Four Best-Practices for Renovating Your Brand—Before It's Too Late

Published on March 24, 2009

Stories of marketing heroes who transform poorly performing brands never fail to enthrall us: the transformation of Dove into an empowering brand; the shift to healthier eating for McDonald's; the rebound of Hewlett Packard in the PC market.

Those are among some recent successes. But they elicit the question: Why do brand leaders wait until their brands are at the breaking point, and at risk of joining such brands as Radio Shack, 7Up, or the GAP... for which renovation may be too late?

Unheralded marketing heroes renovate their brands while they are strong and growing. They spot changing market dynamics and address them as opportunities before they have time to develop into threats. Their reward is faster profitable growth without the negative headlines.
Here are four best-practices in brand renovation identified in our work with businesses across a range of markets.

1. Develop a holistic understanding of the brand
A holistic, customer-driven understanding of the current brand and a vision of the brand's future are crucial to proactive renovators. Typically, a holistic view includes an understanding of the brand's heritage, personality, iconography, functional benefits, emotional benefits, and perceived value in the minds of customers, influencers, and intermediaries.

The key is to understand how each of these groups views the brand in the context of their daily lives and compared with the other things that are on their minds. This view enables proactive renovators to see opportunities to credibly extend the brand and avoid the trap of defining the brand by what the company knows how to make or offer, instead of what customers want to buy.

Crayola has managed to stay relevant despite the digital and graphics technologies that might have threatened its brand's very essence. Its understanding of the brand goes beyond the functional benefits of washable markers or erasable pencils. Crayola's brand leaders understood that colorful fun and creativity best defined its role in the lives of teachers, parents, and children; accordingly, it evolved from an art-products company to a visual-expression company. It moved from being a partner with retailers to a partner with educators, parents, and children.

Crayola recognized the danger of being perceived as traditional and has continuously updated the look and the feel of the brand in a way that stays true to its roots but is fun and creative.
Finally, its leaders have used their understanding to guide them in developing programs for the Internet, a children's magazine, interactive toys, and advanced color technologies, breaking the constraints of selling only what can be made in a crayon and marker factory.
2. Look for segment swings
By the time most brand managers spot important trends, they are already threats. That's not surprising, since it's difficult to identify the early impact of trends among the general population of brand users.

Proactive renovators spot trends early by tracking segments of the population where the impact of change is more apparent, segmenting customers in different ways to fit their businesses.
Among the common segmentation principles:

• First, they ask questions about lifestyles and general attitudes in order to gain a broader context for the role of their products and categories.
  
• Second, they are particularly sensitive to trends with the potential to cross segments—from urban to suburban shoppers, or from youth into mainstream culture, for example.
  
• Third, they proactively test alternative ways to connect their brands to important trends in order to identify opportunities to play a greater role in the lives of their customers

Kohler is one company that is famously attuned to emerging changes in segments of the population, turning them into big business opportunities. In the process, it has been transformed into the US leader in bath and kitchen design solutions.

More than 30 years ago, Kohler spotted an emerging willingness of urban customers to spend more for high-end home designs. Herb Kohler began to advertise the Bold Look of Kohler with a differentiating focus on design that rode the wave of home investment and kitchen renovations throughout the '80s and '90s. In the early '90s, it spotted another emerging trend: the bathroom as a refuge and oasis in large suburban households. It took advantage with a line of whirlpools, Jacuzzis, and tubs, extending its reach into showers and bathroom accessories.

Most recently, Kohler has increased its emphasis on green technologies with toilets, showers, and control systems aimed at a broad audience.
3. Distinguish the underlying issues
Not every brand issue is a competitive one, but we frequently encounter brand leaders so focused on gaining advantage against a narrow set of competitors that they fail to address indirect competition or tackle customers who are questioning whether it's worthwhile to buy the category at all.

Proactive renovators are much more likely to distinguish among different types of threats and respond accordingly. Brand guru (and Prophet vice-chairman) David Aaker groups these threats as commoditization, brand lethargy, and changing customer dynamics:

• Declining brand differentiation underlies commoditization, which is characterized by increasing price competition, entry of low-cost competitors, and narrower margins.
  
• Brand lethargy is often a problem for category leaders who fall into the trap of repeating past success factors rather than updating the brand and keeping it fresh and alive.
  
• Brand relevance underlies customer dynamics issues. Changing technologies, lifestyle patterns, or attitudes typically cause a brand or a category to become less relevant to peoples' lives.

For decades, Coach focused on differentiating itself by handcrafting extremely durable and practical items with classic American designs in American factories. Between 2000 and 2007, it was able to accelerate brand growth from $500 million to $2.5 billion by creatively tackling leather goods' loss of relevance and lack of energy.
The company shed its handcrafted, American-made points of differentiation to leverage its core essence of classic, premium American design within the world of women's fashion accessories. It became more relevant and energetic by introducing color and fresh materials to its designs, transforming its assortment to provide a wide range of accessories and reinventing the Coach shopping experience.
Coach is the ultimate example of a proactive renovator that transformed itself into a category leader.

4. Apply the right strategies
Too many marketers think every brand issue can be solved with a new advertising and promotion campaign.

Of course, brand communication is an important component to building differentiation, energizing a brand, or building relevance. But, proactive renovators ensure that brand communications reflect fundamentally different strategies to cope with differentiation, brand energy, or relevance. One size will not fit all:

• Successful differentiation in commoditized categories almost always requires finding ways to provide more emotional reasons to prefer the brand. Emotional leverage enhances consumer credibility and trust in innovations that drive big margin gains and allows the brand to eke out small, but often crucial, margin advantages in older products. Emotional bonds provide a platform to charge more despite the competition. Staples's focus on ease (think "Easy Button") and expertise in small-business and home-office efficiency differentiates it from other superstores and lends permission to provide such value-added services as office delivery and computer repair to enhance loyalty and margins.
  
• Reinvigorating brand energy typically requires revamping the brand's imagery. A brand image in keeping with its promise makes it more noticeable, easier to understand, and more desirable. Marketers often think that refreshing the logo and trademark imagery is sufficient; that's rarely the case. User, usage, product, and associative imagery all must be explored to truly reinvigorate a brand. Sprite is one brand that regained energy by changing its user imagery to focus on young iconoclasts and its associative imagery to focus on the NBA.
  
• Relevance issues demand a re-examination of the customer experience. When consumers change the ways they shop, live, or use technology, the experience must adapt. Sometimes the adaptations include new offerings such as the salads and wraps that McDonald's has added to its menu to appeal to health-conscious women. Some adaptations encompass a comprehensive redesign of the entire experience, like Coach's store and product redesign to meet women's fashion accessory buying expectations.
  

* * *
These four best-practices expose one central truth: Customers must drive brand decisions.
To succeed, brand leaders must understand the brand through customers' eyes, track how different customer segments are changing, identify the different issues customers have in their lives, and link the brand to customer needs.

A Transformable Shoe Style - Modular Shoes

This shoe design is every fashion lover's dream or nightmare, depending upon your perspective, because it allows you to have just one shoe for every occasion. These funny shoes transform using zippers, and while they might be a bit casual for New York's favorite fashionistas, it's a great solution for the over-packer.

I'm in the process of packing for a trip right now, and lined up by my suitcase are many of the pair of shoes I own.

While I'm all about comfort, I can't decide what the weather and events of the trip will dictate, so I've got a variety of flip-flips, sandals, sneakers and flats. I know you can relate, and fortunately, the fashion designer behind these cool modular shoes, clearly another victim of the over-packing syndrome, has come up with a solution with a shoe that transforms to practically any style.

These funky, fashionable shoes transform from boots to flip-flops and everything in between. Heading straight from the beach to the nightclub and need a pair of stilettos? Just manipulate the zippers on the modular shoes!

Going from the office to a hoedown? Transform your loafers into a pair of country-style cowboy boots! Ok, so the canvas shoes slathered in zippers may not be the most fashion-friendly for the office or nightclub, but just think of the space saved in your suitcase!

These funky, modular shoes were unveiled at the "Bread & Butter" fashion trade show in January, in Barcelona, Spain. No word yet on when they'll be available for retail.

Join the Hunt

17/03/2009

The days of rushing round the garden to find a sadly melted and slightly disfigured Easter Egg could be numbered thanks to a a highly addictive online Easter Egg hunt. M&Ms Speck-tacular Eggs encourages mums as well as young children to ‘Join the Hunt’ at http://www.jointhehunt.ca/, on commercials and on pack promotions and via banner ads.The campaign is a collaboration effort between Proximity, Canada, BBDO Toronto and Firstborn, New York. Players complete games, search the website for Easter eggs, follow links to other sites connected to the campaign and discover pin codes in banner ads and on packaging to collect points for their online profiles.The more points gained, the higher the chance of winning some of the prizes on offer which include family holidays to New York, LA and Orlando. The campaign’s strategy was conceived by Proximity, with a planning process that lasted 18 months. Jon Webber, associate creative director at Proximity Canada told Contagious: ‘One of the key drivers for the campaign was to make sure it all came from one place’. He describes the online egg hunt idea as a ‘natural extension of the brief, to raise the awareness and purchase frequency of the speck-tacular eggs’.

The campaign also includes two TV ads that drive to the website, one of which (Join the Hunt) was developed by Firstborn, which had already produced the impressive 3D animations of the Red and Yellow M&Ms characters for the website. Dan LaCivita, executive creative director at Firstborn explains: ‘Proximity had the whole concept worked out from the pin numbers in packages to the hunt online, and we worked on the site and concept development’. He adds ‘By using the assets from the website in the TV spot we were able to save the client time and money’.The campaign is beautifully simplistic and compulsive, and the overwhelming idea is that the eggs you’re looking for could be anywhere. Christine Parent-Inch, brand director at Mars Canada concurs: ‘The virtual egg hunt was an extraordinary idea for the brand that builds on multiple platforms to engage the consumer. The entire campaign encourages participants to experience the brand through a virtual world that they can explore and tap into in a multitude of ways.’The campaign’s development through agency collaboration and its distribution across multiple platforms is impressive. LaCivita concludes: ‘We are trying to push clients to start with digital; we can find so many different ways to leverage content across multiple channels.’ www.jointhehunt.ca

Possibly the cheapest ad ever made

Proof that a cheapie can be a goodie.

Obviously there's no way of telling whether this is a real campaign or just some random idea that an art student smoked up one night together with his giant bong [the lack of egotistical branding makes us wonder], but a good idea all the same.

Before & After: Svedka Vodka

"The new bottle for Svedka imported Swedish vodka had to be bilingual: It needed to speak to younger scenesters who consider themselves “in the know” and hang out at trendy nightspots as well as an older, more affluent consumer who likes to have a drink at home. This meant the packaging had to look equally attractive lit up on the back-bar of a hip club as well as lining a club store’s shelf, said Marina Hahn, svp, marketing for Spirits Marque One, Svedka’s U.S. importer."

Holli Mølle Organic Flour

The Norwegian design agency, Strømme Throndsen Design, has developed the brand strategy, name, concept, packaging and visual identity of Holli Mølle Organic Flour .

Holli Mølle is a small organic mill in Eastern Norway, specializing in flour production with the use of ancient and nutritious grain types. The target audience is modern women who value health and nutrition and are willing to pay extra for the safety and taste of organic flour, thereby providing them with an extra feeling of love and care for their family.

In creating the name, visual language and packaging for Holli Mølle, the following criteria were highlighted:- The identity should be based on traditional and authentic values- The packaging should be environmental friendly, functional, flexible and efficient in production.- The identity should challenge the existing visual language in the flour category

The result is a simple and unique graphical design, with fresh colours on the labels as the only differentiator between the 6 variants. The design communicates well with the target group, giving them a feeling that the flour really is ”ground with love”, as stated on the packaging in the personal message from the owner, Trygve Nesje

Big Rock Brewery

Rachelle Hynes, a student at Capilano University, recently took the opportunity to redesign the packaging for Big Rock Brewery.

"Big Rock brewery is a grass roots company that is 100% natural. By incorporating illustrations and a flat colour theme, it illuminates their image and gives a unique look amongst its competitors

Personalized print

BRAND: Lexus
BRAND OWNER:Toyota
CATEGORY:Automotive
REGION:USA
DATE:Mar 2009 - May 2009
MEDIA OWNER:Time Inc

The Lexus SUV 2010 RX is a car with 22 customizable settings, plus eight options handled by a dealer. Lexus wanted to highlight this feature and cotton on to the fact that these days consumers demand personalized offerings.

The rise of consumer empowerment in a digitally connected world, means people can read specialized blogs, RSS feeds and create personalized Google homepages.

Consumers have become accustomed to filtering out the content they don’t care about and select to read only the things they want.

Lexus recognized this but also recognized that this type of selection process was not available to the same degree in offline media.

Lexus teamed up with Time Inc to deliver this level of personalization to print. Readers can select five Time Warner magazines that Time editors will combine into a personalized magazine with 56 possible combinations.

The magazine, called “Mine”, is essentially a printed, expanded RSS feed, which is a five issue, 10-week experiment. Magazines available include Time, Sports Illustrated, Food & Wine, Real Simple, Money, In Style, Golf and Travel and Leisure. Lexus is the only advertiser, but with personalized messages for each subscriber targeting their interest.

When users sign up to the service, they fill out an online survey that means that all of the Lexus ads in the magazine are tailored to the reader, and will include their name and where they live.

Brand equity through the eyes of the consumer:

Brand equity through the eyes of the consumer: The case for measuring 'Commitment'

'Brand value is very much like an onion. It has layers and a core. The core is the user who will stick with you until the very end.' This much used quote from Edwin Artz seems simplistic at first glance, but the deeper you delve into it, the more profound are the implications for the brand management process, especially in the measurement of 'brand equity'.

Newcomers such as Lipton are establishing niche markets Whilst many definitions of 'brand equity' exist, most of them agree that any measurement should involve some combination of overall presence, usage or saliency, and public perceptions of the brand. However, this is more of an inside-out rather than the more realistic outside-in view of the brand and one in which not enough importance is given to the consumer experience that the brand generates. Brands are not central to consumers' lives - but consumers are central to a brand's existence; and so any approach to measuring brand equity needs to recognize that. Any practically useful measurement is not simply a function of presence and perceptions, but must also capture the quality of the relationship that the brand has created with its users.

We use the Conversion Model; which views 'Commitment' as the Holy Grail of brand building and measures equity as the brand's ability to convert promiscuous consumers into loyal apostles. Commitment is an attitudinal measure as compared to a behavioural one. Loyalty is behavioural and for that reason alone is not a sufficiently accurate reflection of the consumer-brand relationship.
There may be times when consumers may be highly satisfied with a brand yet still defect to the competition; similarly, dissatisfied consumers do not necessarily gravitate away from a brand at the first opportunity.

Measuring commitment in the UAE youth market

amongst 400 respondents aged 16-24 in the UAE. Our objective was to take a useful measurement of brand equity of key brands in cold beverages (carbonated soft drinks, energy drinks, iced teas etc) and electronic gadgets (MP3 players, gaming consoles, mobile phones etc).
Analyzing the results gives a clear idea of how commitment can shed light on the strength of the brand, important category dynamics, and emerging trends within these categories. As a category electronic gadgets generate greater commitment than cold beverages.

A typical young UAE national is more likely to try out different brands of beverages but unlikely to experiment with brand choice in electronics. While some of this can be attributed to higher switching costs or perceived risk, it also implies that most electronics companies have managed to create a differentiated brand offering through product innovations. Thus 66% of respondents tended to be single minded (i.e. committed to one brand) in their choice of gadgets, while only 47% were single minded in their choice of beverages. The implication is that market factors are more likely to influence brand usage in the beverages category.

Bigger may not always be better
Commitment is also a very useful indicator of future market share. In the cold beverages category a higher incidence of consumption does not necessarily lead to higher commitment. Brands such as Pepsi, 7Up and Coca-Cola currently have the highest consumption levels.

However, when we look into commitment levels we see that new age niche beverages such as Lipton Ice Tea, Power Horse and Oronamin-C enjoy the highest commitment levels in the category, with more committed consumers in their franchises than in the larger brands. This means that these brands have created a strong, dedicated following and while they may be smaller brands currently, they have the potential to wean more and more consumers and hence represent a very real future threat for these large CSD brands.
Based on our experience with cold drinks then, one might argue that a large consumer base leads inevitably to lower commitment. However, for iconic/power brands in some categories this is not the case.

Nokia's 'human' innovation brings success
An example of this is the performance of Nokia in the electronic gadgets category.
Nokia has by far the largest user base with a massive 90% of our respondents claiming to own a Nokia phone. But the more significant measure of Nokia's success as a brand is that 75% of those users are committed to the brand.

This is testament to Nokia's strategy of constant innovation yet consistent adherence to the values of human technology. The only other brands that come close are the iconic Apple Ipod and Sony Vaio, both of which enjoy only a fraction of Nokia's consumer base. An interesting aspect of Nokia's success is that perhaps brands need to be unfettered by the confines of their category and focus primarily on the consumer experience they wish to generate. Would Nokia have managed to create such strong commitment if it thought of itself as just a mobile phone company, and stayed away from photography or music streaming? In a city about to become home to the latest Armani hotel and Versace Pallazo surely that's food for thought.

Driverless car finds its voice

BRAND :Skoda
BRAND OWNER :Skoda
CATEGORY :Automotive
REGION :Netherlands
DATE :Jan 2009 - Feb 2009

To promote its new Octavia model to Dutch consumers, Skoda wanted a campaign that rose above the blandness of car specifications and entered into the realm of entertainment.
Skoda came up with the idea of a remote controlled car, thus Octavia RC was born.

An Octavia car was parked in various locations around the Netherlands. There is a camera inside the car and one outside the car filming the outside of the vehicle. Both of the feeds are sent to a website, http://www.octaviarc.nl/.

Visitors to the website could not only select which camera view they wanted to watch, but also interact with the car and watch the reactions of passers by. Once users arrive at the live feed, they can see a number on their screen which represents a countdown of the number of people who have a turn to do something to the car before it is their turn.

Once their turn arrives, they have one minute to remotely manipulate a number of the car’s features, including the lights, the horn, the windscreen wipers, as well as a series of jingles that are played from a set of speakers installed behind the bumper, which make it sound as though that car is speaking.

PINK IS FOR BOYS:::an exploration of the many meanings and uses of pink

1. MEN

NANTUCKET RED

A trademarked shade of weathered red sold by Murray’s Toggery Shop on Nantucket to unapologetically preppy men. It is, however, decidedly not pink—not the color of Thomas Pink shirts signal¬ing the elegant, crisp aggression of the office; not the color of pink polos dewed with sweat on the golf course; not a match to the rus¬tling pink newsprint haunting the early-morning hours before trad¬ing. Nantucket Red is thoroughly relaxed and never, ever pink.

SOMETIMES, PINK IS THE COLOR FOR BOYS
A century ago, baby boys were swaddled in pink—a watered-down version of red—and girls were in blue, evocative of the Virgin Mary. Ladies’ Home Journal said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger color is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

PINK TRIANGLE = GAY MAN
Homosexual men in Nazi camps wore an inverted pink triangle; lesbians, prostitutes and other “loose” women (including users of birth control) wore an inverted black triangle. Both symbols have been reclaimed by gay-rights organizations as symbols of pride.

FINANCIAL TIMES PAGES
The U.K.’s leading business paper distinguishes itself from com¬petitors by its salmon-pink paper. So ubiquitous is this trademark that “salmon press” is often used as shorthand for the economic press or business sections of general-interest newspapers.

2. EMPIRE

MOUNTBATTEN PINK
Naval camouflage promoted by Admiral Louis Mountbatten of the British Royal Navy during WWII. He colored his entire flotilla of destroyers this shade, intended to match the sky just before dawn or at dusk. Mountbatten Pink scored a “victory” by disguising the HMS Kenya (a.k.a. “The Pink Lady”) off the coast of Norway. The Ger¬mans’ marker dye used to target shelling matched The Pink Lady’s hue so well, they were firing more at their own shells than at the ship.
Mountbatten Pink fell out of favor in 1942 due to a critical snag: As soon as the sun actually rose above the horizon, it spot¬lighted the big pink ships with unfortunate, brilliant accuracy.

THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH
These 53 sovereign states, members of the former British Empire, are often colored pink on maps. In the empire’s heyday, these pink countries represented a behemoth of trade, cultural ties and a visi¬ble manifestation of the Queen’s power sweeping across the globe.

ALL THE THINGS YOUR PINKY FINGER CAN MEAN
Whereas lifting your pinky while drinking tea signals one’s collusion with manners of the British Empire, the pinky has other expressions. Holding the pinky up signals your need to urinate (India) or a vulgarity (China). Link pinky fingers to swear an oath or ask forgiveness (U.S.) or to make a bet (Turkey). Waggling your pinky downward also can refer to a small penis (Australia).

3. REVOLUTION

PINKO COMMIE!
A term coined in TIME Magazine in 1926, a pinko (or “parlor pink”) will express sympathy for the Soviet Red Revolution but rarely budge when urged toward real action. Pass the petit fours.

GEORGIA'S ROSE REVOLUTION
Amid the crush of Georgian-flag designs in the past century, this dark-pink flag fluttered twice, briefly, over the melee below. It first flew in 1918 over the short-lived independent Democratic Repub¬lic of Georgia. The Soviets firmly tucked this flag away when they took over in 1921, but the tricolor rose reappeared in 1990 as Soviet rule fell, only to get stuffed back in the closet in 2004 as a symbol of the chaotic bloodiness of the post-Soviet period.

4. JAPANESE-NESS

CHERRY BLOSSOMS & DEAD WARRIORS
Since the Heian period (794–1191), the quick burst of short-lived sakura flowers has made the perfect, agreeably elegiac symbol of life’s transience. Just as sakura petals drift suddenly to the ground, so samurai die unquestioningly when duty calls. Kami¬kaze suicide units in WWII painted cherry blossoms on the sides of their planes, and folk wisdom suggested warriors’ souls were reincarnated in the fragile blossoms.

YAMATO MADESHIKO
The ne plus ultra in femininity has a name in Japan: Yamato Nade¬shiko, named for the willowy, pale-pink nadeshiko flower native to the nation. Yamato is chaste, quiet, loving, obedient, but—per Jap¬anese WWII propaganda featuring her image—will brandish her takeyari (bamboo spear) to kill if her family or chastity is threatened.

PINK FILMS
Soft-core, low-budget erotic films popularized in Japan from the 1960s through the 1980s, pink films (pinku eiga) worked cleverly around Japanese censorship laws forbidding the display of pubic hair or the so-called “working parts” in a sex film. Classic pink films include Go, Go; Second Time Virgin; Flower and Snake and Daydream.

5. VAGINA

SHOCKING PINK
Parisian couturier Elsa Schiaparelli coined the term “shocking pink” in 1928 as both the name of her signature perfume and the vivid pink box (shaped like Mae West’s torso) the bottle came in. Schiap, as her friends called her, adored shock, but doubly so when the shock involved a transgressive peek of pink: a giant lamb chop-shaped hat, for example (a joint project with Salvador Dalí), or a dress with a pink, trompe-l’oeil breast stitched in fabric. Such outré behavior might explain how shocking pink became a slang term for female genitalia, although Schiap’s motto hardly screams feminism to non-clotheshorses: “Never fit a dress to the body, but train the body to fit the dress.”

MARY KAY'S PINK CADILLACS
In 1968, cosmetics mogul Mary Kay awarded her top saleswoman a pink Cadillac, painted to match the company’s Mountain Lau¬rel shade of blusher. She expanded to her top five producers the next year, spurring hard-driving saleswomen globally to push for the big pink “career car”—although, since 1998, the color of rolling success is not limited to pink, but includes white, black and smoky platinum choices.

THE PINK LADIES IN THE MOVIE GREASE
Female greaser gang from the musical-turned-film Grease. The Pink Ladies included Jan (the fat and funny one), Marty (the super-pretty one), Betty Rizzo (the tough, sarcastic one) and Frenchy (the beauty-school dropout). The Pink Ladies teach doe-eyed Sandy to swill booze, crack gum, talk back (to the Burger Palace Boys, their brother-gang) and definitely put out.

MS. PAC-MAN
Released in 1982, a sequel to the video game Pac-Man. In Ms. Pac-Man, game-play got faster, ghosts cagier, “warp tunnels” suck fruit from side to side, and Ms. Pac-Man does it all with a floppy pink bow half-obscuring her eyes. Also, the orange ghost Clyde is renamed Sue, introducing virtual girl-dot-on-girl-dot action.

6. IRANIAN-NESS

PERSIAN PINK
Persian cuisine is rife with pink ingredients derived from rose petals, rose hips and rose-tinted sugars and syrups. Bastani, Per¬sian rosewater ice cream, is served between wafers as an ice-cream sandwich, evidence of a fine tradition of ice cream in the desert. By 400 B.C. Persians were already storing ice spirited down from the mountains and licking cones well into the summer months.

EATING ROSE HIPS
Rose hips, dark pink or orange in color, are a miracle food: They ward off urinary infections, constipation and iron loss in people, and they boost vitamin C in pet chinchillas (who can’t produce their own). The fine hairs inside a rose-hip bulb also make a nice itching powder.

7. GHOSTLINESS

THE BLACK DEATH & ROSES
Roses lurk around the Black Death as odd parentheticals. Despite popular claims to the contrary, the nursery rhyme “Ring Around the Rosie” does not describe blood-tinged skin blotches indicating bubonic plague; the rhyme actually dates from the 19th century.
Which is not to say roses don’t crop up during times of plague. The general post-Black Death chaos freed up Christine de Pizan to become Europe’s first full-time female writer. Her chief target: the Roman de la Rose—the medieval French poem celebrating the female ideal as represented by the flower—taking particular issue with the antifeminist stuff Jean de Meun had added to the text. Christine and Jean locked horns, circling each other poisonously like a liter¬aro-feminist ring-around-the-rosie, well into the 16th century.

MEHER BABA
Indian spiritual leader Meher Baba dressed himself and his mandali (circle) in pink robes, signifying love, embodied for him in partner Mehera Irani. Meher Baba stopped speaking from 1925 until his death in 1969; presumably the pink robes did triple duty to express his feelings during this period.

PINK NOISE
Also known as 1/f noise, pink noise is a signal with a frequency spec¬trum in which—ahem—“the power spectral density is proportional to the reciprocal of the frequency.” Pink noise occurs everywhere, from the electromagnetic radiation output of certain astronomical bodies to heartbeat rhythms and the pitch-progression of almost all musical melodies. Fittingly, pink noise sits halfway between white and red noise (also known as Brownian noise).

PINKY THE PAC-MAN GHOST
One of the four Pac-Man ghosts, along with brothers Blinky, Inky and Clyde. Ghosts seek to eat Pac-Man, deducting one of his lives, but when Pac-Man eats an energizer pellet, the tables are turned and hunter becomes prey. The ghosts are slowed down, they turn deep blue, they reverse direction, and if they’re not lucky, they’re eaten themselves. Their dead eyes, floating to the sidelines, repre¬sent one of the more heart-tugging instances of digital death.

SEEING PINK ELEPHANTS
When you’re good and snockered, you might start seeing pink elephants—but the real Pink Elephant Brigade stands in reserve, when delirium tremens begin.

8. SPEED

PINKS IN DRAG RACING
Winner-take-all TV show that debuted in 2005 on the Speed Channel. Whichever participant wins three out of the five races takes the loser’s car. The show’s title reportedly comes from the coinage “pink slip,” which handily refers to both getting fired and the ownership certificate for a car.

THE GIRO D'ITALIA
The winner of this long-distance cycling race throughout Italy scores the maglia rosa (pink jersey)—colored to remind bystanders of the pink pages of the sponsoring newspaper, La Gazzetta dello Sport.

FOX-HUNTING JACKETS
They’re colored scarlet, but they’re actually called pinks, as in “donning your pinks” to hunt. Supposedly, pink doesn’t refer to the red as it weathers and fades, but to a legendary hunting-garb tailor named Pink, Pinke or even Pinque.

PINK-SHEET STOCKS
Super-tiny, thinly traded, often-volatile stocks traded on what’s known as the “over-the-counter” market. Pink sheets are rene¬gades, beyond most rules for disclosing financial information, and hence are pretty suspect. Before electronic quotes, quotes to these mad little puppies were printed on pink paper to alert all comers of the wild ride implicit therein.