HELSINQI CREATIVE

New Dolcetto label for Carlton Cellars

Friday, 20 August 2010

We're molto felice that Carlton Cellars will be releasing their new Oregon Dolcetto with our label design this Sunday at Italy in the Valley.

The Dolcetto will be a one-time wine for Carlton Cellars, since they sourced the fruit from their friend Dick Erath, who subsequently grafted the vines to Pinot. It's a very nice wine with a big Italian heart but made in Carlton Cellars' softer, Willamette Valley style.

The photo is one that Anna & Leo shot on a location scout for Carlton Cellars in 2008. We liked the name Miles Crossing, and went out for a look at this picturesque area across Youngs Bay from Astoria, at Oregon's northwest corner. We were delighted to find this old, abandoned cannery, its delicious redness standing out so strikingly from the lush greens and dulcet blues.

Last night we supped with Dave & Robin of Carlton Cellars — at the excellent Lincoln, by the way — and they let us know they're thinking (only thinking!) of planting some of their own Russell-Grooters Vineyard to Dolcetto. We hope so, not just because we like the juice, but because that would give our little cannery pic a new lease on life.

Second-order decision-making

Monday, 26 July 2010

Whose idea was it in the first place to consider consumers — or, really, anyone, come to that — as rational agents making decisions based on fact and logic? It's encouraging to see people discussing behavioral economics and the distinction between (what people claim as their) preferences and real behavior. But hey, is this really anything new? The great advertisers have always understood this, if only intuitively. (Spoken like a creative, right?)

The distinction is between self-image and actual behavior, and what a distinction that is. This is where hands-on experience in Zen or any real mindfulness practice provides an edge in insight. The takeaway there is that it is exceedingly difficult to know oneself with any clarity and that preferences are fickle and contextual, so that asking people what they like is flawed at best. Unless you really know how to deconstruct the results of that inquiry. The corollary is that preferences are accoutrements not unlike Rolexes or Air Jordans, which wrap us in a comfort zone of reifying self-image but which ultimately evaporate like phantoms in the cold light of day and cede to the hard habits of actual behavior.

What does all this have to do with marketing? Only everything, and it's what these bloggers — Bulik, Rubinson, Rubinson — are chewing on with respect to behavioral economics.

If market research is about discovering preferences — in artificial circumstances at that (where "We tend to study preferences at times that are divorced from a respondent being in a need state." 1) — then it is barking up only one of the right trees, and misidentifying it at that. The crucial tree is the behavioral one, the decision tree.

And vis-à-vis that tree, Joel Rubinson has a most thought-provoking post on second-order decision strategies. The nutshell is that people make preliminary decisions about how they will make a substantive decision, in order to simplify byzantine decision-making processes. These preliminary, or second-order, decisions are made, say, while bicycling to the store, when the consumer decides she's going to buy whatever's cheapest, or stick to her favorite brand, or what have you. It's a self-defense heuristic against the hassle of complicated first-order decision-making in the aisle, faced with an embarrassment of choices.

This suggests very different meta-strategies for high-profile national brands vs. price-positioned store brands, and so forth. But hey, just read Rubinson's post on Marketing insights into how we decide.

And then, let's just be done with this preferences of the rational consumer silliness.

Addendum: Malcom Gladwell on spaghetti sauce. At about 10:00, it's all about the "we don't know what we want," we hold on to a self-image. And, a strong caution against universalism, in favor of diversity.

YWCA PDX chooses HELSINQI

Tuesday, 01 December 2009

The YWCA of Greater Portland has engaged HELSINQI for a major messaging refocus. We’re very glad to be working for such a great cause — with such great people!

This is a great opportunity for us as a values-driven, triple-bottom-line business to connect meaningfully with the community. It also brings Anna full circle, back to her days of social work in Portland in the 90s, when she ran a program for latina survivors of domestic violence. At the time, she surely had no idea how the insights she brought out of that experience would come to serve her — and our clients — as co-director of an integrity marketing agency!