Anne of Carversville

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Happy New Year everyone! Perhaps I speak for many people when I say “thank goodness 2009 is over.”

For all the pundits trying to make good news out of the first decade of the 21st century, I say you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel.

As challenging as this year has been for me, it’s also prompted me to take many new risks with this website. I’m happy to say they are paying off, with dramatic increases in traffic and reader support.

When I first began writing Anne of Carversville, it was a weekly self-indulgent journey into myself. Thirty months later, I’m a reborn activist and feminist — but still a lover of the good guys, as my regular readers know.

Anne of Carversville remains a work in process, but its voice and content strategy are coming together.

Rent Is Due

Having decided to invest a lot of myself to develop Anne of Carversville, I gotta pay the rent, as they say.  I’m a merchant by trade and nature, so hopefully I’ll think of clever ways to seduce your wallet.

We’re working now to commercialize the website, without destroying its soul. I don’t know about you, but I detest being chased around by ads on websites. Ads are fine, but my blood pressure rises when I’m reading an article and ads cover up an entire paragraph of text, forcing me to stop and move it out of my way.

I will not do that to you here at Anne of Carversvile. You will not be “chased” by advertisers, in aggressive ad moves that demand your attention or else … We have enough threats in today’s world. You don’t need ads hounding you, right before your eyes.

We will try to remain conscious of our consumption messages, choosing advertisers and products that reflect our values. Trust me, we will not be perfect in our execution.

from another Body Politics blog

Anne of Carversville Content

In 2010 each channel — Smart Sensuality, Cultural Creatives, Green Beings, etc — has a dropdown menu:

• feature stories

• daily news tracker

• key articles from across the website

• bookstore, blogs and great blogs, websites

• archives

The key articles page is very important because it pulls articles across the website into a topic. I’m against silo-thinking.

Click to read more ...

Each of Anne’s presentations is adapted to the individual needs of her client. They are derived from four core topics of focus and can be refined and expanded, based on budget and time availability.

Anne’s presentations run from 20 minutes in to three hours. She is also available as a group brainstormer for a wide range of projects and products targeted towards American women.

Anne’s consulting work is targeted primarily at branding, marketing, design and product development for American women. Her specialty is the Smart Sensuality woman, an ageless female with high standards of excellence, a Cultural Creative who identifies with Michelle Obama and a global network of sensual, resourceful, intelligent, optimistic, globally aware women who embrace career, family, friends, civic responsibility and — first and foremost — themselves.

Current Presentations

Key Lifestyle Trends for Women:

Statistics only tell part of the story of women’s changing lives. Anne digs beneath the surface, studying women’s changing lifestyles within these long-term cultural trends: Girls Rule; Viva La Difference; Do Tell; Are We Happy Yet; Goodbye Mayberry; Real or Surreal; New Eroticism; Forever Young; Uniquely Me; Dazed and Confused; Well-Lived Life; Class and Mass.

The presentation includes definitions and examples of each trend and a projection of where it’s headed in the future.

Anne documents her research with images and multi-media examples (where presentation technology permits) of how the trend is operating in branding, marketing and product development, across a wide range of goods and services.

Understanding the New Cultural Creative Consumer:

Anne traces the evolution of the Cultural Creatives, a term defined by Dr. Paul Ray, as the dominating values subset in 21st century, consumer decision-making. Her presentation reviews the historical values of the Traditionals and Moderns, the predominant cultural meaning-makers emerging from World War II.

Enter the Cultural Creatives in the late Sixties as an important new demographic, with not only a keen concern for environmental issues, but also a more individualistic relationship with brands and product consumption. Anne explores the key attributes, and traditional demographics like household income, age and education, of the three values groups, with examples of products and brands identified with each segment.

We examine the “big picture” going forward for the three groups. Anne also explores segmentation overlaps within the three groups, tightly-defined, shared values concepts that create highly-targeted opportunities for new design and marketing strategies.

Smart Sensuality Women:

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SUMMARY: L Anne Enke is a Fortune 500 women’s lifestyle trends researcher, sensual product design and marketing expert, and Internet website writer/entrepreneur, living in New York City. Anne helps clients and readers of her websites understand the demographic, attitudinal, and cultural issues that contribute to women’s lifestyle choices, and the products and services that support them.

Anne believes that today’s women consumers’ buying decisions are based on “softer characteristics” like a brand’s values and attitudes, and how they compare to a woman’s own values. For over 10 years, Anne has tracked the evolution of three key subsets of American consumers, first identified by Dr. Paul Ray: the Traditionals, Moderns, and Cultural Creatives.

The Cultural Creatives represent the emerging values subset, sixty-five percent female, and born in the American social revolution of the 1960s. Michelle and Barack Obama represent the vanguard of this increasingly relevant and dominating segment of the global mindset.

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