Archive for March, 2006
Pink and the Stupid Girls video
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In the Stupid Girls video from her latest album, Pink is supposed to have made fun of Paris Hilton, Mary Kate Olsen, Jessica Simpson, and Lindsay Lohan. When asked to explain, here’s what Pink had to say,
None of these girls are stupid. (sic) They have dumbed themselves down to be cute. I just feel like one image is being forced down people’s throats. There’s a lot of smart women. There’s a lot of smart girls. Who is representing them?
This is going to be an interesting cultural artifact in 100 years.
But why wait?
Here are 5 of the assumptions in evidence.
1) that these women have dumbed themselves down.
2) that "one image" is being "forced down people’s throats."
3) that smart women and girls need "representation."
4) that representation is the artist’s job.
5) that the way to represent smart women is to mock dumb women.
1) that these celebrities have dumbed themselves down.
I don’t know that this is so. Perhaps Pink has met the women in question. Perhaps they have revealed to her secret subtleties and depths. Maybe. Maybe there are what they seem to be, pretty ordinary except where blessed with beauty, talent, charisma and a fan base substantial enough to make a studio executive wet himself at lunch.
I prefer to think of celebrities as experimental vehicles. Experimental airplane are often named with an "X." (For instance, the "XF-92A" flew between 1948-1953, serving as a test for the delta-wing.) We could adopt this practice: Paris XHilton would signify that she is an experiment from whom we expect to learn something. In her case, we are looking at a girl who is well born, not quite with us (a little like Peter Sellers as Chauncy Saunders in Being There), inclined to sybaritic behavior and the scandalous, without a flicker of the lascivious or any apparent loss of status or celebrity. Now we know. It is not clear whether this is the triumph of self possession or the effect of watching too many Jerry Springer shows, but now we know that some people can do just about anything without cost. We also know, or more accurately we are inclined to suspect, that there is not the performance of stupidity. Paris XHilton has crafted herself in many ways but it is not clear that she dumbed herself down.
2) that one image is being forced down people’s throats.
This has got to be wrong. For every Paris XHilton, there is a Jody Foster. For every Jessica XSimpson, there is a Diane Sawyer. For every Lindsay Lohan, there’s an Ani DiFranco.
3) that smart girls and women need representation.
This is an ideological remainder from the 70s and the 80s. The cultural imaginary created for and by the media. We read these heavens to orient ourselves in physical and moral space. But because this imaginary has been crafted by and for special interests, some images are excluded. It is someone’s job to install these images in the heavens. Thus did the Mia Hamm and the US women’s soccer team of the 1990s help create big changes in the way in which young women thought about sports, competition, and soccer. For every Paris Hilton, there is a Madeline Albright. For every Jessica Simpson, there is a Condoleezza Rice. For every Olsen twin, there is is an Oprah Winfrey.
4) that representation is the artist’s job.
The avant garde are the keepers of culture. It is up to them to refashion our ideas. They do this by dint of their own courageous example. They will create new understandings of who and what we can be.
I think this is now the celebrity’s job. That’s the service they supply us when they act of experimental vehicles. The artist’s lost this assignment. Popular culture took it away from them.
Of course, Pink is a celebrity, and in that capacity she is influential. But when she summons this explanation of her video, she is playing the artist’s card, claiming the artist’s prerogative. And my argument here is simple: celebrities instruct by example, artists by instruction.
5) that the way to represent smart women is to mock dumb women.
This is a dubious strategy at the best of times. It is not clear that anyone has rights of mockery. This right once did exist and it was routinely exercised. Elites would commander the op-ed page and hold forth against "young people today," "movies and TV," "professional athletes," or "wayward adults." We have been hammering away at elites for so long, and they have been misbehaving themselves so consistently, it is heard to see that they have much authority left. Blessedly, we rarely hear from them. But Pink believes this authority still belongs to her
Pink is many things of course, but punk, or pop punk, is an important part of the franchise. Punks defined themselves as the enemies of bourgeois hypocrisy. They protested everything that was false, posturing and inauthentic about middle class society. I am not sure but I think when punks are your moral arbiters, things are going very badly indeed. If I must choose an exemplar, I have to choose Ron and Nancy over Syd and Nancy. I just have to.
Still and all, there is something interesting and worthy about the "Stupid Girls" video, and I have made the cardinal error of listening to what the artist’s says about her art, instead of looking at the art itself. It’s has a little too much of the burlesque about the video, but it takes up important issues and I am deeply glad Pink made it.
References
Collis, Clark. 2006. The Upside of Anger. EntertainmentWeekly. March 31, 2006. p. 35.
Pink. 2006. The Stupid Girls video on IFilms.com. See the video here.
Lifestyle design: a new profession
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We are running out of jobs. So says David Heuther in BusinessWeek.
Mr. Huether says manufacturing jobs are at their lowest level in the U.S. in 50 years. (This despite the fact that productivity is at an all time high.) And this is not only an American problem. The loss of manufacturing jobs is happening in 9 of 10 of the top economies (U.S., Japan, Germany, China, Britain, France, Italy, Korea, Canada and Mexico). Yes, even China is losing jobs, 4.5 million of them since 2000! I know.
Surely, some of the jobs have migrated to the non-manufacturing sectors. We would expect this in a service/knowledge/innovation economy. We would expect this in a marketplace where consumer tastes and preferences are fragmenting and long tail markets are expanding. But I would be very surprised if nonmanufacturing jobs were making up the difference. I suspect we’re still a couple of million jobs shy.
Structural unemployment is a fact of our world, and it is a problem that will get steadily worse.
So what to do? I think marketers have a role to play here. (I am stealing a page from Bruce Mau. When he wonders who’s going to solve the problems of the world, he says, "why not designers? We’ll do it." Pretty forthright for a Canadian. I look at the problem of lifelong unemployment, and think "why not marketers? Leave this to us.")
In fact, this might be a job for account planners, among other marketers, and so I will, without permission, think about this as an assignment for the Account Planning School of the Web, founded by Russell Davies. (With apologies to Mr. Davies for my presumption.)
The problem: many millions of people in First World societies will live entire lifetimes without "gainful employment."
The assignment: Create a lifestyle that makes possible gainful unemployment. Build a lifestyle that will involve, express, and otherwise engage someone who will never work.
Some considerations:
1. idleness is hell.
Lifestyle construction here is critical because idleness is hard on the soul. (I think George Bernard Shaw developed this argument.) And it’s not enough to say, "oh, just get a hobby." Lifestyles, well designed ones, are rich, interesting, various. They are not "a hobby."
2. meanings flow from what we do.
This is why job loss can be so cataclysmic. This is why so many people retire to bleakness and sometimes an early grave. In order to correct the effects of lifelong unemployment, we need to find other sources of meaning, purpose, identity. One way of getting into this would be to think about your own job, or someone else’s, and figure out what it supplies in the way of meaning, drama, engagement, concepts of self, concept of world, and so on. What are alternative events and activities and engagements from which we can source these things?
3. build in manageable difficulty.
when we are create, select and combine employment alternatives, it’s worth remembering that everyone wants "manageable difficulty." An engagement with the world should fall into the sweet spot that stands combines things we can go and things we can’t. This is to say, we should have the skills and talents to engage with it, but it should be larger than those skills and talents. In Halo II, the sweet spot for me is "Normal." "Easy" is way too easy. "Heroic" is way too hard. (To be honest, "Heroic" reduced me to tears of bitter recrimination.)
4. make the difficulty scalable.
As we get better at the engagement, it should reveal layers of difficulty we did not see before. We need a steady supply of challenges to which we can rise. Someday, I hope to advance to "Heroic." No, really.
5. look for mattering racks
We’re odd this way. We like building little mattering racks. They help us organize the world and enable desire. A good illustration here is the collector, for whom X is the great passion of his collecting activity, the thing he moves heaven and earth to get. Two months later, it is Y that has his attention. Yes, X is one of the jewels of his collection, but, no, he doesn’t really care about it. Y is interesting because it will move this coin collection away from antiquities to coins of the early modern Europe. Now an entire body of coins that never really mattered leaps suddenly into view. Now, these matter enough to keep a man awake at night, scheming and plotting for the day when he outranks, outweighs, eclipses every other coin collector in Cincinnati. Hah!
6. build new kinds of capital, and systems for the exchange and accumulation of capital
That people are not gainfully employed gathering conventional capitals, does not mean they cannot be gainfully unemployed pursuing unconventional ones. Collectors do this of course. But it is also clear that one someone volunteers (geez, do something about this word and the odor of sanctimony that surrounds it, will ya!) for social service (phew!), the accululate various capitals, self esteem, social recognition, good will tokens. This capital can be traded on various exchanges, but that’s the bad news. You have to formalize these capitals, build new ones, and invent the exchanges. I would use hsx.com as an example. The trouble with hsx.com is that capital goes in but it never comes out. Another example here might be Second Life. In fact, someday I hope there will be Account Planning School of the Web on Second Life. I am there somewhere. My name is Moral DaSilva. I’m the one is the really stupid hat. Leave me a message.
7. enable plenitude (the invention of new kinds of social life) and transformation (opportunities to add new selves and transform existing ones)
This is a big industry waiting to happen. As it stands, we are doing things by implication. A good deal of branding is about identity creation and transformation. Someday, we will make it more explicit. When that day comes, and there is a real market for identity supply, the graduates of the Account Planning School of the Web, will rise to greatness, as surely as did those Silicon Valley software engineers in the 1990s.
8. create lifestyle constellations
One of the most difficult tasks here is going to be finding ways to draw together varieties of interest, activity and engagement into lifestyle constellations that can be lived, swapped in and out, retrofitted when necessary, and allowed multiply with the chaotic enthusiasm of an English garden. And that is another way to think of this exercise. That what you are doing is creating trellaces and other devices in which the inventive energies of the gainfully unemployed may run riot.
Please have your assignments in by tomorrow at noon. Quiz Friday next. Widmerpol, shut up.
References
Huether, David. 2006. The Case of the Missing Jobs. BusinessWeek. April 3, 2006.
For more on the Russell Davies’ Account Planning School of the Web, please go here.
Explanations
The image is a small part of the map of Elizabethan London by Hollar. I liked it because it shows habitable places for people in transit.
Mash up marketing: a new tactic for fragmented markets
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The Dr Pepper spots were created by Kinka Usher for Y&R New York. Usher mixed music from Kiss, Will Smith and Cyndi Lauper. The point of the exercise was, according to AdAge.com, to "play up the notion that Dr Pepper has 23 flavors that make up its unique taste."
France after France
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The protest continues today in France. The New York Times reports 450,000 people marching outside Paris and hundreds of thousands marching inside the city. A French union puts the figure at 3 million nation wide.
The problem is that there aren’t enough jobs for young people. This is why the state wants to change the law. This is why the protesters wish to keep the law unchanged.
Hmmm. Everyone wants more jobs for young people, but contestation turns on simple contradiction. More choice for companies! No, less choice for companies!
It’s a cultural problem. Anthropologists are supposed to search out the deepest assumptions on which beliefs and ideas are founded. (Every anthropology major knows the story of Milton Singer in the field. He was told that the universe rests on a turtle. When he asked was "under the turtle," there was a brief pause, and he was then informed that it was "turtles all the way down.")
The French appear to cling to the notion that the marketplace must do the bidding of the social good, that it may be constrained and coerced until, for instance, the job security of young people is assured. If we were to ask what’s under this "turtle," they would almost certainly tell us (or variously imply) that the world is a manageable, tractable place that responds to the administrative efforts of politicians, civil servants and other elites. There are lots of things that betray this French confidence in "order from on high." This little assumption (the "tractable world" assumption, let’s call it) funds a good deal of life in France.
Hah! Americans think otherwise. The tractable world idea has fled the land, even Iowa.
Dick Gephardt…ran in Iowa as an anti-dynamism candidate: Protect jobs, protect unions, put up tariffs and barriers, anti-immigration, anti-free-trade. He got his clock cleaned. I was born in Iowa, and if he can’t make that argument work in Iowa, it won’t work anywhere. (Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape)
Under many ideological notions in America, there is a single idea. This is that if we leave the marketplace to its own devices, wealth will be forthcoming and the social good will be served.
But in recent years, there is a still deeper turtle, one that has to do the sheer profusive creativity of the marketplace. I refer once more to the gospel according to Andreessen.
To get philosophical for a minute, I believe (as Milton Friedman says) that human wants and needs are infinite. There are no limits to the things and services that people want or need, so there are no limits to the number of new technologies, companies, and industries we can create. The questions are: how many people worldwide are able to contribute, how much capital is available to them, and how free are they to pursue new ideas?
This argument says that the marketplace should be left relatively unconstrained not just because it is the fount of wealth, but because it is a fount of human invention, creativity and culture.
Now, I do not doubt that there are many French men and women who are now migrating from "order from on high" to "plenitude from below." But, as I think Mark Twain once said, it’s awfully hard to change turtles in the middle of the stream. The special problem for the French is that so much Frenchess assumes the "order from on high" notion. French culture now looks like the Vista programming at Microsoft. We can change some of the fundamental notions, but then we’d have to rewrite most of the code that produces social life. It wouldn’t be easy. It wouldn’t be pretty. Gasp, it wouldn’t be elegant!
Of course, the French can do it. They have produced some of the great minds in the social sciences. They are effortlessly good at conceptualizing. The intellectual world is a spectator sport, so mass engagement is not a problem. Naturally, they will undertake this surrender to individualism in their best collectivist spirit. They will think their way forward to new ideas, they will work their way from new ideas to all the tiny implications they hold for daily life. They will manage to rewrite the 47 million lines of code that make up La France.
And there will come a moment of drama that will simultaneously thrill and appall them. Eventually, it will be necessary to stop conceptualizing…and launch. And this will have to be the moment when, by agreement, the collectivist approach stops, when the elites desist, and all agreement ends. (All the big stuff, anyhow.) All at once, order will give way to disorder, elegance will give way to profusion, and La France will become lots of experiments in Frenchness, unFrenchness, anti-Frenchness, post-Frenchness, and hybrid-Frenchness.
Brrr.
References
Anon. 2004. Outsourcing Isn’t a Zero-Sum Game. BusinessWeek. March 1, 2004. (source for first Andreessen quote). here.
Bortin, Meg and Katrin Bennhold. 2006. Hundreds of Thousands Protest French Labor Law. New York Times. March 28, 2006.
McCracken, Grant. 2006. Precarity. The Blog Sits At … (a couple of days ago)
Webb, Cynthia. An interview with Marc Andreessen. Washington Post. June 10, 2004. (source for second Andreessen quote). here.
Explanations
The photo shows messenger pidgeons taking flight from their carrier in World War I France. I’ve always wanted an excuse to use it.
The better image would have been Yves Klein’s Leap Into the Void
From Yves Klein, Prometheus and Empedocles, by Wolf-Gunter Thiel as it
appeared in Flash Art, March 1995
1998 © all rights belong to the artist estate and Harry Schunk who took the photograph
(and thanks to Dave Dyment of Mercer Union
who reminded me of artist and title. )
What’s It Like Being 18?
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What’s it like being 18?
like shaking hands with a hurricane?
I was wondering over the weekend what it’s like to be 18. This is not because I want to be 18 again. I am deeply grateful to have escaped my youth, a time that now looks to me like Eastern Europe before the collapse of the Soviet, a time defined by arbitary restrictions, ideological immobility, and terrible shortages (in my case, sex, sense and sensibility).
If you are 18 right now, you were born around 1987. You began to move out of the parental orbit around 1997 (when you were 10-ish). Your head began to clear around 2002 (when you were 16-ish).
In 1997, a boy band (Hanson) and a girl band (The Spice Girls) ruled the world. Notorious B.I.G. died that year and hip hop began to splinter and reinvent itself. Around 45% of American homes had a computer and around 40-50 million Americans and Canadians used the internet. Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted on TV introducing a new concept: witty television. In the next few years, you will see the installation of the tech industry as the heart of American commerce. It will look like a gold rush, and it will fail like a gold rush.
In 2002, boy and girl bands were not just a thing of your past, they were a cultural antique. We were one year away from a violent contraction caused by 9/11, but the music scene was still continuing to fragment in all directions, with pop punk, indie, alternative, emo, hip hop, (to name a few), with critical favorites, The White Stripes, The Strokes, The Vines resurrecting the Velvet Underground. A couple of years before, another TV show, The Gilmore Girls, had introduced another bold new idea for TV: articulate television. In any case, you are now spending a big chunk of your disposable time on the computer, a medium that was reinventing itself substantially every 3 months.
If you are now 18, (and I am now guessing, because I haven’t done the ethnography), you live in a world that is noisy with novelty, restless with innovation, giddy with the good natured froth of a pop culture, lively with a new order of intelligence, and swirling with menace and difficulty.
Of course, all of us live in this world (or something like it). But my boomer generation boarded dynamism. We did not have it thrust upon us.
Boomers could see things getting smaller, faster, more hectic. The intellectuals told us so. We could see popular culture and culture drawing together, the sheer liveliness of one now joined to the intelligence of the other. We didn’t have an easy transition, but it was a transition. However we did it (using a bestseller or amnesia as our launch), we were able to pull up beside the new culture and get on. ("Jump, Spot, jump!")
Sure, there were unhappy moments, near misses, terrible spills, hard landings. Not everyone’s dock-siders had quite enough adhesion. Not everyone was quite nimble enough to decide which assumptions were now called for, and which were to be left behind. (There are several million of my generation that are still standing on that ever distant shore, insisting on opera tickets and "civilized discourse," before taking solace in American Idol.) But the rest of us packed our bags and booked passage for the new land of plenty. (Los Lobos/Latin Playboys was my Ellis Island, Ani DiFranco my Lady Liberty.)
If you are 18, it’s not clear to me when you ever had a moment to "get your feet," as the phrase has it. The deck is always wet with something. You go away one summer vacation and "cirque de soleil" becomes the new Vegas. You go away another, and "cage fighting" supplants boxing there. Not, of course, that you care about Vegas very much.
No, what you care about is going to college, and if ever there was an institution like the old Vegas, this is it. The old headliners, aging songsters who are still crooning tunes that haven’t changed for ages. And why change when fan loyalty (aka tenure) protects them for having to rewrite a line? A great buffet is there for the asking, and it is filling, but it’s not long before you begin to wonder if you can ever eat again. Choices, you must make choices! Look, here’s a building that looks like ancient Rome. Here’s another that looks like Tuscany. So life-like, so pleasant, and so utterly implausible as a simulation of any actual Italy, past or present.
Here’s what I was really wondering on the weekend. What if the world has got suddenly smarter? The evidence is everywhere. People thinking without silos, with newly versatile interpretive frames, with newly assimilative powers of survey, with newly rapid and penetrating powers of pattern recognition. And who is it that got smarter? Not me, I can tell you…or don’t have to tell you. Not my cohort companions who continue to pour themselves into well marked forms, the ones that wick away intelligence and culture mobility, their price for this creature’s comfort. No, I think it’s "kids today." (As a concrete test, compare the television created by David Kelley and the television created by Mitch Hurwitz.)
I think this is what happens when you grow up in a world that’s never still. To think at all, you must think well. (Well, not everyone. There’s a "far shore" here too.) But it doesn’t look comfortable. No, it makes me think of a cat leaping up to a counter and landing on a tea towel. He digs in for purchase, only to pull the towel out from under himself…and digs in for purchase, only to…
I leave the rest to Bloc Party and the lyrics of a track called Pioneers.
We will not be the first, we won’t
You said you were going to conquer new frontiers,
Go stick your bloody head in the jaws of the beastWe promised the world, we’d tame it, what were we hoping for?
Breath in, breath out
So here we are reinventing the wheel
I’m shaking hands with a hurricane
It’s a colour that I can’t describe,
It’s a language I can’t understand
Trend watching: 10 rules
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Trend watching is a pressing business. And we now have an increasingly crowded marketplace of suppliers.
In these early days, there are many models and extravagantly different standards. Here are some of the rules with which we can separate the sheep from the goats.
1. the Oracle is dead.
Unless you are Malcolm Gladwell or Tom Wolfe, you can’t do good trend watching by yourself. Trends once ran through our culture and economy like big, slow breakers off the coast of Hawaii but now they tend to come at us more like a perfect storm. Almost certainly, a single individual is insufficiently multiple to capture the sheer range and contradiction of our present creativity. As Hillary might put it, it takes a village.
2. The trend team must be quick about it.
The first value ad here is picking things up early. The more notice we have the more thoroughly and intelligently we can prepare ourselves. Early notice is the difference between responding with tactics and responding with strategy. And we want to be strategic.
3. The trend team may not "name it and claim it."
Everyone dreams of being the intellectual equivalent of the European explorer, the first one to see a new continent, the first one to plant the flag. But this is a temptation that we must learn to resist.
As I have complained before on this blog, the people at trendwatching.com are inclined to come up with their own lingo for trends: inspirence, gravanity, maturialism. This does not help bring order a problem set that now howls with complexity and uncertainty.
Indeed, it prevents comparison and appears to be an attempt to persuade the client that trendwatching.com must be relied upon as a sole source. This is a kind of "winner take all" strategy and very high risk. If you win, you do sweep the marketplace. If you lose, the penalty is obscurity.
4. No cool hunting!
There is a terrible inclination only to report the things that are really, like, cool. But lots and lots of trends are not cool at all (a new building material, say). In my opinion, cool hunters are quilty of a fatal confusion between what they know about the world and what they wish to be true about themselves. They study novelty in order to make themselves more cool.
But frankly when you are acting as my trend watcher, I don’t care how cool you are. I just want you to be right. And the moment I suspect you are ignoring parts of the future because knowledge thereof does not augment your claims to cool, that’s when I ask for my money back.
This brings us to one of the problems with the business model. Some trendwatch enterprises depend upon free labor supplied by people who watch the world chiefly (and sometimes only) to augment their claims to cool. This builds the bias in. See if you can spot one here.
Join a Community of Trend Hunters – Do you crave cool? Do you live on the edge? Is your curiosity insatiable? If so, TREND HUNTER™ should become your new home on the web. There is no place more dedicated to the comprehensive discovery of cool. You can start Trend Hunting today. Engage your intellect with most dynamic individuals on the web.
There are lots and lots of edges in contemporary culture. When we pay attention only to the "edge" of music, and we do so because it makes us look cool, we have probably disqualified ourselves from supplying edge knowledge of many kinds. (Oh, here we go. Iif I were a real cool hunter, I would have by this time copyrighted KNOWL(EDGE).)
I have a cool hunter detection device. I ask the trend watcher if he or she can tell me anything about the "great room." Almost all of them stare at me blankly. This trend has transformed the middle and upper middle class American home. It is responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars of expenditure. And most cool hunters just missed it. (And this is because homes, suburbs, and families are, from the cool hunter’s point of view, not cool.)
5. The trend team must have an archeological instinct.
The team must be thinking about showing the trajectories of the new. It is not enough merely to trumpet the new. Any idiot can do that. In order to grasp the new, and especially to grasp its trajectory, we need to know where it comes from. As I was arguing in Atlanta this week (thank you, John Horton), the new symmetries in the relationships between doctors and patients have been in the works since deTocqueville.
6. The trend team must be interactive.
As it is, everyone doing trend watch appears to pitching what they have at the website, and rarely is there any evidence that they are interacting with one another. This team should be dividing the labor and then working with one another in order to spot the trends across trends. This is an enormous value ad. If we have the same trend at work in different sectors, we have the possibility of a systematic and more lasting shift.
7. The trend team should offer "big picture" observations.
As it is, we are getting a land slide of possibilities each day, which I have to say merely increases my conviction that the very possibility of pattern recognition has been elipsed. This is not helping! This is hurting! So we need something more than first order observations. We need something more thoughtful and aggregating. We need trend watchers talking to one another, and then we need a "meta-trend" team (sorry) aggegrating and a meta-meta-team agggregating still further. We need to give "observations" an opportunity to scale up to "insight" and insight an opportunity to scale up to "conclusion."
8. The trend team should be generative.
Piers Fawkes recently had a revelation at PSFK here. A piece of the future came winging its way out of all that trend watching, and he served it up. Now pattern recognition becomes idea generation. This turns out to be a really good idea, using the phone as a wand to direct media content to the nearest medium. Trend watchers should be trend generators.
9. The trend team should be making predictions.
The people in the capital markets routinely go back and try to determine where they went wrong. They scrutinize their assumptions. They ferret out the error. Unless we wish trend watching to be one big cocktail party in which everyone merely shouts opinions at one another, something more substantial is called for.
10. The trend team must be fully and soberingly disclosing of their talents.
As it is, the trend watching websites are shamelessly self promoting. Let’s be a little more like a great big consulting company. What I don’t want to read is something like this:
Michael Tchong’s father was born in Canton, China. His family name means “bell” in Chinese. No wonder Michael’s entire career has been focused on making things “clear as a bell.”
References
Trend Hunter here.
Michael Tchong here.
PSFK.com here.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Saminather, Nichola. Moving Online: The New Trend in Trend Spotting. Columbia News Services and to PFSK for spotting and posting the article here.
Conflicts of interest
PSFK cross links to this blog.
Branding, the Birkin bag and damage control
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I managed to make it to mid life without ever hearing about the Birkin bag, but then some kinds of knowledge, perhaps the most important things, are withheld from the anthropologist.
I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know enough. This was insider knowledge I would have to earn.
Naturally, just about everyone else knew, including a dear friend, Joan Kron, who owns a Birkin, and my wife, who would dearly love to. Birkins are made by Hermes and they cost between $6000 to $75,000. They were named for an English singer, Jane Birkin (pictured), who took French popular music by storm in 1968 with ‘Je t’aime moi non plus," a song that drew the censure from the Vatican. Jane Birkin won still more notoriety by appearing naked in bed with Bridget Bardot. This plus her "I’ve been idea-free for a decade" beauty endeared her mightily to the French (who have been idea-free for much longer) and prepared her to leave her mark not just on music but on handbags.
According to the origin myth, as reported to the New York Times by Andrew Litvak, here’s what happened.
[Jane] was on an airplane one day, and the guy next to her was the president of Hermès. He looked at the bag that she was carrying, which was a form of the Birkin bag but was in canvas or something, and he said to her, ‘Hey, how would you like it if we designed a bag like yours?’ It would be the first bag since Grace Kelly that we’ve given an actress’s name to. And Jane said, ‘Sure, that would be great.’ So she drew up a sketch."
All brands should be born this way, from contact, between a mortal and a goddess, as they pass in the heavens. The mortal pleads for inspiration from his muse and in her majestic way, she consents ("Sure, that would be great.") And the rest, as they say, is fashion history. The Birkin went on to become perhaps the single most coveted item in women’s fashion.
But now the bad news, and here’s where it gets interesting for marketers. According to the Scotsman, my first source for fashion news, Jane Birkin recently repudiated the Birkin and now carries a sporran she bought for £10 in Edinburgh. Disavowed, dissed and dumped. Dommage!
Now, if we were the Birkin brand manager, we might say, "Je m’en fiche." What do we care if we are abandoned by a celebrity endorser? Most women who covet the Birkin have never heard of Jane Birkin. The brand has moved on. Jane and the sporran are well matched. We wish them well.
But there is another way of thinking about this. When Hermes reached out to Jane Birkin, she was still a creature of great exoticism, and certainly the only Hermes partner who had been photographed naked with Bridget Bardo. (There are photos of certain senior managers, but that’s another story.) We can assume that Hermes was displaced, as many great brands were, by the cultural shift of the 1960s and 1970s. Connecting with a young bohemian beauty was a very good idea, and an opportunity to renew currency and altitude.
Now to lose Ms. Birkin, this might well put the brand in jeopardy. Now the brand is simply about the upper reaches, the glory, that is the fashion world. It has lost that connection to the great counter culture that arose at mid-20th century.
We were noting yesterday that the winner of American Idol will combine contradictory elements. So it is, perhaps, with fashion brands. A little grist, type working against type, all of this is sometimes the essential ingredient in meanng manufacture and the very secret of brand meaning managment.
Marketers are like any culture bearers. They are sometimes lucky enough to have brands of such standing and power that they obliterate the very idea of their diminishment. But this can happen. And to lose an essential piece of the brand portfolio, this is the way it happens.
References
Smith, Aidan. 2006. Jane Birkin ditches Hermes bag for sporra. The Scotsman. March 19, 2006. here.
Wadler, Joyce with Paula Schwartz. 2004. Can You Even Left It? New York Times. September 7, 2004. here.
Acknowledgments
To The Agenda, with a hat tip for the head’s up here.
American Idol: minerva taking wing at dusk
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Mark Berman of Mediaweek notes that American Idol helped Fox beat all the other networks combined, last night
Mr. Berman has a prediction to make:
Chris Daughtry is the definite favorite, while talent-less Bucky Covington is the most likely to bid adieu tonight. Potentially joining Bucky in the bottom three: Lisa Tucker and, unfortunately, energetic Taylor Hicks in place of oddball teen Kevin Covais. Did you ever, meanwhile, see a contestant more in love with himself than Ace Young?
I am surprised to see how easy it is to make predictions. Everyone seems to know exactly who will win. And there is surprising agreement. Clearly, Kevin Covais will have to go just as surely (and for the opposite reason) that Santino Rice had to leave Project Runway. Kevin was too nice and Santino not nearly nice enough. (We want our icons, in music as in design, a combination of the two.)
But if we are truly a post modernist society, buzzing with variety and novelty, surely the American Idol confidence and consensus should be impossible. Surely, the whole thing should be playing itself out as a great mystery, with, say, performances of emo that shock and puzzle.
That there is confidence and consensus tells us a) we are mostly wrong when we talk about the new structural properties of contemporary culture, or b) there is something about American Idol that smooths the way for our confidence and our consensus. I am prepared to be talking into "A" but I have a feeling that the answer is "B."
After all, there are moments when watching AI where I find myself wondering what decade this is. No one has chosen a song penned in the 21st century. Indeed, as Randy, Paula, and Simon are often moved to observe, clothing and makeup choices often seem to harken back to another time. This is my way of saying that American Idol is a lie and perhaps even a conspiracy. It appears to be crafted to give the impression that American culture remains a mass culture, that happy time when every thing was known to everyone (see Monday’s post on the "death of destination television").
This is the "big brand" approach to contemporary music. Covington is an Eagles imitator. Daughtry is a road house rocker. Ace does Motown. My favorite, Elliott Yamin, a guy who looks endearingly like George C. Scott, covers Stevie. The girls, generally, are anyone anyone wants them to be as long as it obliges them to dress in clothing that no one has worn for several decades.
As we have noted here before, the great fluorescence of cultural invention that is taking place at the moment has certain structural effects, some of them predictable, some not. Predictably, it drives a plenitude of musical production, a fragmentation of consumer taste, and profusion of long tail markets. Unpredictably, it creates a flight to the higher ground of broader choice.
So much for the notion that the center will not hold. The fluorescence of our culture at one end is forcing a new coherence at the other. There are several benefits of this development. One of these is that we are left with an impression that really this a mass society, that nothing has changed. And it’s a very veritable impression. Forty million viewers. God in heaven.
I can think of several institutions that will buy the lie. The business schools will say, "listen, American Idol is proof that we do not have to let contemporary culture into the curriculum.It is business (school) as usual." Several brands, famous for the cluelessness, will also insist that American Idol is a license for complacency.
Too bad. For this appearance of cohesion is, I think, being driven by its opposite.
References
Berman, Marc. Programming Inside. Mediaweek. March 22, 2006. By subscription. Sorry, I don’t have an url. I get the Programming Insider by email.
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the death of destination television
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My anthro & econ "dream team" of "must read" journalists continues to grow.
James Poniewoznik is now our man in TVland, joining Lisa Schwartzbaum of Entertainment Weekly (movies), Barbara Lippert of Adweek (advertising), and Joan Kron (plastic surgery). (Please feel free to nominate people.)
Poniewozik recently noted several TV shows he thinks we might have missed. And I have to say this sent a chill through me. TV I might have missed? It seems like only yesterday, I could take for granted that by this time of the year I would have seen all the new shows. But sure enough, Poniewozik names several shows I have not seen.
His list: Sons and Daughters (ABC), The Loop (FOX), Free Ride (FOX), Wonder Shozen (MTV2), Nighty Night (Oxygen), and Slings and Arrows (Sundance).
TV was for a long time our hearth, the focal point around which families and the nation could bathe together "in the glow." One measure of how customary (and obligatory) was this participation: everyone knew pretty much knew all the shows, even if they didn’t watch them. It was rare to speak of a show in conversation and discover that someone had no clue what it was about. This was a common ground.
Now there are several good shows in their second season, I don’t know. This is no doubt a measure of my addled condition and one of the many costs of living in Connecticut, but it is also a reflection of changes taking place in the TV producer and the TV consumer.
There are now many, many good channels carrying many good shows. I am astonished how high the standard of the comedic writing is. I was watching an episode of How I Met Your Mother recently, and there was a particular jewel about an American boyfriend driving off a French girlfriend that was fiendishly clever. It’s amazing how many people can write well for TV. The art of sit com acting is all about dropping the line in at exactly the right moment, delivery it with perfect economy and emphasis, and then giving way to the next joke. It’s amazing how many people can do this flawlessly. This tells us that as channels grow, so will the shows capable of supplying them. There is, apparently, no shortage of talent. The profusion of "must see" TV that I fail to see will continue to grow.
On the consumer end, there is an explosion of options. Lots of channels carried on lots of TVs in the home. There are DVDs (via purchase or Netflix) and pay per view movies. There is place shifting (Slingbox) and timeshifting (Tivo). At any given time, a family has thousands of options. The chances of them all sitting down to a single moment of "destination television" (aka "appointment television") are increasingly slender.
It’s almost as if TV is going to go the way of the family meal. A shared meal (sometimes, Sunday night, sometimes Friday) was once the center piece of American family life. It was the moment when people came together to remember, reenact and otherwise reassert that they were a family, and what it was to be a family. This institution has been under extraordinary pressure in recent years. Someone told me recently that Americans now eat something like 10% of their meals while driving in the car! ("Dashboard dining" they called it.) "Grazing" and individual preparation is also on the rise. The family meal is now longer a staple of family ritual, but increasingly an occasional and ad hoc accomplishment.
This wasn’t so bad because families were still sitting down to destination television. (In a perfect world, some academic would have worked out the precise differences between shared meals and shared television, but until our scholarly cousins awaken from their postmodernist slumber, this topic will remain unexamined.) But if destination TV is now for the high jump (as the English say), what can this mean for family life?
Now if this were 1972, we could rely on an academic to write a book about how TV is killing our culture. Happily, it is now 21st century and we are more inclined to wonder how this will change culture, not kill it. To some extent, the family has been a balwark against plenitude. Culture fragmented outside the family, and to be sure, some of this leaked in. But the family was still largely a world onto itself. What we are looking at with the end of destination TV might be the death of the family’s last ceremonial center. In this event, plenitude will have come home in earnest and not even a great room will be big enough to contain the explosion.
References
Poniewozik, James. 2006. 6 Totally Funny TV Series. Time Magazine. March 20, 2006, p. 118.
Precarity
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Today, I learned a new word. It might represent a new trend. Call it precarity.
It comes to us swirling up from the student protests taking place in France. (The PM of France, Dominique de Villepin, has introduced legislation that would make it easier for companies to fire young workers. Students are unhappy and now voluble:)
As students and workers continue to occupy the Sorbonne and march through the streets of France, we will join them with our virtual bodies from around the world. SOLIDARITY WITH THE STUDENTS OF FRANCE! SOLIDARITÉ!
The reference to "virtual bodies" aside, this is pretty much "politics as usual" for the French. What caught my attention is one the ideas at work here.
[P]eople around the world are suffering from the system that the French students are protesting against. The neoliberal, corporate model of society increases the precarity of life for everyone through employment instability, war and environmental destruction. It must be stopped. Youth all over the world face bleak prospects under the current models. New economic and social models must be developed.
Precarity, huh? Notice how elegantly it brings together three disparate topics (employment, war and environment) and bundles them so to recruit a larger body of protest. (The fragmentation that makes life interesting for all of us is especially intense in youth cultures, and this makes it hard to establish consensus and mobilize action.)
But what a strange little idea this is! That life should not be precarious. Wow. If one idea has passed from currency, it’s the notion that liberal democracies can make life predictable and orderly. The sheer force of dynamism in every aspect of contemporary life makes this unthinkable.
But who knows, this might be the little idea that could. Perhaps it will sew together acts of umbrage and outrage. Perhaps it will mobilize students around the world. In an odd way, it gets at the symptom of our contemporary condition most precisely. Naturally, I can’t help feeling that when it moves French students to shut down parts of Paris, the notion of precarity is itself an agent of precarity. But what do I know? You can’t make a souffle without breaking a few eggs.
For more on the protest in France, and the source of materials quoted in this post, go here
Revolutionary
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This is Tom Messner. He writes a column for Adweek. In January, Tom decided to review traditional texts in the field of advertising. The essay is called Old Testament.
This is brilliant in the way that the best of advertising discourse is often brilliant. Just when the world has decided that advertising (of a conventional kind) is over, Messner steps forward, puts this anxiety aside with not so much as a parenthetical acknowledgment, and patiently begins the work of recovery. What are the key texts?
The review is filled with wonderful moments, as when Messner stops to come part first sentence translations of Proust’s Swan’s Way.
Reviewing From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor, by Jerry Della Femina, Messner says,
It is dated and contemporary; shrewd and unwise; avuncular and juvenile. For those who grew up in New York, going to work in advertising was not unlike going to work for steel in Pittsburgh, coal in West Virginia or tires in Akron. I always thought Della Femina had too much fun being Jerry B. Jerry to write the great American ad, but he did write the great American ad book.
Reviewing My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising, by Claude Hopkins, Messner says,
Every syllable says 19th century: He puts a period in "ads." as an abbreviation and is the embodiment of the Puritan work ethic in its best sense. David Ogilvy read his books seven times and said they changed his life; I read them once and remain untouched to that extent but moved by the spare sincerity.
If I may presume to say, this is what happens in moments of crisis. When all the world runs shouting into the night, some people say, "Ok, let’s review. What is it we say we do? What do we do?" in the process extracting the most powerful propositions and processes of the industry before the naysayers succeed in burning it down.
It’s a little like Minerva taking flight at dusk, but in this case, I think it represents a recovery of memory, a return to self, for an industry that systematically refused an idea of what it was.
In this vacuum, post war intellectuals scathingly set up shop. And advertising became whatever they said it was. Speaking now anthropologically, this was a very bad thing. It encouraged the creation of a culture’s self loathing and self mystification. The intellectuals were pleased to call the advertising community our myth makers, but in fact they are more properly called our meaning makers. Myth makers, that’s a title we should reserve for the Stuart Ewen and the John Kenneth Galbraith.
References
Messner, Tom. 2006. The Old Testament. Adweek. January 16, 2006. here.
by subscription.
On the radio
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Ok, I just finished an interview with Christopher Lydon for Open Source, the WGBH radio program out of Boston. The topic was clutter and spring cleaning. Most participants were singing that anti-consumer-society hymn we all know and love so well. You know, the one that asks why can’t we all be more like Thoreau and live the simple life.
I find this sort of thing hard to listen to. It seems to be to neglect the powers and subtleties of the person-object relationship in our culture. Oh, sure, some stuff gets into our houses under false pretenses. We just "have" to have it at the moment of purchase. Several weeks later it is one more regretable piece of plastic, one that richly deserves the old heave ho.
But most of the things that "clutter" our homes are pretty important to us. Strip them from us, by an act of God or man, hurricane or robbery, and the effects can be devastating. We like to think that personhood is contained within the boundaries of the skin and that everything "out there" is so much clutter or at least utterly external.
But 25 years of doing the anthropology of North America tells me that the self is actually located across these boundaries, so that part of us is resident within, and part of us is resident in the things we call our own. Anyhow, this is not everyone’s favorite point of view, and I try to make myself useful on the show without being a "Mr. Know it all, Professor smarty pants, but I have a PhD, damnit, I’ve done the research, don’t you see."
And this is where it gets interesting. Christopher Lydon (pictured) has this way of presiding with a very quiet impatience. You could hear him willing we three guests to say something interesting, to step up to the intellectual and conversational opportunity, to make this topic live. Naturally, he is keen on this because he runs a radio show, but it don’t think that was the motive.
No, I think he wants some place for his intelligence to engage, and when the conversation gets glassy, as it did on a couple of occasions, he hovers over the stray remark, beating his wings, seeing if he can’t scare even the tinyest field mouse out from under cover. Who knows, but this might be a tasty morsel. Who know, but that we might actually feast on this. It was as vivid a demonstration of a roving, summoning intellect as I have seen in a long time.
This is going to sound like sycophancy, and so I am now obliged to say that I find the guy in studio a little chilly, even by Boston standards. Clearly, he is one of those guys who lives in the voice. And on the radio he sounds passionate, all emotion in the service of idea. In person, well in person, the warmth is not so clear. There, now I have overcorrected and almost certainly offended him.
Icarus meets the Phoenix, that crazy Donald Trump
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What I really dislike about the show is the way it distorts our idea of capitalism and marketing.
Sure there are moments in the corporation when the knives come out, but I would be astonished to learn that people are ever obliged to stand up and denounce one another. Mr. Trump, I believe you are thinking of the show trials of Stalinist Russia. Oh, don’t feel bad. It’s an easy mistake to make. I get them mixed up all the time.
Further more, unless the profession has changed over the weekend, marketing is not a matter of amateur dramatics in the streets of Manhattan. In the show last time, the team created a "marketing campaign" for the Gillette Fusion that obliged them to take to the streets in their bathrobes. In the only other show I have seen, the team gave a public Karaoke performance.
Mr. Trump, no one does this. This is not marketing. It may be good television but…oh, let’s be honest, it’s moronic television.
What is it about this guy? Once a decade, he rises like a Phoenix, not from the flames but his own ignominy…only to screw it up all over again. Some day, Donald Trump will make a interesting subject for someone writing about self branding and celebrity construction. For the moment, he’s, well, an embarrassment to us all.
Branding strategies: Finding the cult in culture
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Some brands are in the right place at the right time. One minute, they are muddling in obscurity. The next, greatness is bestowed upon them. Every trend produces winners of this kind: Nike in the 1970s, Filofax in the 1980s, Snapple in the 1990s.
This is pretty much what happened to Birkenstocks. Sometime in the late 1960s, these odd little shoes were adopted by hippies and flower children. They became a telling consumer choice and they entered a body of consumer choices (macrobiotics, granola, cork curtains, macrame wall hangings, tie die t-shirts, candles, frisbees, bicycles, Volvos). Birkenstocks came to signal a hostility for industrial, capitalist, consumer, urban and urbane society. For some consumers, they were a badge of ideological courage and convictions. For others, well, some people took their Birkenstocks and quietly burned them in the garden.
Quite often, marketers work to soften the edges of the new brand, the better to expand the market. Not Birkenstocks. Scott Radcliffe, the marketing director at Birkenstock Distribution USA, says "the brand’s strong point is its power to elicit both positive and negative reactions. That speaks to the bigger cultural relevance of the brand. That’s something I want to participate in. That’s not something I’m trying to shake."
Birkenstock didn’t mind when their shoes ended up dressing the feet of Senator Ortolan Finistirre, an antismoking environmentalist Democrat from Vermont, played by William H. Macy in the new movie, Thank you for smoking. The director of the movie, Jason Reitman, used the brand to a purpose:
"Nothing says, ‘I want to tell you how to live your life’ more than Birkenstocks," The visual registers immediately. There’s something about the shoe that is universally understood that makes it so funny. The sandals are emblems of liberal do-gooderness."
For Radcliffe, this, too, was okay. "Birkenstock fans," he said, "feel like they’re part of something bigger than most other shoe choices, frankly."
This branding strategy is clear. Forget maximizing the market. Forswear the extensive game of appealing to more consumers for the intensive one of appealing more to existing consumers. Stay small. Keep the faith.
Most marketers will sneer at this. The point of all marketing is to expand the market, to maximize the opportunity, to harvest the profit. But there are reasons to suppose that the Birkenstocks strategy will assume new important in the marketer’s playbook.
Some of these are technical. Some growth strategies are driven by the 20% grow rule imposed by the street. Private ownership will make a difference here. There is also a growing feeling that no brand flourishes in the death valley between big brands and niche ones. There is no chance for Birkenstock to makes its way across the death valley and install itself as a big brands. So don’t bother trying
But the Birkenstock strategy is also driven by the new logic of the market place. The connection between brands and consumers is now a relationship. Brand recognition has become brand engagement. The "value proposition" is less about a USP than a place in the consumer’s concept of who they are and what their world is. So when a cultural trend fashions all of this for you, maybe the smart thing to do is to stay put and explore the riches of niches.
"So how do we make any money?" will be the heart felt question of the true marketer. And the answer I think is, more brands. Not brand extensions. This, as we know, is where brand intensity goes to die. No, real, full blooded, utterly different brands. These are hell to manage for a single company, to be sure. But we are looking at a new marketplace, and more, smaller, more distinct brands, may be a new objective for us all.
Reference
Carr, Coeli. 2006. Thank You for Insulting Our Sandals. New York Times. March 12, 2005.
Children of 9/11, Children of technology
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Yesterday, Pam and I played host to the DeCesare/Goodman/Bergman clan. This meant five kids in the house.
We have a little room, a kind of shed, attached to the garage. The kids adopted this as their own. We were charmed when they appeared to turn the shed into a new country, complete with its own three color flag. "As long as they don’t start singing and marching," the adults joked, and that’s the last we thought of it.
Then the four year old wandered back to the house carrying a slip that read, "Beutyful 2414."
Eventually, it dawned on us that this was her password and security code. Here is the entire manifest. (I give it to you in the strictest confidence.)
Pretty: 8412
Curley: 3333
Navey: 1384
Beutyful: 2414
Flower: 1211
Each of the kids has a password and security code. I don’t know how many terrorists there are in my part of Connecticut but clearly the little shed is now secure. Relatively speaking. We could use a metal detector and a rent-a-cop but then the kids will have to start raising taxes, and no one around here wants that, believe me.
Now, it may be that this is the 21st century version of the those hand scrawled signs that have always appeared on tree houses and forts, the ones that read "keep out." (We adults couldn’t help noticing that no one gave us passwords and security codes.) Maybe the kids were just building a boundary the way kids have always liked to do.
But surely these kids are the children of 9/11. I don’t think their homes, education or worship bristle with security, but it’s inevitable they feel boundaries to be imperiled, scrutinized, and protected. Notice that the kids yesterday had passwords AND security codes. Nothing casual about this system. Besides, the passwords are vaguely descriptive (to make them easier to remember), but not so easy that you could just guess what someone’s code would be. This security system is in earnest. It makes a little chill run down your back.
If the pundits are right, technological enablement is going to make these kids as porous as anything. The cell phone is just the beginning. Eventually, all the world is going to be able to find them anywhere. From an anthropological point of view, it’s also clear that these kids are going to be loose bounded, not just the world streaming in but the kid streaming out. Any way you look at it, porousness is the new order of the day.
Perhaps it’ s their sense of this, as much as the heritage of 9/11, that makes them prize the idea of border control. Frost said, good fences make good neighbors. These kids may feel they make good kids.
