aren't the most obvious. Strange, but true.

When it comes to marketing in retail, Meyer&Wallis has done it all. From national name brands to scrappy local competitors, we know how to reach potential customers where they're at. And, since "where they're at" is increasingly online, I should mention that our online advertising strategies are so cutting edge, we've even taken out a trademark on one of our concepts. Wherever your potential customers are, Meyer & Wallis can find them. Even if they're in a place so obvious it hurts.

Meyer&Wallis has been named the agency of record by Carpet Town, one of the leading purveyors of flooring and interior design in the Milwaukee area for more than 35 years. Meyer & Wallis will provide Carpet Town with marketing and advertising services.

Founded in 1971, Carpet Town quickly grew from a “cash-and-carry” carpeting warehouse to one of the largest retail flooring stores in the greater Milwaukee area. It has repeatedly earned The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Consumer Analysis Award as the number one choice for flooring. It has also won multiple awards from the Metropolitan Builders Association, and is proud to be one of 200 retail stores nationwide chosen as a Stainmaster Flooring Center.

Throughout our 40-year history, Meyer & Wallis has built up a rich foundation of experience working with a wide variety of retailers. And, despite our being a midwestern ad agency, many of them have been from all over the country, including supermarkets, realtors, manufacturers, and several specialty retailers. Through our prorietary planning methodologies, award-winning creative abilities, and innovative media buying strategies, Meyer & Wallis intends to help keep Carpet Town on a trajectory of success and growth!

Visit Carpet Town by clicking their logo above, and visit our main site to see what else we've been up to.

Just saw this on another blog, and it turned me all reflective on the work we do here at Meyer&Wallis.

So often, when trying to differentiate yourself in the marketplace, the impulse is to talk about your brand, your method, your product. After all, you truly believe it's superior!

But consumers don't want to hear how much you know about what you're selling them; they want to hear how well you know them. Which is a great argument for the existence of ad agencies in the first place. It's your job to know your product, and it's our job to know your customer. We're the ones who take all the effort and passion you've put into your product(s) and try to communicate that to the heart of your customers. There are plenty of ad agencies who can make compelling claims about your product. There are far fewer who can confidently, accurately talk directly to your potential customer. This is what we've been specializing in for 40 years.

Retail marketing is all about insight about the consumer. With proprietary research methods that have been perfected over decades, we're confident at Meyer & Wallis that we have the edge when it comes to knowing who you're talking to as an advertiser.

One of my recent posts was about our work on behalf of Meijer. They were facing a huge full-on attack by Wal*Mart in most of their markets, and bracing for tremendous losses. We told them that we had some ideas, but first, we needed to talk to some of the consumers who chose to shop and chose not to shop their stores. After several quick focus groups, our strategy changed in light of what we found. Based on the numbers, the only way Meijer could survive was if they spoke directly to those who had already rejected them. And how do you talk to a consumer who has already decided she doesn't like you? You talk about her. And it worked.

Or work for Meijer was a huge success. They have expanded their business and continue to thrive, even though they were once bracing themselves for extinction.

This is why we consider Meyer & Wallis to be a turnaround specialist. When time is of the essence and options seem slim, there's no one with a more proven ability to identify your key strengths, communicate them to consumers in a way that feels focused on them, and generate immediate, mesurable results.

According to Crain's Chicago Business, Wal*Mart is poised to take advantage of the current economy and to muscle out even more of its competition in the Chicago market. Over the past year, Wal*Mart has almost doubled it's share of Chicago's $12 billion market, to the detriment of local competitors Dominick's and Jewel-Osco. With stronger capital and distribution chains at its disposal, Walmart is up to the challenge.

What's worse, in previous years, both Dominick's and Jewel-Osco have lost market share to upscale retailers like Whole Foods. Now, with the economy taking a turn in the other direction, they will be feeling competition from the bottom as well as the top.

What are Dominick's and Jewel-Osco to do? Well, Meyer&Wallis happens to be a retail marketing specialist. And in the not-too-distant past, we actually took on Wal*Mart in a similar situation, and won. What? When? How??

A few years ago, we had the Meijer superstores as a client. After years of impressive growth and rising market share, Meijer caught the attention of Wal*Mart, who then opened stores directly adjacent to many Meijer locations, many in the suburban Chicago area. Meijer expected to lose considerable market share to the more established Wal*Mart. In fact, they felt their very existence was in jeopardy.

Meijer’s first instinct was to lower prices, but under the agency’s counsel, knew this was not a sustainable long-term solution. The agency felt the only way to survive would be to attract customers who had rejected Meijer as a shopping destination. Out of our own coffers, we commissioned research to find out who had rejected Meijer and why.

Armed with research findings, we created television, radio and print ads that spoke to and empathized with female rejectors. We appealed to the belief that they were the “CEOs of their households” and offered them a shopping experience that would save them both money and time – two of their greatest concerns.

Due to Wal*Mart’s significant presence, Meijer did indeed lose 9 share points to Wal*Mart. However, we gained 11 share points by winning over previous rejectors.  Bottom line...Meijer actually gained 2 share points despite Wal*Mart opening stores in 40 of Meijer’s measured markets, and they continue to thrive today.

Incidentally, we've also had Dominick's and Jewel-Osco as clients, helping them survive similar challenges within the supermarket world.

When it comes to retail marketing, especially supermarket marketing, no one has more experience, or has engineered more successes on behalf of their clients, than Meyer & Wallis. That's just the truth.

Is your business in the shadow of the Wal*Mart of your industry? We might have a few ideas for you...

That's our slogan.

Think inside the circle.

And our logo is a target:


It's like there's a theme going, here.

Take some time to look around the web at some other ad agency websites. (Go ahead, it's okay.) There are a lot of (younger) agencies out there that pride themselves on being able to think up the most outrageous, off-the-wall, outside-the-box ideas. And they'll prove it to you. Check out their sample work: lots of ads with images and headlines that are often more memorable than the message given about the brand being advertised.

See, "creative types" are born creative. It doesn't really take a whole lot of experience to think up an ad people will notice. What comes with experience is having seen hundreds of successful and unsuccessful ad campaigns and figuring out what makes them different. What comes with time is the discipline to think up outrageously creative marketing that ALSO adheres to a specific brand strategy.  Did you know Meyer&Wallis uses proprietary research techniques that we've perfected over the past 30 years? Only after we feel we've nailed the ideal marketing strategy do we start working on the ads. And if there's one thing we feel sets us apart from other ad shops, it's that our campaigns are consistently successful. They may not all be funny or famous, but they work. And what's more important to an advertiser than that?

So we think the essence of great advertising is execution to a precise strategy. Go check out our sample work if you haven't already. Some of it might make you smile, some of it might make you think, but all of it should tell you something about the brand being advertised.

Thinking outside the box may get people's attention, but often misses the mark when it comes to achieving a marketing goal. We'll let the kids do that stuff. After more than 40 years, we prefer to think inside the circle.

Earlier this month, McDonald's began heavily promoting their new selection of cappuccinos, lattes and mochas. This, after Starbucks' sales are down about 6% for the 4th quarter (after it posted its first quarterly loss in the 3rd) and it has closed 600 stores and laid off 1000 employees in the last year. What has happened to not only make Starbucks fall from it's once insurmountable position as the premier coffee purveyor in America, but to also make McDonald's — home of the Big Mac — a viable alternative for premium coffee?

I think it comes back to something I talked about a week or so ago: line extension. If you expand your brand so much that it no longer represents what once made you unique, you're in trouble, mister.

There was a time when, if you walked into a Starbucks and didn't like coffee, you left thirsty. They were proudly snobbish about their love for coffee, and had no intention of pretending otherwise. Employees were required to taste every variety of coffee in the store so they were ready to describe any of them to a customer. They even had to be able to identify any one of their two dozen roasts by taste alone. Hardcore! (Full disclosure: I actually used to work at Starbucks back in the late 90s. Hence, the "insider info.")

But, as time went on, Starbucks realized there were people coming into their stores with their coffee-loving friends and leaving with just a pastry, or just a Tiazzi (once the only non-coffee beverage on the menu). What harm could it do to provide some coffee alternatives for them?

And so began the downfall of Starbucks. What began as a justifiable expansion into teas and fruity beverages has snowballed to include chocolates, music, small appliances, plush toys, Christmas ornaments, sandwiches and clothing — most of it conspicuously overpriced. With a product lineup like this, how could they honestly keep positioning themselves as the leading authority on coffee? Are they awesome at everything? Plus, if we can fairly assume their $12/pound coffee enjoys a similar markup to their $5/bar chocolate or $10/box biscotti, then they might just be selling the same coffee as everyone else (a skeptical, cost-conscious consumer might suspect).

Not only this, but the decision to expand their offerings has changed the culture of Starbucks. Used to be, if you went to a Starbucks, you expected a coffeeshop. Intelligent-looking people talking politics over mugs of coffee, with a copy of the Wall Street Journal sitting on the table between them. Obscure jazz and indie music playing on the speakers — and you felt really cool if you recognized a song that came on. You got anxious about asking for your order "right." After all, Starbucks knew coffee best, so you'd better order it correctly according to their system, right? Now, Starbucks no longer feels like a coffee shop. They're something on the menu for everyone. You're likely to hear the same song in the store that was just playing in your car as you drove there. They no longer brew three different coffees a day. They no longer brag about how often they throw out their coffee and keep brewing fresh stuff. They don't have to. No one cares. People aren't there for premium, fresh-roasted coffee. They want Frappuccinos.

And so, enter McDonald's. If a hodge-podge Everyman-pleasing joint like Starbucks can still sell a latte for $5 a cup, who can't?

In abandoning their position as being passionate about coffee above all else, in expanding their product line way beyond coffee, Starbucks changed consumers' expectations for what a coffee shop should feel like — even though they were the ones who originally defined it. They stopped selling us a unique experience and started selling us products. And they day they gave up on their unique experience, they gave up their position on the top of the coffee world.

I'm willing to bet that you visit Starbucks less than you used to. It's a statistical probability. So where are you getting your coffee instead? Has Starbucks convinced you that you can probably find the same quality at your local supermarket, or have you sought out a more authentic feeling coffee house experience? Either way, blame it on Starbucks.

Now, could Starbucks turn it around? Could they rally and reclaim their former position as the best premium coffee retailer? Perhaps, but they'd need a really good retail marketing team. Someone who can develop their brand while staying true to a very specific brand strategy. Say — that's what we do! In fact, we consider Meyer & Wallis to be somewhat of a turnaround specialist. We love helping struggling brands right a sinking ship. Do you feel like the Starbucks of your industry?

We can help.

This week, the USDA begins requiring retailers to include country of origin information on several products, including fresh and frozen produce, nuts, and fresh meats. We’ve seen cute little stickers on most of our fruits and vegetables for a while that tell us where they hail from. But within the next 6 months, expect to see similar declarations of origin on beef, pork, lamb, etc. I asked our CEO Bob Meyer, who on his own has over 40 years’ experience with retail advertising and retail marketing, for his thoughts on what this means for supermarkets.

“I think it will create a huge advantage for American breeders... probably an almost unfair advantage because the assumption is that the controls here over the raising of livestock are much tighter and more stringent than they are in foreign countries. And I don’t know if that’s true or not, but, that being the assumption, it will give the advantage for American growers. It will put an impetus on foreign growers — which is probably very positive.

You almost have to believe that the reason this got passed is that American breeders wanted it and lobbied for it because it does create kind of an unknown advantage for unknown reasons.

It will put the impetus on subjectively lesser origins. We don’t know that they’re lesser, we just think they are. The impetus on retailers of those products and those suppliers will be to promote their own cleanliness. I think it will create some opportunity, either for Americans to come out and say, “we have better meat here, “ or for foreigners to claim that they do something better.

It’s interesting. meat breeders have been trying to figure out a way to brand meat for a long time. Meat, historically, has been largely unbranded and if there’s any assumptions of quality that come to the meat it’s from the store, not the breeder, because meat is one of the things that the store prepares and presents, and upon which their reputation is built. Breeders, for at least 20 years, have been trying to figure out how to brand meat. Coleman has tried with beef— that’s where our president Chris Mortenson worked. Right here in Wisconsin, Provini has tried with veal. People have been trying to do it with limited success, because the stores don’t want to get caught having to stock three different brands of beef.

It seems to me that what will eventually come from this is an opportunity to brand the meat. I mean, if New Zealand lamb is really better, then now there’s much more of a reason to call attention to the fact that it’s a New Zealand product. But it also creates a huge downside risk. If there is any significant problem or health risk in the food supply of a foreign company, it will kill them in the marketplace here. All it will take is one person saying they got sick from a “New Zealand lamb product,” and it will hurt all New Zealand lamb sales. This will probably have a huge impact on quality control in foreign countries that import these affected goods into the US.”

Starting next month, Samsung is going to begin shipping its mobile phones with an application called ScanLife preinstalled. This is a product made by a company called Scanbuy, and allows a user with a simple digital camera — like those in mobile phones — to read a special barcode. Similar technologies have been explored in Japan and other parts of Asia for about a year. I think even Google has been trying to push its own version of something like this. Now, it looks like the tech is finally getting large-scale support stateside.