Archive for April, 2006
Building stronger brands
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I just finished attending the first annual C3 (Convergence Culture Consortium) retreat at MIT. It was revelational. C3 is the accomplishment of Henry Jenkins, and C3 faculty and students. I can’t think of any place in the academic world where people think about the interface between culture and commerce with such clarity, power and absense of cant. It was really, really interesting.
I hope to share things from the retreat over the next few weeks, but there was one issue that struck me. We noted that technologies have made possible the participation of consumers in the construction of the brand. Technologies aside, many consumers have make it clear that the only brands that they will really care about are the ones they help cocreate.
But as I was noting a couple of days ago on the post about Chevy Tahoe, cocreation is not for the faint hearted. When the marketing team invites the consumer "into the tent" weird and nervous making things are bound to happen. The question is whether and when we will come to see the brand as something big enough and resilient enough to withstand the "rough air" created by new cocreation strategies.
We were talking this through during the retreat and I suddenly remembered that something like this issue has vexed the marketing community before. When I was doing research for Chrysler in the 1980s, Detroit was buzzing with a recent change of heart. Sometime in the 1970s, new marketing research techniques had made it possible to test design possibilities, and these techniques had been ceased upon to eliminate anything that eliminated anyone. The result was several years of bland boxes that no one much cared about.
Finally, someone took their courage in both hands and said, "look, we cannot eliminate what some hate without eliminate what some love. Delight and provocation are connected. Besides, something like half of the people who say they hate a design will eventually come to love it. So really, we’re talking about an alienation factor not of half, but more like 20%" And with this Detroit return, somewhat tepidly, to designs that were more genuinely provocative, and we might argue that the advances made by Chryster in the last view years is a lineal descendant of this philosophical repositioning.
Brands are where design was. Let’s not cause offense. Let’s hew to the middle. Let’s make ourselves agreeable. Let’s talk out anything that is odd, counterintuitive, or inaccessible. Let’s make nice. Let’s play nice.
I think we can argue that this was never a very promising approach. The idea is not to eliminate risk but to manage it. But now that we are letting the consumer into the process of brand creation, and now that this will surely result in things that are odd or unsavory (as in the Tahoe case), we really have to rethink whether the brand can continue to think of itself in traditional terms. Ok, it is now 11:58 on Friday night. If I want to post this Friday, I have just seconds to wrap this up. My conclusion, brands now live in a world in which there is more to fear from being conservative than from being dynamic.
I feel to thinking
Obituary for a friend
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This is an obituary for a friend who has gone over to the method.
Let’s call him Danny. Danny used to be a deeply creative guy. He was a joy to work with and a joy to work for.
Working with Danny was like fishing the Grand Banks before the Europeans came in earnest. So many ideas, so thickly packed, you could walk on them anywhere. New found land! Everywhere.
This is not one of those Village of the Damned scenarios or anything. Danny doesn’t have a glassy stare or a robotic gate. No, it’s just that he now plays things by the book. He’s got this method through which everything must pass. It’s an "eye of the needle" thing. If you are rich in ideas, forget it, you’re not getting through.
I don’t know where Danny got the method. I think it’s a Rube Goldberg contraption that made up with bits and pieces of management theory. Now every act of creativity takes a Powerpoint deck to choke a horse. There are lots of lines and boxes and arrows so complicated it reminds me of a radio I broke into as a child. Man! (Complicated, mind you. Not complex. Complex I believe in. Because complexity comes from simple principles. But complicated, that’s, what’s the term again? oh, yeah, bad.)
Danny used to believe in beautiful ideas. And he would tell you, before the method got him, that beautiful ideas were always clear and radically simple. Yes, you had to roll out lots of supporting data. Yes, you had to marshal the argument, dotting your Is and crossing your Ts. But the old Danny treated all of this as the stage mechanics they have at the MET. It has to be there, but only as a platform.
Danny loves the method I think because he thinks it makes him smarter. And maybe this is true. But the method actually makes it kind of hard to tell whether he’s smart or not. It gives all his thinking a certain prefab quality. This is not a bad thing when we are trying to snow the client, I guess. I mean, if we’ve "got nothing," method supplies a facsimile of something. Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe Danny lost his nerve. Maybe he’s off his game. Maybe the method is smoke and mirrors, bang and chatter, and otherwise deliberately obfuscating of a clear and simple truth: Danny is tapped. (Hey, I’ve been there.)
But I think the method is also a kind of talisman designed to give comfort to Danny and the people who rely on him. "Oh, a method! Hurmph! Here, here!" Suddenly, we’re in a men’s club in Victorian London with everyone nodding in stodging agreement that orthodoxy is always better than just winging it. "I mean, after all!"
"I mean, after all," used to be a phrase we could actually use in conversation. Everyone knew exactly what we meant and what we meant was "let’s hew to orthodoxy because it’s been crafted by people better than ourselves and tested by the ages. Let’s not forget the things we know! Let us come to our senses. I mean, after all."
Those days have passed. Orthodoxy is sometimes useful. More often it is a decrepit bridge over a very deep gorge. It might get us to the other side. It worked the last time we tried it. It looks okay. I’m sure it’ll be fine.
No one says, "I mean, after all." much anymore because precedent is no longer always a better bet than its alternative. Precedent is not even usually better than its alternative. Precedent should be marked "for use only in an emergency by trained professionals…or Paul" because, as the business press never tires of telling us, "everything we know is wrong."
Ok, so what’s better than method? Smart people thinking not with method but with messiness. The world got various. Our professional lives stream with novelty. The new comes from every kind of factory, staffed by every kind of creative, driven by the whip of opportunity and the joy of opportunity.
How we might use this "new" is also various. First we have to say what it is, and this is not easy. Is this new an innovation that will take like television or is this an innovation that will fail like smellovision? In the early days of TV, this was technology looking for a purpose and it took several years (and a General) to figure out what that purpose was.
We have to figure out whether and how it might serve as an opportunity, whether and how it might serve as a risk, and to do this we have to shuffle through a deck of interpretive transparencies that help us see it this way and now that way. We have to evoke a series of assumptions and let each of these reveal what it is we might be looking at.
So much for method. This is about intellectual agility. This is about framing and reframing the issue at hand until we find the one that helps make it make minimum sense. Method actually makes things harder. It locks us into one set of assumptions when what we need is to be "assumption agnostic" and capable of a swallow’s flight between assumptions. In Gladwell’s language, it is blink, then blink, then blink, each time supplying new assumptions.
All of us are multiple and in transit. We work for corporations that are multiple and in transit. We live in a world that is multiple and in transit. This makes method perilous, if not murderously at odds with the management of complexity that is now our first assignment, whatever else we are called upon to do.
I don’t know what happened to Danny. He lost his gifting for thinking, his gift for creativity, or maybe he just lost his nerve. He’s still multiple. He’s still in transit. But the method that is supposed to serve him serves him ill. I’m sure he’ll snap out of it. Hope so. I could really use a hand with this smellovision thing.
Golfing, Phil Mickelson, and the American corporation
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Everyone would like to be this responsive…and almost no one but the corporation is. (Imagine what a handful of fire breathing American corporations could do for the common good of France, Iraq or for that matter Canada?)
But there are pockets of resistance inside the corporation. There are still time-servers and nay-sayers who harken back to another era. These people happily spend the resources of the corporation making sure it is kept from its dynamic, most responsive, best.
"He’s charging up the back 9."
"Things got wild at Augusta again today."
"They are duking it out on 7!"
Wha? This language is always applied to middle aged men of transcendental serenity delivering a tiny object up and down a park-like setting. Charging? Wild? Duking? I don’t think so.
No one knows how he does it, but Phil Mickelson has become one of the game’s all-time greats by taking chances other pros won’t. From skipping a ball off a lake on to the green for an eagle, to playing chip shots that fly backwards over his head, Phil’s daring and creative game is a magical thing to behold.
Acknowledgments
The photo is courtesy of Gaylord Sports Management, Mickelson’s agent in matters of celebrity endorsement here.
Chevy Cocreation
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In March, Chevy invited people to make ads for the 2007 Tahoe. The Chevy website supplied videoclips, sound tracks, and a copy field. Hey, presto, consumer created content.
The results were not surprising. Some people seized this opportunity to mock SUVs as a cause of global warning, as a danger on the highway, and as a source of social injustice. There are now some 4 dozen Tahoe ads on YouTube. Most are anti-Tahoe.
What is surprising is that Chevy is now being trashed in the marketing press for its failure to see this coming. In a piece called "Chevy’s Crash, Burn," Adweek columnist Catharine Taylor calls this an
… ill-advised experiment with consumer-generated advertising [that] ended up looking like a series of drive-by shootings, with the Tahoe’s image in the cross hairs.
Well, maybe. Here’s what Chevrolet general manager Ed Peper had to say.
Early on we made the decision that if we were to hold this contest, in which we invite anyone to create an ad, in an open forum, that we would be summarily destroyed in the blogosphere if we censored the ads based on their viewpoint. So, we adopted a position of openness and transparency, and decided that we would welcome the debate.
Welcome the debate? I think he just won it.
Is anyone really naive enough to think that consumer creation is a decorative gesture? Does anyone suppose that we invite the consumer in for merely decorative purposes? Does anyone think that consumers wish to participate only then to be patronized?
Here’s what we know, somewhat syllogistically,
1) consumer participation is essential for vibrant messages and brands.
2) more consumer participation means less control.
3) less control means controversy is going to happen.
4) controversy is the price of vibrant messages and brands
Anyone who is surprised by controversy, anyone who resists it, has yet to grasp the revolution in marketing that cocreation represents.
Openness and transparency are essential. Controversy, even anti-brand messages, are the price of admission. If we want the brand to participate in contemporary culture, we must make it porous. We must surrender some of our control, and send the brand out into the world for good and ill.
There is no question that Tahoe took a hit. But I think some of this was good for the brand. It made Tahoe, Chevy and Detroit part of the conversation. From a meaning management point of view, it actually works quite well. It says, "Behold, a brand that survives controversy, a brand that enables controversy. Behold a brand that’s as rugged and mobile and all terrain." Surviving controvery. Enabling controversy. When was the last time Brand America took a risk like this?
There is a fundamental shift in the rules of the game of marketing. We have to change our risk tolerances. We have to understand that the marketer’s work, once so dominated by risk avoidance, is now much more about risk management. If Adweek doesn’t get this, what hope do we have of persuading the client?
References
Peper, Ed. 2006. Now that we’ve got your attention. GM FastLane Blog. April 6, 2006. here.
Taylor, Catharine P. 2006. Chevy’s Crash and Burn. Adweek. April 17, 2006, p. 14. (not available on line.)
Youtube page for Tahoe ads here.
Bloggers vs. the old media (are they panicking yet?)
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I think the old media verge on panic. One or two symptoms are beginning to show.
Thursday, I noted Lance Ulanoff’s alarmist treatment of YouTube. Ulanoff thinks it will turn us all into iVideots and that things must end badly:
The inescapable truth is that the moving image will be everywhere, yet iVideots will soon lose any true connection with the live people moving all around them.
Tom Guarriello caught the WSJ’s Henninger calling our world, gasp, uncivilized.
But there is one more personality trait common to the blogosphere that, like crabgrass, may be spreading to touch and cover everything. It’s called disinhibition. Briefly, disinhibition is what the world would look like if everyone behaved like Jerry Lewis or Paris Hilton or we all lived in South Park.
Recently, Ann Moore, CEO of Time, Inc., implied that blogging was cheap opinion.
One of the biggest threats to our business is this confusion in the public between real, fact-based, checked news and opinion, which is very cheap… And so, I’m really committed…to really paying attention to Time and figuring out how we can hold up the price value of fact-based news.
I am sure there is an "anthropology of decline" that documents the symptomatology of regime transition. I just don’t know it.
But here’s a simple typology. I keep it on cardboard in my wallet….to make it easier to identity institutions in their last days.
Stage 1. Benign neglect.
In the early days of regime transition, the incumbent (aka New York Times, Wall Street Journal) treats the new challenger (aka bloggers) with a certain high handed indifference. If acknowledgment occurs at all, it comes with a patronizing pat on the head, as in "Hey, aren’t the newcomers charmingly amateur? Welcome to the party. Now, run along and get me a drink." More often, bloggers are not acknowledged. They just don’t matter.
Stage 2. Lordly disdain
Blogging actually wins a couple of battles. In its "wisdom of crowds" way, it begins to threaten the traditional players. These respond with certain sneering, scolding, dismissal. The implicit message: "who do you think you are, don’t you know who I am?" Now we’re getting somewhere.
Stage 3. Irritation plus Obfuscation
As it turns out, bloggers refuse to wither in the face of high handed treatment. In fact, they get stronger. Their victories grow more numerous. Their voice becomes more compelling.
Now it’s clear that the traditional media outlets must pay attention. They begin to "cover" blogging. They begin to read blogging. They begin to help themselves to its content.
And now they begin to see the writing on the wall. If Wikipedia can rise to become a creditable challenge for the Encyclopedia Britannica, surely the NYT and the vulnerable too. And at this point, things can get a little chippy. See my account of a skirmish with a Canadian journalist (McCracken 2004) below.
Stage 4. Panic! Attack! Panic Attack!
In Stage 4, the alarm is now running full time. You can hear it coming from the old media world as if from a neglected warehouse. It’s time to roll out the "barbarians at the gate" argument. Enter Ulanoff, Henninger and Moore.
Now, not everyone reacts this way. I had lunch with a senior journalist who cheerfully admitted that the NYT might be dead in a decade. But for most people, it is time to defend the vested interest. (And this is of course a rich irony, coming as it does from profession that is supposed to protect us against same.)
Naturally, these aggressions can make thing worse. Moore reveals a deeply patronizing attitude towards her reading public. She implies they are not quite bright enough to see the difference between fact and opinion. (Yes, I appreciate she is trying to stake out a value proposition for the capital markets, but when a CEO makes her value proposition by dissing her customers, analysts are going to wonder if she’s fit for office. This self destructive behavior may be taken as a real measure of the panic.)
What you can do
How far will they go? The old media is a little like the old mafia. We muscle in on their turf at our peril. We can’t know how far they will go, but I think it’s more than remotely possible that the community of bloggers, normally so serene and tranquil, is this far from becoming one of those Law and Order episodes in which bodies start turning up everywhere.
This means bloggers will want to think about hiring protection. Plastic surgery and name changes are not out of the question. (Finally, an excuse!) I understand that a blogger was found beaten and bloody in Second Life. He was incoherent, but in his hand was found a scrap of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. You are warned. Take steps now!
References
Guarriello, Tom. 2006. Guest Post: On mass media and blogging. This blog sits at the… April 21, 2006. here.
Lance, Ulanoff. 2006. Are you an iVideot? Internet Video is sucking life out of our live world. PCMagazine. April 20, 2006. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2004. Newspaper vs. Blogs: I think we’re catching up. December 20, 2004. here. [for the Canadian journalist thing]
McCracken, Grant. 2006. Youtube: a peril to us all? This blog sits at… April 20, 2006. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2006. Muddles in the old media models. This Blog Sits At… February 8, 2006. here.
Steinberg, Brian. 2006. Time’s Chief Plans A Digital-Age Transformation. Wall Street Journal. February 8, 2006. p. B3.
Surowiecki, James. 2004. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Doubleday.
the Wikipedia homepage here.
Post Script.
On Thursday, Steve Postrel offered this useful bigger picture of the regime transition:
Remember: it was always better Before. The ancient Greeks had Golden, Silver, and Bronze Ages before their own Lead. The Roman Republic looked back to Romulus and Remus. The early Roman Empire missed the Republic. The Renaissance thinkers and artists saw themselves as restoring ancient glory.
Nostaligia turned to "social criticism" during the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. The romantic movements in poetry and literature set the tone. Then we had Rousseau and then Marxists (not all of them, and not Marx himself) who insisted that living in a free society with specialization and market competition and fluid social roles was inferior to rustic stability and feudalism.
Fast-forward to the postwar US. First we had the problems of the Lonely Crowd and mass society–things were better in the old days when people were more individualistic. Then we had the problem of excessive abundance and mindless consumerism and the Leisure Crisis–things were better when our mass economy wasn’t so productive. Then we had the Age of Scarcity–things were better when the economy was booming and we didn’t have to worry about foreign competition.
Then we had the transition to today’s New Economy, with flexible supply chains and firms facing gales of entrepreneurial creative destruction, higher returns to skill and creativity, and the ability to segment and individualize goods and services like never before.
Now the Before of the social critics is the Mass Society where people didn’t go Bowling Alone or watch different TV shows from one another. And they’re already campaigning to valorize today as a Before life-extension period, when people had the good grace to die quickly.
Thank you, Steve.
Guest post: Tom Guarriello on the mass media and blogging
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Yesterday, Tom Guarriello offered a great comment on old media’s cry of alarm about blogging and the new media:
It’s a particularly interesting day in the "they’ve gone mad" wing of the tsk-tskers. Here, Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal:
"But there is one more personality trait common to the blogosphere that, like crabgrass, may be spreading to touch and cover everything. It’s called disinhibition. Briefly, disinhibition is what the world would look like if everyone behaved like Jerry Lewis or Paris Hilton or we all lived in South Park.
Example: The Web site currently famous for enabling and aggregating millions of personal blogs is called MySpace.com. If you opened its "blogs" page this week, the first thing you saw was a blogger’s video of a guy swilling beer and sticking his middle finger through a car window. Right below that were two blogs by women in their underwear.
In our time, it has generally been thought bad and unhealthy to "repress" inhibitions. Spend a few days inside the new world of personal blogs, however, and one might want to revisit the repression issue."
Oh, man, women in their underwear. What’s next?
References
Tom’s blog, The TrueTalk Blog, here.
YouTube: a peril to us all?
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Lance Ulanoff is warning us about the dangers of YouTube and what he calls iVideoism:
iVideoism is the insatiable need to digest video of virtually any kind on the Web and elsewhere (except TV). Most sufferers will live on viral video sites like TagWorld, Google Video, and YouTube.
I thought for a moment he might be kidding but no, he appears to be in earnest. Lance thinks access to video on the net might be a social problem.
The inescapable truth is that the moving image will be everywhere, yet iVideots will soon lose any true connection with the live people moving all around them.
It’s puzzling. This "alienation" argument is precisely the one social critics used in the 20th century to warn us about TV. But they thought that TV would have this effect because it was dominated by a few channels, a few brands, and a lot of brainless advertising. The trouble with TV in the 1950s, they supposed, was that it was contained uniformity that must induce conformity from which alientation must surely follow.
Say what you will about YouTube, but the problem here is precisely not the stupefying powers of a mass medium. No, the reason YouTube is interesting is that it offers a fountain of invention from many thousands of people, pursuing a vast number of, some of them, deeply strange and cryptic projects. YouTube is a mad house of inventiveness. Regard the sprawling mess that is our culture.
That’s what you begin to wonder about social commentators. They have a very few "critical" cannons to roll out when called upon to reflect upon our world. It doesn’t matter whether the target is mass media or micro media, the answer is going to be the same. This is bound to be bad for us, not least because it will alienate us one from the other.
Isn’t this the most powerful argument for the emergent, unedited, unconstrained, unpoliced and unapproved nature of our culture. If we left it to the commentators, every innovation would look like a problem. Every innovation, TV and its opposite, would be forbidden us. Thank god we have intellectuals to protect us from ourselves. Thank god we don’t ever listen to them.
Lance, buddy, stow the warnings and break out the bubbly. Every member of the species would love to have the "problem" of too much choice. In the contemporary phrase with which we often honor the propulsive force of our culture, all of them like to be sipping from this fire house. This is what we look like. This is who we are.
References
Lance, Ulanoff. 2006. Are you an iVideot? Internet Video is sucking life out of our live world. PCMagazine. April 20, 2006. here.
G. Clotaire Rapaille and his dartboard
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Clotaire Rapaille is a market researcher and a gifted one.
Every time I hear his name, I remember a marketing conference a couple of years ago.
We were sitting around a table, 4 or 5 of us. It was late. We were deep into our cups. The evening was over. Rapaille’s name came up. Someone said,
"Oh, yeah, that guy. We hired him. He told us our ATM machine was "mother.""
Heads shot up around the table, and almost simultaneously, several voices protested,
"That’s what he said our product was!"
"Hmm," I thought, "that’s the trouble with Jungian archetypes. There only a few of them, and eventually you have to start recycling."
Ever since then, I’ve had a picture of a dart board at Rapaille’s headquarters. "Let’s find an archetype for sports cars! How about luncheon meats? Stand clear, everyone. I’m throwing for a South African resort!"
This is unkind. But hey, I’m entitled. Rapaille and I are in the same business. And he’s a big success. According to a recent story in Fast Company, Rapaille has a mansion in Tuxedo Park, an 9th century castle in France, his own helicopter, and millions of dollars. Until recently, I lived in a rickety condo in Montreal where I lived without a car, a chateau, a helicopter, or much in the way of a bank account. (I take my profits and pour them straight down the hole marked "deservedly obscure books." Clearly, I need a new investment advisor.)
I would not have offered comment had John Winsor not gently baited me on his blog today.
But comment is called for, because Clotaire Rapaille is a man without shame, the P.T. Barnum of the research world.
What else can we say about a man who claims to have understood Japanese, Chinese, German, American and Indian culture by "cracking their code." Rapaille says,
"The code is like an access code: How do you punch the buttons to open the door? Suddenly, once you get the code, you understand everything. It’s like getting new glasses."
When I listen to this kind of thing I think of Milton Singer, the great anthropologist at the University of Chicago who devoted his life to the study of India. "Did Professor Singer discover a code?" I ask myself. "Did he break through the South Asian security system?" My head spins.
I know enough about India to know that it is encompasses an almost limitless diversity. And this was true before it embraced the postmodernism that has reshaped global and local cultures. The idea that there is a code! This is ludicrous. The idea that someone can crack this code with a simple proposition, a lively phrase, a striking image! I think it’s just possible even the infinitely gentle Professor Singer might well have strangled you for suggesting as much.
Now, I am guilty as charged. I have presumed to do ethnographic marketing work many times in China and several times in India and Japan. To be credit, I always told the client (usually Kodak and the Coca-Cola Company) that the culture in question, that North America is my "beat." They always replied that they wanted the same eyes and ears for the problem at hand.
There is no code. There is just good marketing. Listen carefully. Identify the cultural meanings,the market conditions, and the economic constraints and inducements in place. Spot the opportunity. Sell the opportunity back in to the corporation. No theater. No fancy language. No professional Frenchman charisma. No glittering phrases. Just very clear insights that can be put into practice straight away.
Good market research, especially these days is bound by 3 rules that seem specially germane in a case like this one.
1) Research has to be bespoke. It has to come from the interviews in a particular way. It has to speak to the problem in a particular way. It has to be custom made. No Jungian dart boards. No prefab archetypes.
2) Good research should not be parading around in grand declamations and charismatic presentation. We are not branding an idea. We are reporting our findings. Good research is thoughtful, grounded, nuanced, and precise. It is after all social science, of a kind, and not theater, of any kind.
3) It’s not about us. The Fast Company records Rapaille’s eagerness to claim the success of the PT Cruiser has his own. "I discover the code, and–bingo!–the car sells like crazy." The article also notes the unhappiness of Chrysler employees when they hear of this. Good research delivers new insight but this insight will come from the corporation as much as it does the researcher. The research is working collaboratively with the consumer and the client.
But, hey, I’m keen on anything that works. And evidently, Rapaille has created lots of value for lots of clients. Fast Company suggests that up to 25% of his utterances may have substance. And let’s not forget. Sometimes it takes a PT Barnum to create a PT Cruiser.
References
For a brief summary of the career of Milton Singer, see his obituary here.
Sacks, Danielle. 2006. Crack this Code. Fast Company. Issue 104. April. here.
Winsor, John. Cracking the Culture. Under the Radar. April 19, 2006. here.
Acknowledgments
With thanks to J. Duncan Berry for giving me a head’s up on the Fast Company article.
Thanks to John Winsor for getting me to shoot my mouth off.
Branding the hard way (leave it to the MBAs)
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I went to the opera, Wagner, last night, a weird MET production that teetered between solemn and camp. Eesh.
Robert Wagner, now with this Wagner, an actor of standing, a man of deep and relentless talent, this sort of thing doesn’t happen. Ok, so it happens all the time. Never mind.
But what was really distressing was the conversation at dinner. I listened to people talk about how very confusing things are inside some corporations, how little clarity is brought to bear on critical questions of the brand.
It’s as if there’s no system. The marketing people, often MBAs, are reduced to issuing "make it so" pronouncements. Because, chances are, they don’t know how to "make it so." Let’s hope someone else does.
Business schools are not very forthcoming on this one. What is the brand? How does the brand speak for the marketing team and the corporation? How does it speak to the consumer, in all of his/her/their blooming? How does the brand keep it’s center of gravity in a culture that looks more and more like the Bermuda triangle in hurricane season. (Brands disappear! We don’t know why!) This is a complicated business about which the business school offers merely a chapter here and there, and at best a course in the second year.
But really it’s up to kids without much preparation to preside over the brand, and they are making a hash of it. Just ask anyone who works with them.
Brands, they are really, really, really hard to do well. Very smart people, with great training, working at the top of their game, with magnificent colleagues and limitless resources can still get it wrong. When is the business school world going to snap out of it and get this right?
When Wagner sings Wagner at the MET, that would be my guess. Maybe we should just start again.
Reading the Sunday Times
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The New York Times is beginning to look more and more like a badly tethered Macy’s parade float. One more busted guy wire and it’s good night and good luck.
In the Times yesterday, James Wolcott offered a fond remembrance of Dwight Macdonald.
Dwight Macdonald! If there is a 20th century man of letters who earned his obscurity fair and square, it’s Dwight Macdonald.
Macdonald bet heavily against popular culture. He specialized in scorning it. Here Wolcott remembers a debate between Macdonald and Stanley Kauffmann about filmmaking.
Stanley Kauffmann [] said he didn’t want to speak slightingly of "the popcorn crowd," which made Macdonald crack, "Aw, go ahead."
Kauffmann: "No, no; Ingmar Bergman has remarked that those who go to see a Doris Day film [...] may go to see one of his films the following week. Often in the same theater."
Macdonald: "They shouldn’t be allowed to."
[Finally] Kauffmann explained to the audience that Macdonald came from the Mencken generation, more comfortable responding to culture with a cynical No rather than an embracing Yes.
Macdonald pleaded guilty, but argued that experience had taught him the wisdom of heeding his inner veto power: "When I say no I’m always right, and when I say yes I’m almost always wrong."
But No was wrong and Yes was right. Hollywood continues to make films that would horrify even Kauffmann, but popular culture got better. In the language of Hargurchet Bhabra, popular culture became culture, the usual mixture of the good, the bad, the atrocious and the sublime. And, quite suddenly, it ceased to be an easy target.
Oh, damn. Bad luck for the intellectuals! It’s the 30s all over again. A couple of soup kitchens sustain them. One or two publications take them in. A few simpletons continue to bang the drum, but, really, who cares? (Ok, I do, evidently. Consider this custodial work. I am the man in a green twill jump suit, pushing confetti and stacking chairs in the hopes that stragglers will just go home.)
James Wood reviews a new book on Flaubert, and while this is less provocative, it remains a little, um, how shall I put this, oh, never mind.
Flaubert writes:
At the back of deserted cafes, women behind the bars yawned between their untouched bottles; the newspapers lay unopened on the reading-room tables; in the laundresses’ workshops the washing quivered in the warm draughts. Every now and then he stopped at a bookseller’s stall; an omnibus, coming down the street and grazing the pavement, made him turn round; and when he reached the Luxembourg he retraced his steps.
Wood comments:
This was published in 1869, but might have appeared in 1969; many, perhaps most, novelists still sound essentially the same. Flaubert scans the streets indifferently, it seems, like a camera. [W]hat he has selected is not of course casually scanned but quite savagely chosen, [] each detail is almost frozen in its gel of chosenness. How superb and magnificently isolate the details are – the women yawning, the unopened newspapers, the washing quivering in the warm air.
The flaneur exercised new liberties, noticing things not noticed, not noticeable, actually non negotiable, in the world of letters and polite society.
But I think Flaubert acknowledges that his literary powers are always up against a limit, that some of the things in his gaze sit on the verge of comprehension. And this makes him a friend of the blogger, anyone, in fact, who ambles through contemporary culture.
I would be grateful if you would stop reading, for a moment, and go to your Del.icio.us file. Tell me:
1) who many items you’ve clipped,
2) how many items you’ve reread (since clipping),
3) how many items you actually remember clipping,
4) how many items are now mysterious (as in "why did I clip this again?")
As contemporary flaneurs, sauntering through the virtual world, we are no longer choosing. The gel of chosenness, as Wood calls it, has liquefied and run away. We no longer file. Some time ago, filing gave way to piling. Piling gave way to binning, binning then to dumping. Happily, we’re using a virtual land tip. Still, we do we bother?
We bother because, before Del.icio.us, we were trailed everywhere on the internet by the uneasy feeling that this was a random search out of which nothing recoverable could come. I remember how thrilled I was by Del.icio.us. Finally, a map, a record, a way to recover my investment of time and effort. But I almost never go back.
Flaubert could retrace his steps. But when we exercise his liberty, the world overwhelms us. Much of what we see sits on the verge of comprehension, if only by weight and by volume. What was a test for Flaubert is a trial for us.
This continuity might have been worthy observing in the Times, but then of course the Times still believes in a manageable world, they believe they are a source of order, that they are architects of the manageable world. All the news that’s fit to print!
Come on, fellas. You are going to have to do better than Dwight Macdonald remembrances to make yourself useful.
References
Wolcott, James. 2006. Dwight Macdonald at 100. The New York Times. April 16, 2006.
Wood, James. 2006. The Man Behind Bovary. The New York Times. April 16, 2006.
Google Calendar: design matters?
Posted by: | CommentsDesign matters. AG Lafley says so. Debbie Millman says so. Virginia Postrel says so. Every creative profession and design industry says so (and have done so for years). Is there anyone who has not got the news?
Google apparently has not got the news. Yesterday it produced the Google calender. This will prove a useful part of their " giant killer" strategy.
But did they maximize the opportunity? Well, no. For some reason Google decided to not to add value by adding design. Here’s what they are showing on line at the moment. It’s clean. It’s also bland as can be.
What’s the issue here? How does design add value? Why does Google calendar disappoint?
1) we live our lives in the wind tunnel of contemporary culture. Data howls past us. We are Floridians in a data storm.
2) people need us to take information and make decisions. Preferably by lunch time. Certainly by the end of the business day.
3) most of us are always 2 or 3 data points away from chaos. ("That roof’s about to go. Get in the basement!")
Good design serve us especially well these days when it cools the world down. The iPod, for instance, takes many functions and makes them available in a very quiet package. All that music in an elegant little container. "Ah," we say, "that’s better."
Certainly, it’s about functionality. How well does the calendar capture, organize and deliver temporality? But a great calendar should make us feel areodynamic…as if we can stand in the wind tunnel of contemporary life with suffer undue damage to our senses or our wits. Increasingly, clarity will be the value that brands make available to us.
I believe Google won the search engine war partly because it gave us such an elegant interface. (Better than Alta Vista. Way better than Yahoo which always looked like a dog’s breakfast.) All those million and millions of pages out there on the net? "Nevermind," said Google design. "This is your gateway." One simple, very cool frame. "Ah," we said, "that’s better."
But somehow this design sensibility did not find its way throughout the Google corporate culture, and now that we need it most, with the calendar that promises to bring order to our chaos, elegance has given way to a Protestant plainness that says effectively, "God but your life is a mess. What is the matter with you?"
I believe that engineers are perhaps the community most resistant to the design message that has transformed the world of P&G, Target, Chrysler, Motorola, Apple, Six Apart, Starbucks, W Hotels, JetBlue, and us all. Finally, this is a community that in its heart, at its core, believes that design is something you add after the fact. Build the functionality. Hang the tinsel. Done.
I would have thought that Google understand that design matters. Maybe not so much.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2005. Design and the corporation. This blogs sits at the… October 25, 2005. here.
Millman, Debbie. Design Matters, broadcast Fridays between 3.4 EST on VoiceAmerica here.
Today, Debbie is interviewing William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand are partners in Winterhouse (here). Drenttel is president emeritus of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, a trustee of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and a Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities at NYU. Jessica Helfand is Senior Critic at Yale School of Art.
Nussbaum, Bruce. 2005. Target is a great design innovator. here.
Reingold, Jennifer. The Interpreter [on design at P&G]. Fast Company. June. here.
Scandal rocks New York Magazine
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What is the matter with New York magazine? This issue shows on the front cover a photograph of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie with their new baby (as pictured).
Just kidding! Those are models. Now that you’ve bought the magazine, the truth may be told. In 7 point type:
Requisite disclaimer: This is a fake picture Brad is an imposter; Angelina is a computer clone. The baby has not yet been born.
In the typography business, 7 point type is called "mouse print." It’s virtually invisible.
How craven do you have to fund your commercial success using someone else’s privacy (or the facsimile thereof)? How utterly without journalist scruple to trade in the bond between parent and child? How deeply and completely corrupt does this make you?
Using the photos of the real Jolie and Pitt would be objectionable. But New York magazine has stuped to turning real people into avatars, the better to have them do their bidding.
What’s especially galling is that it comes with a wink, as if to say
When New York magazine does this sort of thing it’s ok, because we’re being ironic, we’re having a little fun with the whole concept of celebrity, we’re being critical.
Ladies and gentlemen, when you hear these terms, I advise you to collect the silver and run for your lives. There is an intellectual mountebank in the house.
"Whole concept" is particularly telling. What it tells you is that the speaker is having a hard time "getting their head around" an idea. "Critical," especially when applied to "studies," "approach," or "theory," tells you that the writer is too stupid to understand that all studies, approaches and theories are "critical" except, rather too often, the ones that feel obliged to say they are.
Come to think of it, it’s a little like saying "requisite disclaimer." This is the kind of thing stupid people say when they’re trying to be cute. All disclaimers are requisite. Otherwise, we wouldn’t make them.
Oh, I’m sorry, did I give the impression that the editors and writers actually used language like "whole concept," and "critical?"
They have made their breakfast. Now they may lie in it.
That means you, Adam Moss, editor-in-chief, John Homans, executive editor, and Ann Clarke, managing editor. Shame on you.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2006. Celebrity Culture: Muddles in the models. This Blog Sits At The… October 10, 2005. here.
Zengerle, Jason. 2006. Not Since Jesus. New York. April 17, 2006, pp. 32-39.
Pink and the Stupid Girls Video II
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A couple of days ago, I was moved to comment on Pink’s "Stupid Girls" video. Why criticize the likes of Paris Hilton, Mary Kate Olsen, Jessica Simpson, and Lindsay Lohan? Why would Pink need to make herself a spokesperson for "smart girls?"
I was wrong…as readers pointed out! Tom Asacker observed that my examples of smart women were a generation or two too old. Patricia said, "There aren’t many young celebrity women equated with high intelligence that could be mentioned as effective role models." Anastasia Goodstein at YPulse made the good point that the high profile of the video may be taken as proof of its veracity.
I can’t recall the last time I heard a true pop song that made a meaningful social statement to any effect. I’m sure they were made, but the fact that I don’t remember them points to the fact that they didn’t have traction in the media or culture. But now, Pink’s "Stupid Girls" is arguably pulling it off, even if the social commentary is generally off-the-cuff and fairly shallow. The fact is, it is sparking a lot of discussion, and Pink’s new role is manifesting in ways I wouldn’t have previously imagined.
So it’s time for the anthropologist to think again. Last night I staged an informal focus group in the kitchen. We tried to think of young women who now serve as celelbrities. (There’s a good chance we missed some.)
Here’s the list we came up with:
Beyonce
Keira Knightley
Sarah Silverman
Avril Lavigne
Little Kim
Britney Spears
Christina Aguilera
Natalie Portman
Nora Jones
A word on Sarah Silverman. I really wanted to get this name on the list. (Silverman is evidently smart as the dickens and I was still trying to prove my original argument.) But it probably doesn’t belong there. 1) No one in my kitchen knew who she was. So she is not a celebrity in the full sense of the term. 2) It turns out, she is 36 years old. Damn.
It’s worth pointing out that Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Lindsay Lohan all went through "bad girl" moments. This appeared designed to free them from the Disney brat pack, "not a girl, not a woman," vacuity, and to give them sufficient substance to survive the transition into older markets and new, more substantial material. On the other hand, some will say that this new persona was a "dumbed down," that these girls were turning themselves into witless boy toys.
Avril Lavigne is in that pop punk tradition (not so much angry as bad tempered) but I think it would be wrong that she dumbed herself down to win stardom. The great case in point is of course Natalie Portman, Harvard educated, articulate, beautiful, charismatic. This is I believe is what everyone means by a role model.
Summing, there is some evidence to the contrary, but in general it appears to be true that young women (late teens, early 20s) are not supplied with an extraordinary number of smart girl exemplars. This raises two questions: are young men? (and) is this age group ever so favored? I leave these questions to very smart readers.
A couple of days ago, I wrote a piece about "what it’s like to be 18." Apparently, I left one condition out: when you are 18, you are not well served by your heroes.
References
Goodstein, Anastasia. 2006. Pink’s Smart Girl PR. Ypulse. April 10, 2006. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2006. Pink and the stupid girl video. This blog sits at… March 31, 2006. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2006. What’s it like being 18. This blog sits at… March 27, 2006. here.
Future of Television II: the multiplicity play
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The future of television got a little clearer today, as news of the Disney/ABC plan continue to trickle out.
(Piercing this together feels a little like pouring through Pravda to figure out Soviet intentions during the Cold War.)
One thing that jumps out is a multiplicity theme. I think that’s the "new new" here.
What we learned today:
1. unskippable ads will be shorter than conventional TV ads (still no indication of how "unskippable" is possible)
2. it appears that some people are thinking that more engaging ads will help make ads at least "less skippable." Noreen Simmons of Unilever says, "It’s going to be a different viewing experience. Rather than people sitting back in their chairs watching TV, this is going to be a lean-forward experience." This seems to resonate with the notion of "engagement advertising" recently proposed by Joe Plummer. Clearly, this does not solve the fast-forward problem, but it appears to be part of the strategic package.
3. assuming Disney/ABC continues to sell episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives through the iTunes music store, the consumer will be able to choose whether to buy an episode that is ad-free (for $1.99) or watch ad-full.
4. Anne Sweeney, co-chair, Disney Media Networks and president, Disney-ABC Television Group, (pictured) appears unconcerned about the possibility of cannibalization (and channel discord). Indeed, Ms. Sweeney seems to see multiple streams as a value add for the viewer. If we miss our show in first run, we can use internet download to catch up, and iPod purchase to catch up on the run.
(This model assumes that the viewer will not choose one stream, but work with several of them to manage the complexities of their own lives. Some seem to assume that viewers will segment by channel choice, as they choose a single platform and use it exclusively. This does not conform to anything else we know about the new consumers.)
5. Ms. Sweeney volunteered, "None of us live in the world of one business model." I think this marks a big shift in the world of marketing thought and practice. This is a senior manager saying, ‘listen, the world is multiple, we will work its complexity for our advantage and as a value ad for the consumer.’ When you think about how much the notion of cannibalization has terrorized marketing decision making, this is pretty remarkable. We might go so far as to say that Sweeney has opened up the future of TV by embracing a multiplicity model.
6. No hint in any of this whether Sweeney will open up shows like Lost to greater cocreation. The studios and the networks are sometimes slow to relinquish any kind of creative control to the viewer, but cocreation is precisely one of the things that encourages the use of several media and if this is one of Sweeney’s objectives, she might want to give MIT’s Henry Jenkins’ a call about this thing called "transmedia."
7. Sweeney was quoted today as saying,
"In the future, consumers will rely more and more on strong brands to help them navigate the digital world, and we have some of the strongest brands in entertainment. Our digital media efforts will help us strengthen our connection with our consumers. Stay tuned … because this is just the beginning."
If I were an analyst with a bet to make on Disney, this sort of talk would make me uncomfortable. It is unquestionably true that the Disney is a choice making portal that guarantees certain standards of quality and a certain moral tone. This makes them a favorite supplier for families struggling to rise their kids well. Got it.
But the world of the viewer has changed dramatically here. (Henry Jenkins is once more the go-to guy on this question.) We have seen the emergence of a more confident, more participatory viewer/consumer. Now we could just as easily say,
"In the future, the brand well rely more and more on strong consumers to help them navigate the digital world…"
And as it stands, there is nothing in these several Pravadas that suggests Sweeney understands this part of the proposition.
In sum, the Disney move appears to take a page from the multiplicity play book. Thus does TV change to remain the same.
References
Barnes, Brooks and Brian Sternberg. Disney’s Web Move Shakes Up Decades-Old TV Model. Wall Street Journal. April 11, 2006. B1, B2.
Bosman, Julie. 2006. Soon, Catch "Lost" Online, a Day Later. New York Times. April 11, 2006. here.
Shields, Mike. 2006. ABC to put hit shows on line. AdWeek on line. April 11, 2006. by subscription. here.
The reinvention of television: so now we know
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Disney is planning to show Desperate Housewives, Lost and other programs on line for free. Viewers would be obliged to watch ads.
If this works, we are looking at the reinvention of television.
The winners:
conventional programming
(for now, conventional content will continue, new media will not make for new messages…yet)
conventional advertising
(30 seconds ads, challenged by TIVO and purchase, are restored)
The losers:
cable
(Moonves, CBS CEO, has been talking about the "cable bypass," here it is. Cable loses twice, as the pipeline and as the supplier of on-demand content)
TIVO
(eventually, all content will be available all the time)
DVDs
(why have our own copies if all content is available all the time?)
The network and its affiliates
(remind me, what’s an "affiliate" again? The tail that so often wagged the network dog is now in peril.)
television sets
(we will no longer "watch TV" to watch TV)
Google
(Google wanted to be a video pipe line. ABC has not forgiven them technical SNAFUs)
Apple
The Ipod "pay per" model is now at risk. In the early days of television subscription models were hoped for. The British pursued this with license fees for the BBC. Then advertising paid the way. History repeats itself.
The questions:
1) The WSJ says Disney will an attempt to engage an on-line community:
[V]iewers from around the country will be able to gather in "rooms" online to watch an episode of, say, "Lost" and chat about it. Disney will also promote the creation of fan sites for various shows. "We want to tie all of these fan sites closer to our brand," Mr. Cheng says.
Can Disney build on-line communities? This will take more than chat rooms, and there’s a good chance that Disney will fail to rise to the challenge. Real fan engagement will demand an approach that is too far from the Disney corporate culture.
2) Disney claims that viewers will have to watch the whole ad. This despite the fact that the programming itself will have fastforward capability. It’s hard to see how this make sense. Even if it works, surely someone will invent a TIVO for Internet.
References
Barnes, Brooks. 2006. Disney Will Offer Many TV Shows Frre on the Web: ABC’s Prime-time hits and Zap-Proof Commercials are Pillars of Bold Strategy. Wall Street Journal. April 10, 2006. subscription required. here.
