Winner of best-of-show at CES 2010, Spring Design’s Alex Reader has a lot going for it: It’s the only dual screen reader based on Google’s Android platform to fully integrate web browsing and reading. From the outset, it gives readers access to over one million Google books. And it will be heavily promoted in the US through Borders.

Of course, Alex needs a lot going for it, too. While hardly mature, the eReader marketplace now features entries from all of the major players, with several lesser-known contenders weighing in as well.

Heading the new reader’s brand, name and identity development, San José, California-based Liquid Agency engaged longtime collaborator Applied Storytelling to provide the messaging framework to support the eReader at launch.

Beyond individual messages building on the eReader’s distinctive features and benefits, Applied Storytelling also crafted a Real Reader Credo, which begins with the premise of “reading unlimited” and states a belief “in the power of the curious mind unfettered.”

Sample headlines and copy concepts, a common feature of Applied Storytelling messaging deliverables, also gave a boost to pre-launch creative.

As noted elsewhere (Seen and Heard, October 24, 2007), George Saunders is the most savagely funny satirist of the Marketing Age. I approached this new collection of essays as something of a window into the world and the mind behind the stories (In Persuasion Nation, Pastoralia, Civilwarland in Bad Decline). Here and there, the book packs some delightful surprises. My favorite: In "The New Mecca", Saunders’ account of a visit to Dubai, we actually find him rhapsodizing — imagine! — about a themed place, the Madinat Jumeirah:

And so, though my first response to elaborate Theming is often irony (Who did this? And why? Look at that modern Exit sign over that 18th Century bedstead. Haw!) what I found during my stay at the Madinat is that irony is actually my first response to tepid, lame Theming. In the belly of radical Theming, my first response was to want to stay forever, bring my family over, set up shop in my hut-evoking villa, and never go home again.

Because the truth is, it’s beautiful.

And, a paragraph or so farther along:

...I came to the realization that authenticity and pleasure are not causally related. How is this “fake”? This is real flowing water, the date and palm trees are real, the smell of incense and rose water is real. The staggering effect of the immense scale of one particular crosswalk — which joins two hotels together and is, if you can imagine this, a four-story ornate crosswalk that looks like it should have ten thousand cheering Imperial Troops clustered under it and an enigmatic young princess waving from one of its arabesquey windows — that effect is real. You feel it in your gut and your legs. It makes you feel happy and heroic and a little breathless, in love anew with the world and its possibilities. You have somehow entered the landscape of a dream, the Platonic realization of the idea of Ancient Village...

On another note, the title essay might be titled “Dumbing Down 101”. Want a simple, lively primer on how we’re at risk of becoming even more vulgar than we already are? Here you go.

The marketized world in which we live is now beginning to get its due in literature. Here’s a starter course. If you’re in the business, you’ll appreciate the inside details that feel oh-so-right (and the places where the writers, who aren’t us, hit an off note). You might also read these as cautionary tales. I do.

Syrup, by Max Barry. Set in the world of soft drink marketing, it’s as much about how the two main characters, Scat and 6, market themselves to each other as it is about the marketing ideas they have. Chapters begin with fake marketing principles that get at the rudest, crudest side of what we do. Briskly paced, smartly timed — copywriting married to a keen eye, a sharp wit and a longer format.

Company, by Max Barry. Imagine a company that exists for the sole purpose of studying corporate behavior. Next, imagine working there without any knowledge of this higher purpose. Existential absurdity on the level of Kafka — but with all the immediacy of the everyday. A great, searing send-up of corporate culture.

Pastoralia, by George Saunders. The title story in this collection presents us with a theme park (Pastoralia) “in bad decline” — to borrow a phrase from another, related George Saunders story set in a theme park, Civil War Land in Bad Decline. For Saunders, the theme park is the world in miniature. So take this, then, as an exploration of “the themed life”— its sheer banality on one hand, its ability to overtake and ultimately degrade just about everything it touches on the other. Good, sobering reading for anyone involved in brand work for destinations.

In Persuasion Nation, by George Saunders. The title couldn’t be more telling — right down to its gleanmean near-rhyme. Every single story is Swift for the Marketing Age. Two, in particular, stand out: In the title story, the “reality” of commercials is real for real. Characters live and die and live again in step with the commercials’ own mores and physical laws. In their endless suffering and horrific value system, of course, we see a reflection of who we are — which is to say, what we’ve become. An even sadder mirror, to me, exists in the story “93990”. It’s a story about a certain kind of blindness. Read it.

The Futurist, by James P. Othmer. At one time or another, you, too may have been referred to as a “guru” — as in “marketing guru”. At all costs, dispel the term and resist the temptation to wear the label. The same for its equally evil twin term “futurist”, and for similar reasons: both suggest super-ordinary powers of divination about the fundamentally and profanely unfathomable. Want a cautionary tale about someone who decides to go with the futurist flow? Here you are.

Read all of this, and reflect on the world you help to create, in light of Robert Grudin’s American Vulgar: The Politics of Manipulation versus The Culture of Awareness. Grudin sees a process — an agenda, almost — of vulgarization transforming America into a place of ill-informed, narrow-minded and uncouth individuals. The agents of vulgarization — an intellectual and social dumbing down — are politicians, advertisers, marketers and other exploiters of media. Are you contributing to this vulgarization willingly? Unwittingly? Do you see yourself as above it? Can you be above it — and if so, how and where? Can you serve as an agent of counter-vulgarization while still in the service of the marketplace? I am still asking these questions of myself. Grudin, by the way, is a lovely writer. His earlier book, Time and The Art of Living, is one I dip into often. On Alcatraz, prisoners were allowed a maximum of 12 books on the shelf of their cell. This would have been one of my 12, and it would have freed me.

The basic premise of this book is that the very things that make successful companies with established products successful tend to work against them when new, disruptive technologies appear on the scene. For someone in an established company, this message is bound to be disquieting, even though the book offers some reasonable-sounding courses of action.

The author observes that the companies that are most successful in commercializing disruptive technologies view the primary development challenge not as a technological one but as a marketing one.

And what a challenge it is: Christensen demonstrates pretty convincingly that with a disruptive technology it’s not possible to know what the customers want beforehand: a process of mutual discovery must follow. This suggests that many kinds of market testing or validation may be useless or, worse, seriously misleading. It also suggests that marketers must design messages and campaigns that can be light and nimble, easily torn down and rebuilt, perhaps multiple times.

Another gem of insight, with regard to commoditization: “A product becomes a commodity within a specific market segment when the repeated changes on the basis of competition...completely play themselves out, that is, when market needs on each attribute or dimension of performance have been fully satisfied by more than one available product.” And its corollary: “It may be...that the product offerings of competitors in a market continue to be differentiated from each other. But differentiation loses its meaning when the features and functionality have exceeded what the market demands.”

Positioning with the gears stripped.