After my last post about crowd sourced design, I rather enjoyed Rob Walker’s Consumed article “Banana Democracy” here in today’s New York Times Magazine. The piece explores Chiquita’s public competition for designs for stickers on its bananas. Arising out of the popularity of a web-based design-your-own sticker tool (some 25,000 people took part, apparently), the company decided to extend it into a competition. Public voting on the 1,355 entries starts tomorrow.

Walker goes on to refer to the “pop” nature of this design framework. DJ Neff, the Chiquita art director for this campaign, is quoted as describing this as the creation of “a familiar association with an unfamiliar dynamic.” Walker, in turn, suggests that “A big part of being ‘pop’ anything these days is prodding the masses to participate directly.” It is this element of the crowd sourced design competition that makes me wonder about the authenticity of connections between the brand and its audience. My last post queried the ethical nature of these public design frameworks, but Walker identifies another aspect, which is the brand stewards’ desired enhancement of attachment and meaning between a brand and its audience through this sort of interactive contributory evolution.

A degree of satirical skepticism exudes from Walker’s prose, such as when he quotes a Chiquita spokesperson, “Chiquita is particularly interested in communicating to the under-25 crowd that the company offers the ‘convenient healthy snacking platforms that people are looking for these days’,” which Walker interprets as, “I believe that means bananas.” Chiquita representatives used the word “emotional” more than five times in a 10 minute conversation prompting Walker to ask, “Are people really emotional about their banana shopping?”

What it seems to boil down to is brand gimmickry, albeit very clever, creative, fun and enjoyable marketing. After all, the public will, as Walker points out, be looking to the grocery aisle to find these sticker designs and maybe even purchase the banana. Or as Walker wryly observes, they’ll buy the sticker, which comes with a banana as a bonus. But has this really extended the brand’s core idea … ?

Tags: chiquita, consumed, new york times, rob walker

Written by Stuart
David Day | Associates
About the Author: Stuart is constantly curious and believes conversation matters, for business, people and community. Feel free to join in...

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 22nd, 2010 at 7:26 pm and is filed under Branding, Business, Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.