Monthly Archives: February 2006

Ovidian capitalism

Icon_iconbuilder

If you’re not a Marxist at 20, there’s something wrong with your heart.  If you’re still a Marxist at 30, there’s something with your head.

So say the English, and quite right too.  When I was 20, I was persuaded that capitalism was the villain of the piece.  I believed there must have been a historical turning point when good hearted villagers devoted to mutual aid were so corrupted by the marketplace that they now lived lives of suspicion, estrangment, and desperation.  The professor from our sociology course in second year sung us this, the "cash nexus," lullabye so often we know it by heart. 

Most of us snap out of it.  (Not that sociology professor, of course. He’s got tenure.)  For many of us, capitalism is then a grim reality, something to be obeyed as the arbiter of our work-a-day lives.  If we think about capitalism…well, mostly we don’t think about capitalism. It is an ineluctable force, and mostly an impenetrable one.  We could become economists, but unless we have the good fortune to become Tyler Cowen, we are taking orders in a dismal science, committing ourselves to the tedious reckoning of the collective effects of all that getting and spending.  Capitalism, impenetrable perhaps but never mysterious.  Most of us would rather sell aluminium siding.

Not so fast.  Selling aluminium siding is a lot less fun than it looks.  And besides there is another way of looking at capitalism that makes it a good deal less dismal and rather more fascinating.  It is to say that capitalism is a transformation machine.  It allows for all things to be reckoned relative to one another.  It allows almost anything to be turned into almost anything else.  In one of the great Ovidian exercises of the 16th century for instance, a man could turn himself from a striving, grasping commoner into a gentleman, and he could do this merely by turning iron (mongering) first into gold and then gold into a manorial home, a well appointed wardrobe, and table growing with silver and hospitality.  (That the English were better at this transformation than the French explains, I believe, a substantial part of the relative wealth of these nations.) 

I always thought this "conversion," or "transformation" effect was the proper domain, or at least the likely preoccupation of the anthropologist.  And I figured that it must be a latter day revelation.  But this all ended when John Wheeler.  In 1601, Mr. Wheeler published A Treatise of Commerce.  He wrote this book in his capacity as the secretary of the Society of Merchant Adventures. And indeed his Treatise is generally dismissed as a piece of sustained shilling by Wheeler on behalf of his employers.  At their most generous, historians call the Treatise an early pamphlet in the field of public relations. 

Oh, but it’s much more than that.

In the opening pages, Wheeler wants to observe how much of the world is now part of the marketplace.

For there is nothing in the world so ordinary and natural unto men, as to contract, truck, merchandise, and traffic one with another, so that it is almost unpossible for three persons to converse together two hours, but they will fall into talk of one bargain or another, chopping [i.e., bartering], changing [i.e., exchanging], or some other kind of contract. 

Everyone does it.

The Prince with his subjects, the master with his servants, one friend and acquaintance withanother, the captain with his soldiers, the husband with his wife, women with and among themselves, and in a word, all the world choppeth and changeth, runneth and raveth after marts, markets and merchandising.

And then Wheeler reaches out of his workmanlike treatise for something like the sublime.  Having glimpsed how commerce was now implied everywhere apparently with everyone, Wheeler now proposes a reciprocal effect: that commerce must be a conduit of culture.

            … all things come into commerce, and pass into traffic…

References

Wheeler, John.  2004 (1601).  A Treatise of Commerce.  Clark, New Jersey: The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. 

Singing their praises: the heroes of marketing

Alarmclock4_150_1Friends of mine went to a London hotel recently only to discover that they couldn’t check in.  In fact, they couldn’t find see a front desk. 

No, instead, they were met in the lobby and quietly ushered to their room.  No standing in line.  No fishing out of credit cards.  No waiting for the staff and technology to "sign them in."

Sign them in?  Was that ever necessary.?  Who said so? But it is, for all of us, so much a part of the ritual of visiting a hotel that Cheryl and Craig said that they were briefly disoriented.  They were standing in their room, thinking, "Um, are we here yet."

Front desks and entry rituals, these are so deeply etched in our cultures, the hospitality industry, and our own expectations, that the world is a little confusing without them.  But in an era of the high-end hotel, they are, of course, completely gratuitous, and a classic example of the dead head of competence.  We force you to stand in line, because we always have. 

Capitalism finds advantage "outside the box."  So we are quick to "reinvent the world."  It takes us several decades to do so, but finally someone had the wit to eliminate the front desk and the entry ritual.

My question, and I do have one, who was this?  This is one of those wonderful innovations thrown off by the world of marketing, but no one is going to get the credit.  I’ve made this point here before, but the other meaning makers in our culture (film makers, talk show hosts, writers) get lots of ink.  No sooner were we treated to endless interviews with Peter Jackson to celebrate the release of King Kong, then we must now endure endless photos of and stories about George Clooney.  Hollywood would very much like to shower this fella with Oscars, so we will be subject to Clooney "revelations" right through Febuary. 

But will we ever learn who "rethought" the front desk of the hotel?  Not a chance.

In November, I was singing the praises of Geoffrey Frost, the man who brought the Razr through Motorola and into the world.  This guy did something extraordinary, and he died, November 17th, virtually unheralded.  As an anthropologist, I am obliged to tell you, this is just screwed up.  Our culture does not honor everyone it might. 

Another example is Stephen Gordon, the guy who founded and ran Restoration Hardware.  I wanted to write a case about him when I was at Harvard, and somehow the chance slipped away.  Now he appears to have left Restoration Hardware altogether.  (And if you have been in a Restoration Hardware recently, I didn’t have to tell you this.)  It is not impossible to find traces of this guy’s career on line, including, for instance, this intriquing comment:

It’s not about nostalgia. It’s an intuitive process to understand what an egg beater can mean to people, to package a set of salt cellars so they evoke a whole set of  memories…We appreciate tradition and history, but we stay away from ye-old.

Here’s my plea: please would you rack your brain and let me know of people like Geoffrey Frost or Stephen Gordon, that we might sing their praises here and perhaps elsewhere on Corante.  I mean, if we don’t, who’s going to?

References

Anon. n.d., Restoration Hardware.  Publication of the Corporate Design Foundation. here.
(source for the Stephen Gordon quote)

Farewell to that doggie in the window

AiboSony Corp. has officially euthanized the Sony AIBO entertainment robot … the company said today.

The "announcement" was slipped into Sony’s 2005 third-quarter earnings report, which also detailed a number of plant closings and a refocusing to core businesses like entertainment, pictures and music.

A couple of years ago I bought an Aibo in Tokyo.  I found him on the third floor of a crowded department store, surrounded by people transfixed by his smallest gesture.  I knew I had to own one.

It was Christmas time, and I came back through Victoria, B.C. to see my family for the holidays.  At first, I thought I would leave Aibo in my luggage, but wiser heads prevailed and pretty soon Aibo was doing tricks in the middle of the living room floor. 

The men in the family dismissed Aibo immediately on seeing him and the women, all three generations of them, watched him with an air of what I can only describe as fond expectation.  Aibo wasn’t actually doing anything that charmed them, but something about him persuaded them he soon would. 

My family is not big on gender orthodoxy (descending from a Victorian feminist, we have our own orthodoxy), but Aibo split the family right down the middle.  The men thought he was a machine flawed by improbable sentience.  The women thought he was a machine improved by nascent sentience.  This turned out to be one of many Xmas disagreements.

But who cared, really.  Not me.  I got bought Aibo mostly out of guilt.  I was travelling a lot, and this meant neglecting Daz, my very talkative, very companionable, Siamese cat.  When I saw Aibo in that Tokyo department store, I thought, "perfect, a pet for my pet.  Daz will love him."  But Daz was true to the gender orthodoxy in effect.  After one good sniff, he dismissed Aibo completely. Aibo was consigned to a back room, as if he’d done something really bad, and I came to regard him as one of my many failed investments in the field of guilt management.      

Now in the marketing research community, these are called unofficial, anecdotal findings.  But of course that does not mean I don’t intend to run with them. 

I think it’s fair to say, if my "findings" are anything to judge by, Aibo fell between the men who buy computers and the women, in this case, who love them.  I know this sounds like a sexist howler (no pun intended), but ethnographic research in several tech categories persuades me that, by and large, men insist on making household computer purchases.  They may not be smarter about technology than women, but they insist on acting as if they are.  (Women, bless them, look the other way.)

Now this is an interesting marketing problem.  How to find a way to parachute a consumer good like Aibo into the lives of female consumer over the walls of male disapproval and budgetary control?  Everyone’s answer for a problem like this is always, "Oprah."  And that is in fact the right answer, but it is also a lot like the lottery.  Our chances of getting Aibo on Oprah are one in a ten thousand.  Harpo productions looks like O’Hare airport: everyone’s trying to land there.

So what are the options?  We know there are precedents.  Honda launched the Prelude as a car for guys and women took it over.  (Marlboro cigarettes moved in the opposite direction.)  It might be possible to sell it in as the ultimate office accessory.  I like the idea of visiting the office of a high powered executive, being greeted by her exuberant Aibo, and being reassured with a dry, "Oh, don’t be alarmed.  He’s quite harmless."  That would tell us we were dealing with someone with higher orders of intelligence and cultural literacy, wouldn’t it?  (Useful for her, too.)

Sony might have commissioned a transmedia novel called "Raised by Aibo," about a woman who was, like, raised by Aibo.  In fact, there are several movie and fictional properties waiting to happen: "Jane Ford, Aibo wrangler," "Aibo walkies: domesticating your new best friend," "Letting Aibo out: discovering the beast within."   

But in point of fact, I don’t think Sony pitched women at all.  In fact, my sense is they blithely hoped that he would be embraced by the hobbiest lobby, a community that is still largely made up with men.  Weird!  All they had to do was put Aibo in a roomful of women to know that this was the wrong audience, or, at least, not the only audience, or best, a distant second to the real target. 

Aibo’s demise might be the result of bad research, bad marketing or bad management.  But this is a terrible error and a spectacular waste of R&D dollars.  I can’t help wondering whether the research failed to do their due diligence.   There is nothing wrong with this product that good marketing could not fix. 

References

This story is on many websites today.  My crawling cursor is driving me absolutely crazy and I am putting off all citations till I can get the thing fixed.