Culture matters for marketing.

Of course it does.  Quaker bought Snapple for $1.7 billion dollars in 1993 and sold it 3 years later for $330 million.  Culture changed.  Quaker missed it.  In this case, culture mattered to the tune of $1.3 billion. 

Culture matters to the balance sheet, and so it matters to anyone interested in marketing, branding, ethnography, design, product development, strategy, trend watching, investment strategy, and innovation.

Culture matters, for instance, because it tells us:

1. that and how the new Acura MDX ad campaign is flawed. 

[the culture key: Acura tapped the wrong body of cultural meanings for this campaign.  For an elaboration, please go here. ] 

2. that and how the new campaign for Volvo is near note perfect.

[the culture key: the creative choices were the strategic choices.  Elaboration here.]

3. that department stores might have a chance to restore themselves to greatness or at least profit.

[the culture key: department stores are better at managing consumer dynamism than the brand boutique.  Elaboration here.]

4. the sudden rise and new celebrity of Rachael Ray

[the culture key: that Ms. Ray defined herself in opposition to Whole Foods, Chez Panisse and Martha Stewart. Elaboration here.]

5. how nearly Disney destroyed Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

[the culture key: the Disney team nearly meddled Johnny Depp's performance. Elaboration here.]

6. what drives the artisanal trend.

[the culture key: there are 10 trend drivers. Elaboration here.]

[Forgive me using my own statements of how culture matters for marketing.  They are the ones I know best.] 

Tomorrow, we’ll look at marketers and marketing theorists who don’t know that culture matters. 

References

Harrison, Lawrence and Samuel Huntington.  2000.  Culture Matters: How values shape human progress.  New York: Basic Books.

When professors Harrison and Huntington wrote a book with this title, my reaction was pure puzzlement.  I felt like a NASA engineer who had just been given a book called "Math: more useful than you think!" 

Of course, culture matters.  It supplies the software for contemporary life.  Does this software matter?  Consider a hypothetical "Inuit test."  We are going to find someone living near the Arctic circle, someone untouched by contact. (This is almost impossible to do, but let’s pretend.)  We shall call our hero Annakpok.  (This means "free" and in our case it means "free of American culture".)  We are giving Annakpok a rudimentary knowledge of English, a destination (Manhattan), a plane ticket, one or two financial instruments…and that’s all.

The plane ride is a wonder, but Annakpok’s challenges have just begun.  He wanders around the airport for while, and finally, he sees a line of people climbing into yellow cars.  Someone in line tells him that the cars are going to "Manhattan."  Perfect.  Allan, the "taxi driver" is a chatter box and tells Annakpok all about "hotels."   He also helps to clarify the idea of money by helping himself to some of the pieces of paper in Annakpok’s pocket.  By the time, Annakpok reaches mid town, he is confident he can find the "front desk," "book" a "room," and hand over the piece of plastic in his pocket. (Allan’s advice still rings in his ears, "don’t let them keep it!")  Annapok has heard of coffee but when he arrives at the local Starbucks, he is a overwhelmed by the menu, so many choices, such high prices.  (Annakpok is already price sensitive.)

All of this knowledge is merely the "first pass," the mere rudiments of the knowledge that culture supplies and our life demands.  As Annakpok wanders the airport, Manhattan and then Starbucks, thousands of culture matters and materials escape him.  All the signs, the fact that people when walking tend to bear to the right, those hundreds of "magazines," beautiful things that last a month, Annakpok discovers, only then to be thrown away, and not least the differences in clothing of people around him (and the status, gender, class, professional, ethnic, and religious information this clothing gives off).  Poor Annakpok can’t tell the difference between the uniform worn by the man handing out hamburgers and the one who carries a really large metal appliance, that appears always to be pointing, Annakpok does notice, downward.  He has a really tough time with security screening.  ("Take my shoes off?")

But all of these are themselves mere rudiments compared to the complicated and delicate interactions taking place throughout the airport.  At the bar, a pilot tries to pick up a waitress.  In the United Lounge, a business deal is being negotiated.  Both of these take an exquisite control of detail, timing,and strategy, not to mention a mastery of fundamental ideas of contact and contract that escape even Allan.

It will take some months before Annakpok can engage in the kind of conversation that ordinary travelers have while waiting to board the plane.  You know, the one that contemplates that there are one too many airlines, the joys of the spoke and hub model, the trouble with O’Hare, labor troubles at Northwest, and when it was, exactly, that air travel ceased to be glamorous and started to feel like bus travel. Any one of these topics is fantastically presuppositional.  You have to know a lot even to make a hash of them. 

Oh, I know this sounds like that earnest lecture that kicks off "anthropology 101."  It is designed to remind us that culture is invisible and active in the most minor things.  But too often it has a "did you know!" ingenuousness that begins to irritate, and eventually the brighter students begin to wonder, "well, if it operates so invisibly, let’s just take it as read and move on."  This is essentially the same skepticism that leads people to ask whether they really needed to know anything about Basic to operate their new personal computers.  (In the early 1990s, there were Deans who encouraged everyone to take a course in Basic to "get with the program."  This is unconcious decanal humor.) 

Here’s the thing.  Culture does matter.  It matters especially to marketers.  Tomorrow, in part two, of this post, I will try to show why.

References

Harrison, Lawrence and Samuel P. Huntington.  (eds.) 2000. Culture Matters. New York: Basic Books. 

With Robert Altman’s death on Monday, the airwaves and internet are filling with recollections.  Mine is slender and I offer it as a "bit part" in the larger drama. 

I was a chauffeur for Julie Christie during the filming of McCabe and Mrs. Miller in Vancouver in 1970. Julie was entitled by contract to a chauffeur and a limo.  She asked instead for an ordinary sedan and a film student. What she got was me and a Volkswagen.  The alternative mood of the 60s had found its way to Hollywood and it flourished on this particular film set.

(I know this is the biggest, stupidest Hollywood cliche: using a celebrity’s first name to indicate that you have a personal relationship with them.  But I spend several hundred hours with "Ms. Christie" without ever once calling her that.  It seems wrong to start now.)

The alternative mood gave me liberties that have vanished from the present Hollywood.  I didn’t wear a uniform or a cap. I was allowed "upstairs."  I was integrated into the Christie-Beatty household.  (Julie lived with Warren Beatty at the time in a Arthur Erickson home not far from Horseshoe Bay.  I remembered it as a series of wood and glass rectangles tacked to a stone incline as it ran down to the water.)  Shaggy, clueless, good natured, eager, I must have been a little like a Labrador, welcome just so long as everything small and precious was kept well clear. 

Occasionally, Robert Altman would come to visit.  I was allowed to "stick around."  From time to time, my opinion would be solicited.  There was some question as to how the movie should end.  It was clear that McCabe would die.  But at who’s hand?   Beatty thought the character should be killed by corporate thugs.  (This is indeed how the film ends.)  I thought this was a little predictable, a little "Hollywood" at a time when traditional narratives were being challenged, not least by Altman, that Mongolian horseman who had just swept off the plains. 

My suggestion, timid but persistent, was that McCabe should die at the hand of Mr. Elliot (Corey Fischer), the spooky Protestant preacher who occupied a wooden church at far edge of the village.  Poor, stumbling McCabe feared the power of the corporation that wished to buy his saloon.  He had thought not at all of the more ancient, less scrutable menace of the vestigial church at the end of the road.  So close to gold, so far from God. 

Altman was open to a suggestion of this kind.  In truth, he was open to suggestions of any kind.  Beatty much less so.  I think he looked on Altman’s "open source" approach with alarm.  I can’t say I blame him.  Some part of Beatty’s career hung in the balance, in a way did not for chauffeurs, kitchen staff and carpenters.  We may have been pretending this was an egalitarian universe, but in fact Beatty was risking much more than the rest of us.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller formed in the filming.  Occasionally, I would run bits of dialog from Altman’s trailer to Julie’s trailer.  She would have to memorize it for the following day.  So it wasn’t a few big creative decisions that were still to be decided.  In fact lots of little creative decisions were being each day.  This was exhilarating for some, but not all. 

Beatty and Altman were often at odds.  Beatty, enriched and empowered by Bonnie and Clyde (1967), could claim to being "new regime," but it was not entirely clear that he understood the counter culture in any thoroughgoing way.  He seemed to think that McCabe and Mrs. Miller was plenty odd enough in narrative.  (His character was not very bright, not very heroic, and a bit of dolt.)  Surely, he seemed to argue, this was quite enough "departure."  Surely, this was enough to be new Hollywood.   

Altman wasn’t merely out to satisfy the new agenda.  He was keen to see what could be done to and for filmmaking with these new freedoms in place.  This is to say he embraced the counter intuitive and the anti-generic not for their own sake, but because something interesting might issue therefore.  We could hear in the dailies that he was using sounds in new ways.  He was pleased when the lab came back with strange, muted colors on the screen.  It was discovered that the film stock in question had been deteriorating in the can, and Hollywood was scoured for more with the same date stamp.  Minor characters were set free to explore character and some extraordinary results were forthcoming.  Now the question was how to make a place for them.  (The actor who does a minor drunk ballet was especially admired.  So was the actor who offers the line "My friend wouldn’t pay five dollars to find out something that wasn’t true.")  [If someone can identify these actors by name, please let me know.]

The debate between Beatty and Altman grew more intense after a screening of Brewster McLoud (1970).  We gathered in a rented auditorium in West Vancouver.  The reaction was sheer astonishment.  Most of people were thinking (without necessarily thinking about it very hard) that McCabe and Mrs. Miller might be a kind of Mash set in the 19th century of the American Northwest, funny, ascerbic, revealing, and of course new regime.  But Brewster McLoud struck most people in the room as being just plain weird, and it was clear from the look on most people’s faces as they left the auditorium that they were now harboring extreme doubts.  Who was this guy and what kind of picture did he mean to make in McCabe and Mrs. Miller?  As I remember it, people left the auditorium as if no longer certain of their footing. 

It was a quiet contest.  Until he saw the first complete edit, I think Beatty never raised his voice.  He was all gentle persuasion and self confident charm.  Clearly, here was a man who never doubted his powers of persuasion, and you could see in the way women treated him, that in his domain he had never had to.  He was accustomed to charming the Hollywood media into a stupor of grateful admiration.  I remember sitting on a grey sofa, looking out over a grey ocean, his right hand working the touch pad of his telephone, the way only accountants could work an adding machine.  He was working the phones, and the calls were mostly to members of the Democratic machine. 

There was something confiding about the way he talked to Altman, as if the two of them were not making a film, but planning a particularly cunning piece of politics.  Altman, for his part, was not so much confiding as bluff.  He too spoke as if it was perfectly obvious both parties had the best of all possible intentions, enjoyed one another company extraordinarily, and shared an unmistakable community of interest.  Of course, everything was going to work out splendidly.  He and Beatty were merely clearing up the smallest of executional details. 

I remember thinking that his eyes glittered with insecurity.  (Not that nasty, "don’t cross me" insecurity, but the "what is this universe and what might it do to me next" insecurity.)  But when I suggested this in passing, everyone, Julie, her friend, Alfie, and her hairdresser, Barry, exclaimed that this was manifestly the most ridiculous, the most unreliable reading of human character on record.  And they could be right. 

Finally, it was, I thought, a contest between an actor who was managing his career with all due caution, and an artist who genuinely wanted to see what was possible in the new regime.  It is worth remember that these are the recollections of a Labrador.  I regarded Beatty then as a man who might someday inflict emotional injury on my employer, and I can tell you he did this more than once.  (I was asked to say more for a recent biography on Beatty but Julie would not give me clearance to do so.)   My dislike of Beatty has perhaps encouraged me to mistake the man I have compared him to.  But, for what it’s worth, this is what I remember about the filmmaker called Robert Altman.   May he rest in peace. 

References

Honeycutt, Kirk.  2006.  Director made chaos flow.  The Hollywood Reporter East.  November 22, 2006. p. 1.   

Kilday, Gregg.  2006.  Robert Altman, 81, dies: Helmer challenged conventions. The Hollywood Reporter east.  November 22, 2006, p. 1.

The artisanal movement has come to cheese, salt, bread, pickles, quick serve restaurants, chocolate, beer, olive oil, ice cream and stoves. Yes, stoves. 

In 2004, several bread makers lost sales, including Private labels (-5.6%), Interstate Brands, George Weston, Sara Lee and General Mills (-14%).  Sales for La Brea Bakery, on the other hand, were up 38.7%. 

La Brea Bakery calls itself "America’s Great Artisan Bakery."  Here’s the way they tell the story.

Back in 1989, La Brea Bakery changed the way people ate bread in Los Angeles.  Those beautiful artisan loaves baked for centuries in Europe had yet to make their way to the states.  The only bread available was the flavorless, squishy white rectangle that came pre-sliced in a bag. Little did we know that when we began producing our crusty varieties such as olive, walnut or rosemary that we were about to embark on an American bread revolution. 

It’s the anthropologist’s job to see the cultural components of this trend.  I think there are 10 of them.  The artisanal movement is composed of and driven by:

1. a preference for things that are human scale.

If once we delighted in the sheer scale of a consumer society, now we want things made in tiny batches.  In the place of Morton Salt that comes from some vast industrial process, some of us prefer artisanal salt.  Pam bought salt recently that came with a talkative, 4 color, brochure.  Geez, I wondered, what is there to say about salt?.  Plenty, apparently.   The first paragraph reads:

The production of premium sea salt takes time and attention to detail. Each small batch of sea salt requires weeks of hand panning and grading to produce the perfect grain.  Our quality is a testimonial to the artisan nature of this age-old craft.

I have had a team of ordinary language philosophers working on the last proposition for several days now.  No one can make head nor tail of it. 

2.  a preference for things that are hand made.  Sorry, hand panned! 

If once we delighted in machine manufacture, now we want things made by humans.  The weird thing here is that things that were handmade, especially things that bore the mark of manual manufacture, these were contemptible.  One of the nastiest things we could say about a gentleman in the 16th century is that made his wealth by dint of manual labor.  Indeed, the first thing a gentleman did was remove his family from all proximity to industry. 

In the contemporary version of this notion, it is as if we believe that artisans are "free range," happier in their work and more likely to deliver quality. (This too is stuffed with dangerous assumption.  The philosophers just looked at me when I asked for exposition.)

3. a preference for things that are relatively raw and untransformed. 

The nobility of early modern and modern Europe delighted in things that were ornate and highly crafted.  Calling something "artificial" was a way to praise it.

This aspect of the movement owes something to the hippie revolution of the 1960s, a moment in which Adele Davis encouraged people to protect their food even from the interference caused by light!  (I had a girlfriend in the 1970s who kept everything in the fridge in a brown paper bag.  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the light went off when you closed the door.)  No transformation was the best transformation.  The closer food was to its natural, uncooked state the better.

4. a preference for things that are unbranded. 

This is really an odd one for we are still a culture that treats brands as navigational devices in a turbulent culture.  But now cheese from a farmer’s market is better for the fact that it is not branded.  This too takes as full circle, for in 18th and 19th century America, consumers were buying from barrels.  Brands came in as a welcome innovation. 

It turns out that Marx was right.  (Finally.)  The meaning of the object comes from the act of manufacture, not the act of marketing and consumption. And now I have a lovely bridge I’d like to sell you.  For the artisinal movement is yet another act of meaning manufacture, driven perhaps by new enthusiasms but shaped at every step by marketing.  For starters, this thing we call artisanal production almost certainly relies on mechanics, scale, and artifice. The "artisanal" is yet another cultural meaning that marketers assign to goods. 

5. a preference for things that are personalized. 

The best example here perhaps is the farmer’s market.  We are no longer buying from a vast supermarket that has contracted with agribusiness. Now we want to see the face of the man who grew the food and shake his hand.  We prefer to deal with a small retailer, someone who calls us by our first name, and knows our tastes so well, he sets things aside awaiting our arrival on Saturday morning.  It is as if we have declared war on anonymity.  It is as if we are attempting to "reenchant" the world with personalization.  (The term is Weber’s.)

6. a preference for a new transparency

It is as if we want to know, or to know of, all the parties who grow, transport, sell and resell the food on our table.  This is not the same as wishing to live in  personalized world.  This is a matter of disclosure.  We know where our food has been.  This is one of the things that drives the slow food movement and the Alice Waters Chez Panisse regime. 

7. a preference for things that are "authentic"

There is an idea that the food chain has been poisoned by artificial notions of food, and that only a return to "authentic" menu items, foodstuffs, and cooking methods can save us.  The James Beard website praises "an artisanal movement that’s bringing back flavors of a world untainted by Wonder-bread and Kraft singles."

8. a preference for things that have been marked by locality 

This is in a sense the new branding.  If we prefer cheese that is unbranded, all cheeses threaten to become one.  Locality, which may or may not make a difference to taste, is commandeered and pressed into service. 

Here is Sally Bany, co-owner and brand manager for the west coast chocolate company, Moonstruck.

"We add chili pepper to it and it becomes a  conversation piece for the sales person. ‘Have you tried this  particular chocolate. It has these flavors because it’s grown in this region.’ People learn where in the world it came from, the variety and taste characteristics."

9. a preference for the new connoisseurship

Artisanal products are not without a certain claim to sophistication. Artisanal salt, cheese, bread, these are all better than their non-artisanal equivalents, and any discerning palate can tell this is so. 

There is, in other words, a kind of connoisseurship at work.  But it is a roomy connoisseurship.  Unlike French wine, there are no rules and regs that constrain how something is served, how long it must breathe, or the food with which it may be eaten.  There are no real demands for reverence.  Artisanal foods can be served and eaten in any way.  No special forks required.

Artisanal food allows us be discerning without actually requiring us to learn anything.  We get to be special without being specialized.  To this extent artisanal food helps play out our expressive individualism. 

10.  a preference for the simplified

All of the properties that help to make something artisanal are seen to simplify the product, the producer, the act of buying and the act of consumption.  Artisanal is the enemy of artifice and complexity.  It returns us to a simpler world.  There is to this extent a certain nostalgia about the artisanal.  It harkens back to another time, another world.  Never mind that the happy world of honest artisans engaged in unalienated labor exists only in the mind of the Marxist history.  We can harken after it anyhow.

Artisans may or may not have made the new "artisanal" cheese, bread, and salt in our kitchen.  But our culture certainly had a hand in their production.

Acknowledgments

Bill O’Connor, CEO, Source/Inc. 

Paul Rogers, author of the article noted below.

References

Ness, Carol.  2006.  Slow Food Movement has global outreach.  Farmers, producers share knowledge at Italy convention.  San Francisco Chronicle.  October 30, 2006. here.   

Rogers, Paul.  2004. Special Report: U.S. State of the [Candy] Industry.  Candy Industry. here. 

Bread sales figures here.

La Brea self description here.

the James Beard quote here.