PS. It’s “Hayek”, thus “Hayekian”. I mention only because I was a bit confused at first; I thought you were referring to a Finn I’d never heard of.

But of course.  Recall Kafka’s runner with a message for you from the dying Emporer.  When he makes his way out of the palace, he is confronted with the vast market, outside of which is only the first ring of the city.  I, however, am confident he will get here any minute, for he is Cool Hand Luke and can eat fifty eggs.

I’ve been a humble and interested voyeur, a self-proclaimed above-average consumer of goods and trends and culture who also believes I play a role in their creation, in the work I do. Yet, though I hate to admit it, I had never given thought to the theories of economists and anthropologists (though much thought to ethnographies) and the study of whether markets and incentives are human inventions and whether a new, emergent order should be left alone or defined.

But that’s not to say these are not in play and not relevant to branding, because they are. We just go about our work trying to sort through the muddle and bring understanding to the thoughts and motivations of the consumers we target as our “strategic value consumer”, design for and market to. From my vantage point, I believe most corporations work hard (yet are not very successful) at trying to identify trends and study consumers in the hopes of understanding the needs and motivations of their most valued audience. Large companies often suffer from the chaos and lack of focus on innovation that’s required to create trends, so they cannot control or manipulate change, but they can react to it and copy or leverage innovation as it makes its way down stream. I agree wholeheartedly to your point, Grant, that anthropologists need to take on the challenge of thinking about a culture that comes out of individual choices, by highly innovative individuals who no longer defer to any particular norm – because that’s the world we live in today, we being transformational and dynamic individuals.

So I hope you soldier on so those on the front line of branding can be inspired by your brilliance and apply your work of “making the miraculous a little more intelligible”. How’s that for incentive?

I have a couple unrelated, maybe even contradictory, responses to this piece.

The first is a suggestion of one way in which anthropologists, even those suspicious of economics qua panacea, could make it a useful tool. One so inclined could use economics almost as an old-time miner used a pan when panning for gold. When encountering an interesting situation, such as the agreement made by King James, one could first attempt to explain the situation in simple economic terms. But in most situations of interest to an anthropogist (e.g., not a simple exchange of pigs for corn in some virtual futures market), the economic explanation will be incomplete, leaving important aspects of the situation unexplained or incompletely explained. The identification and exploitation of these unexplained aspects of the situation is not a trivial task and will require careful study and judgement, but that’s why computers make poor anthropologists (and economists).

The second comment is really more of a proposed truce. It seems, from your caricature, that some anthropologists are unhappy about economics muscling in on their turf. This is understandable, especially in light the expansion of the “proper” subject matter of economics led by folks like Gary Becker. They don’t call it economic imperialism for nothing.

But I think viewing things in this way is a mistake. So what if an economist can give an economic explanation for every phenomenon we see in the social world. Nothing stops an anthropologist from giving a parallel exaplantion: which explanation is best depends on the purposes you have in mind.. why do you want this explanation? Or more importantly, for what? When I look at a bucket of water, a farmer can explain the water in one way: as an essential ingrediant in the growth of plants.. an input to his business. A biologist would see it in a related but different way, as a component to certain key processes (such as photosynthesis). A chemist would have his description, a physicist would have hers. Are those descriptions right? That’s a question for farmers to argue with farmers and physicists to argue with physicists. But the key question for us is which is appropriate? Thats the place where we need talk between professions, where a blog can sit: at the interesection of anthropology and economics.