Archive for November, 2005
And stop calling me stupid
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Yesterday, in It’s the Purpose Brand, Stupid, Clayton Christensen, Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall endeavored to set the field of marketing back a hundred years.
If they were merely three cranks in a coffee shop, this wouldn’t matter. But Christensen is a vastly and deservedly influential professor at the Harvard Business School, Cook the cofounder of Intuit software, and, most distressingly, Hall is the "chief strategy officer" for the Advertising Research Foundation. Worse, what is now merely an article in the Wall Street Journal is soon to be an article in the Harvard Business Review. Can a book from HBSP be far behind?
The three wise men assert,
a simple rule has been forgotten. To build a product that people want, you need to help them do a job that they are trying to get done.
the marketer’s fundamental task is not so much to understand the customer as it is to understand what jobs customers need to do — and build products that serve those specific purposes.
I had a philosophy professor who, when confronted by nonsense he regarded as especially egregious, would put down his book, look away and close his eyes. Think of me so.
The "purpose brand" proposition is egregious nonsense. Brands, at their best, and among other things, bundles of meanings, some of them robust, some of them delicate, all of them poised to speak to one or more segments and to deliver unto them an understanding of not just what the product does but what it stands for, how it may be used, for whom it may stand, and where it is located in the larger scheme of things, commercial and cultural. (These values are not functions. They are values that create value.)
To reduce the brand to "purpose" is to dumb down the enterprise, diminish the art and science of marketing, beggar the consumer, and so displace the marketer, that our three wise men must be seen to conduct themselves as proverbial bulls in the china shop of marketing concept, method and action, destroying advances made over the 100 years.
Shakespeare was clear on this. When Lear is stripped of the markers of his standing, and told that he doesn’t really need them, he replies
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is cheap as beast’s." (2.4.264)
But not just Shakespeare takes umbrage. The social sciences once embraced and then quite emphatically repudiated the "purpose" approach to things. They called it "functionalism" and came to regard it as a violent act of reduction. Functionalism reduced complicated human artifacts to purposes they served. Thus did theory make us stupid. Functionalism obliged us to ignore much of what we knew to be true about the object of study.
Some costs of the Purpose Brand proposition: Puccini becomes entertainment, indistinguishable from Disney. There is no difference between time keep devices called Patek Philippe and Timex. Ford makes the same thing as Volkswagen. All business schools, mark you, Dr. Christensen, are pretty much the same. Intuit is only a couple of features different from Microsoft Money. Most of all, Mr. Hall, there is no longer any such thing as advertising strategy. Now, it’s sell the function all day long. (And to think that marketers and agencies actually fund the Advertising Research Foundation!)
The three wise men are a wrecking crew. They would have us forget the advances made by Trout, Ries, Levy, Kotler, Levitt, to name a few. They would commit the marketing professional to the cultural illiteracy now installed in the business school world They restore to usefulness a theory that is scorned in the rest of the academic world. But most of all they would will away some of the most interesting, most difficult, and, yes, most useful elements of the marketer’s responsibility.
Join with me now. Let us look away and close our eyes.
Reference
Christensen, Clayton M., Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall. 2005. It’s the Purpose Brand, Stupid. Wall Street Journal. November 29, 2005; Page B2.
Shakespeare quote is approximate.
Surfing Your Own Wave: plenty, Netflix, and the creation of managed scarcity
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This man’s name is Eric Hayes. He is co-founder and Vice President of research and development at Attensa.
I met him at the Corante/Berkman social software event. He was standing there at the cocktail hour with a video iPod. It showed a clip of him surfing behind a motor boat…for a really long time. Clearly, Eric had found the endless wave.
For those who would like to try this at home, Eric gave me the specs.
2003 MasterCraft X2 (with 2,000 lbs of water ballast on the one side) 20.8’ long 310hp GM Vortec V8, decked out with 17 speakers (10 on the tower) 1700 watts of power (so you can hear it while surfing or wake boarding), and an ipod mini playing the blues. The surfboard was a 5.5’ Hyperlite “LandLoc” wake surfer. The river was the Upper Willamette in Portland, Oregon.
Now you know.
The other thing that was wrong with this picture was Eric himself. Really friendly. Really happy. Not at all like every other surfer I have met.
I have long believed that surfers are not by nature surly, ill mannered as*holes. No, I think it’s surfing that makes them so. Surfing is the original scarcity enterprise. There are relatively few places where surfing is possible. Even here, really good waves are scarce. And even these waves, the really good ones, last a relatively short time. This is why surfers are so mean spirited. (Ironically, bad temper spread from them to skaters from whom scarcity is not nearly the same problem. Evidentally, this was a matter of style, not praxis.)
Eric is a happy human being for many reasons, I’m sure. But one of the reasons is this: as long as he’s got his 2003 MasterCraft X2 and a body of water, he can surf till he can’t stand up. In fact, he told me this was one of the problems with surfing behind a motor boat. If you remain upright, the wave will always last longer than your abilities to ride it. (This puts me in mind of that old English dance hall joke: "Can you play the Maple Leaf Forever?" "No, sir, eventually my arms get tired.")
Now, it is not revelational to say that the new media and the new technologies, variously enabled by the new economies, have blunted the force of scarcity as an aribiter of value. Now the problem for some consumers, the lucky ones anyhow, is how to choose when scarcity no longer does most of the work of choice for them.
I did a project for the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) on file sharing (KaZaa, etc.). Some of my respondents now had many thousands upon thousands of tracks on their hard drive. And it was harder and harder for them to savor any one of these songs. That time honored institution of choosing favorites" (key, in the old world, to group affiliation and self definition) was now under challenge. Limitless music was a problem. (Scarcity was apparently playing a role even in identity formation.)
And this brings me to the genius of NetFlix. I have been trying to figure out what’s so charming about the model. (I have only been signed up for a couple of months. Thanks to Tom Guarriello for getting me started.) Partly, it is the sheer pleasure of getting a "surprise in the mail." Partly, it is the sheer convenience of filling the " Q" at my leisure and having them fill orders at theirs. Partly, it’s the blessing of assisted choice and those, sometimes cunning, recommendations. (Was there anything so depressing as going to a video store to stare at the containers of really bad movies in order to find the one you wanted.)
But mostly the power of Netflix comes from it’s creation of "access constrained by interval" and the recreation of a kind of scarcity (a "managed scarcity"). With Netflix, I have access to just about all the movies in the world. But, given my subscription model, they come to me only 2 at a time.
Two movies are not a lot. In a world of nearly limitless access, this should be irksome. But it ain’t, of course, because these are almost always exactly the movies that interest me. Two movies has a deeper virtue. "Two movies" is an elimination of all the movies that might otherwise bid for my attention, damaging my sense of value and, God knows, even my identity formation. (And there’s been quite enough of that, already.)
The fulfillment model is especially clever. I can speed up the interval at which I receive new movies. I do so merely by returning the old ones. This is an interval I do not choose or need to dwell upon. It is set in train naturally when I finish watching my present movies. In effect, I am setting my own wave. I am managing access. I am mediating plenty in a post-scarcity world. I am, to this extent, restoring a sense of value. (The Tarantino picture I own outright on DVD may be diminished by its ubiguity. The same picture come to me from Netflix is precious because it’s engagement, as we used to say, is limited.)
Furthermore, the fulfillment model feels like an act of generosity on Netflix’s part. ("Finished those first two? Here have some more. No, you don’t have to pay extra!") This eliminates the cell phone user’s anxiety, "how many minutes (movies) do I have left this month?" And it restores the feeling of living in a universe untroubled by scarcity.
In sum, Netflix has found a sweet spot. It has found a way to create the generosity of a post scarcity economy while relieving us of the costs and penalties thereof. And to think that they did so by harnessing the intervals established by the US Mail, an off line institution almost as old as the nation! (Bricks, clicks and letter carriers!) The mind goggles.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Eric Hayes for consenting to this coverage. See his interesting enterprise and useful search software here.
Thanks to Andy Macaulay at ZIG for the CRIA assignment.
Thanks again to Tom Guarriello at True Talk for the head’s up. (See his recent posts on "both/and" as an example of post-scarcity logics.)
Brands behaving badly: The Sony story
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Sony Corporation is having a bad couple of weeks. Several days ago, this came rattling out of the teletype machine:
Security experts have found that a hidden antipiracy technology on some Sony BMG music CDs causes dangerous computer vulnerabilities – as does the company’s method for removing the original program.
This is of course disasterous from a branding point of view. It says, "we, the corporation, don’t trust you, the consumer." Worse, there’s a follow up. The antipiracy debacle also says, "You shouldn’t trust us and here’s why. We just helped ourselves to your hard drive without disclosure or permission."
For the last couple of days we have been getting reports from the Wooster Collective about ads for the Sony PlayStation masquerading as graffiti, as pictured.
This too is very bad for branding. It says "we are happy to help ourselves to someone’s else credibility and, no, we didn’t think you’d notice." I believe this is another way of saying, "we, the corporation, don’t trust your intelligence and this, and the graffiti campaign, might serve as evidence that you shouldn’t trust ours."
The success of the PlayStation is often attributed to Andrew House, a 15 year Sony executive and Oxford man. In September, House was made CMO and group executive at Sony to oversee global marketing. On his appointment, House said he,
foresees no changes in Sony’s marketing partnerships, which include Omnicom Group’s TBWA\Chiat\Day, Havas-owned McKinney + Silver and Publicis Groupe’s Fallon.
I wonder if that will change.
References
Anonymous. 2005. Sony Protection Problems at a Glance. The Associated Press via Yahoo. November 15, 2005. here.
Post from the Wooster Collective here.
Photo from PSP updates here.
Solman, Gregory. 2005. Sony Names Global CMO. Adweek, September 14. here.
The Arrested Development case study: Say you’re Mitchell Hurwitz, what would you do?
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The TV series called Arrested Development was just cancelled by Fox.
I think this real life situation would make a dandy case study. (And there is, to my knowledge, nothing in the Harvard Business School case study archive on long tail markets.)
If this were a case study, the first paragraph would read something like this:
Series creator Mitch Hurwitz was sitting at his desk at The Hurwitz Company. The office was quiet, even a little mournful. Mitch’s baby, Arrested Development, had just been cancelled.
Five Emmys and the 2004 award for "best comedy series" had not been enough to protect it. As Fox executive Peter Liguori put it, ”The fan base is unquestionably one of the most loyal in TV – it’s just too small." The numbers this season had been disappointing, around 4.3 million viewers a week.
(if this were a real case study, we would do a quick review of economics of TV: how many viewers are required to sustain a series, what it costs to mount one, what the break even point is, how decisions are made, famous exceptions, etc.We would also note how the audience for AD took shape. Did the numbers build slowly? Did early adopters convert to loyalists? Was there a good deal of "churn" is fans came and went?)
In the old days, Mitch knew, cancellation was cancellation. The networks were god. There were no stays of executive. When the network cancelled a show, it stayed cancelled. But because Mitch was familiar with the writings of Chris Anderson at Wired Magazine and because he was a man deeply acquainted with the trends of his industry, he knew there was still hope.
(if this were a case study, we would talk about Mitch’s career in television, what he had come to know about the industry, how things had changed as he came up, etc. There is a good interview at the AV Club (link below) from which we could steal shamelessly. We would also talk about how network TV had changed, how cable plays had emerged, the role of HBO in the reinvention of cable, how even small cable outlets were now producing, and how the economics of the industry had changed as a result. This would also be a place to talk about Anderson’s small tail theory. We would also talk about new distribution options opened up by DVD sales, video iPod, Internet access, and consumers who "prepay" for access to TV shows as they do in the world of the arts [the opera subscription] and in the world of marketing research.] )
(Here are the four scenarios which smart students would extract from the welter of details with which we have filled the case.)
Scenario 1: "revenge of the long tail."
Fox, bless them, gave AD it’s run. The numbers are in and the test is over. AD has found its audience: 4.3 million viewers is it. Mitch should throw in his cards. He might want to take AD to cable, but a guy with his talent and track record would do better to start again. AD gives him lots of profile and credibility. People will return his phone calls. Dump this baby. Go again.
Scenario 2: Retreat to cable
With the advent of long tail TV (LTTV?), there is a lingering hope for AD: that it takes refuge with a lesser network. There are some networks for whom 4.3 million viewers is just fine, thank you very much. On TNT, an only slightly larger number made The Closer one of the biggest hits in cable history.
The students who take this position would have to defend themselves against the accusation that there is not enough money in cable to sustain a show like AD and if some of its stars left, the show would close in any case.
Scenario 3: Return to glory
This option says, take refuge with USA network for a couple of years, let the audience build, and return to Fox (and the big money). Mitch is on record as saying, "why should we assume that when you try something different it will immediately be accepted?” This suggests that he believes that AD is a little ahead of its time. He might wish to say in play until the world catches up to him.
Scenario 4: Move to new channels and new revenue sources
[this scenario was added to the post thanks to the comments from Hey, Terry, Ken King, Ginna Dowler, and Peter McBurney. Please see their comments below. (Would these authors please let me know their full names so that I can give more complete acknowledgement?)]
Hurwitz can abandon TV distribution altogether. The advent of the DVD market gives him both a new way to get to market and a new source of funding. (See Ginna on Sternberg on Whedon’s Firefly options, below. ) There is also a internet distribution possibility, likely funded by a subscription model of some kind.
This option leaves open the "return to network glory" possibility, but I am guessing that Scenario 4 would give Hurwitz more creative freedom and better returns. It was also give him a heroic standing in the small tail markets that remain, in the case of TV and Hollywood, still pretty "fat middle."
And the winner is…
Each of these positions is defensible and every good case study should allow the class to break into camps and for controversy to ensue. But every case has, in the heart of the writer and the instructor, a right answer. And this is a section from the "teaching note" that is send to the instructor.
How do we decide which scenario? The shape of the numbers should tell us. When Liguori says, ”The fan base is unquestionably one of the most loyal in TV," this is a bad sign. This suggests that we have got everyone aboard who is coming aboard. If this is what the numbers tell us, advantage goes to students who support Scenario 1.
On the other hand, if the enthusiasm is distributed, that’s more promising. They should show degrees of enthusiasm and some evidence of conversion: that it takes awhile for newcomers to become fans, for fans to become loyalists and for loyalists to become devotees. We should see word of mouth support and the statistical evidence that WOM is indeed taking place.
Of course, there is a more fundamental problem here and that is whether news of AD actually found its way to all or most of the would-be viewers. Daniel Drezner says that news reached him belatedly…and this suggests that marketing has something to answer for. Drezner is after all pretty well informed about popular culture. If we determine that news was badly distributed, then we go with Scenario 2 and/or 3.
So the "right answer" turns on whether we think the AD audience is a long tail market, or a long tail market struggling to become a fat middle. So the "right answer" turns on what numbers we supply (or what they can be made to say). Do they show an adoption pattern for AD that is thickly packed or more stretched out? Does this flock cluster or does it attenuate?
Will this post become a case study?
If this post suddenly comes down, it is on its way to becoming a case study.
References
Drezner, Daniel. 2005. My Personal Apologies to Mitchell Hurwitz. Blog post. November 14, 2005. here.
Justin, Neal. 2005. Neal Justin: Kyra Sedgwick is getting her closeup — finally. Star Tribune. July 28, 2005. here.
Robinson, Tasha. 2005. An interview with Mitchell Hurwitz. The AV Club. February 9th 2005. here.
Snierson, Dan. 2005. Arrested Development 2003-2005? We say goodbye to ”Arrested Development” — EW looks back on the three seasons of the critically acclaimed Fox comedy.
Entertainment Weekly. November 18, 2005. here. (subscription required)
(all quotes and stats from the Entertainment Weekly article, with the exception of the numbers for The Closer which are from Neal Justin, as above.)
Meanings made: branding and sound
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These things we hold to be incontrovertible:
that brands are made of meanings
that meanings are made of images, words, and sounds
that sounds are the poor relation of the lot
Several weeks ago, I met a woman named Audrey Arbeeny who runs a company called Audiobrain. She did a great job persuading me that sound is indeed the neglected opportunity in the marketing world, especially when it comes to meaning management.
We spend vast amounts of time and money constructing brands but only sometimes do we thing about what Audrey calls the "sonic" signature of the brand. There are exceptions and the Sony Play Station sound is a good one of these. Truly, it makes "live in your world, play in ours" work in ways it could not otherwise.
We are logo-centric, we are image-idolatrous, but sound, not so much. (How many bloggers use sound?) Weird. Anyone curious to see what difference sound can make may wish to go to Audrey’s website and look at the video clip she has there for the work she has done for HBO. Have a listen with your speakers on "mute" and listen again with the volume turned up. The HBO spot is here.
Happy Thanksgiving from Grant, Pam, Molly and the boys at the lab.
The Gadgetification of America: The last frontier?
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Gadgets have a certain fascination, don’t they? They promise technological enablement. They make us see further, hear better, sort more intelligently, think more adroitly, connect more, er, better. Gadgets extend the body and the mind. Where would we be without them? What would we be without them? Personally, they can have my laptop and cell phone when they pry them out of my cold, dead hands.
But gadgets have been mostly a male obsession. Indeed, there is not a male reader of this blog who has not been mocked by a women for being a little gadget crazy. Women sometimes refer to "boys and their toys" as if gadget glorification were a male mania. This holiday season, we will indeed find guys in the kitchen talking heatedly about wireless access, HD TV and Xbox360 refresh rates. Women, many of them, will just roll their eyes, as if to say, "Guys! What are you going to do?"
But times, they are a changing. The P&G success stories of the last few years have been gadgets.* Swiffer and swiffer extensions are little technological enablements. Some of this is due to the influence of IDEO there. Little machines is what they do. And some of it is due to the margins to be made on appliances and the refills they demand. But I believe there may have been a time when the female householder would look at something machine like, gadget-ish, and said, "No gadgets for Gidget, thank you just the same."
There are other hints of a shift in the way in which women see technology. The renovation of the kitchen has seen the introduction, around 15 years ago, of the industrial stove. Industrial stoves! These are large, out of scale, indelicate and capable of feeding several hundred people at a time. No body "plays house" with one of these monsters. This is industrial strength.
And what about the Suburbans now so much in evidence. In my parts (tiny town Connecticut), the car of choice used to be a white Volvo station wagon. It said, "I am practical but not inelegant." Suburbans are not much smaller than a mobile home. To drive one of these cars as a "station car" for toing and froing from the commuter line, well, unless your husband or one of your children, or you yourself, hold high political office, it’s really more car than you need.
It does look like there is a cultural development here. Once anti-tech and gadget mocking, women appear to be moving away from their traditonal position. And if the micro trends noted here actually reflect the same thing, we can track the macro trend accordingly. Fifteen years ago, the industrial stove, 10 years ago the Suburban, and just a few years ago the great Swiffer trend.
We might have seen this coming. We might have made a bundle. We could have started a Swiffer start-up and then sold to P&G for a heart warmingly large sum of money. But, oh, no, most of us were too busy standing in the kitchen talking about baud rates and internet access.
* (from BusinessWeek, ref. below) In the past year [P&G] has launched at least eight mechanical or electric gizmos. They include Febreze Scentstories, an electric air freshener machine that plays CD-like scent disks; Tide Buzz Ultrasonic Stain Remover; and Tide StainBrush, a battery-powered brush. It also introduced Swiffer Sweep + Vac, a device that combines a Swiffer electrostatic dust mop with a vacuum, and Mr. Clean AutoDry, a water-pressure-powered car-cleaning system that dries without streaking. Sales of all P&G’s gadget-related items grew 16% last year and now total about 8% of its $54 billion in annual sales. That’s up from 2% in 2000, estimates Lehman Brothers Inc. analyst Ann Gillin Lefever.
Reference
Berner, Robert and William Symonds. 2005. Consumer giant is leading the way in building brands with mechanical gizmos. BusinessWeek. February 7, 2005. here. (subscription required)
Doughboy RIP (an object lesson in marketing)
Posted by: | CommentsSad news today in the branding world
. This obit is circulating on the internet.
The Pillsbury Doughboy died yesterday of a yeast infection and trauma complications from repeated pokes in the belly. He was 71. Dozens of celebrities turned out to pay their respects, including Mrs. Butterworth, Hungry Jack, Betty Crocker, and the Hostess Twinkies. Early in his career he faced a minor scandal for appearing in "Hot Crossed Buns," a short movie that exposed his affinity for the pop ‘n fresh genre. Nonetheless, Doughboy rose quickly in show business and remained a roll model for millions. Doughboy is survived by his wife Play Dough, two children, John Dough and Jane Dough, plus they had one in the oven. The funeral was held at 3:50 for about 20 minutes.
The larger issue: this is a good example of a brand icon being taken up and reworked by the consumer (aka the multiplier). In this moment of "co-creation," the consumer breaths life, humor, and interest into an icon that heretofor hasn’t done much more than giggle.
A good thing? If you are one of the "new marketing" marketers, you say "yes." This is funny, lively, and animating (the funereal theme notwithstanding). If you are one of the "old marketing" marketers you blink in astonishment, mutter "an obit for my brand!" and reach for a lawyer.
As someone who belongs to the first group, I think the argument for tolerating and indeed encouraging this kind of thing is clear cut. We may think of it as a simple trade off of just the kind that BMW made when it allowed Jay Leno to introduce the Z on the stage of the Tonight show.
To get currency, spontaneity, and liveliness, we was must give up control and all hopes of micromanaging the meanings of the brand. Or to put this another way, the only way to persuade people to take an interest in the brand citadel is to throw down the draw bridge
It’s no longer "if you build it, they will come" but "if they build it, they will come."
References
Origins online here, here, and here.
With light editing by Grant McCracken and humor implants by Brian Kenny.
CSI MIA
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One of the most important developments in popular culture this year is going on sale in a few minutes. Xbox360 is almost with us.
To celebrate, CSI Miami is now showing an episode about a killer "video game." It’s about college students who cannot distinquish between virtual reality and TV reality. Some kids rob a bank as if playing a game and chose their victims according to the "points" they’re worth. Another plays for 70 hours straight, dying with his virtual boots on. So remember, kids, guns don’t kill people, games and gamers do.
Breathtakingly stupid and further evidence that even the creators of popular culture are not always very well acquainted with it. CSI Miami, say good bye to a segment or two. But, hey, the genre is pretty much over, isn’t it?
Is Google worth $400? It’s an Elizabethan problem.
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How much is Google worth? Many said the share price was too high at $85. Many say it’s undervalued at $400. This is an Elizabethan problem.
The problem is one of scale and unreliable assumptions. It is hard to keep any sense of proportion when things scale up rapidly from $85 to $400.
It is our sense of proportion that serves us an early warning device. This is where are our instincts are rooted. When we get accustomed to thinking in the $100 range, $200 is manifestly too much. Grudgingly, we adjust, but when the share price goes to $400, we have to reset yet again. Our instincts, our "blink" ability, as Gladwell might call it, is now unreliable, no sooner adjusted than exploded. Our blinks have become twitches.
This is what made it so hard to say "when" when money was pouring into our accounts in the late 1990s. Yes, it was all madness. Our instincts said, "stop." But, no, this is what they said six months ago, and if I had listened to them then, I would have missed a great runup of value.
Elizabethans had this problem…not so much with share prices as with whales. Here is Thomas Fuller referred to
the mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of oil swimming in them.
Like the Google share price, whales were hard to think about. And this was the problem of scale. A whale, very large, was contained in a limitless world. A whale, pretty small, contained a limitless world within. Hmmm.
It wasn’t just whales. The Reformation was, among other things, a massive adjustment of spiritual scale. It stripped away all the intermediaries between God and the believer. The hierarchy of saints, angles and prelates collapsed and took scale with them. Fundamental questions became hard to think. How large was God? Had we drawn closer? Or were we very far away.
The geographic discoveries, those of the new world, were hard to think as well. The "West Indies" was a very long away, but it proved to be not nearly far enough. "India: proved to be another ocean or two away. And then there was the problem of all that Spanish wealth (by which we mean South American gold and silver). It was enough to elevate Drake, float the nation, and dwarf local notions of wealth out of all recognition. Hmmm.
Sir Francis Beacon was prepared to stand at the gates of knowledge (as pictured) and observe what happened when certain assumptions were abandoned. The Mediterranean, he said, was once a useful metaphor for knowledge, but now, clearly, not all the oceans, even with all their whales, would serve.
In a sense, the Elizabethans were working on the problem of problems. What was the unit of analysis? What were the actual and possible relationships between these units? What was the field in which to located units and their relationships? What scales applied here? What was the best concepts/assumptions with which to see the present and the possible? What in short was a problem?
We have the problem of problems in the very worst way. The Social Architecture meetings at Berkman last week was awash with them. My favorite: the "is this something or nothing" test. Someone tells you about new software (www.pubsub.com). It searches the future not the past! And you have to decide whether this is something or nothing. And if we are a VC or an analyst, we can’t just be guessing. But until we have decided what Google is (merely a way of searching the past?), who knows?
The second problem, which assumptions did I just use to reach my conclusion? The thing about assumptions is that they are hard to unearth. We make them assumptions for a very good reason, so that they can serve us as subroutines, small compact understandings that we can run quickly without much effort. But now we have to root them out, lay them bare, test them thoroughly, and then decide how Humpty Dumpty goes back together again. Oi! (The Yiddish one, not the Skinhead one.)
And if things really get messy, then it’s right down to basics, as above. What are the units, relationships, fields, concepts? Double oi! All I want to know is whether to invest in subpub (now that I’ve given up on subpop). And it turns out that what I have to do is reinvent the universe. It’s as if there is no such thing as a small or simple problem. They all seem to spiral back to basics, to scale up to head-wrenching complexity.
Here’s the biggest question. Will this get better or will it get worse?
The "better" scenario: Someday the world will settle down. We won’t have to think about every thing to think about some thing. We will develop new intellectual appliances and subroutines with which to deal with the new world (and all that silver). There will be some people who engage with, and some problems that demand that we engage with, the problem of problems. But for the most of us most of the time, we may return to that sense that the world is, give or take, an intelligible place.
The "worse" scenario: Don’t count on it. Things are going to get curiouser and curiouser. The world will explode into a diversity and dynamism, and subroutines be damned. We will carry on and occasionally we will catch up. Occasionally, there will be Mandelbrotian masteries of scale, for instance. But usually, every problem will have to be addressed de novo with a down-to-the-ground scrutiny of all the possibilities.
So is Google worth $400? Well, see, it depends.
References
I got the Fuller and Milton quotes from the opening pages of Melville’s Moby Dick. (No, he doesn’t give a source either accept to say the first is from the Holy and Profane State and the second, Paradise Lost. I hate it when that happens. )
Milton (a near Elizabethan) called the whale "a moving land [which] spouts out a sea."
Story time 15: emergency ethnography for the Coca-Cola Company in Japan
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This is the latest installment in an occasional series of stories drawn from my experience as a professional marketer. Usually, "story time" runs on Friday and it aims to reveal something about the practice of marketing, and, in this way, the models of marketing.
In 1998, Nick Hahn and I were sent to Nagano, Japan on an emergency mission. The Torch Run sponsored by the Coca-Cola Company (TCCC hereafter) had proven unexpectedly successful, and Sergio Zyman, then VP in charge of marketing, wanted to know why. More simply, TCCC had hit a marketing gusher and the question was "why did this happen and how do we leverage it?"
The Torch Run is a relatively recent innovation at the Olympics, emerging in the Amsterdam and Berlin games of 1928 and 1936. The formula is now simple. A new flame is lit in the Greece. The flame tours Greece, and is then transported, usually by plane, to the site of the new Olympic games.
In the Nagano case, the flame had come ashore at three points in Japan and, over the course of a month, was making its way by three routes, touching en route almost all of Japan’s 47 prefectures. Eventually, about 2 weeks from now, the three torches would become one, and a single flame would be carried into the stadium to mark the beginning of the Winter games. The stadium torch would burn for the duration of the game and would then be extinquished during the closing ceremony.
The surprise was this. TCCC had hoped that the Torch Run would bring people out to urge the torch bearers forward. Precedent and best estimates said that people would come out in the 10s and 100s. Instead, they came out in the 1000s and 10000s, demonstrative, weeping, applauding, exulting. The Run proved unexpectedly emotional. Word went back to Atlanta, and Nick and I were dispatched. We were accompanied by Ewen Cameron of the advertising firm Berlin Cameron.
Torch bearers were a variety of people: local school children, public officials, athletes, notables of one kind or another. A Taiwan TV celebrity, Pai Ping-ping was chosen. She was running, she said, to demonstrate to her daughter, murdered a year before, that "Mum is back on her feet again." Chris Moon, a British activists who had lost an arm and a leg to a mine in Mozambique and was now working to end the use of land mines, also participated. A junior high school teacher Yasuji Niwa carried the Olympic flame in Gifu Prefecture by the Pacific Ocean route through western Japan. Niwa, 28, had suffered a terrible injury and had been in a coma for 3 months. Kazuo Kawamoto, a social worker who seven years ago survived heart surgery, completed his 1-km trek with his wife, a nurse he met at the hospital.
Nick’s team had a week to do the research, write the report and present, first to TCCC Japan and then TCCC USA in the intimidating person of Sergio Zyman. The idea was to come up with actionable findings while the Olympics were still in play. This meant doing our interviews, visiting the Torch Run (still in progress), doing analysis, yelling at one another, undertaking the idea generation, writing the report, and yelling at one another, almost all at once while in transit with jet lag all on a just-in-time, what-should-we-do-next, where-should-we-go-next sort of spontaneity. It was as if the 2 minute drill from football had come to marketing.
The Japanese loved the Torch run for several reasons. This Olympics came at a time when some Japanese were feeling that scandals, banking difficulties, and other frustrations had diminished the country’s position as a master of capitalism. The Olympics would not restore this vaunted position, but it would augment Japan’s international profile. The Torch Run was the first opportunity to contemplate the Olypics and Japan together.
There was also a certain admiration for the logistical perfection of the Torch Run. Getting three torches from far flung places by 1 kilometer intervals through thousands of hands for simultaneous arrival in Nagano is not easy. Americans might have taken the thing for granted, but some of the Japanese I talked to were deeply impressed. It was as if the exquisite calibrations of the Tokyo subway system had been scaled up to fit an entire nation. (And the Tokyo subway is of course a system so perfectly organized that it dares tell you that the next train will arrive in 5…4…3…2…1 seconds. At the stroke of 0, a train pulls up and the doors open. I coulda plotzed.)
The Torch Run also impressed because it was so deeply local, touching many, tiny little towns that would normally be allowed to slumber in obscurity. The idea that the far margin should be articulated with a national center and that this center should be articulated with an international event, there was an embedded hierarchy here that impressed some respondents almost into speechlessness. It is a tough idea to represent with words, but I began to see that what really made it tricky was that it was emotionally powerful and brought some people close to tears to see played out. (You would have to know more about Japanese culture to know how the Torch Run interacted with Japanese notions of center and periphery, traditional and current. Clearly, something was going on here. I couldn’t be sure what. More exactly, I could get the "what" but not the "why".)
And then there was the choice of all those people who had very personal and sometimes tragic stories to tell. This made the Torch Runners like so many panels in a comic book. Each runner his/her own story, all runners a collectivity. Differences visible, identities undiminished. (Or in the language of Weinberger’s magnificient title: Small pieces loosely joined.) Here too it was clear that something was at work in the play of individualism relative to the collective. If I had had something more than 7 days, I might have found what.
There was also the sheer heroism of some of these runners. They were civilians who had endured difficulty with courage and this, at a stroke, made everyone an Olympic hero, and this in turn made the preliminary "run up" (sorry) to the Olympics fully continuous with the Olympics. The runners were, in some emotional sense, Olympians too.
In sum, the emergency ethnographers were able to report back to TCCC Japan and TCCC Atlanta and suggest some of the things that had ignited the success of the Torch Run.
I had the distinct sense that Cameron was handling us. He is a very sweet guy and a great travelling companion. But he appeared to have made up his mind what it was we would discover, and he seemed to have a fixed idea what creative strategy we ought to pursue. Indeed, he suggested a great idea to leverage the success of the Torch Run, but I couldnt help feeling that he was dusting something off, some creative armament he had long wanted to get into a TCCC cannon.
But then this is daring work, and we can be forgiven working prefab. The pressure is pretty spectacular. We were working across time zones, countries, cultures, and languages. It was not easy. Nick is good in these circumstances. He was "other worldly" enough to commune with the creatives and "this worldly" enough to keep us on target, on schedule and on budget. But everyone is pressed to the limit on one of these things. I remember rocketing back to the hotel lobby to join the team. Nick said, "he’s always just a little bit late." And indeed I always was, not least because I was in my hotel room treasuring a last few seconds out of the sheer, relentless press of getting things right.
Actually, this was the trip in which I discovered that I dance in elevators (and absolutely no place else). The elevators in the Imperial hotel in Tokyo have little video cameras in the corner. This was enough to prompt me to think about what I was doing, and to discover, to my astonishment, that I was dancing. I am not a good dancer. By which I mean I’m Canadian, but there is something about being in those suspended little cubicles that brings out the disco artist within.
Certainly, the Torch Run study looks like an exercise in the ad hoc and episodic, and not at all the sort of thing we would expect to be become a part of marketing orthodoxy or due process. But if marketing is moving away from the soap opera to staging many, smaller, short lived, events that must be ventured, recalled, rethought, reissued…if marketing is going to become, that is to say, more creative, experimental, innovative and iterative, then emergency ethnography might well become the order of the day, useful for the study of unexpected successes and sudden failures alike.
A couple of posts ago, we praised Motorola for it’s use of small, fast, teams in the creation of the Razr. It may well be that these very teams are the things we use to investigate our innovations after they have been released into the world.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2005. The Malamud effect: Ideas and the Corporation. September 23, 2005. here.
post script:
I did promise Thursday that I would look at the similarities between the worlds of Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II and I now promise to do that Monday. Sorry.
Elizabeth I: long has she ruled over us
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Today is the anniversary of the accession of Elizabeth I to the throne of England in 1558. For Elizabethans, November 17th became an opportunity for bonfires and fireworks. Towards the end of her reign, they thanked God for their monarch. Things were not quite so promising in 1558.
Elizabeth I was a woman confronted by presumptuous male aristocrats happy to relieve her of her power. She was a teenager confronted by commoners deeply skeptical of her ability to rule. She did not have a standing army, and she was still plagued by the "over mighty subject" and the "masterless man." That English taste for disobedience was flourishing. Sir Thomas Elyot warned, "men’s hartes [hearts] be free and they will love whom they liste [like]."
Elizabeth was the beneficiary of her grandfather (Henry VII) and his brutal strategies for clearing the kingdom of people with a competitive claim to the throne. But she was also heir to the religious complications created by her father (Henry VIII). England was now the Protestant upstart, and a beacon for those people in every continental country who wished to break with Rome. The Pope declared that the man who killed Elizabeth would commit no sin. Spain believed that a destruction of the English court would be God’s work. Thanks, Dad!
There a lots of historical reasons to revive the celebration. Elizabeth represents the triumph of cunning over stupidity, intelligence over mere cunning, genius over mere intelligence. She was the triumph of will over skepticism, a Renaissance education over the domestic arts, and theatre of power over realpolitik.
But there are also lots of contemporary reasons to celebrate Elizabeth and to remember her. As I will argue tomorrow, there are some interesting similarities between her time and our own.
Watches worth watching
Posted by: | CommentsIn the 20th century, the brand universe was small (e.g., Timex, Rolex [as pictured], Longines, Omega, 
Bulova, Cartier) and the models were relatively few.
Welcome to the Cambrian era of time keepers. There are 110 models from 40 brands in the current Town and Country. Swatch, until recently, made 180 models. Casio appears to have more than 2000 models on Amazon.com. How many distinct models in the universe of watches? I had the boys in the lab run the numbers. Their answer: really a lot.
There are a thousand points of price. The Volant (European Watch Company) costs $57,600. My Casio cost $10. (It is the tragically named "Casio Classical White Men’s Watch"!)
There are many styles: modern (CVSTOS, Rado), sporty (Tagheur, Porsche, Nike), retro (vintage), groaning with gems (Meyer, as pictured), quietly expensive (Patek Philippe), fashion forward (Bill Blass, Issye Mikake) and atomic (Junghans).
There are watches covered in diamonds (Pierre Kunz). There are watches covered in bells and whistles. The Breitling Montbrillant Olympus ($15,850, pictured) is 
capable of 461 distinctions (seconds, minutes, hours, months, seasons, moon phases, and much, much more). The Montbrillant can predict the weather in 42 countries. The downside, it looks like there’s a hedgehog strapped to your wrist.
It is not hard to see the things that drives this plenitude of watches. Growing wealth at the top, a willingness to "trade up" in the middle, these drive the luxury market. As for the rest, new technologies, off shore manufacture, and fierce competitition drives things nicely.
There is evidence of two things that suggest this universe is changing. A couple of days ago the Wall Street Journal said that mechanical watches were once more on the rise.
There are a few dominant trends in men’s watches this season: larger faces, an increase in rectangular face styles and more leather straps. The biggest change, though, is in the number of mechanical watches taking the place of quartz…
Ah, the rational consumer. Economic man rushes off to buy a watch that is more expensive and less reliable than his alternatives. No doubt, we are prepared to suffer imprecision from our wrist watch because we are surrounded by quite reliable time keepers: the clocks in our tool bar, fridge, stove, TV, cable box, telephone, cars, PDAs and of course VCRs. Everything that is the least bit electronic comes equipped with an accurate clock, (except at my house where the VCR blinks "12:00" for some reason. We just cover it with tape.) It may also be true that we like mechanical watches because they give off the princely implication that we do not need to be anywhere on time or at least that we are not slaves to precision. (Hah!)
But the other thing that struck me was this new watch by Corum. These are the people who used to make watches out of silver dollars, as I recall. 
Their new watch is called the Corum Bubble Privateer. This watch shows a skull and cross bones. Someone had the bright idea of giving the skull a gingham topper and the watch a splash of color. Surely, this is the gift to give the "hostile take over" enthusiast in your family.
This really opens things up. All those watches out there (and there are as we noted, how thousands of them), and almost none of them departs from the "function plus decoration/design" convention. None does what the Privateer does rather dashingly, combine the representational, evocative, and the iconic into a design that suggests both a tribal totem and the beginnings of narrative.
Now that story lines and historical evocation is part of the game we may expect the market to flood new possibilities. Surely, we can find something else in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson. How about something chivalric from Sir Walter Scott? How about something from Twain that’s Huck Finn-ish? The world of popular 19th century literature is just loaded with new watch ideas, now that Corum has blessed us with the Privateer.
And so does the design vocabulary of the commercial world expand, along with the dramatic, playful possibilities thereof.
References
Smith, Ray A. 2005. Watches Shift Into Automatic: Ready to pay more for a less accurate timepiece? We look at the new mechanical models on the market. Wall Street Journal. November 12, 2005.
Peter Drucker
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Marketing has not always distinquished itself as an intellectual discipline. One measure: the "top ten" list for marketing books contains several titles that would be ridiculed in other more rigorous fields. (They know who they are. Um, no, probably they have no idea.)
Part of the problem is that marketing has been the bastard child of the professional world. A certain stigma attaches to the field and I think its fair to say that this stigma is, to some extent, the propagandistic achievement of the likes of John Kenneth Galbraith and other post-war intellectuals.
Marketer, heal thy self. One of the ways to fight this public standing is to lionize the founders of the field, especially when these founders are people of remarkable talent and accomplishment.
This weekend we lost Peter Drucker.
Peter Drucker invented the field of modern management. Through his 35 books and hundreds of seminal articles Drucker has had an enormous influence on the managers of corporations, nonprofits and government agencies around the world. … According to Drucker biographer Jack Beatty…, "this writer has had more influence on the lives of human beings than any other writer of this (20th) century." Procter & Gamble’s CEO A.G. Lafley calls Drucker the Babe Ruth and Ted Williams of management writers and consultants. GE’s former CEO Jack Welch: " Management around the world owes a debt of gratitude to Drucker who devoted his life to clarifying the role of an organization in our society." (From the website "Leader to Leader" here.)
Peter Drucker is the Father of Management. For many of us, he is our role model, continually generating new ideas and refining old ones. I regard it as a compliment when some people call me the Father of Marketing. I tell them that if this the case, then Peter Drucker is the Grandfather of marketing. (Philip Kotler here.)
SSA, consumer centricity and the passing of Peter Drucker
Posted by: | CommentsSorry not to have blogged more. I am minutes away from having my battery run out.
Just to say, very briefly, that one of themes that preoccupied the afternoon had to do with the ways in which social software ought to, and can, make itself more responsive to the user.
Not to be a Mr. smarty-pants about this but consumer centricity is something that the marketing community knows about. In the person of Charles Coolidge Parlin, this community invented the phrase "consumer is king" in or around 1912.
Indeed, the marketing community can claim to be a champion of this notion. This might be one place that marketers can make themselves useful to the social software community. Mind you, there isn’t much to this beyond a willingness to take vows of humility, forsake the meanings with which we construe the world, and embrace first the possibility and then the fact that others have their own ways of seeing things. The concept here is pretty straight forward. It’s the practice that’s hard, especially for corporations that are inclined to a certain self absorption.
And on this note, I will seize this opportunity to mark the passing of the master on the weekend, Peter Drucker, the man who did so much to persuade that "it was not about them" but the consumer.
Social Architecture and its enemies
Posted by: | CommentsMore from the floor at Corante’s Social Architecture meeting in Cambridge (details above).
To illustrate his contention that politicians use a different "operating system" from the rest of us Andrew Rasiej said that he asked Mayor Bloomberg about a wireless New York and the Mayor replied (something like), "oh, that’s great. Would we have to dig up the streets for that?"
As funny as this is, there is a larger problem here. It’s the "they just don’t get it" accusation that certain parties like to level against the political and the power incumbents. Sometimes this is exactly right, and it makes it clear that nothing less than a fundamental cultural shift and change of incumbents will get the job done.
But sometimes, this language (and the terms that just were used by someone asking a question from the floor, "technophobic," and "techno ignorant") actually obscures the opportunities for rapprochement. There is a larger performative objective here that I dislike, that with this language we construct, we annoint ourselves as smart, attached, people who truly "do get it." This is self congratulation and when it licenses a refusal to engage with power incumbents, well, it’s just stupid. I do not level this charge against Rasiej who runs for office and advises politicians.
