Monthly Archives: June 2005

new brands, new consumers

Spears

In today’s New York Times, there are a couple of stories on perfume. Both contain surprises that attract the trend watcher’s eye and the marketer’s scrutiny.  

Surprise 1

One of the hits of the perfume season smells like rubber.  Horyn of the NYT describes it is “a manly, tasty blend of black pepper and bergamot with just a hint of Scotch pine, whiskey and – could it be? – rubber.”

"People are always shocked when they smell it. They’re like, ‘Oh, this is really good.’ Well, that speaks a lot about perfume today.  People are all too often prepared for something powerful and not immediately pleasant.” (Christopher Brosius in Horyn, 2005)

The perfume industry has always been able to reach beyond the merely pleasant and agreeable for scents that were more nuanced, interesting and mysterious. But this is the first time, I believe, they have willingly embraced something that was “not immediately pleasant.” It made me wonder whether the industry was breaking with what, a couple of days ago, we called minstrel marketing: the inclination to offer products and services that were agreeable, even when this meant they were also a little bland or entirely idiotic. 

In a fiercely segmented marketplace, some marketers are prepared to embrace a trade-off: in order to get real engagement with the consumer, they embrace something that is stranger and less agreeable. In this case, the perfumer achieves a smash hit with (and by) something that smells like rubber.  

This has an interesting implication for the world of marketing: we can now reach for brand meanings that were once out of bounds. Now the brand can have meanings that are dark and/or difficult, and/or a little odd, and/or really (not merely) mysterious. Once we give up being agreeable, an entire range of meanings and creative strategies opens up to us. (Several days ago, we noted this development in the case of Honest Tea.)

Surprise 2

The perfume in question is endorsed by and named for the Hollywood star, Alan Cumming. And this is really counter-expectational. For Cumming is not comely. He is not handsome, especially likeable, or even charismatic, except in that spooky way villains sometimes are. Here too I think we appear to see a willingness to “buy” engagement at the price of a marketing device that is unattractive or at least unconventional. 

If Cumming is now a useful celebrity endorser, the universe of acceptable endorser has just expanded dramatically.  Can a perfume contract for Steve Buschmi (sp?) be far behind.  Come to think of it, virtually everyone in Reservoir Dogs should be expecting a call.  Just kidding.  But you see what I mean.  If Cumming’s useful as a source of meanings for a brand, we are looking at a substantially expanded set of possibilities, one that takes the marketing world well beyond its usual band of happy, beautiful people.

Surprise 3

Gina Pell is the CEO of Splendora, a fashion web site. She is a sophisticated consumer of perfumes. She has a large collection of scents which includes Stella McCartney, Must de Cartier and Cuir de Russie by Chanel. So Ruth La Ferla of the Times was surprised that Pell also uses Curious. This is the Britney Spears perfume, something La Ferla describes as “a vanilla-and-peach-scented elixir that is distinctly mass market.” 

This is a mixing of the high and the low, the disciplined and, um, peachy.  When Silverstein and Fisk (authors of Trading up and members of Boston Consulting Group) observed this sort of mixing and matching behavior, they put it down to a wish to attain high status goods.   And La Ferla is clearly tempted by this interpretation, calling Curious a “guilty pleasure.”  And this may well be it. But when Pell is asked to explain herself she says she mixes Curious with Eau d’Orange Verte by Hermès, “to set her[self] apart from those ‘blind trend followers’ who would never dream of tainting their Fracas or Prada with a drugstore scent.

This mixing and matching behavior may be driven by a status motive, but we may also see it as an indication that where we do not create new variety, the consumer step in and create it for themselves. In Pell’s case, we are looking at customization that makes her scent absolutely distinct.  And down this road we may see a branded, commercial world in which there are, perhaps someday,  as many meanings as there are consumers.  And strewn along this road lay the ruins of the arguments of those who insisted the commercial society must always encourage a regression to the mean, a uniformity of offering, and a strict conformity of purchase behavior.  
Surprises 1 and 2 suggest that the meanings of the brand are becoming more various…and not a moment too soon.  Suprise 3 says consumers are becoming more various too. 

References

La Ferla, Ruth. 2005. The Guilty Pleasure of Smelling Like Vanilla and Peach. The New York Times. June 30, 2005. here.   

Horyn, Cathy. 2005. The sweet smell of celebrity. The New York Times. June 30, 2005. here.

McCracken, Grant. 2005. Minstrel marketing and the Hegarty trade-off. This Blog Sits At… here.

McCracken, Grant. 2005. Brand meaning management: new opportunities. This Blog Sits At… here.

McCracken, Grant. 2005. Who is the Celebrity Endorser? In Culture and Consumption II: Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (releasing any day now, I promise.)

Silverstein, Michael and Neil Fiske.  2003. Trading up: The New American Luxury. New York: Portfolio.

branding and plenitude at the Red Cat

Red_cat_ii_1

The marketplace is struggling to contend with the new multiplicity of consumer taste and preference.

The trick: how to appeal broadly, without descending into the chaotic and indecipherable, or (the older strategy) rising to the unforgivably bland.

This New York restaurant may be an exemplar. According to Frank Bruni,

[T]he Red Cat is a restaurant Rorschach, different things at different times to different people, which is just what its owners, Jimmy Bradley and Danny Abrams, intended. The simultaneously prosaic and cryptic name they gave it alludes to nothing, connotes nothing. It’s a phrase to be imbued with whatever meaning the imbuing party deems fit.

Mr. Bradley and Mr. Abrams did not want to be pigeonholed into any one tidy theme or identity, so they jumbled the decorative motifs, hanging Moroccan lanterns from the ceilings, putting framed paintings and photographs on the walls and using reclaimed barn wood from Pennsylvania, some of it painted red and some white, as paneling. The Red Cat feels vaguely colonial and tavernlike, except when it feels downtown-gallery cool, and apart from those moments when it feels modestly and eclectically elegant. Choose your mood.

Speaking to a heterogeneous marketplace will take new powers and strategies of meaning management. Brands like the Coca-Cola Company have take advantage of fragmenting media to deliver highly targeted messages. There are many messages out there, but we only hear one (or two) of them. Coke is becoming many things to many people.

But restaurants must manifest themselves for anyone in full view of everyone. This will take an exceptional control of the meaning making process. Certainly, the new aesthetic and cultural rules of post-modernism permit variety and the cross-over noise it must create. But still there are going to be moments when meaning collide and contradict one another.

Here’s what I suggest. Those of us blogging about brands in the New York City area meet for dinner at The Red Cat and see what we can see. (How good is the meaning management? How separate are the signals?  How much bleed takes place?  In fact, we should blog from The Red Cat in real time, some of us sitting in the part of that is “vague colonial and tavernlike” and some in the part that is “downtown-gallery cool.”)  Or maybe we’ll just have arguments that are so alcohol assisted, rhetorically elevated and down right loud that they’ll ask to leave.   We just can’t lose. 

Who can do July 12? Contact me at grant27[AT]gmail[DOTCOM].

References

Bruni, Frank. 2005. A place in the mood for anything. New York Times. June 29th, 2005. here.

Map image of the Red Cat, courtesy of Google Earth. 

The Comeback: something more like life

Kudrow

I saw Lisa Kudrow in The Comeback last night, giving a performance wonderfully more skillful than anything she ever attempted in Friends. 

Pam, my wife, spotted something I didn’t. Kudrow hits the woody vocal notes of a Katharine Hepburn as if to place a “do not cross” barrier before her.  This made more poignant what I could see: the desperate good humor Kudrow beams from within the compound so to signal, apparently, the willingness to capitulate before any attack is broached.  Passive aggression in a new key.

It is a cringingly good performance. Where Kudrow on Friends was ditzy and loveable, here she is almost too painful to watch.  There is in fact only one way to watch this program:  horrified fascination. Her “comeback” must end badly.  I haven’t felt this uncomfortable since I was watching The Office. 

Friends was a joke manufactory.  Characterization, plots, sets, actors, all were subordinated to the need to deliver funny every 4.5 seconds or so.  (The program was a program, as it were.) But The Comeback is closer to drama than comedy.  When Kudrow must choose between ha-ha funny and the cringingly accurate, she is knows what to do. She has engaged in hours of meticulous observation. She has done her anthropology. And now she delivers it without remorse, and sometimes without the funny.  (This is why the show will fail to produce more than HBO numbers, despite its star. It is more interested in the comedian’s comedy, than mainstream comedy. See my post below for more on this argument.)

Television that makes you cringe? Who would have guessed that the great “wasteland” of television would ever have this effect?  And it got me thinking about all those CSI moments when we are obliged to look at the most ghoulish of scenes: bodies that are damaged or decomposed to the point that someone in the room is moved to shout “hey, they can’t show that on TV, can they?”

Law and Order used take the standard approach. Each show would begin with someone lying prostrate, body and clothes askew, blood modestly in evidence, as if the camera were saying (assume voice of Denis Leary), “listen, this person has met with an act of violence and now they’re dead.  Ok? Let’s move on.”  Not any more. Now the camera pours over cadavers like a ghoul. And everyone at my house puts their hands over their eyes, and waits for Molly, the cat, to give the all clear signal. 

So what’s happening here? Is this a trend?  Is culture shifting? Johnson argues convincingly that TV has become more intellectual demanding, with more themes and a new complexity.  Could it be that TV is becoming more emotionally difficult, too?  Now that the simple plot lines are disappearing, so are the easy laughs and the cheap sympathies.  Now we have to pay for our humor and our drama and engage with something more like life. 

References

Johnson, Steven. 2005. Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.  New York: Riverhead.

McCracken, Grant. 2005.  Anthropologist saves Hollywood.   May 11, 2005.  here.

Ethnography and quality control

Pith_helmet_1

Well, this is a little awkward.  Renee Hopkins Callahan at Corante/IdeaFlow is reporting on a conference that promises an “An Ethnographic Learning Journey IntoThe CPSI Culture.”  (CPSI stands for Creative Problem Solving Institute.)

“Great,” I thought, “ethnography!” It’s interesting to see what becomes of this brave little method when it leaves the groves of the academic world for the “real world.”  I have done quite a lot of ethnographic “export” myself, and in fact I am now working on a study for the Marketing Science Institute on this very topic. 

Here’s the problem: the “Immersion Session” in question, the one that will “use ethnography as a research method,” does not appear to have anyone trained in ethnography attached to it.  The leader of the session says that she has a degree in Psychology and that she is a “self-trained visual anthropologist.”  Self-trained anthropologist? Oh, be still my acid pen.

Well, that could be something for Callahan to report on.  If she sees an ethnographer, I mean.  “News flash: ethnographer found at learning journey!”

This is a widespread problem. There are lots of people claiming to do ethnography who are, um, “self trained.”   There are of no barriers to entry and no one licensing ethnographers. And the term “ethnography” is now so sought after in certain circles that there is plenty of demand.

For all I know, the CPSI “ethnographer” is smart and variously gifted enough to do a great job leading the research and creating the “immersion.”  But it is not clear to me that the term “ethnography” is properly used here.

Minstrel marketing and the Hegarty trade-off

HegartyJohn Hegarty of Bartle, Bogle, Hegarty says his agency one day made a fateful decision:

[We decided] to say to people, “this is what we believe in, if you don’t like, it’s fine.”

Hegarty was embracing a trade off: Offending some people was ok, because

“other people will find [us] fantastic and will want to buy into [our] brand.” 

This is a great and unheralded event in a society largely formed by the mass media and the meaning makers of the commercial world (advertising, media, branding.)

At some point, almost all the important players in the world of marketing embraced the Hegarty trade off.*  They stopped trying to appeal to everyone all the time. They gave up climbing to ever cheerier, cheesier heights of good humor. They surrendered the “fun in the sun” creative that made advertising the laughing stock of the educated world. Most important, they released marketing from its minstrel pursuit of the maximally agreeable.

The Hegarty trade-off understood that mass appeal was not just clueless, but wrong. It was extensive when it should have been intensive. Minstrel marketing prevents the power and acuity of a particular pitch to a particular segment. As the world segments ever more finely, the Hegarty trade-off becomes ever more important. No longer a “creative opportunity,” it is now the only sensible way of doing business.

Naturally, minstrel marketing lives on. Clients, especially, are nervous of giving offense.  (“My mother watches these ads, you know.”) Much of the bad advertising out there exists because the client cannot work up the courage to embrace the Hegarty trade-off, or the marketer has failed to advise them of its urgency.  But all and all, the deal is done. Those Mentos parodies (sluggish and dim though they may be) are predicated on the received understanding that just about everyone gets that minstrel marketing is over. 

I don’t know that we have thought systematically about the Hegarty trade-off, but here are a couple of reflections Once a marketing team embraces the HTO, there are two places they can go: mystery or antagonism.

Mystery

Take the Volkswagen Jetta ad called “synchronicity.” This spot was maximally HTO. It said, “Let’s create a spot that will speak with real acuity to our segment, even it means leaving the rest of the world out in the cold.” Is there a down-side here? No, the people who can’t “get” the ad are never going to buy a Jetta is any case.  (They might buy a VW of another kind, and this would require of us a marketing calculation of the possibility of brand “halos” and a “bleed” across brands.) 

Antagonism

The other outcome of an HTO strategy is antagonism.  The Synchronicity spot merely mystified.  Some spots are more readable, and we are pretty sure we don’t like what we see.  I am striking out on examples here (I would be grateful for comments), but it is not hard to imagine what these might be.  Vann’s had used graffiti and the Warped tour, both of them the kind of thing likely to strike irritation, if not terror, in the hearts of the bourgeoisie.  (And this has its own very useful brand building effect, to the extent that skaters often  feel themselves outlaws in the eyes of their parents and the owner of every mall in America.)

Hummer ads actually have this effect on me. By celebrating Hummer values with passion and precision, the agency leave this consumer thinking, “you brainless nitwits, what’s wrong with the brand that you must protest its masculinity so.”  This antagonism is perhaps a little less useful than the one created by Vanns. Some Hummer consumers will care that some extra-Hummer consumers think them ridiculous.  (Or not. It is an open question, and a necessary one that obliges the marketer to decide.)   

There are plenty of larger implications here. And you will forgive me if it looks like I am labeling the obvious.  Do we really, you might ask, need terms like Minstrel marketing and HTO strategy?  Bernard Sahlins used to say there is a difference between seeing something and having a concept of it.  Only with the latter are we mobilized to begin the search for a more systematic view, treatment and application. 

But I have in mind a more practical outcome.  I hope that the account team will now pause the next time the client makes so particularly stupid “fun in the sun” suggestion and say, gravely, “well, of course, that would be off target from an HTO point of view.” I am hoping the client will go “oh, there something more than agency creativity at stake here” and defer to agency genius.  There is, finally, virtuous cycle already in play.  The better ads get, the greater our sophistication, client and otherwise, and the better ads get.  As British advertising generally demonstrates, everyone gets well.  If This Blogs Sits At can help with a few new terms, we are most pleased to help.

References and acknowledgments

With many thanks to “I have an idea” blog, and the interview with Hegarty from which the quote comes.  Find the interview here. 

With a hat tip to The Hidden Persuader for the link to the interview.  Find The Hidden Persuader blog  here.

* Notice please the "Hegarty trade-off"  is a label of convenience.  I do not know that Hegarty is the first or the best author of this trade-off.  My guess is that many people embraced it, and that indeed this is one of those decision made in a collective manner, and not because there was a single hero of the piece.  But we have to call it something, if only to give the client pause.  (This caveat may be unfair to Hegarty if he was the hero of the piece, and if this is true, I apologize!)

Whack meetings at Motorola (the new secret of success)

Zander_1

WSJ: How would you describe your management philosophy?

 

Ed Zander (CEO, Motorola): Whack yourself before somebody whacks you. I used to have these meetings called the whack meetings at Sun where we’d think about what could happen to us and what we have to do to keep that from happening. That approach led to the creation of Java and a lot of the Internet.

 

When Peters and Waterman published In Search of Excellence in 1982, they identified many really good companies.  Within two years, several of these exemplars, including Atari, Chesebrough-Pond’s, Data General, Fluor and National General, were in decline.

 

What happened? I think there’s a good chance they weren’t holding whack meetings.  They were taking care of business in the conventional way: doing 5 year reviews, meeting quarterly targets, keeping the great ship of state on course and on time.  In those days, you could pursue excellence without whack meetings. Due diligence might call for brain storming of one kind or another, but the manager’s philosophy was about squeezing margins, tightening quality control, “trimming sails” and “tuning engines.”

 

Something changed.  Whack meetings moved from being an expensive luxury to the very stuff of due process.  Now, as a matter of course, the corporation was required to engage in the self contemplation that was once the preserve of the philosopher and the self absorbed.  Notice that Zander didn’t say that “whack meetings” were a good idea, or something that stands high on his “to do” list.  He called them his “management philosophy.”

 

Well, what changed, exactly? Thanks to the work of Clayton Christensen and others, we understand that discontinuity is a new structural characteristic of capitalism.  This means that it’s now necessary for corporations to engage in a constant act of self and world scrutiny that asks deeply skeptical questions: what business are we in, what industry are we becoming, what just happened to our consumers, what does nanotechnology mean to us, what will change when 3G is fully installed, is everything we now assume dubious or just a couple of our dearest assumptions, and if that latter, which ones? It’s enough to make the head spin.  (I wonder if this is why they call them “whack meetings.”)

 

There are lots of implications here, but one of my favorites is what whack meetings tell us about the real intellectual demands of business.  Whack meetings may be charmingly, disarmingly named, but make no mistake.  This term stands for the deep contemplation of what and who the corporation is, and how its world might change as a result of a discontinuous innovation. For a long time, we have had to endure the disdain of intellectuals and academics on this score. Really smart people didn’t go into business.  After all, there was nothing to engage them. Well, now there are whack meetings. Come on down.

 

References

 

Christensen, Clayton. 1997. The Innovator’s Dilemma. Boston: Harvard Business School.

 

Kim, W. Chan and Renee Mauborgne. 2005. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant.  Boston: Harvard Business Press. (acknowledged with thanks for data in paragraph 3)

 

Peters, Tom and Robert Waterman Jr. 1982.  In Search of Excellence. New York: Warner Books.

 

Rhoads, Christopher. 2005. Motorola’s Modernizer.  Wall Street Journal. June 23, 2005, pp. B1, B5. subscription required here.

Wal-Mart : Target :: value : meaning

WalmartAccording to Reason Express, Wal-Mart is stepping up to the Target challenge.

As we have noted, this is, among other things, a contest between value, the thing that Wal-Mart now does well, and meaning, the thing it now does badly.  If I may quote a blog entry from December of 04.

Wal-Mart is good at price but bad at meaning. It can “pile em high and sell em cheap.” But in the process it reduces the brand to a commodity and the retail experience to a trudge through tedium. Placed in the Wal-Marts , brands created to deliver potent meanings, fashion, locality, individuality and lifestyle, are diminished or missing. Wal-Mart actually manages to wick away the very meanings that add value to the product and the life of the consumer. 

If there is a single indicator of the problem Wal-Mart has created for itself, consider the in-store experience.  They have managed to turn stores into warehouses and  shopping into that "lost in a big box" feeling we all love so well. 

Target is in its own way a value hound, but it also sees the point of adding meanings.  They source these meanings from better store presentation and packaging, and from the use of  design and designers.  Target stores and products are cultural located.  They are rich in meaning.  The store and the products do not have that dreadful big-box blankness.

To challenge Target successfully, the old dog is going to have to learn new tricks.  Reason has its doubts about their hopes of successs, as do I.   Wal-Mart is going to have undergo a cultural reformation to compete.  It will have to create a corporate culture that is capable both of X (the value game) and not-X (the meaning game).  The pursuit of meaning and value now spring from different mind sets.  They encourage different corporate cultures.  When brought together in a single company, they create some of the most powerful antagonisms a corporation can endure.

First step at Wal-Mart: copies of Virginia’s book for everyone!

Second step: hire Tom Guarriello. 

References

Anon.  2005.  Wal-Mart Targets Target.  Reason

Anon. 2005. Wal-Mart takes aim at Target. MSNBC.com treatment here

McCracken, Grant.  2004.  Brands and Wal-Mart: value vs. meaning.  This blog sits at… December 2.  here

Postrel, Virginia.  2003.  The Substance of Style.  New York: HarperCollins.

 

anthropologist undercover

Pith_helmetThe Opensource interview with Jason Scott and Christopher Lydon got me thinking about who will capture an ethnographic record of contemporary society and how. 

Good news from Time Magazine.

It has become fashionable to take a menial job–nanny, say, or assistant to Anna Wintour–and then snitch about it in a thinly veiled novel. 

The latest case in point, apparently, is a novel by Rachel Pine, The Twins of Tribeca.  This is said to be an insider account of Miramax, here called Glorious Picures.  This won’t be as good as a true ethnographic study, but then it’s hard to imagine that the Weinstein brothers would have let an anthropologist in.  (For God sake, Harv, let me know if this is wrong.)

What we need know, for someone with lots of time and a very deep knowledge on contemporary non-fiction, is a map of contemporary culture (and its groups, activities, institutions, economies, and so on) that shows where all the existing "first person ethnographies" now stand and where the blanks exist. 

I expect Hollywood is pretty well covered.  The world of capital somewhat less well.  And the world of Little League coaching, for instance, not at all.  Too bad.  But then the publishing industry is "funding" only those ethnographies that promise scandal, titillation, celebrity worship or schadenfreude. 

Wouldn’t it be a good idea for an "Institute of Contemporary Culture" to recruit and fund people to do the rest? This was an issue that did not emerge in the Open Source show.  Thank god for people like Jason Scott who now captures podcasts.  But until the documentation of contemporary culture is given over to the safe keeping of the marketplace, it will remain a minority enthusiasm and a spotty one at that.

We need two things:

1. Someone needs to set up a documentation service.  This will drop in on us every x months and record as much or as little as we want them to.  At a minimum this should be a detailed record of our material surroundings, a 40 minute interview in which we say who we think we are and what we think we are doing in/with our lives, and, less often, a quick race around the neighborhoods and cities in which we live and work.  We need a snappy name.  (Paging Leora Kornfeld.)  And we need storage facilities.  And then we need a business model.  I don’t think we’d have to charge much for capture and storage.  And there is a failsafe factor here.  Even if someone decides that they no longer wish to continue with the service, we can store their data indefinitely and sure as shooting someone in the next generation is going to want it.  (What would you pay for this kind of record of your parents in their 20s?  I personally would pay a small fortune.) 

2.  We need a Paul Allen or some other patron to create the Institute that would capture the things that private, for-profit initiatives do not.  It might not quite as much fun as owning a major league sports franchise, but hey, you get to be remembered forever. 

References

Anonymous.  2005.  Five fantastic first novels.  Time Magazine, June 20, 2005. p. ~70. 

Branding in the new economy (strategies for relationship building)

Flickr_1Everyone with a Flickr account got this email yesterday. It’s an innocent little communication, not to be given a second thought.  Click the “delete” icon and it’s gone.

 

The Flickr team has up and moved this week to Californ-i-a and has
been singing Beach Boys songs non-stop since arrival. And you’re
moving too!

We’re moving each and every pixel, bit, and byte, all your data, lock,
stock, and barrel, from our humble server shack in Canada to our new
server palace in the U.S. of A!

This process will begin during the week of June 28 and will result in
speediness, stableness, and happiness. For more information, please
visit the FAQ about the data center move.

Thank you, Flickreebies, for making Flickr such a wonderful place to
share, connect, and befriend. We love you! (In an entirely non-creepy
way.)

– The Flickroobies

But we’re laborious here at This Blog Sits At.  We sweat the details, interrogating them until they “spill.”

Here’s what we got when we tortured the Flickr email. Why the interrogation? If brand building is a process of relationship building, this could be interesting. 

1) The email tells us something we don’t need to know. Indeed it tells us something that would otherwise have been invisible. (We don’t care whether Flickr is resident in Canada or the US, just so long as our accounts are available on line.) It seizes a pretext for communication. The motives here can’t be informational (or referential, as the linguists call it).  They must be otherwise. Interesting.

2) Flickr doesn’t just announce a move, it uses a voice that is revealing and chatty.  (They are singing Beach Boy songs at Flickr.) The tone is exuberant and a little corny (“Californ-i-a,” “U.S. of A.”) 

This kind of communication is characteristic of contact between friends.  We tell friends about the small, nonessential details of our personal lives.  (The closer we are, the more likely we are to do this.)  The function of this kind of communication is that it keeps us in sync.  We might call this “phatic information.” It is designed to give us the sense that we are “in touch.”.  (When do relationships end?  It is precisely when this kind of information dries up and blows away.)  Interestinger.

3) I wonder if we could say this is a performative (“wishing makes it so”) strategy.  If Flickr talks to us as if there is a familiar relationship, then they create a familiar relationship.  The full intention of the email are revealed: Flickr use a familiar tone to create a familiar relationship, and so to create an intimacy and bond. Interestingest.

4) Actually, the tone is not merely intimate, it is sentimental. “Thank you for making Flickr such a wonderful place to share, connect, and befriend. We love you!” To my flinty, Protestant soul, this feels like it goes right over the top.  I am grateful that Flickr provides a service. Their love, I can take or leave.  On second thought, I will leave it.  Hmm.  Less interesting.

5) But here’s the thing that really struck me, the people at Flickr call themselves Flickroobies and they call us Flickreebies.  Suddenly, I feel like I am back at a United Church summer camp where they were used to put us into groups of 4 or 5 and give us "jazzy" names designed to whip up a little tribal enthusiasm without actually encouraging us to stage an amateur production of Lord of the Flies.  (Naturally, we did anyhow.)

Strickly speaking, I don’t care what the people at Flickr call themselves.  But I am pretty sure I do not wish to be called a Flickroobie or even to know that I am so called at Flickr. 

Call it an arc. The first three stages move upward, using simple linguistic strategies to help build the Flickr brand, and then, Icarus like, things go too far, and the entire enterprise  comes crashing down.  Hey, it’s still early days and we are learning. 

Ford rides a trend

Mustang_1The Ford Motor Company is selling 18,000 a month Mustangs a month.  They could sell more but, darn it, then they’d have to make them.

To meet current demand, Ford considered investing in additional capacity to build more Mustangs…  Executives decides against it to avoid getting stuck with too much capacity should demand slack off after a year or two.

If I were a share holder or an analyst, I’d be unhappy about this.  Ford is leaving value  on the table.  And they are doing so,  apparently, because  they cannot predict demand a year or two down the road.

If I were a share holder or an analyst, I would  say, "Predicting demand?  Isn’t this what we pay you for?  Haven’t you just declared yourself unfit for office?"

Anyone who hasn’t been living in North Korea the last couple of years knows that muscle cars are back.  Even Hollywood got the news and managed to make a lot of money with a couple of pictures staring Vin Diesel.  Mr. Diesel can’t act to save his life (or a picture) but then he didn’t have to.  In fact, the real stars of The Fast and the Furious and XXX were the cars Mr. Diesel drove.   

This is marketing for free.  Contemporary culture in its wisdom and for its own particular reasons decided that cars were BACK.  In other words, Detroit just got a great big gift. 

But to ride the trend, Detroit must know the trend.  And to know the trend Detroit must bridge the gap between  kids racing in the streets and Detroit marketing executives.  From an anthropological point of view, it’s hard to imagine two worlds more disparate.  Men of middle age living in the leafy, gracious suburbs of Detroit (grosse point blank) versus kids working two jobs to race  one car late, late at night in warehouse districts where leaves are not allowed.  There is a vast cultural difference between them. 

But the good news: bridging the gap is easy.  The important thing: never  use cool hunters, or a member of the car community.  The trick: put on your dumbest, more conservative suit.  Borrow the stupidest car you can find.  A K-car would be an excellent choice.  Get up at 2:00 in the morning, go to a warehouse district and listen for loud engines.  Find the race, approach someone, and pepper them with questions.

You will be met with ridicule.  This is good. 

Ethnography begins with an act of humility and the declaration of igorance.  The respondent will mock you at first and then something remarkable happens.  When they see that you are not going to cut and run, that you are so sincere about finding out about what they know, you are prepared to endure a massive loss of face to do so, they will take you in, sit you down, and tell you all about it. 

Clearly, this is only the first step.  It remains to talk to everyone else in the diffusion chain about newly muscular cars.  This will tell us which and how much of the innovations of the early adopter will come in from the margin to transform the tastes and preferences of more mainstream players.  And this will tell us whether demand is sufficient to warrant expanding our production numbers for the next couple of years. 

And this is a very good thing, because, frankly, I think share holders and analysts are watching. 

References

Boudette, Neal. E.  2005.  Muscle Cars Make a Comeback.  Wall Street Journal.  June 16, 2005, pp. D1, D3.

anthropologist overboard

SupermarketThose fellas at PSFK  keep earning our admiration. 

See the post by Piers on mixed tapes and webites like TinyMixTapes that solicit themes for which they then supply play lists.  An example:

A request someone posted at TinyMixTapes:

I need unapologetically cheerful music, perfect for dancing around the kitchen while baking cookies and forgetting that I am very, very alone.

The response:

requested by: M
compiled by: little cola wong

Side One:
01. The Partridge Family – "Come on Get Happy" (Partridge Family: Greatest Hits)
02. Billy Bragg & Wilco – "I Guess I Planted" (Mermaid Avenue)
03. Cookies – "Girls Grow Up Faster Than" (Complete Dimension Sessions)
03. James Brown – "I Got Ants in My Pants (And I Want to Dance)" (Make It Funky – The Payback)
04. PJ Harvey – "Good Fortune" (Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea)
05. Pizzicato 5 – "We Love Pizzicato Five" (The Sound of Music)
06. K-OS – "Fantastique" (Exit)
07. Le Tigre – "Tres Bien" (Feminist Sweepstakes)
08. Jill Scott – "Golden" (Beautifully Human)
09. Bjork – "There’s More to Life Than This" (Debut)
10. Cibo Matto – "Sci-Fi Wasabi" (Stero Type A)

This summons the idea of an exchange in which we program culture for one another.  Blogs already serve this sorting function.  ("Hey read this.  Consider that.")  But what’s especially interesting is that there could exist large banks of playlists or playlist creators which could deliver playlists that are very carefully chosen to fit a very particular moment.  Now the playlists become "sound tracks," as exquisitely appropriate for our lives as they are for a movie.

And this makes me think of the discussion that just took place on the Wharton site: Wikis, Weblogs and RSS: what does the new internet mean for business.  Janice Fraser, Ross Mayfield and Philip Evans are interviewed by Kevin Werbach, and Janice talks about

a shift from what I call host-provided value — such as CitySearch (where publishers provide local events listings in different cities) — to user-provided value in websites such as Upcoming.org (a global events calendar managed by users).

As we see it being played out at the moment, it works precisely as an exchange in a quite  literal sense.  You and I engage in several reciprocities, and, as I result, I can reasonably ask you to program music choice  for my drive to the Cape in July.  (I will reciprocate with a list of the 10 best novels about Elizabethan England to read on your vacation.)

But unless we are living on a Kibbutz, filled with fabulously smart and well informed people, chances are we are going to want some cultural programming for which no friends exist.  And this is, I believe, the reason we have a marketplace (and something liquid called "money" to make non reciprocal exchanges possible)!

So how about it?  When is the internet going to create a marketplace inwhich intellectual, social and cultural capitals trade hands in exchange for money.  When are we going to grow up and move on?  The problem, to use Weberian language, is that we have made most of the cultural exchange that takes place on the internet "enchanted."  It is shot through with larger meanings and governed by larger reciprocities.  And yes, he said, wiping away the tears, I think there is something touching about all of us, and especially me, doing all this programming for free. 

But until we monitize this exchange, we systematically exclude from possibility some of the cultural productions we will care about most.  (I would love a mix every fortnight of current music from several genre, complete with intelligent commentary and a little cultural GPS positioning on the cultural map.  And, yes, I would pay for it.) 

Put it this way.  The informal, enchanted, reciprocal exchange of cultural productions has been great.  It has been an honor and a privilege, that is to say, to live on this Kibbutz.  But, ladies and gentlemen, we must someday come to our senses, move to Haifa, and live in the real world.  Ok, Tel Aviv. 

Why Cinderella Man is doing badly

Angie_4If they were Martians, we’d resent them by this time  It’s not enough that celebrities  commandeer our admiration on the silver screen.  Now they publish books, release clothing lines, start rock bands, found restaurants, launch political careers,  and otherwise colonize as much of the non-movie world as possible. 

Why, just a couple of days ago, I was buying a shirt in Greenwich.  There was no staff anywhere, and when I went to investigate, I discovered Angie Everhart surrounded by sales staff.  Not her fault of course.  I could entirely see the point of witless admiration and it was all I could do not to stand there staring too.  When Ms. Everhart was not glowing, she was shining.  When not shining, she was gleaming. We had gathered round her like so many flowers to the sun. 

But celebrities compete  in our lives even when they are not actually front and center.  Here’s how Chuck Klosterman puts it:

I once loved a girl who almost loved me, but not as much as she loved John Cusack.  …  If Cusack and I were competing for the same woman, I could easily accept losing.  However, I don’t really feel like John and I were "competing" for the girl I’m referring to, inasmuch as her relationship to Cusack was confined to watching him as a two-dimensional projection, pretending to be characters who don’t actually exist.  [This should have] given me a huge advantage over Johnny C., insasmuch as my relationship with this woman including things like "talking on the phone" and "nuzzling under umbrellas" and "eating pancakes."  However, I have come to realize that I perceived this competition completely backward; it was definitely an unfair battle, but not in my favor.  It was unfair in Cusack’s favor.  I never had a chance.

Actually Klosterman has no idea how bad it is.  Reading this passage, I suddenly heard it being spoken in the voice of the character that Cusack plays in Hi-Fidelity.  Klosterman  complains about a celebrity stealing his girlfriend?  The celebrity steals his voice.

It’s when they insist they can play the little guy, this is the only place we draw the line.  As when Tom Hanks plays that poor bastard living in an airport.  Or Russel Crowe plays a working class hero in Cinderella Man.  This is where we say, you can have stardom, your books, clothing lines, rock bands,  restaurants, and political careers,  but you can’t play the little guy.  You can’t insist that your celebrity is a "get into anywhere free" card and then make it go away in the movie house.  We’re not buying it.

Maybe.  The other more terrifying possibility is that we are so enamored of celebrities, we have ceased to care about the little guy.  Little guy, schmittle guy.  We’re all celebrities now.  Give us movies about movies, not movies about life. 

References

Agins, Teri.  2005.  With Her Own Line, Pop Star Rides Rise In Celebrity Fashion Upstaging Upscale Designers, Jessica Simpson Prepares For Big Launch in Stores Nixing a ‘Cheesy’ Touch.  Wall Street Journal. June 9, 2005.  A1.

Klosterman, Chuck.  2004.  Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs.  New York: Scribner, p. 2.

Alma mater gets a clue: university as marketplace

Alma_mater_at_columbiaMany of the country’s stronger universities are actively discounting tuition. These rebates, which can be thousands of dollars, aren’t coming from endowments or government grants. The colleges are dipping into their own tuition revenue—essentially taking from students who pay full freight and giving to others. And it is the high achievers rather than the needy students who are getting a good chunk of money.  (Wall Street Journal yesterday)

Economic actors, even universities, are rational creatures. So why are they discounting the price of the “product.”  It can’t be to drum up more business. They’re oversubscribed as it is.  I think it’s to create more generous alums. Down the road, better students should enjoy more accomplished careers, earn bigger incomes, and give bigger gifts to alum mater. It’s a long term bet, but universities are well positioned for long term bets.

Would this be the time to think about quality control? There is no point bringing better students to campus, if we are going to inflict a substandard education on them. They will graduate unhappy. Or they will just leave and end up giving their alum dollars someplace else.

So it’s time to do something about those academic dead beats. You know the ones I mean. (If you don’t have them as colleagues, you had them as teachers.) Almost every department in almost every university has academics who just gave up years ago. Usually, they don’t teach very well. Usually, they hardly think at all. Now in mid-career, they appear to be struggling to qualify as late entrants in that rather large club identified by George Bernard Shaw. “Most people would rather die than think. Most do.”

Bad teachers have gone largely unchallenged for many reasons.  Clearly, tenure is one. But incompetents have been tolerated to some extent, I think, because it’s hard to figure the real cost of the damages they inflict.

We can change that. Let us figure out how much a bad teacher costs a university. This will give a Dean something she can use. She can sit Dr. Lunatic down and say, “Dr. Lunatic, we’ve run the numbers. And it is clear to us that you have cost this university a small fortune in alumi giving, and, clearly, its only going to get worse. If we add to this your salary costs, roughly $140,000 a year, you are one expensive son of a gun and a luxury we can no longer afford.”

Ah, the discipline of numbers. Let us find this figure and post it imaginatively above the heads of every incompetent. Let us fix it there, so that it shows when he or she is sitting at the Faculty Club, walking across campus, and pretending to look something up in the library. Call it a “price on their head.” Not what the bounty hunter can win, but what the institution will lose.

First, a “lifetime value” calculation: the student, who for modest discount “x” in tuition, brings in an additional “y” in alumni gifting each year multiplied by the number of years he/she survives after graduation, adjusted for the upturn and downturn of income over time.

Now, a “lifetime damage” calculation. Dr. Lunatic teaches the intro course twice a year. (His department is punishing him for being a lunatic.) That’s 1000 students a year. Let’s say 1% of these students were given a discount to attend. Now of these 10 students, one is so appalled by Dr. Lunatic that she leaves the university immediately. (This is only a tiny fraction of the larger class but the whole of her alum generosity must be charged against Dr. Lunatic’s account. If her life time value is, say, $40,000, Dr. Lunatic is on the hook for a nifty sum. If it happens that the student in question goes on to enjoy the career of a Carly Fiorina, well, Dr. Lunatic, you have my permission to shoot yourself. Multiply the (non-Fiorina) alumni cost and Dr. Lunatic’s “lifetime damage”  (on this score alone) is around $12,000,000. Talk about a price on your head.

Of the remaining nine students in the intro course, three will leave before graduation, the victim of all the Dr. Lunatics to whom they have been exposed. (Dr. Lunatic only gets partial credit here.) The remaining six students will split. Half of them will forgive the university their Dr. Lunatics and give as many alumni dollars as they would have given in any case. (Dr. Lunatic dodges a bullet thanks to undergraduate cluelessness. He is in short the beneficiary of the very cluelessness that it was his charge to dispel. Sometimes incompetence is it’s own reward and more.) The remaining three will give at smaller than expected funding levels, each more punishing than the last. Or something.

What does this add to Dr. Lunatic lifetime damage calculation? I haven’t clue. But someone out there must know how to run with these numbers within acceptable limits of approximation. I will happily give you the floor. Or, if you prefer to remain anonymous, I will post your wisdom and take your secret to my grave.

You can see what I’m hoping for here: a concrete number that clarifies the real costs of academic incompetence. As it is, university presidents, college deans, and department heads don’t have much leverage. Sure, it’s clear to everyone that Dr. Lunatic is a one-man wrecking machine in the classroom but until someone demonstrates the costs of this incompetence, it is hard to muster the administrative will to do anything about it. We need to shadow him on campus with that value that shows his real costs to the institution. Call this is a shame function. It makes us feel better but it doesn’t materially change the world and certainly not Dr. Lunatic.

But there is a larger opportunity for leverage. If we can get this number right, we can calculate not only the costs inflicted on alumni support created by Dr. Lunatic, but the amount that must be laid at the door of university administrators who refuse to move against him. Now we have a metric that can be used to assess performance in the high offices of the university. Dr. Lunatic has no shame. If he had, he would have restored himself to usefulness years ago. But Dean Robertson?  Actually, she has pretty active sense of pride. If we say she is costing us hundreds of thousands of alumni dollars by suffering Dr. Lunatic, there’s a pretty good chance she will do something about it. 

Yes, in my dreams.

References

 Anonymous. 2005. Unlocking the Special Codes. Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2005, p. D7

Image above: Alma Mater on the campus of Columbia University.

Blog rolling in our time

Here’s the cover of my new book.  Lively and engaging, it is still missing something. 

Book_cover_cc_ii_jpg_1

Exactly.  No kind words, no endorsements, no puffery, no (b)logging rolling.

Consider this a solicitation.  I would be grateful for any and all suggestions.

Examples:

This book stands like a colossus in its field. Winston Churchill

Great to dance to.  Cher

Keeps doors open real good.  A  friend from high school.

You get the idea.

p.s., book  design by David Drummond.

p.p.s.,  C&C II due out in a couple of weeks. 

Open Source Radio (WGBH)

In transit today to do the Open Source show on WGBH and to see old pals in Cambridge.

The show tonight is called "Attention, calling all future historians."  Show time is 7:00. 

The Open Source  link is down.   Here is the way they describe what they do. 

Open Source from PRI is a LIVE on-air conversation designed to capture the sound of the Web, embracing the Internet transformation of media as host Christopher Lydon engages callers, e-mailers, and bloggers from around the world on a range of topics.

Open Source from PRI aims to begin conversations on the Web each day and invite a worldwide audience to contribute topics, guests, and information that advance understanding of issues and ideas. Whether dissecting the perils of war, disease, and hunger or the pleasures of cultural connections and the promise of science and medicine, Lydon and company pursue a topic’s inherent global dimensions via the Internet.

"My ambition, with producer Mary McGrath, is to thread the seeming chaos of the Web into a coherent skein of ideas and argument," says Lydon. "We want to launch the smartest, most wide-open, democratic conversation anyone’s ever been invited to join, in any format. The Internet transition we’re living through is a boundless opportunity. It extends the rim of the roundtable and the range of the give-and-take to the whole planet."

And, yes, that  penultimate sentence does make you wonder what they think they are doing inviting me.