Coca-Cola sent a team to the food fair held in Cologne a few years ago. We were there to listen for new trends that might influence the world of carbonated soft drinks.

The fair itself was interesting. There were acres of innovations. Wine in a box, cheese on a stick, that kind of thing. But the best part of the trip was what happened over drinks back at the hotel.

Nick Hahn and Charlotte Oades were presiding and the conversation turned to Sophie, a creature invented for marketing purposes, and as a far as I know an unprecedented in this endlessly inventive field.

Sophie was designed for one audience: pre-teen and early teen girls. Our assumption was that there is no group of consumers in the world more curious, more inventive or more participatory than this group.

Sophie was designed to exist two places. The first was on-line. Sophie would have an apartment on-line. Anyone could visit. Sophie would never be home, but the apartment would be filled with cues. The visitor could look at look in Sophie’s cupboards, listen to her answer machine, look at the notes and postcards on her fridge. The visitor could examine her wardrobe, bathroom and bedroom. The visitor can start up Sophie’s computer, examine her desktop, read her email, examine other files. The visitor could stand by an open window and hear fragments of conversation coming up from the street.

Nothing escapes a twelve year old girl. That picture on the fridge: Sophie’s brother or boyfriend? Those voices coming up from the street: is that Spanish or Italian? And what about the "note to self" on the fridge, the one that reads "sboats bhd schd!"

But Sophie would also manifest herself in the real world. The strategy here was to stage events in the world. I think our unofficial motto here was that 90s bumber sticker that read "practice senseless acts of kindness and random acts of beauty." Corny, to be sure, but useful as pungent little phrases can be when you are in the thick of ideation. 

We imagined a series of "acts." One was to light up a fountain in the middle of Mexico City, say, the Diana fountain there. Another was to moor sailboats in Sydney harbor so that they formed in a circle. A third was to return stolen art to the Hermitage.  Always the press would be notified that something was going to happen, and always when something did happen, foodbanks and city services would fill to overflowing.

Our hope was that the press would begin to report these stories and that teen readers would begin to make connections. Our principle was always less is more. We wanted to give the press only as much as they needed to file a story and not a jot more. We knew that key word searches would allow the teen girls to find Sophie wherever she was manifesting herself. We guessed that they see patterns that the press would not.

Sophie had a calculated duality. Everytime you thought she was an ordinary girl living in her first apartment (Rome? Madrid?), you were lead to suspect she might in fact be a goddess. And just as you were beginning to suspect she was a indeed a creature of myth and fable, you would begin to see her as a girl again.

But most of all Sophie was a marketing creation. She would be funded by TCCC (the Coca-Cola Company) but she would have to be leveraged in the most delicate way possible. The moment that TCCC claimed her, she was over. The moment TCCC so much as labelled her, she was over. The best TCCC could hope for is to have Sophie sometimes smile in their direction. This meant, amongst other things, merely more Cokes in Sophie’s fridge than Pepsis. Not no Pepsi’s!

In effect, TCCC would have to treat Sophie with the same exquisite care and solicitude with which it now treats Santa Claus, another of its marketing creations.  Marketing instruments and vehicles must grow more interesting and sophisticated.  Pirates, jolly green giants, dough boys, these are no longer enough.  What we want now are more fully realized creatures that invite the consumer to enter into acts of co-creation and self completion. 

The funny thing is that if we do our jobs, the creature leaves the brand and enters the culture.  Now marketers are like any other culture creators, except that, unlike the creators of the Simpsons, say, they seize the marketing opportunity at the beginning instead of the end of the creature’s life cycle.

References

The photo above, sorry about the quality, shows the Diana Fountain of Mexico City. 

Tom Asacker was kind enough to invite me to answer some questions for the interview series he’s conducting at www.acleareye.com.  I sat down to answer his question and before I knew it, I had a blog post. (I guess we’re all now blogging machines.) Here is Tom’s question and my answer, with the debate to continue at www.acleareye.com on Wednesday.

Tom Asacker’s question:

Grant. In your new book, Culture and Consumption II, you write "the consumer is an individual in a cultural context engaged in a cultural project. They are looking for small meanings, concepts of what it is to be a man or a woman, concepts of what it is to be middle aged, concepts of what it is to be a parent, concepts of what a child is and what a child is becoming, concepts of what it is to be a member of a community and a country."

You go on to say that "advertising is the preeminent meaning maker." Some would view that as a dated concept considering the level of consumer skepticism¾and perhaps cynicism¾towards advertising, the fragmentation of media, and the increasing importance of design and the customer experience on meaning-making in the marketplace. Can you speak to those trends as they relate to your premise?

Grant McCracken’s answer:

Tom, This is a great question. Advertising was once the paradigmatic meaning maker in our culture, and it’s a good idea to ask whether it remains so. Clearly, advertising did astonishing things in its time. As I show in the "cars" chapter in C&CII, it actually helped to create North American culture in the 1950s…not in that dumbed-down way preferred by intellectuals but in a way that was much substantial, genuine and, yes, authentic.

But clearly, things have changed. New media are upon us. Contemporary culture is swifter and more turbulent. Consumers have become newly participatory. They are smarter about how media works. They are more diverse internally. (There are more tastes and preferences within any given consumer.) They are more diverse externally. (There are more groups of consumers, distinguished by new principles.)

But, this just begins to tap the problem. The basic notions here, "consumer," "segment," "brand," "relationship," these are all up for grabs. Marketing academics and professionals now have to redefine, rework and reapply them.

This means the "big cannon" approach to marketing is in dispute. This said: take a simple message (aka, "the clown") and fire it at a large target (aka, "a bucket of water") as often and loudly as possible. As a guy who worked for P&G in the 1970s recently told me, "We could get 85% American householders with one week of advertising on the big three networks." USP (aka "unique selling proposition") really stood for "keep it simple, stupid." The marketer’s mantra, say it loud and say it proud, "we’re here, we’re mere, get used to it."

What we need is a "many cannons" approach: many, shifting targets and a constant, shifting cannonade. Or maybe it makes sense just to dispense with the metaphor altogether. (Military metaphors, with advertising "campaigns," approved by "captains" of industry, that make a "killing," these were always an odd way of thinking about what advertising was and now they seem particularly odd. My fellow "Coburn Change Fellow," Jerry Michalski, doesn’t even like to use the term "consumer." There’s a good chance that much of the vocabulary of marketing will change.)

The "many cannons" approach is already with us. Smart marketers are using new, more interesting messages, delivered by media that is multi and well mixed. But it’s not clear to me that the beast called advertising is dead. There is no meaning maker in the marketer’s tool kit as powerful as advertising. A TV spot can use 15 seconds to astonishing effect. It can make meanings, build relationships, construct brands at a stroke. When this is followed up by the smaller message and the more delicate interventions made possible by the new media, then we’ve really got something. But it seems to me too early to dismiss the mass media advertising instrument. I think it will be with us always.

But here’s what really bugs me. I don’t believe we have a persuasive model of how the new marketing and the new media are going to assume the "meaning management" abilities once so magnificently deployed by advertising proper. It’s a little as if we are now working with a "cheap, fast and out of control" model (Thank you, Earl Morris). There are lots of little devices at our disposal. But they are dubious, uncertain, and, most important, yet to be coordinated to big branding effects.

Everyone says the king is dead. But are we quite sure this is so? Have we got a monarch in waiting? Perhaps we should hold off on the regicide until we have a new plan for running the country.

References

The image above of Madison Avenue is from the Wikipedia entry on Manhattan and it was created by Lief Knutsen. 

I am at Design Management Institute meetings here on the Cape.  This morning there was a presentation from Jonathan Hayes (Design Director, Microsoft) and Michael Jager (Creative Director, Jager Di Paola Kemp Design).

Jager presented in the outfit of Master Chief from Halo.  Many of us were moved to tears.  That’s Jonathan on the right trying to calm us down. 

You will see in the photos to the right that the console is undergoing a redesign.  The first version, the Xbox, was, as Jonathan put it, designed to suggest the containment of tremendous power, a kind of Incredible Hulk, buttons popping, power unleashing, grab the kids, save the dog sort of thing.  You can see it in the bow of the top verticle plane and of course in the famous Xbox logo. 

This is great design because it is the sort of thing that every young teenager would like to see happen to himself.  There is a reason that comic book heroes are always going from Clark Kents to Supermen.  But it is wrong to patronize their kids for their fascination.  In fact, they have good physiological and emotional grounds for identifying deeply with Incredible Hulks.  This is very like the transformation being forced on them by adolescence.  And we must add to this a third effect that gives teens an interest in Hulk containment: in our lifetime, computer based gaming and cyborg enablements have expanded the Hulk opportunities exponentially. 

The Xbox was, in sum, an canny piece of meaning management.  It reached out to the first consumer, the early adopter, and spoke to them with an image and meaning they cared about.

But what happens when the Xbox decides it wants to move out of the basements of hollowed eyed teenagers into the the study, the dens, the living rooms of a massively larger audience?  The design team adopts what Michael calls a new "design sobriety".  And they looked for another way to talk about power through electronic augmentation, digital transformation.

Microsoft needed an image that is disciplined, more precise, nuanced, but still formidable.   And here, to the right, is what they did.  This is the Xbox360, available in stores in 5 or 6 weeks.  Sorry, the photo is something less than perfect.  What it obscures is the fact that this Xbox box looks a little like parentheses turned back to back:  ) (   or  ] [ . 

Jonathan and Michael talk about this icon as "the inhale of breath before a strike in the martial arts."  So we have power represented here still but now appears in a new idiom, one that older, more mainstream consumers can embrace.  This is power with poise, power with grace, power from discipline, power from intelligence.  Nice one.

All of these "reach" strategies are daring ones.  More and more, we marketers find ourselves obliged to speak to 2 (or more) audiences with the same product design or brand.  (This is because there are more new segments, and more difference between old segments.  In this case: technologically enabled teens who come down to dinner having competing on line with friends in Ghana against enemies in the Philipines and now sit with parents who barely make their way through this morning’s newspaper.) In this case, Microsoft needed a design that speaks to the old consistency even as it recruits a new one.  The formula: semiotic sameness to keep the segment you have and semiotic departure to capture the segment you want. 

Will this work?  That’s the great thing about culture in capitalism.  We shall see whether this one design can talk to two very different groups. 

One thing is clear, the Xbox team is a lot like the "ring of light" icon on which they are working.  They are invitational, dynamic and overlapping in their energies.  This means they work as an international team, draw heavily on design players outside Microsoft, consult closely with the player community, and work towards an ever shifting consensus that is maximally alive to what is happening inside Microsoft and the extra-Microsoft worlds to which they belong.  (Michael said that at one point in the development process he saw what he thought was a perfect, lasting consensus come out of kilter in just 4 months.)

I sat there thinking, "Gosh, this doesn’t sound like the Microsoft I know.  What if…what if while reinventing the Xbox, they found a way to reinvent the mother ship?" Some one get in touch with the real Master Chief.