Archive for August, 2005
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I have been on the road for the last week and a half, and
something remarkable happened while I was away. Google went from being the darling of the internet to something poised
on the verge of branding ignominy. WTF?
Many things are happening at once here. John Battelle’s book about Google is being talked
about. Google is on the verge of a
second stock offering. There are two new
products, Talk and Desktop 2, that reveal more comprehensive ambitions in the
marketplace. The article by Elinor
Mills, a CNET staff writer, has been released and Google has blacklisted CNET.
The most striking public event in the last 10 days: the
press is now prepared to speak ill of Google. Criticism has become a thinkable posture.
I guess this was inevitable The anti-Microsoft could not hope to remain so forever. As it grew, Google would eventually lose it’s "little guy" status and risk reclassification as the new bully on the scene.
But what is interesting for a marketer is to watch this
event play out in one’s own head. Over
the last few years, Google had wormed its way into my affections. I had made it my search engine, my email
supplier, and my desktop search engine. I
was impressed by the product development strategies and other aspects of the
corporate culture. I was pleased to see
Google anoint itself as an enemy of the philistine Microsoft.
And then in the last ten days, things shifted. Call me capricious. Call me inconstant. Call me superficial. But suddenly I could feel the brand slips its
moorings. For a marketer, this is a
revelational moment. We are there at the
moment of creation, in this case, recreation. We are there to feel the brand sliding out of one meaning and sit poised on the verge of others.
Most of cultural meanings come draped in their own inevitability…even
when they are that particularly subset of meaning, the brand. We don’t choose to think them. They’re just there. We don’t give them their authority. They bring that with them when they enter our
world. We don’t give brands their power
or their meanings. We merely honor what
is extant.
Until things change. Google is now exploring that moment when the brand is suddenly separated
from the meanings and the glory thrust upon it. (No doubt, some of these meanings were crafted through good marketing. But only some.) Now, the thing, the brand, is negotiable. Now its labile. Now we know what Google does next, and how we
respond will make this thing in our heads called “Google.”
Now the hard work of marketing begins in
earnest. I wish them well. I think.
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grant
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In Dallas, on the weekend, I talked to a woman who spoke
good but accented English. She told me
that spoke an aboriginal language most of her childhood. She didn’t learn English till she was about 10
years old. She learned it from the women
who came to live with the family and the 13 kids after her mother fell
sick.
She didn’t have a chance to use her English outside the
community until some years later. She
and her brother went in to Tucson to buy the hose
and the bucket they needed to build an outdoor shower.
She went to the hardware store and placed her order. The person behind the counter looked at her and
raised his hands in the air, the sign of incomprehension. So she tried again: "can you sell me a bucket and a hose?" She got the same reaction.
Now she said, “What is the matter with this guy? Doesn’t he speak English?”
The man beside her looked at her with surprise and
said, “Lady, you’re speaking Spanish.”
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grant
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If you want to survey the experimental margin of our culture,
chances are you don’t go to Dallas, Texas. Austin, with its aggressive food and film communities, maybe. But chances are you’ll stay clear of Texas
altogether. It’s too large to be subtle,
too monolithic to be interesting. I mean
this is a place that worships football.
But we are learning that a number of unlikely places can play
sunken ship—not the dead space that environments warned us against but a place diverse
species congregate and multiply. Dallas
might, I think, be one of those places.
My first clue was the galleria attached to my hotel. Extravagantly upscale shops all around and at
the center of everything, a skating rink. Witty! In a land where summer temperature are
measured in three digits, this is what “oasis” looks like.
My second clue: one of the shops in the Galleria has a shoe
store called Gregory’s that has devoted one window to the work of Ed Hardy: conventional
baseball caps, heavily customized and each of them apparently unique. One of them showed a skull and cross bones and
the legend: “love kills slowly.” I’m not
sure who would wear this or where. It’s
too expensive and dramatic for private use. So you wear it publicly—with a spouse? With a friend? By yourself? It’s a little Darwinian possibly, but could we suppose this hat tells us
there must be a time and a place where it can be worn and a group who would
appreciate it?
The third clue was the music in the elevator of my hotel, a
Westin. Brazilian and interesting, I
think, but out of my range. To be fair,
my range is not very broad, but this is the first time the music in a hotel
elevator has exceeded it. (Yeah, I
know. It is possible that I have finally
achieved a complete cultural senescence. Not recognizing elevator music, that would
have to be the first symptom.)
The fourth clue: Central Market, a food retail operation so
aggressive that it makes Whole Foods and Trader Joes look completely
pedestrian. The place was packed with
consumers, with variety (over 20 kinds of salsa), with experiments, free
samples, exotics foodstuffs I did not recognize, and brands I have never heard
of. The only thing that was not jammed
was the check out line. What a novel
idea. Dallas is a place with lots of
experiments in the restaurant and food world. The local notion is that “if you can make it
in Dallas, you can make it anywhere.”
Some sunken ships works best when there is one very large,
public, and well defined idea in place. As long as this remains in place, as an apparent consensus, the thing
everyone KNOWS about Dallas, then everyone can go off and do whatever the hell
they want. And this might be the
strategy by which Dallas makes itself more various and more interesting than a place
like Austin with its self conscious feeling for the alternative.
This could be one of those cunning identity plays in which
the background and foreground are switched. (A Canadian example: Quebec claims to be a
society with one language and culture, but in fact everyone there is bilingual.
In the rest of Canada: a great show is
made of being bilingual but in fact most everyone is monolingual.) In this case: Austin is putatively
experimental and ends up being a relatively small universe of well policed
options while Dallas claims to be narrow and monolithic when it is in fact free
wheeling and multiple.
A last note: I had dinner on Saturday with
every thinking person’s notion of a power couple: Virginia and Steve Postrel. I had just finished 7 hours of interviewing so
I was pretty sure that my head was going to explode on several occasions. But I came away with this conclusion. Every business school has the same problem:
how to give the MBA student a cultural literacy and the strategic
sophistication needed to act on it. I
mean some of these kids are going to have to fight the cola wars, decide how
Kroger should fight the Central Market threat, find a way to make design a
standard part of the Detroit automotive product, or think about the difference
between Dallas and Austin. The b-school
curriculum is way under weight on this one. One way to solve this problem: hire the
Postrels and give them the Coca-Cola, Kroger, General Motors Power Couple Professorship.
(posted from Atlanta)
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grant
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A couple of years ago, I was doing ethnographic
research on the topic of beer drinking. Martin Weigel, my agency double, and I went to Cleveland to a
neighborhood filled with bars called “the flats.”
The flats has one big advantage as a place to go
drinking. It used to be an industrial
area and now it’s just bars. So there is
no residential population there to take umbrage when the young people of
Cleveland indulge themselves with Dionysian abandon.
Martin is an Englishman and the young people of Ohio
are…not. (Some anthropological
assertions are incontrovertible.) There
are many differences between Englishmen and Ohioans, but this story-time turns
on one in particular: the young people of Ohio are pleased to make a spectacle
of themselves in a way that Martin and I never would.
The English are raised never to make a spectacle of
themselves.* (Canadians, too.) It’s a rule. Laughing too loudly. Sneezing
more than once. Shouting, gesticulating,
staggering around in public. Anything
that suggests a failure of self control breaks the spectacle rule. The penalty is clear. Make a spectacle of yourself and you
surrender your status credentials, and, of course, any self respect you may be
harboring.
So putting an Englishman and a Canadian onto the flats
was a very good idea. (Thank you, J. Walter Thompson.) Nothing we saw there was
likely to escape our attention. We might
as well have been on Mars. (Martin, my
favorite Martian.)
This particular evening, a Thursday I think, all was
quiet. Martin and I go into several bars
and the tableau is always the same. The
music is loud, the place is relatively crowded, the drinks are in place. Everything is there except the
spectacle.
The bar is a big square room. Men and women stand around the
perimeter. The women, many of them, are
dancing in place, as if by themselves. They are standing beside men who are leaning against the bar. Occasionally, the girls beseech the guys to
start dancing. The music was
deafening. The DJ was exhorting people
to dance. Nothing doing. Martin and I look on and wonder: What’s to be
learned from a room like this?
We wander out into the street. Kids walk past wearing crazy paper hats with
outrageously off-color remarks written on them. One of them reads, and I am not making this up, “sperm receptacle.” Evidently, there is a restaurant in the
flats that makes these hats up and hands them out. Wonder of wonders, customers agree to wear them. Further wonder: they then wear them while
walking in the flats. Talk about making
a spectacle of yourself! Martin can’t
believe his eyes. I feel a strong temptation
to look the other way. It’s the only
decent, Canadian, thoroughly tedious thing to do.
Martin and I wonder back into the bar. Whammo! All hell has broken lose. Everyone is dancing, including the guys. There are women now actually dancing on the bar. In the ten minutes that Martin and I spent on
the street, the bar went off. In his dry
English way, Martin said, “I guess they were waiting for us to leave.”
In a perfect world, we would have had Malcolm Gladwell
with us. Clearly, some tipping point had
just been passed. It would take a finer
eye, or at least more research, to determine how the crowd negotiated this
sudden transition, this phase change. (The
trouble with this research is that there is never more than a couple of days to
collect data.) No doubt, several
signaling systems were used. Or maybe
this is a simple hydraulic system. Combine
enough patrons with enough drinks, music, DJ exhortation, and this always
happens around the 44 minute mark.
What was especially interesting for Martin and I was
that the tipping point here marked a transition from social restraint to
spectacle. Something, some things, in
the bar worked as a licensing system. All these people had found a way to give one another permission to go
nuts. It was a kind of social contract
that begins, “I will if you will.” No
doubt, there are lots of early gambits. People take leads and no one follows. But eventually one lead brings out a couple of imitators and this
provokes still more “adoption” until the whole thing scales up and over the
tipping point.
But none of this reckons with the flats. This is apparently a liminal zone, a place
that says you may leave your usual “spectacle constraints” at home. There is an inclination to suppose that
liminal places are ones in which no rules apply. This is wrong. In fact, the behavior of young people in Cleveland
is as highly coded, social formed, cultural codified and socially formed after
the tipping point as before it. People
who get really blind, stumbling, who-am-I, where-am-I, drunk wake up
friendless, unless they have the designated “Jim Belushi” role to play. And ever here there are still rules that
constraint what remains a performance of drunkenness.
It is one of those little miracles that happen in
American life, governed as it so often is not by a ceremonial order, but
something more emergent. We are a culture where things emerge out of an apparent muddling and the most subtle of signalling systems. Usually, it’s the market place that supplies the field for this convergence not consensus. Not in Cleveland. Here it’s that alluvial plane called the flats.
Reference
Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point. Viking.
Footnote:
* I knew an English family, educated and intelligent,
who insisted that no one should ever tell Sarah, a daughter in her early 30s,
any sort of joke. Why? Because once someone told Sarah a joke and
she couldn’t stop laughing.
(Filed from Dallas)
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grant
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Has this ever happened to you?
You finally see a movie on TV that you shunned at the cinema. And it’s not bad. In fact, it’s pretty good. And you ask yourself, "why didn’t I see this in first run?" And the answer that returns to you is, "the ads on TV made it look kind of dubious."
This happened to me last night. I was sitting in my hotel room, ransacking the limited selection there for something interesting. And I came upon the Tom Hanks stuck in an airport movie. Sure, it was a little stupid in places. But it also had lots of good points–none of which were promised by the TV ad I saw on TV.
There is a necessary problem here. Ads for TV always use footage from the movie itself. (They get this for free. Why would they go and shoot something more?) The trouble is they cannot show the "punch lines" without giving away the ending. And they cannot show the subtler moments, because out of context, these tend to be a little cryptic.
What they are left with is not very interesting. In the Tom Hanks in an airport movie, I was left thinking, "stuck in an airport! C’est moi. Why would I want to see this in a film?" More exactly, I couldn’t imagine how a story about a man in an airport could engage or hold me. All the ad footage had done was to confirm my suspicion that life lived in an airport would be pointless and dreary.
The solution here is obvious: make real ads. Don’t use your own footage. Act like a real marketer instead of marketer-in-law, marketer on the cheap, marketer by proxy. The qualities that make footage good for a movie make it almost necessarily bad for an ad.
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grant
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The slump in Hollywood pictures continues. Ticket sales are off 11.5 percent from last year.
There are many thoughts on what the trouble is. Waxman of the Times reviews them:
… a failure of studio marketing, the rising
price of gas, the lure of alternate entertainment, even the prevalence of
commercials and pesky cellphones inside once-sacrosanct theaters. But many
movie executives and industry experts are beginning to conclude that something
more fundamental is at work: Too many Hollywood movies these days, they say,
just are not good enough.
There is another factor that does not seem to be getting much play: the
fragmentation in consumer taste and preference.
Hollywood continues to rely on the blockbuster to make its numbers…and
occasionally, this miracle of consensus is forthcoming (e.g., The Wedding
Crashers). But any marketer can tell you that markets are fragmenting. This must mean
that blockbusters are harder and harder to manufacture. To be sure, Hollywood has always promoted
“chick flicks” that could talk to men, and mature pictures that could bring in
the young. But the differences of gender
and age map only a relatively small part of the difference “out there.”
To make matters more difficult, TV has got better at responding to
difference. Hundreds of channels, and
the opportunity to leap between them instanteously, this is what responsiveness
looks like in the "channel" channel. (Skipping between films in the multi-plex is just wrong somehow.) Furthermore, the relative health of the indie
film industry means that there are more and more films that can be precisely
targeted (Bend it like Beckham) and one or two “sleepers” that come from narrow
origins to go wide.
Packaged good marketing has had the great luxury of offering multiple
offerings in fragmenting channels. Hollywood is obliged to make a one size that fits all. This is not impossible, but it will take a
reinvention of the filmmaker’s art and science. As I understand it, marketers in Hollywood now stand mostly for artistic
compromise. They encourage market
accommodation with scant regard for artistic costs.
And this is interesting to contemplate: marketers as fully
committed to the success of narrative as they are to the demographic reach of the product. What business school is prepared to take
this on? Where is the MBA program
capable of this breadth? Let’s be honest. Existing MBA
program are currently doing a terrible job preparing their students to ride the
Tsunami of a dynamic contemporary culture. What makes us think they could add to this new knowledge, the ability to
engage in “product innovation” (aka script development) that spoke to many audiences with both artistic engagement and marketing acuity. Because, and this is
the marketer’s new lesson, it can’t work as a marketing enterprise
unless it works as an artistic one.
In sum, as Hollywood struggles to respond to the challenges of
contemporary culture, marketing partners must struggle, too.
References
Waxman, Sharon. 2005. Summer Fading, Hollywood
Sees Fizzle. New York Times. August 24, 2005. here.
