Archive for October, 2006
Elementary marketing
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Pam and I live near a building site, and many mornings, banging away at my ThinkPad, I hear the rumble of a big engine and the sound of a horn. It’s a lunch wagon.
This is marketing. Go to where the consumer is and make a joyful sound. This is marketing in its simplest, more elemental form. I am guessing, but I am pretty sure the guy who drives the lunch wagon manages without a marketing plan, a website, or, God knows, the advice of a consultant. He and his wife prepared sandwiches the night before. The next day, he drives by construction sites and blows his horn.
Ok, it’s not as simple as that. There are cultural rules even here. Some guys use the horn that comes with the truck. But I’ve noticed that some people have installed a special "lunch wagon horn." This horn has a lot more flourish in it than a conventional car horn. It actually sounds a little like a "horse and hound" horn. Considering how hard it is to make a living this way, it is a small miracle that anyone bothers with a new horn. But, hey, there is a right way and a wrong way to do this. Culture has spoken. And the consumer responds (apparently).
Then there is the way you use the horn. You could simply give one long blast, in the manner of a fog horn. Or you could give lots of little blits. Or you could change it everytime. All you are really doing is announcing yourself. And it’s not like you are competing with other horns. Any sort of sound should do.
But no. The convention insists you give a "a couple of cheery blasts." Robust tooting. Apparently this sends a message. The guy who comes by "our" building site makes his horn sound beckoning, whimsical, and good natured. He actually makes the horn sound like break time: fun, indulgent, a break from drudgery and tedium.
Ok, so even this simplest commercial message is coded and symbolically purposeful. Even this is a promise, a contract and a message, an exercise in meaning management. I am sure these guys have done their tests. They blow this horn hundreds of times a week, plenty of time to see what works and what does not. Plenty of time to experiment and perfect. Plenty of time to make meanings and then to see which of them make money.
It turns out that the simplest form of marketing isn’t all that different from the more elaborate kinds we work on day to day. There is just "no percentage" in being all informational about it. There is no point in selling the function, stupid. There is no point in just blowing your horn to say, "I am selling something. Come here now." You want to communicate the value proposition beyond the utilitarian. You want to construct what’s on offer.
Do I ever go out and have a coffee? No, I’m too busy banging away at my ThinkPad. I should really. Next time. Maybe he can give me marketing advice.
Katie Couric and celebrity that is bundled not blended
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It was the strangest thing. Suddenly, in the summer of 2006, from diverse corners, I heard people speaking ill of Katie Couric. Nothing specific. But it was unmistakeable and ubiguitous. The talk grumpy and shocked.
Then I heard Ms. Couric was planning to leave her NBC day-time show, Today, for the CBS Evening News. Interestingly, no one was criticizing her for seeking a change in assignments. No, they were speaking ill of her character, her intelligence, or good intentions.
The mystery of the criticism (and especially, the misdirected nature of the criticism) makes sense if we suppose that people were registering a sense of dissonance. Something about the day-time Couric was incompatible with the proposed "Couric" of the evening news.
I haven’t done the research here, but at a distance some things seem clear. The day time Couric (DTC) fashioned a particular bargain with the American viewer. DTC would be unthreatening, approachable, winning. She would forswear any of the grandeur or power that adheres to the celebrity of Angelina Jolie or even a Diane Sawyer. No, DTC would be diminutive in every sense. She would be "cute," the least threatening of the public persona a woman can assume. She would, in short, be "Katie," not Katherine.
It was if viewers were dubious. How could diminutive DTC occupy a position of a sage, dignified, and solemn of a nighttime newsreader. The American viewers had "bought" the first construction of the public Couric. And they were taking umbrage at her symbolic relocation.
It is a larger anthropological question why it is our day time personality should have to be approachable and nightime newsreaders austere. Perhaps, we suppose that the "vessel" of nighttime news must be stout enough to withstand the emotional difficulty and moral horror contained in many newscasts. Perhaps its a simpler sexism that says that news reading at night is a kind of rhetorical heavy lifting and to this extent "men’s work."
In any case, this opens up an interesting case study in the world of meaning management. This is the kind of thing that marketers know how to think about. At least, I think we do.
The first question is whether some meanings are nonnegotiable. Once a celebrity or a brand lays claim to them, the deal is done. We can shift the line of the ocean liner we have created. But, effectively, no real changes of direction are possible. This point of view would have said that Katie Couric was now the captive of our persona and that the nighttime news was a bad idea.
The second question says, if meanings are negotiable, how do we negotiate them? Clearly, CBS is doing their darndest. They have changed the pronounciation of Ms. Couric’s name. They have worked on hair style and color. Clothing is, I am sure, a matter of constant debate. Ditto, he temper and pacing of Ms. Couric’s speaking voice.
One option is clearly out. It doesn’t make any sense to rush to the other extreme, and insist that Katie is now Katherine. There is no point in dressing Ms. Couric up in gravitas, even if this is the single most frequently used adjective when it comes to praising newscaster. No, the point of the exercise was to give gravitas a certain approachability, to "port" Ms. Couric’s winningness into role of the newscaster. Clearly, CBS was hoping that Katie + newscaster would reach out to new segments, to animate and perhaps soften the news.
But if the news today is anything to judge by, things are not going well. The CBS Evening News has fallen to third place. Splicing the old Couric with the newscaster role is not working. I think from an anthropological and a marketing point of view, it is fair to say there is no sweet spot, no point where these two meanings meet and mix. In our culture, thanks perhaps to several centuries of gender discrimination, these categories (the approachable and the austere) are mutually inconsistent. One is what the other is not.
Unless we are simply to throw up our hands and say this is a bad idea, one must find another strategy. I think the real possibility is an episodic approach, so that Ms. Couric is sometimes approachable and sometimes grave, but never attempts to be the two together. This takes a careful crafting of the message, but if I were CBS I would be scouring the career of Elizabeth I, a monarch who deftly sought to win both love and fear by demonstrating being sometimes one monarch and sometimes another,so to inspire the loyalty of her fractious, diverse, easily distracted subjects (and in this very like the American TV viewing public).
What we are talking about here is an approach to meaning making that does not blend, but bundles. The brand message looks then like a cable cut open. The constituent meanings are not just distinct but color coded. At any point in the cable, we can see which is which. This is possible. Elizabeth turned into into a monarchy of astounding power and longevity in the face of challenges religious, military, geopolitical, economic, social, cultural, and conceptual. Geez, by this standard, the evening news ought to be clear sailing.
References
Johnson, Peter. 2006. Ratings Dip, but Couric Stays Upbeat. USA Today. October 29, 2006. here.
Several authors. n.d. Katie Couric. Wikipedia. here.
Meet Rosie, scourge of the new advertising
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Volvo and Nissan both have ads on TV at the moment. One recalls the greatness that was advertising, the other gives us advertising’s dismal present.
The Nissan ad is called "Seven Days in a Sentra" and it features a young man spending a week in his car. At the end of the first spot, Marc Horowitz looks into the camera and says, "this could get interesting."
But it never does. There was a time, 10 years ago, when this idea was fresh and funny. Now it is an exercise in the obvious, right down to Marc’s garden gnome, that object of the college prank transplanted to the mainstream by the movie Amelie and then forced into over exposure by those tremendously bad Travelocity ads.
Now the odd thing is that the campaign is adored by Barbara Lippert, Adweek’s brilliant judge of advertising. So maybe I’m wrong. But I can’t help feeling that the creative team sat down and decided to "get a little crazy" in pursuit of a younger consumer. One of the new rules of advertising: don’t ever patronize your market, especially when they enjoy acute sensitivity to contemporary culture in general and marketing in particular.
(It is perhaps too easy to blame the agency [TBWA\CHIAT\DAY, Playa Del Rey]. Ever since Carlos Ghosn moved the Nissan marketing team to Nashville, we have had to wonder what the costs might be. Maybe this sort of ad plays in Nashville. More probably, when you live in Nashville, it’s hard to see that it doesn’t play on the coasts.)
Lippert likes the Sentra campaign she says because there is "genius…in the casting."
Horowitz’s good-natured, quirky, inventive and flexible approach to life is delightful to watch.
But in an era of really gifted comics and satirists, people capable of interrogating contemporary life until the seams burst and the lining tears away (think Jon Heder [Napoleon Dynamite] or Sasha Baron Cohen [Borat], ) this ends up looking "indie lite," or agit prop with the "agit" excised, or performance art turned into dinner theatre. (When your average frat boy would have been wittier, you know you have a problem.)
Now to the good news: a Volvo ad called "Rosie" that features a little girl chattering away as her Dad buckles her into the back seat of the family car.
This is advertising as we used to make it. Someone sat down and thought about the value proposition of any car from a father’s point of view (something like "safe passage"), the standard feature of the Volvo value proposition ("really safe passage"), and then looked for a way to propose this proposition in a manner that is interesting and powerful.
Sweet Jerusalem, they hit this one so far out of the park, it’s still traveling. Rosie, a little girl of about 5, is talking, talking, and talking (as above, complete with visual aid). We can’t tell what she is saying. She could be reporting a story, she could be making one up. (Actually, it’s hard to tell: is Rosie telling the story, or is the story, with its calls for dramatic gesture and exclamation, telling her?) Dad hesitates to close the door for fear of interrupting, but it’s clear to us (and to him) that there is no interrupting this great spill of detail, enthusiasm and fluting talk.
One of the things I love about the ad is that "Dad" is played with restraint. It would have been easy to have him "mug" his reaction or signal how achingly sweet this moment is. But, no, that would have been patronizing. Rosie is plenty because Rosie is everything. We know exactly what is going on here. No additional indexing, no additional "viewing instructions" are necessary. What we get from Dad, at the end of the spot, is the littlest smile as he drives away. Rosie, of course, is still talking.
Rosie’s talking jag is the sort of thing that one parent might report back to another. It’s possible that the grandparent’s might hear about it. But it is also the sort of thing that is so deeply implicated in family life that, chances are, it will not stay in memory. After the fact, Dad might say, "yeah, that Rosie has always been a chatter box" but the treasure of this moment will not make it into the family’s "oral tradition," into the scrap book or into the attic. It is evanescent. It is gone.
Someone at the agency went and recovered it. (Did they get it from research? Did it come from a brainstorm?) And they seized on it as a way for us to think about "really safe passage" and the value that Volvo creates. Left to their own devices, the automotive engineers will wow us with side impact tests and braking stats. And we can communicate these to the consumer with promises of "safety." And, bless them, even in a focus group, the consumer pretends to be interested, because, hey, who isn’t interested in safety?
But when the pitch is about safety, the particular gets lost in the general. Yes, we all believe in safety, in the way we all believe in motherhood or iPods. But for God’s sake, safety does not work as a brand proposition, and it isn’t something Volvo can claim for itself, unless it is made vivid, actual, human, and urgent.
Rosie is safety made vivid, actual, human and urgent. It is when we see a little girl telling a story from her Dad’s point of view that see how much safety matters. Now it’s clear. Now it’s clear that Volvo is worth every penny of the price premium, and the styling shortfall, that Volvo obliges us to pay for it.
There are several ways to express the value augmentation, the meaning manufacture, taking place here. Here’s one: Rosie’s story > (augments) Rosie’s charm > Rosie’s vulnerability > Dad’s responsibility and solicitude > Volvo’s safety. Actually, we could parse it a couple of ways. And this too is the measure of a great ad. It has a kind of semiotic redundancy built into it. We can see it several ways but we always up back in the same place.
But enough about the anthropology. What about the advertising? It turns out we can choose. We can choose between agencies that chase after new segments with palid recitations of the kind of thing the consumer can do better while sleepwalking. Or we can tell human and branding stories with such power that the world comes to us. If advertising (and marketing and anthropology) learned anything in the 1990s, it was this: don’t play your consumer, don’t patronize. Do what you do as well as you can do. Find the value propositions and tell its story with all the creative power and cultural knowledge the agency has at its disposal. Or, as we might now put it, find the Rosie within.
References
Anonymous. 2006. Nissan’s Long Haul To Nashville. BusinessWeek. July 3, 2006. here.
Lippert, Barbara. 2006. Living la Vida Nissan: TBWA’s inventive campaign stars a man, a car and a life. Adweek. October 23, 2006, p. 26. here.
For a YouTube version of the Volvo ad, here.
Hats off to the authors of this ad:
(details courtesy of Euro RSCG Worldwide)
Title of campaign – Volvo “Who Would You Give a Volvo To?”
Network – Euro RSCG Worldwide
Office – Euro RSCG Worldwide New York
Advertiser – Ford Motor Company
Brand – Volvo Cars North America
Product Category – Automotive
Launch Month/Year – September 2006
Geographical Area – North America
AGENCY credits-
Global Chief Executive Officer: David Jones
Chief Executive Officer, NY and San Francisco: Ron Berger
Executive Creative Director: Jeff Kling
Creative Director: Nick Cohen
Art Director: Julie Lamb
Copywriter: Risa Mickenberg
Contributor: Sharoz Marakechi
Director of Broadcast Production: Joe Guyt
Director of Broadcast Production, Business Affairs: Cathy Pitegoff
Associate Producer: Becky Burkhard
Group Account Director: Ian Marlowe
Account Mgmt: Edward Yu, Caroline Jackson and Amy Richardson
Business Manager: Deborah Steeg
Talent: Dawn Kerr
PRODUCTION credits
Production Company AND City: Furlined, Los Angeles
Director: Pekka Hara
Director of Photography: Joaquin Baca-Asay
Executive Producer: David Thorne
Producer: Rob Stark
Wharton giveth and Wharton taketh away (or, why 57 million consumers must be wrong)
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Wharton reveals that consumer centricity is coming even to the health care industry. In a Knowledge@Wharton interview, Mike McCallister, Humana CEO, says:
When we decided to set the strategy for this company after I became CEO
in 2000, one of the most important decisions we ever made was to organize and drive this company around the simple premise that the consumer had to be at the heart of health care. Now there’s a lot of talk around that idea today. Six years ago there wasn’t anybody talking about it and there weren’t many people going down that path. If you think about health care and the way it operates and has for a hundred years — very paternalistic, no information — it’s a mother and father "may I" kind of environment. To have the consumer at the core of how it’s organized seems so simple and seems so right — except when you talk to health care people, who think it’s crazy. That decision was a big one and has really guided everything we’ve done for the last six years with varying levels of success…. What’s particularly gratifying is that the rest of the industry has now decided they’re going to go down this path, too. We get the benefit of having been at it for a while, and we also take pride in the fact that we may have helped nudge the industry toward consumers. (emphasis added)
Wharton also reports the Pew Internet and American Life Project finding that 57 million American adults now read individual blogs. But this does not impress one member of the marketing faculty, Xavier Dreze.
Blogs are the latest forum for people who have nothing to say that others actually care about. [...] I don’t see the point. It’s a bunch of people writing their opinions, and those people have no credibility. The information content is very low.
Thank you, Professor Dreze. Consumer centricity, I guess this has to work it’s way through the health care industry before it reaches the marketing faculty of a major business school.
References
Hunter, Dan et al., 2006. To Blog or not to blog: Report from the front. Knowledge@Wharton: Managing Technology. October 18, 2006. here.
Useem, Michael and Stephen Wilson. 2006. An interview with Humana CEO Mike McCallister: Letting the Consumer Drive Innovation. Knowledge@Wharton, October 25, 2006. here.
Hoax!
Posted by: | CommentsOne of my happiest discoveries in graduate school was an article called "the limits of Elizabethan credulity," from which I learned that Elizabethans believed in ghosts, magic, alchemy and unicorns. (The last were, they believed, merely scarce.)
This article got me wondering about the line between credible and incredible in the present day, and in the last couple of days I have started to wonder whether "American credulity" is not shifting.
Borat pretends to being a documentary. Most of us are hip to the joke. We "get" that this is parodic, that Sasha Baron Cohen, the creator and star, is "just kidding."
But the anthropologist is a bore. He insists on asking:
1) what are the signals that tell us something is parodic?
2) who gets them?
3) do some people not get them?
4) how many people need to fail to get them before we may (or must) cry "hoax"?
Now, I know what you are thinking. You would actually have to be from Kazakhstan not to understand that Borat is a parody.
But what about these other examples? Sega did a campaign that pretended to be the diary of someone trying to "blow the whistle" on the dangerous properties of Sega game.
Mini USA released "actual footage" of a giant robot. The animation is really good, but what sold me on this hoax was the opening interview with a British engineer pottering about in his cardigan and his garden shed. Note perfect.
Alright, so I am from Kazakhstan. I only wish that MIT colleagues, Sam Ford and Ivan Askwith, had not been there to see me fall for it. (Very politely, they pretended not to notice the shocking elasticity of my credulity.)
The world is now filled with what we hope are note perfect confabulations. And the odd thing: we don’t much care. This used to be the job of the chattering classes: to police the difference between appearance and reality, between veritas and verisimilitude. Indeed, the 1990s seemed preoccupied with conspiracy with the Kennedy assassination and Roswell that were all about the possibility that some things were just appearances. If someone were to restage War of the Worlds, would there be the outcry, the indignation that greeted Orson Wells? I don’t think so.
What happened to the cry: Hoax!
References
Mini ads. These have disappeared from the internet without a trace. Anyone who can find them is urged to let me know.
The Sega ads here.
Post bonus: A Citroen ad that might have been a hoax except that we are way too canny. Or perhaps I am missing something. Thoughts here.
Innovations for the Innovator
Posted by: | CommentsThe corporation once had a "perfect world" scenario: create an extraordinary product in a blue ocean (i.e., new) category and defend a fountain of profit with good strategy and smart tactics.
In the perfect world, change came in increments. Some competitors would enter the category with some variation on the theme. Others would look for "nook and cranny" weaknesses. The corporation would secure it’s position with incremental responses…and profit poured forth.
The world changed. Now, the corporation is subject to blind side hits. Now the problem is not incremental challenges, but fundamental shifts. For Time Warner, this was the rise of an advertising based revenue model. For The Coca-Cola Company, it was the rise of the non-corbonated soft drink. For Microsoft, it was the rise first of the internet and then server-based software. For Detroit, it was Japan. (The irony: while American corporations are being encouraged to set out in search of "blue oceans," the real challenge are the great masses of water that come looking for them.)
These changes require fundamental shifts in corporate assumption and practice. And this is hard. Corporations rise to greatness because they are good at, say, CSDs (carbonated soft drinks). The advent of Snapple and Gatorade forces them to take on the new, but often this feels like a betrayal of the very things that make the corporation exceptional. "Sure," goes the complaint, "we can make fruit juice, but what we exist to make CSDs!"
It is, finally, a cultural problem. CSD assumptions supply not just the "what" and the "why" of the corporation, but it’s deepest, most powerful, and least visible assumptions, the "unknown knowns," we might call them (with apologies to Donald Rumsfeld).
The problem at corporations like Time Warner, the Coca-Cola Company, Microsoft and "Detroit," is not intellectual laziness, a failure of the imagination, or, God knows, a failure of will. The problem is that non-incremental change forces the corporation off its game, out of its competence, and away from its deepest understandings of the world. Adaptation is possible, but a voice of warning sounds in the head of the senior manager: that way lies the destruction of the extraordinary intellectual, strategic, and cultural capitals that make us who we are. That way lies chaos.
There are lots of ways to rethink the corporation so that it can address the problem of non-incremental change. There is the challenge taken up by Brown and Eisenhardt, Foster and Kaplan, Hammer and Chompy, Handy, Peters, Prahalad, to name a few. The corporation is learning new tricks. The new corporation is being invented fitfully, gradually, and painfully. But it’s coming.
Innovator’s innovation 1
What I would like to see, for deeply self interested reasons, is the creation of an observation platform from which we can keep an eye out for the next new things. In keeping with our Tsunami references, let’s call it a wheelhouse, a conning tower, or a ship’s bridge.
The trick would be to find 5 or 6 really smart, well educated, well informed, well connected, deeply curious, utterly practical people. These qualifications create a tiny Venn intersection, but, hey, we only need 5 or 6 people.
Innovator’s innovation 2
Once potential changes are identified, it is time to see what difference their difference will make. How will the corporation as it is presently constituted in these particular waters? This will help us to find, extract and replace the "unknown knowns" in the corporate culture.
Innovator’s innovation 3
Ok, now we need to build a series of simulated corporations, fit them out, run them in a tub somewhere, and refit as necessary. (Will someone please scuttle the naval metaphor, please!) We can’t wait till the future is here to start the work of adaptation. We want to have done the conceptual work for eventualities well before they eventuate.
Ok, out of time.
References
Brown, Shona L. and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt. 1998. Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Foster, Richard and Sarah Kaplan. 2001. Creative Destruction. New York: Currency.
Hammer, Michael, and James Champy. 1993. Reengineering the Corporation. New York: HarperBusiness.
Handy, Charles. 1990. The Age of Unreason. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Kim, Chan and Renee Mauborgne. 2005. Blue Ocean Strategy. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Peters, Tom. 1987. Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for Management Revolution. New York: Knopf.
Prahalad, C.K. and Venkat Ramaswamy. 2004. The Future of Competition. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Getting better at Borat
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Ok, I think I’m starting to understand the notable Kazakhstani anthropologist, Borat. (See my first go, Friday.)
The stereotyping of Kazakhstan in the movie Borat is shameless and knuckleheaded, but it does help to establish Borat’s bona fides as a child of innocence (COI).
And Borat has to be a creature from another, utterly other culture to make key scenes in the movie work…as when he asks politely (in a deleted scene from Borat) the best way to prepare his newly adopted puppie for eating.
And it is essential that he make this work because it reveals that the pound owner who defends the puppie in question has no scruples about committing herself to the most outrageous anti-semitism.
The Borat character is good at anthropology, and his ethnographic excursion works as a kind of "edge finding" to use the language of trend watchers and futurists.
On the Conan O’Brien show, he investigated the categories and rules that govern what people may say about desire, especially in the highly codified circumstances of the talk show.
The interview is just settling down, when Borat comments on Queen Latifah, and says with great sincerity.
"I would like to make a romance inside of her."
O’Brian shakes his head in astonishment, and it is clear that he is thinking exactly what the rest of us are thinking. This is a patent obscenity, except…well, perhaps, the charming and old fashioned "romance" saves it.
Does it. Or doesn’t it? Where’s the edge? What’s the rule? Everyone is now desparately trying to "run the numbers" to find the reading that would make it OK and more or less COI. Which of course we can’t. Ok.
Finally, O’Brien asks, "you want to make a romance inside of her?"
Borat replies with great feeling and sincerity, and a resignation that says "I know I am asking for the stars, and that I do not deserve such a thing."
"I hope."
This sells the joke and the COI notion to perfection. This guy has no clue how far off acceptable behavior he has put himself.
But the boundary testing is not done. Second laters, with pitch perfect wonder and good natured indignation, Borat asks Conan.
"You tell me, you would not like to make a liquid explosion in Queen Latifah?"
This is over the top. Conan is horrified. The audience recoils. Ok, we can draw the line right here. Not even good natured innocence will forgive this. Not in our culture. Not on a talk show.
We suspect that this is where Borat likes to end up, well outside the boundaries of acceptable culture. But we also suspect that he likes to get there by stages and not before he has confounded our distinctions.
This guy reminds me of Peter Sellers, but the two comedians could not be more different. Sellers liked to get inside his comedic creations (see his perfectly distinct characters in Dr. Strangelove). Cohen likes to set up shop between them.
References
Cohen, Sasha Baron. Pound (Deleted Scene from Borat). YouTube. here.
Cohen, Sasha Baron. Borat on Conan O’Brien. YouTube. here.
Cohen, Sasha Baron. Borat [opening four minutes] YouTube. [featured on sidebar of YouTube homepage]. here.
Dark matter and marketing
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Several weeks ago, a bolt of excitement ran through the scientific community. There was now direct proof of the existence of "dark matter."
Several decades ago it was recognized that galaxies rotate much faster than their mass, stricktly speaking, allows. Theorists suggested that something must keep these galaxies from flying apart. They called this something "dark matter."
I am beginning to wonder if marketers and social scientists should posit a "dark matter" of our own.
There are, at least, two forces at work in the contemporary world. One is fragmentation. Every social group (i.e., nation, culture, ethnic, subcultural) is fragmenting into smaller groups. Every organization is "baggier" than it used to be, containing a looser assembly of elements themselves more numerous and more heterogeneous in nature than before. Indeed, even small units (neighborhoods, familities and selves) feel the effects of fragmentation.
The other force is change. This comes faster and goes further. What used to take a century can now happen in a decade. What used to take a decade can now happen in a year or two. (Let’s mark YouTube as exhibit "A." This organization went from nothing to $1.6 billion of value in a couple of years.)
Between the two of them, fragmentation and change put the very system of contemporary life in question. In the first decade of the 21st century, "system" is too generous a word. There is no overarching architecture. But things do seem to work together, the center does somehow hold. We might not have a system but we are still systematic-ish. So is this good for the duration? Is there a point at which things cease to sync? At what point do fragmentation and change accumulate until a wheel comes off?
This is no liberal cry. I am not making an argument about "the world we have lost," life before the "cash nexus," or the effects of alienation, anomie, or bowling alone. The sociologists and one or two economists have made a good living telling us the sky is falling, and I dearly hope that I have not just signed on as one of them.
But I am growing impatient with the Panglossian argument that says that we are sustained by the invisible hand of "emergent properties" or the "wisdom of crowds." I used to buy this, and I might sign up again some day. But as an anthropologist, I do "look down" every so often to see to what sustains contemporary world. I am always relieved to see that we are not "treading air" but usually I am hard pressed to see what holds us up.
Is there dark matter there. What am I missing?
References
Anonymous. 2006. Galactic crash sheds light on mysterious dark matter: researchers. Anatara News. here.
Borat and the rest of us
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Borat has broken, and it’s star, Sacha Baron Cohen, is now in the ascendancy. Without much thinking about it, I assumed this guy was another trickster figure in a long line of trickster figures (John Belushi, Jim Carrey, Tom Green, Dave Chappelle…).
But no.
Borat was screened this summer for the likes of Garry Shandling, George Meyer, Judd Apatow, and Larry David.
When the movie ended and the lights came up, everyone realized they had just seen something totally original, perhaps even revolutionary. Capturing the sense of collective astonishment, Meyer turned to Apatow and said, "I feel like something just played me Sgt. Pepper’s for the first time." (EW, as below)
"Totally original"! ""Revolutionary"? What a good way to get our attention. Post modern cultures, as Baudrillard would say, keep things in circulation, creating novelty out of precedent. By this account, originality is impossible.
So what happened? What’s new? Rottenberg speculates that Cohen offers us satire that never acknowledges itself. Borat never once gives the audience an ironic wink, no "get a load of this" respite. This could be true, but I don’t remember Tom Green ever acknowledging his satire, at least in the early years.
It could be that Cohen is more daring than other tricksters. His Ali G character could be read as racist. Borat is unmistakably anti-semitic. Borat holds the nation of Kazakhstan up to ridicule, a character assassination of vast proportions. But this is a difference of degree, not kind. Many comedians are rule breaking. To say that Cohenis more rule breaking does not, cannot, sustain a claim to originality.
Perhaps what matters is a daring of another kind. The filming of Borat took star and crew into peril. Director Larry Charles says,
We walked into extremely hostile situations that we then exacerbated into incredibly hostile situations. (EW, as below)
Well, maybe. This exercise in comedic ambush looks as if targets were chosen with the advice of Michael Moore (i.e., all targets are the favorite liberal ones). Unless you are prepared to subject your own world to satire and ridicule, it’s not really courageous comedy. (When you make fun of your own, there is no place to hide.)
Strickly speaking, the expert here is Leora Kornfeld and if she would grace us with a study of Borat I would be proud to host it. In the meantime, may I offer this suggestion?
Borat is about boundaries. We live in a time of porous boundaries. If you will forgive a moment of self reference, here’s something I posted in 2004.
Selves, groups, institutions, nations, cultures are all now more porous and less bounded than they used to be. Once we were like silos. Now we are now more like bird cages: positively breezy in our willingness to admit influences from outside. (lightly edited, McCracken, as below)
In a culture with diminished boundaries, some are consumed by the spirit of adventure. Is there anything I cannot say or do? Is there anyone I may not be?
Borat is the last moment in a longstanding cultural development, one that takes on new power and definition from the avant garde of the 20th century. Artists and poets (the predecessor of our comedian) looks to see what sensibilities may be scandalized. French painters and their successors the American beat writers lay seige to several of the pieities and clarities of bourgeois culture. And it worked. Eventually the movement was embraced even by the middle class. Once unmistakeable ideas are now marked not by boundaries but quotation marks.
Enter Borat. This character comes to offer a last test, a mopping up exercise. Are there any boundaries left? Well, in certain social circles (both conservative and radical), there will always be boundaries left. (It is interesting to see how often these groups devote themselves almost entirely to what the boundaries are. Much Punk discourse is about Punk boundaries.) Borat is the last enemy of our fixity. He is the new champion of our fluidity. Borat is proof that we can go anywhere and be anyone…or, at least, that there are no cultural categories or prohibitions left to constrain us.
I like the fact that Cohen is never interviewed except in character. I think this says that the Ali G./Borat exercise is not about him. And this makes him profoundly different from another rule breaking exemplar, the now downright tedious Madonna, for whom each successive manifestation and the larger transformational exercise is most distinctly about her.
As proof of Borat, I offer Monk. Borat will go anywhere, beard anyone, say anything, however much it makes us cringe. Monk (someone to whom I think I am a little closer in temperment) is a man squeamish about every kind of boundary and category confusion. While Borat plays the storm trooper, Monk wants nothing so much to stay home and wonder if that place mat is really, truly at right angles with the table on which it sits. Even tiny inconsistencies and imperfections are, for Monk, assaults on the senses, outrages against expectation, a tipping point from which chaos must surely follow. Such a character is inevitable when all placemats are matter out of place.
The structural properties of our culture are changing. We are becoming more fluid, more porous, more dynamic. It is inevitable that we should produce characters like Borat who delight testing the freedom this change brings. And characters like Monk who, like the rest of us, live in quiet horror.
Does this make Borat original? Not really. But he might be the last man in, the character for whom there are no longer any rites of passage, only rights of passage. And when he says and does things that are really impossibly rude, we cringe, but we don’t refuse him. We get what he’s doing. We know where he’s going. He is, after all, one of us.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2004. Culture Porousness. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. May 24, 2004. here.
Rottenberg, Josh. 2006. The Village Idiot Genuis. Entertainment Weekly. October 20, 2006, pp. 31-38. (Quotes are from pages 34 and 38 respectively.)
the Zaltman method
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Today I was at the Advertising Research Foundation meetings in New York City. This was organized by the esteemed Joe Plummer of ARF. Joe asked the panel I was on to address issues that emerged in his recent interviews with Gerry Zaltman.
I have long observed the Zaltman research enterprise. Gerry was once a colleague at HBS and I believe him to be one of the nicest human being God ever created. (I once did a drive around Carmel with Gerry and his wife, and I came away thinking that there was something positively saintly about the guy. Coming as it does from a low church Protestant, this is very high praise indeed.) My regard for Gerry was enough to make me hold my tongue when I came across examples of his work.
But now that I had been asked to comment publicly, I felt obliged to speak candidly. As I said this morning during the panel, I believe that there is something wrong with the Zaltman model. I believe the model is missing something. That something is culture.
This wouldn’t matter if Gerry were just talking about brain structure, function or chemistry. But that is not what Gerry does, not for consulting purposes anyhow. What Gerry does is solicit images from consumers (as pictured, to Gerry’s right) and then presume to tell us what these images mean. I understand that Gerry’s book is called "how customers think" but when he hires out for consulting purposes what he gives us is "what customers think."
I have friends in the marketing world who have used Gerry’s Zmet technique to great effect. And I believe all of methodological infighting and territory claiming must defer to this. If the method works, the method is good. The proof of the pudding has nothing to do with the theory of the pudding or the method of the pudding. The proof of the pudding is a client who says, "this was illuminating. I understand my consumer and my market in ways that I did not, could not before."
I am obliged to say that Gerry is making unsound assumptions. He believes that culture and cultures don’t matter. In How the Customer Thinks, he speaks blithely of "human universals" and the "myth of diversity."
Here’s the thing: If cultural diversity doesn’t matter, marketing doesn’t matter. Is this not precisely what we do: account for the ways in which one group of consumers is different from another group of consumers? Segmentation, I believe we call it. Changes in consumer trends? Isn’t this what we do? Aren’t we always looking for not the state of human universals, but the changes in culture that have changed our consumers? What matters for marketing purposes, is always human specifics, not human universals. My target, this brand, the marketing opportunity, right now. What would have happened at Motorola if Geoffrey Frost had been driven by a pursuit of human universals instead of his exquisitely particular understanding of what the technology could do and what the culture would respond to, right now?
I believe that these cultural differences and developments are the very bread and butter, the very point of marketing. But, if what Dr. Zaltman is correct, marketers may strike their tents and surrender the world of marketing to those who are prepared to posit a few simple human universals. Really? Shouldn’t we take exception to this savage act of intellectual reduction? Shouldn’t we insist that consumers are more complicated than this. A few deep and universal meanings inhabiting and informing all human consciousness? Really? Perhaps human beings are actually a little more various, nuanced, and multiple than this. (And if this is not the case, marketing is just so much sound and fury.)
When Dr. Zaltman sits down with composite images and claims to see what they mean, I get nervous. To suppose, for marketing purposes, that a single individual can use this technique to capture what anyone from any culture must mean, this is not a persuasive claim.
The problem is not just that Gerry doesn’t get culture. The problem is that he doesn’t understand American culture. In fact, Gerry doesn’t understand contemporary American culture. And this is crucial. God help the marketer who loses touch with where and what his or her culture is at any given moment.
Now, granted, Gerry thinks that knowledge of culture, American culture, and contemporary culture, is gratuitous. And maybe for some analytical purposes it is. But you cannot talk about consumer meanings unless you have a very clear idea of the cultures that supply these meanings. It is important to know how consumers think, and Gerry’s work here is interesting and important. But if we are going to talk about what they think, we have to do what marketers have always done, understand the world in which the consumer lives, understand the life the consumer leads, and understand the cultures that make these worlds and lives make sense.
References
Zaltman, Gerald. 2003. How Customers Think. Essential Insights into the mind of the market. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Rachael Ray: branding goddess?
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Did Rachael Ray sneak up on you?
I thought I knew day-time television. Suddenly, her name was everywhere.
Here are 5 things I learned about Rachael Ray:
1) She is 38 years old. She was raised in upstate New York in an Italian-American family. She published her first book, 30 Minute Meals, in 1998 and started her first TV show, 30 Minute Meals in 2001. (She came up fast.)
2) She is now the author of 11 books, a magazine Every Day With Rachael Ray, and her own TV program, Rachael Ray, which launched September 18, 2006. (She came up prodigiously.)
3) Rachael Ray’s approach to food is peppy and practical. She doesn’t do finnicky or precious. She doesn’t do baking. This has earned her the devotion of contemporary homemakers, and the loathing of foodies who see her as an enemy of the new food culture. (She came up contra-trend. She rose while a new approach to food was colonizing the American consciousness: the "slow food," Chez Panisse, Saveur Magazine, celebrity chef, high-end restaurant, connoisseurship trend.)
4) Stylistically, Rachael Ray is the anti-Martha. Her website calls her "TV’s most down-to-earth and relatable star." Where Martha Stewart was cool, authoritative, self possessed, as if from the manor born, Rachael Ray is warm, improvisational, unassuming, and just folks. If Martha Stewart was ceremonial perfection to home making, Rachael Ray captures the "close enough is good enough" spirit that animates most American households. (Contra-trend meets contra-snootiness, Rachael Ray is a celebrity in that democratic, "America’s sweetheart," tradition.)
5) Rachael Ray is not only peppy but peppery. The "adorable" Rachael is frequently accompanied by a Rachael who lets fly with sexual innuendo, little digs, and frank observations. "Sweetness and light" meets "nobody’s fool." (Ray builds her celebrity out of mixed signals, in this case, the sweet and the savory.)
So Rachael came up fast, prodigiously, contra-trend, contra-snootiness, and she came up with a balanced brand-celebrity message. And none of this interests us.
What interests is what Rachael Ray can teach us about branding.
Most cooking shows are about food. They focus on recipes, ingredients, preparation, things cooking, things cooked. The money shot? That overhead camera that stares down onto simmering shallots and bubbling stews.
Rachael Ray is interested in what food becomes, how food turns into meals, social occasions, brimming kitchens, people communing, families eating…and talking…and being a family. This enterprise begins with food and moves briskly on to the emotional, social, and cultural benefits that food gives us.
Sound familiar? In the early days of marketing, we were encouraged to think of products and brands in terms of Unique Selling Propositions (USPs). What we were selling was the physical property and benefit of the product. In the food category, it was about being creamier, meatier, sweeter, flakier, richer, tastier, etc. In the pre-Rachael era, the food category was about food.
Some marketers climbed Mazlow’s hierachy in search of the higher benefits of food brands. But always there was someone on the marketing team prepared to say, "keep it simple, stupid, this brand has to be about the product benefit." The USP didn’t keep it simple. It kept it stupid.
In the post-Rachael era, a new approach emerges. Now we want to sell what food turns into, the meals, the social occasions, the brimming kitchens, people communing, families eating..and talking…and being a family. And from this point of view, the consumer is not a cook, she is a very different kind of problem server. Here is a women who is called upon to manage a family that is bulging with highly individual individuals, diverse enthusiasms, and conflicting schedules. (And she must do this at the very moment that every health care professional is insisting on less fat, less sugar, less salt, the very building blocks of food that brings people to take and turns them into families.) This woman needs a bigger and richer value proposition that the USP. This woman needs ways to imagine and stage the family that make it easy to think and do this thing called a family.
The new approach in marketing must be more Rachael-like. We want to see how the brand invests food with meanings that convert to the things that Moms most care about, animated kids, engaged dads, and vivid table talk. This consumer wants food that turns into a "meal," meals that turn into "events," events that turn into a "family." USPs? Please.
It’s hard to imagine that anyone could reinvent the cooking show. It’s still larger to imagine that anyone should have found a way to get below the "receipe" approach to cooking and into the real emotional, social and cultural aspects of food. But Rachael Ray did. She turned her persona into a celebration of why food matters.
When does marketing catch up?
References
The Rachael Ray Show website here.
Anonymous. n.d., Rachael Ray 101. The Food Network. here.
Anonymous. 2006. Stupid Questions: This week with Rachael Ray. Entertainment Weekly. October 20, 2006, p. 90.
Pellettieri, Jill Hunter. 2005. Rachael Ray: Why Good Snobs Should Quit Picking on Her. Slate.com, July 13, 2005. here.
An ethnography of the ethnographer
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Finally, the ethnographic camera has been turned on the ethnographer himself.
Here is a "warts and all" portrait of Jean Claude Claris and the ethnography he did for Google in preparation for the YouTube purchase.
It’s hardhitting. It’s honest. It’s raw. It’s real. (Ok, realish.)
Claris, Jean Claude. 2006. Confidential Video for Google Internal Use Only. here.
We are 700!
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This is the 700th post for This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.
Thank you very much to TBSA readers for their 3729 comments and many off line encouragements. I once heard someone say that TBSA had the smartest readers in the blogosphere. I believe this is true.
Other stats:
There are now around 800,000 words in 700 posts.
According to Technorati, there are 2328 links from 368 blogs.
Thanks very much to everyone who has participated with great comments, questions, and challenges.
Normally, when TBSA reaches a milestone, I ask visitors to keep their ticket stubs and claim a free beverage (medium) of their choice in the lobby. Mrs. Burton has been rethinking the "whole idea" of "sugary drinks" and Pomegranate juice will be served instead. We are deeply sorry.
Oh, and thanks to BusinessWeek Online for their attention and these kind words:
WHY READ IT
Because Grant McCracken — an anthropologist and corporate ethnography consultant — is witty, opinionated, and razor sharp. "This blog sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics," he announces to his readers. And it does. His posts filter marketing and commerce through a cultural lens and vice versa. In the process, he offers smart takes on everything from "chunky" markets (the growth in the audience that lies between mass consumers and "long tail" niches) to the branding quandary Apple (AAPL ) faced when it put Intel (INTC ) chips into its Macs.
References
McGregor, Jena. 2006. Why Read It. BusinessWeek Online. October 2, 2006.
Serving Christ and Caesar: multiplicity and the postmodern corporation
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I know that this blog must look like a bumper car competition. No sooner have I run into one topic than I go speeding off in search of another. Continuity is not a strong suit here at This Blog Sits At…
So now for something completely different. Today I want to dwell on the implications of the two most recent posts and comments thereon.
Yesterday, I wondered whether we should treat inconsistency as a new corporate objective. The day before I was talking about how senior managers are now obliged to engage in the new art of "assumption jumping" to respond property to change.
Clearly these are related. If inconsistency is a new objective of the corporation, it will take senior managers capable of new orders of "assumption jumping" to sustain the thing.
Now, I think we can say for certain that the corporation has a way of winnowing out people who are endowed with sure fire assumption jumping abilities. The corporation has been slow to hire women, minorities and creatures from the margin. It’s as if the old logic of banking that said "if we wish to be the keeper of people’s money, we must appear to be as orthodox as possible" had someone crept into the rest of corporate life…even when money or lifetime security or great risks were not issue. So you wouldn’t want someone showing up with a Mohawk or even more alarmingly, a Chelsea. I mean what would this say about their "fitness for office"?
The trouble with this culling exercise is that it eliminated people who were obliged to "assumption jump" to have any sort of mainstream existence. (Don’t get me wrong. I do not suppose that only minorities and margins have an exclusive gift for or right to this sort of thing. This is one of the most delirious and vexing notions of the post modern delirium.)
But everyone has assumption jumping abilities and the corporation had a way of discouraging even those of the people it did hire. I have worked with people who are experts, enthusiasts and participants in fields wildly distant from the corporate culture, and it can be ages before you ever have a chance to glimpse this membership in multiple worlds, or, more to the point, to see the operation of this alternate sensibility in day to day problem solving. The corporation appears sometimes to be inclined to hire "standard issue" people and then to demand of them standard issue interests. (In the 1950s, of course, we believed that this conformity and uniformity was epidemical in its proportions.)
This "flattening" effect begins early. Every so often I would ask one of my Harvard Business School students to address a marketing problem with something other than their HBS hat on and they would look at me with shock and surprise, as if to say, "but I put all of that aside when I joined HBS. I thought all that was off the table." Business schools sometimes specialize in estranging their students from the experiences and memberships that can make them especially useful problem solvers in the corporate world. (Oh, good one.)
Now before I set to thinking about this problem, I want to acknowledge the aptness of Steve Postrel’s comment on yesterday’s post. His complaint is well taken. Real inconsistency would be intolerable. And I was engaging, as a guru must, in hyperbolic rhetoric. As when people, especially in the 1990s, used to tell us that "everything you know is wrong." (Which always moved me to want to scream, "what, even this!") That’s how gurus move the furniture around, by saying things that are outrageous and a little unhinged. I mean, who is going to pay me $60,000 to say things that make any real sense. (No, I don’t make $60 k for a lecture, but gurus do. "Gurus do." Good, huh. I hear a book title in the works. Yes! "Guru dos and don’ts. " Snappy! Too bad it would only have a readership of 14 people. I have a talent for obscure topics and small audiences.)
So, no, I don’t really mean what I say. (Unless, of course, you are prepared to pay me $60k for the lecture in which I say it. Let’s be honest, for $60k I’d say pretty much anything.) But I think it is useful to move the conversation and the corporation off the present strategy that insists on a single proposition, image and "vision." It helps us to think about the corporation as a complex adaptive system, with all the messiness and multiplicity that implies.
Back to the hiring issue. How do we find people with the requisite skills in assumption jumping even as we find people who can be good stewarts of a single corporation. This is, I think, the multiplicity in simplicity that Dr. Postrel is talking about. I think the thing to do here is to resort to a Christ and Caesar strategy, to frankly both faces of the corporate employee. As it stands, we ask everyone to perform according to a single, common set of rules and regs, the good corporate citizen more or less. And this is very good, and a really wonderful accomplishment. I am often thrilled to see how much commonality a diverse group can summon on this basis. But I think it’s also time to dial up the other half of the equation, and encourage people also to be all the other people they are. I mean, these are all precious resources for the corporation, as is the ability to jump between these worlds.
We might talk about this in terms of Bell’s expressive and instrumental individualism. I believe Bell is not one of Steve’s favorite thinkers, but I think this distinction works well. We can use it to satisfy Steve’s demand for a nuanced multiplicity and inconsistency. The corporation may ask the employee to summon the instrumental individualism that now prevails in the world a day world, while asking him or her to continue repudiating or concealing the expressive individualism that does so much to form him or her in "civilian" life.
We are going to have to move some furniture to make the corporation suitably responsive to the dynamic world in which it finds itself and the real intellectual talents and cultural capitals that the employees now obscure or conceal. The old models of the corporation and the employee are wasteful and wrong. They squander talents and resources the corporation cannot live without.
Remodelling the corporation
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Here’s a thought. What if we gave up consistency as an organizational objective? What if we stopped trying to integrate ventures and strategies? What if we just let the corporation rip as something essentially inconsistent and unintegrated?
This thought struck me while reading Stefan Stern on the new article by Philip Kotler and Neil Rackham in the Harvard Business Review. (I know, I know. I should be working from the HBR original, but, hey, I’m on train and the noble, winged Acela doesn’t have internet access.)
The Kotler/Rackham argument addresses the troubled relationship between marketing and sales departments. Readers of this blog know that I regard Philip Kotler as a kind of God. I don’t know Rackham’s work particularly, but if Kotler is prepared to work with him, he must be a demi-God at the very least.
But I paused when Stern offered this summary of the Kotler and Rackham argument:
[C]ompanies need to do more than simply align sales and marketing better. They actually need to integrate them fully and concentrate on deploying the skills that generate revenue.
It’s that word "integrate" that got me. Isn’t corporate integration almost always a recipe for unhappiness. Doesn’t it almost always leave those who have been "integrated" with the sense that one culture had been given the upper hand or that both cultures have been diminished.
My second thought was that the very idea of "integration" might be a relic of another age. The old idea of the corporation imagined it a model of modernist clarity. In the minds of senior managers (and some analysts), it was a beautifully clear, well defined idea, consistent, coherent, elegant, not a single assumption out of place, a perfect rendering of all but only the roles, responsibilities and personnel needed to make and sell all but only and exactly the kitchen appliances America needs at any given moment.
By this reckoning, the corporation was supposed to present itself to the world with a single face. And it was the job of marketing, among others, to make this so. Clean up all the false starts, the bad ideas, the notions now antique, and replace them with a single concept, that elegant idea, of what the corporation was.
This was especially what designers would do when they consulting to the corporation. They would do an image inventory, a review of all the brands, logos, and executions by which the corporations was known. The dramatic script was always the same. Fill a board room with clients, shakes your head gravely, and say, "Children, children, children, your image is all over the place. The corporation has more faces than Eve! You are immensely fortunate to have hired me. Consistency, this is what you pay me for." And then the designer would begin a process of discipline that all the corporate faces might now be one.
That was then. This is now. Now the corporation is entitled, if not obliged, to be many things to many people. Consumers have multiplied externally and internally. They appreciate that the world is complicated and, in better moments, complex. I don’t think anyone demands consistency from the corporation. I’m not sure that they expect integration. I mean, everyone understands what has happened to the world, the tsunami of dynamism that washed over us all. No one lives an "integrated" or "consistent" life. I do not believe they hold the corporation to a higher standard. (Actually, this is an interesting question. Who and what is the corporation now in the mind of the consumer? What do we expect and demand of it? I do not presume to know the answer here or to treat the question with scant regard. Which of course I just did.)
So what if we dumbed consistency and integration as marketing objectives and just let her rip. We speak with many tonques, we are known by many faces. It’s an ugly idea, by modernist standards, but an incredibly useful one. It is for instance, the answer to a newly complicated market place, one in which there are lots of segments, and lots of cultural difference between the segments. In an age of plenitude, is the strategic thing to do.
Partly, I am playing the guru game here. The rules of the game: 1) come up with a bold idea! 2) Say it loud, say it proud! 3) Bang your own drum, until the world says, "enough all ready, we’ll buy the book!" 4) roll out the franchise of books, articles and speaking engagements. 5) unleash the guru! (Christensen, Cook and Hall played this game recently with their launch of the "purpose brand" argument.) The guru game depends on the introduction of a single conceptual stroke that claims to cut away the obfuscation, confusion, and shilly shallying that stands between the corporation and new clarity. Behold, says the guru, here is an idea before which the world must defer (and wallets open).
In the case of Christensen, Cook and Hall, the results are disasterous. The world of marketing is actually encouraged to forget much of what it knows, to dumb itself down in a most unHBS way. (Shame on you, Mr. Christensen. HBS is nothing if not tactical, and the "function" idea dispenses with all tactics but one.) This failing might be apply here too. Oh, let’s be honest, it probably is true here too.
There are larger intellectual and institutional validations. The concept of the corporation as a creature of many faces is the concept of the corporation cultivated by complexity theory. From this point of view, the corporation cannot be, and should not be, consistent, integrated, and monolithic. For the purposes of evolutionary success, it should be messy and multiple, a thing constantly in the process of becoming, and entirely unapologetic about the multiplicity that results. By this reckoning, the coporation is a CAS, a complex adaptive system.
Anyhow, perhaps consistency and integration are best regarded as intellectual, managerial antiques. Perhaps it’s time to move on.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2005. And stop calling me stupid. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. November 30, 2005. here.
Stern, Stefan. 2006. Why the people from marketing must be branded a failure. Financial Times. October 10, 2006. p. 8.
