From the MEC website: woman trail running on a moss-covered log. Unless, they’re hawking golf cleats, I’m not sure how much sense this image makes.

More than a decade later, many retailers have incorporated entertainment concepts into their stores. As you would expect, the strategy is also applicable online. Most brands with online direct sales platforms have merged the brand and product information approach of their pre-ecommerce websites with the nuts and bolts of presenting products and processing transactions online.

This non-product-content takes many forms, from travelogue look books at J. Crew to expedition videos at The North Face. Some brands, like Patagonia have created separate channels for their brand-related entertainment. In most cases, the content is keyed to specific products or serves a more general brand-building function.

Few retailers, however, take the pure entertainment approach, creating marketing content, like Super Bowl commercials, primarily to entertain. That’s why Backcountry.com’s Steep and Cheap email newsletter caught my eye.

The email newsletter/ad is called The Daily Dose and highlights a few of the products to be featured on Steep and Cheap’s upcoming one-time deals. It also has a big chunk of unrelated body copy.

But before I sample and critique I should first come clean with my plain out admiration for Backcountry.com’s commitment to good content. Their product descriptions and spec listings are thorough. Their review content and functionality is good. And, most importantly, their blog, The Goat, stands out for copy (mostly Rocky Thompson’s) that’s informative, funny, and just plain well written.

The Daily Dose copy, however, is strictly for entertainment purposes. Here’s a sample:

When I go to a new liquor store, I look for a liter bottle of Jamison. If it’s $40, I laugh in the face of the clerk and walk out. If it’s $35, I’ll maybe buy one thing and never come back. If it’s $28, I’m a customer for life. It’s important to have a fixed-cost good that you can use to gauge whether or not the place you’re shopping is grossly overpriced, but it’s difficult in most situations. A liquor store is not one of them.

The copy, while amusing, is completely unrelated to the products the email is hawking. Instead, it usually consists of random musings of the where-do-missing-socks-go variety.

Such non-content is intended partly as a humorous foil to the promotional content of the rest of the email. It also functions as a parody of the kind of lame marketing body copy that prevails in catalogs and e-retail. Nobody reads the stuff anyway, the thinking goes, and if somebody does read that crap, it doesn’t really tell them anything. So why not cut to the chase and write nonsense. It’s the sort of thing Moosejaw introduced a few years ago with random blog entries about dating and direct mail campaigns consisting of lobster bibs.

Good strategy for Steep and Cheap? Probably. Though it will be annoying to some, the approach lets Backcountry.com leverage the promise of a funny bit of writing to increase the chances that a regular recipient will open the email. And overall, it pairs well with the deal-a-day model, a retail pitch that’s more about impulse-buy-entertainment than it is about serious need-fulfillment shopping.

What’s most interesting, though, is the use of pure entertainment to reward the reader for interacting with a promotion. While this is nothing new for folks like Evian, it stands out in an industry where most marketing is keyed to the serious business of sports and outdoor survival.

Backcountry.com is nibbling away at a problem that plagues most outdoor brands: the things they choose to talk about are not very interesting, even to a large percentage of their core customers. Athlete profiles, expedition stories and product demos quickly begin to sound like the same old story. Brands have trouble differentiating and offer little to entice consumers to return for more content. With The Goat, niche portals that speak directly to subsets of its consumer base, and the Daily Dose, Backcountry.com is able to put a lot of brand distance between itself and competitors like REI, EMS and Altrec.

This approach won’t work for everyone. Arc’teryx has little to gain from humorous content—it’s just too far from the personality of the brand. But traditional outdoor brands have a lot to learn from what Backcountry.com is doing. The right mix of pure entertainment content, if it’s in line with the overall brand personality, could add life to an industry in which brands seem increasingly to be telling the same story.

A great example of content as marketing. This news and sundries stall in the San Francisco Ferry Building marketplace doesn’t have a lot to offer: magazines, maps and some kitchy souveneirs. What they do have is a great location: the main intersection in a major food, tourist and transit destination. And they know how to work with what they’ve got.

Look at where they sank their visual merchandising dollars. Not on fixtures, displays or signage but on an oversize clock and three large flat screen displays. The displays show transit schedules. Never mind that this is a small retailer in no way connected with any Bay Area transit agency. They have access, as we all do, to published transit schedules. And they’re repurposing that information as marketing content.

Thousands of people walk by their stall. Many, especially the tourists who no doubt make up the core of their customer base, will pause, interpreting the clock and schedule data as signifiers of transit information. Many will stop. Some will ask questions. A few will make use of the information on the monitors. But everyone who pauses, momentarily tricked into thinking the stall a source of travel information, will end up casting an eye across the display. And some of those passers by, now converted to traffic, will be converted to sales. All because the retailer understood what kind of content was relavant to its target customers and how to deliver it.

Bicycling magazine does a pretty good job of catching my attention. Daily (or nearly daily) email newsletters tease content on the website and in newsstand editions. For the most part, they are well targeted and well presented, leaning heavily on reviews and training tips to generate click-throughs to their site—exactly what one would hope for from a magazine publisher. (Brand marketers take note: real content generates real interest. Promotional messages, P.R. drivel and the umpteenth athlete profile generate yawns.)

But what really caught my attention this week was the header that ran above a review of 2010 bikes. In the banner above the reviews, a navigational area lists the bike categories under which the various reviews are classified. There are twenty-six of them. Twenty-six categories of bicycle, eleven flavors of mountain bikes alone.

This sort of slice-and-dice segmentation is rife in both the bike and outdoor industries. A single line of outerwear may be broken into a dozen categories: climbing shells, mountaineering shells, backcountry shells, soft shells, wind shells, ski jackets, snowboards jackets and on and on. REI, not satisfied with the half-dozen traditional tent classifications even came up with a new category last fall, All-Season-Lightweight. “What’s that?,” you say. It’s the space “between backpacking and mountaineering tents.” I’m not sure you could squeeze a bivy sack into that space, let alone a line of tents.

To make matters worse, the classification system can change from season to season. Flip back through a few years of Patagonia catalogs and you’ll see an ever-evolving series of collection names bracketing the same assortment of products. A jacket in the “Alpine” collection one season might appear in “Mountaineering” the next. Skip ahead a few seasons and both these categories are gone, having melded into “Alpine Climbing.”

The crazy categorizing happens when manufacturers try to group products into collections they imagine will help dealers understand their offering. Often, given the lead role of developers in the outdoor industry in determining what products to bring to market, it’s not until the time comes to create sales collateral that someone starts thinking about how to present the offering as a whole to retailers.

Once the line lands in front of the dealer, the buyer must do some complicated translating to decide how to allocate open-to-buy dollars, mapping his or her classification system to that of the supplier. In the days before the web, the consumer was at the mercy of the dealer’s classification system since, no matter how the supplier organized things, it was up to the dealer to merchandise them. With the rise of direct sales though, consumers are often faced with multiple classification systems for the same product class, one on the manufacturer’s website, one on the retail floor of their local shop and probably a few more across a variety on online retailers.

So, what’s the harm in a little confusion? Ultimately, a consumer will find a jacket they like and buy it, whether it’s called an “alpine” or “mountaineering” shell. After all, they’re just going to wear it skiing anyway. Maybe. But there are a few consequences to a system in which manufacturers and retailers slice and dice products into ever-smaller and frequently changing categories.

1. It confuses consumers, positioning some products as more specialized than they should be and, especially when sport-specific categories are involved, blind entire segments of retail customers to your products.

2. It distracts both manufacturers and dealers from a real problem, and one that has plagued the industry since at least the mid-1990s: overly specialized product positioning. This is a problem bigger than the scope of this article. But for now, suffice it to say that outdoor specialty has gone specialization crazy, developing and classifying products according to what I would call sub-sports, niche segments of a broader sport, the freeride segment of mountain biking, the bouldering segment of climbing and the adventure travel segment of sportswear to name a few.

Manufacturers have gone after these spaces for a few reasons. Some have merit such as differentiation, attempts to land new distribution channels or an attempt to address a perceived unmet consumer need. Some are more questionable and amount to little more than trying to make sense of SKU-bloat by breaking a group of ill-conceived styles into a new category.

But whatever the reasons, the trend towards specialization has changed the specialty outdoor landscape, creating more collections that are meaningful to fewer consumers. This is a dangerous path, one that ends, ultimately, in a balkanized retail floor, where the average outdoor consumer bounces from one fixture to the next as they’re presented categories too specific for their needs. And pretty soon, finding a rain shell will be almost as off-putting as trying to buy a bike.

The “fors” claimed that it helps raise awareness of breast cancer. The “againsts” call it worthless titillation. Whatever it was, it took off, probably exposing millions to the idea and building membership for anti-breast-cancer Facebook pages. To a marketer, those numbers sound like proof of a successful campaign. Great reach! Great frequency! Great work! Message delivered. Uh, what message?

This isn’t the first time disease fighters have launched a vaguely directed awareness campaign. Red AIDS ribbons and Livestrong bracelets were designed to bring awareness to their issues. The bra color campaign had the same goals. But as Marcy Carmichael wrote in her Newsweek blog last week: “At this point, there can’t be a person in the world who isn’t aware of breast cancer.”

You may counter that the wearing of a wristband or the Tweeting of a bra color represent an act of solidarity. Participants are not just looking to raise awareness, but to state their commitment to an cause. This, of course, is the idea behind celebrity endorsements: that personal commitment helps build the perceived importance of an issue. But the public hardly needs an army of the just to lend gravitas to the issue of breast cancer. It’s cancer for God’s sake. We know it’s serious. What’s needed are resources for research, treatment and prevention.

Even if last week’s bra campaign caused a discernible spike in the number of Americans aware of breast cancer, it’s far from clear that this will result in contributions, letters to senators or any of the other tangible steps that may help bring resources to the fight. Why? Because it was too easy. Social media makes it very easy for communicators to get the word out. One of the reasons for this is that reception and retransmission of the messages now require so little mind-time by those that pass them along. Yes, it’s community participation, but it’s participation at such a low level of engagement that it’s not worth much.

The lesson to brand and product marketers is that while new tools make it far easier to build awareness on a limited budget than anyone would have thought possible five years ago, awareness in itself isn’t much of a goal. It may be that the sheer difficulty of building brand awareness in the old days made it seem like the brass ring. But by lowering the bar, we have lowered the value of the prize—one more metric shifted by changing media.

What hasn’t changed is the fundamental rule of marketing communications: know what you want to say. Dissemination is a means to an end. If what you deliver to the ears and eyeballs of the Internet isn’t carefully crafted to drive recipients to a very specific action, you’re wasting everyone’s time. The opportunities provided by new media are enormous but they’re only as good to marketers as the messages they deliver.

Patagonia is a brand that’s not afraid to stick with what’s working. Its very first product, the Stand Up Short is still in the line after 37 years of service. The brand’s marketing collateral too, uses elements that have been in the creative mix for 20-odd years. The consumer catalog is no exception.

In terms of product styling, page layout, and the way product and non-product content is woven together, the books employ many of the same tropes they used in the early 80s. (Some would say the design look and feel is stuck there too but that’s a topic for another post.)

What struck me about the Heart of Winter 2010 catalog that came in the mail today was the sheer length of the editorial content. In comparison to most consumer catalogs, that statement is a double whammy. Few apparel catalogs have any editorial content at all. Except for a paragraph or two of brand fluff to position the brand or romance a collection, few books offer anything but vaguely emotive lifestyle photography and product images with corresponding product descriptions.

The current winter book has four long pieces, each close to 1,000 words, describing a scene or two from various expeditions. Patagonia has always dedicated a fair amount of page real estate to editorial-style stories about its athletes and their expeditions.* But these days, 1,000 words is long by any standards. As marketing content, it’s astonishing. We’re told daily by media pundits that attention spans aren’t what they used to be and that Americans’ appetite for content, if we have any appetite at all, is limited to sound bites, 140-character updates and text messages consisting of a string of acronyms.

In the outdoor gear and apparel market, using expedition stories to lend credibility to the brand is as common as the zipper garage. But these stories are generally shared with consumers in 21st-century media style: lots of images, short video, and choppy blog posts heavy on the photos. Devoting full pages to close-set type all in the same typeface and point size is unheard of. It’s as if Patagonia actually expects someone to read it.

One of two things is going on. Either Patagonia is woefully out of date and employing elderly, climbing-obsessed marketers to focus messages solely at their peers, or there’s still a place for long-form marketing text in some dark corners of our economy.

With no data to make a call one way or the other, I’m going to opine that Patty is preaching to the choir. A segment of their community is still probably interested in this content in this format, but that group is shrinking every year. Time will tell if Patagonia’s marketers can poke far enough outside the bubble to get in the heads of the majority of their customers: outdoor consumers that love the brand, live the lifestyle, but are nonetheless evolving in how they acquire and interact with brand stories.

The only constant is change. And while long form editorial is refreshing, I think it’s ultimately going to go the way of the morning paper.

What’s with the Stand Up Shorts anyway. A five-inch inseam? Nobody’s worn shorts like that since Higgins kicked Thomas Magnum out of the Robin’s Nest.

*I wrote about the use of expeditions in marketing for a SNEWS issue to come out at the ORWM. There’s lots more to ponder about the efficacy of marketing apparel using images very similar to your competitors’ (despite its beauty, expedition photography all looks pretty similar) and text describing sports that only a small segment of your consumer base can understand, let alone identify with.

We’re a design studio. Staffed by designers (and others) who take pride in personal creativity and working with their hands. That said, we work very differently than we did 10 years ago. The difference isn’t a new philosophy or a new way of approaching design or branding. It’s a difference in how we step design concepts out into finished pieces that serve our clients.

In the past 10 years—even in the past 5—the opportunities for automating the production of creative projects have blossomed. Using web applications (like Skubedo), plug-ins for Adobe products and better data management, scripting integration and publishing media, small (but smart) creative teams can produce big and complicated documents, sites, packaging programs and more.

But while these opportunities are available to both inside creative teams and outside agencies, we’re always amazed at how many of our peers still do things the old fashioned way, copying and pasting text and individually prepping and placing images.

Incorporating automation doesn’t just save on production costs, it changes the very way a creative team approaches projects. We’ve found that reducing the production window often buys more time to get the design right and that starting the production phase of a catalog or website later can be a huge advantage when you’re waiting on tardy data from product developers. Doing it right once beats the heck out of creating draft after draft full of incorrect or incomplete product data.

So if your creative team isn’t automating, you’re wasting resources and weighing down staff with uninspiring, repetitive tasks. One of the biggest reasons for turnover in in-house creative departments is good designers getting bored at having to design the same old pieces month after month. Automation takes away a lot of the tedium and frees up creative staff to focus on being creative.

As any soon-to-be parent knows, naming is hard work. What some brand managers don’t know is that it’s often plain unnecessary. Take Tully’s coffee, a Seattle chain of Starbucks-like coffee shops. Like Starbucks, they have decided to make up names for things we already have names for. In Tully’s case, the new terms apply to coffee taste rather than cup sizes.

On the back of the package above, you can see how Tully’s has classified its coffee tastes into three categories: Spirited, Balanced and Bold. But, out of a recognition that their terminology is meaningless to their customers, they’ve hedged their bet by following each of their terms (in the green bars above) with the corresponding term it’s meant to replace (in bold beneath the green bars).

So, rather than romancing their brand with evocative product descriptors, they’ve just provided extra visual and mental clutter. While I’m skeptical that creating a naming system adds much to their messaging, if they’re going to go for it, they should go for it. In the case of this packaging, each heading is followed by a one-sentence descriptor, so the bold translation line is hardly necessary. This sort of second guessing is akin to stopping halfway when crossing a busy street.

In researching a piece for SNEWS on how outdoor brands use expedition stories and images to define themselves, I connected with an Australian academic doing work on the ways sporting goods brands incorporate athletes and sponsorships into their marketing. While much of his work relates to brands partnering with professional sports teams, he has an interesting section on surf brands and their use of athletes and imagery. He could just as easily be describing the outdoor market:

Quiksilver sponsors major surfers and events on the World Professional Surfing circuit and understands that consumers can transfer personalized meanings of the sport to the brand. The Quiksilver brand accompanies images of surfers on high quality (sometimes thunderous) waves with very discrete use of the logo. They are most fussy about these images as they recognize how pivotal they can be in encouraging consumers to associate the brand with what they cherish most about the sport. That might include meanings associated with the search for the perfect wave, the freedom and flow (joy at being in the moment) that comes from riding the wave and communing with nature, or other notions around spirituality and how it is uniquely understood by the individual in the context of the surfing imagery.

Significantly, where major surf brands were once lauded for their ability to use sponsorship to attach themselves closely with the sport, there are ample signs that they too are driving hard toward sameness. In their desperate (and often conservative) attempt to be perceived as the most authentic, surf brands like major political parties, have gravitated to a homogenous centre in the way they attach the brand to sport. Major surf brands such as Quiksilver, Billabong and Rip Curl will often adopt the minimalist approach in their communication and product design. They use images of a surfer and wave and little else which can be powerful in that they may prompt the consumer to emplace themselves in the cultural scene and personalize meanings, yet when all the brands are relying on very similar sport assets there is often little that sets them apart.

It is our belief that surf brands will fare better if they embed themselves within the more unique stories and meanings that makes surfing culturally distinct from other sports including similar board sports like snowboarding and skateboarding. For example, an appreciation of freedom sits at the heart of all sport subcultures so it is imperative from a Values Transfer perspective to evoke what distinguishes what freedom (and other cultural assets) means to a surfer in a highly engaging and nuanced way. This approach will bring subtlety and strength to associated brand meanings. Before elucidating examples of what such an approach might look like it is worthwhile developing the point further.

From a draft of “4^th Generation Sponsorship: Values Transfer,” by Francis Farrelly, Associate Professor at the Department of Marketing, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Ownership—Twitter is allowed to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.

While I’m no IP lawyer, my business makes me conversant with copyright speak and this sounds an awful lot like a grant of copyright. The only thing missing in the laundry list of ceded rights is that of the right to claim authorship. Judging from the rest of the language, that is the only sense in which your words still belong to you.

Why care? Well, if you’re an outdoor brand or athlete streaming realtime tweets about an expedition, you’ve just granted Twitter as much right as you have to publish your story. You may have authored the words, but you’ve now given Twitter co-ownership, very different from what happens wher you just post the stuff to a blog.

* What’s equally interesting is that, if you read the actual terms, the Stone-quoted phrase doesn’t actually appear in the terms of service. Not sure what that means but It calls into question exactly what rights you’re really giving away. See for yourself: http://www.twitter.com/tos