Monthly Archives: March 2007

A note on ethnography

Hanswerner_sahm_a_new_morning Barbara, my translator here in Germany, likes the sound of ethnography and she asked me to tell her more about it. 

Here’s an elaboration of the answer I gave her.  It comes in three parts.

Part 1

To do ethnography, she would want to master the mechanics of the interview process.

1) humility.  Interviews work well when the interviewer understands that the respondent is the expert and defers to him or her carefully.  It is precisely when the respondent hears this deference that he or she is willing to open up.

2) empathy, a willingess to suspend what you think for what the respondent thinks. 

3) patience. Does the respondent mean X or Y?  Very good.  Is it X1 or X2?  Fine, is it X1a or X1b?  The ethnographer ends up acting like a programming language for which only the most exacting input will do. 

Many people have these 3 qualities as aspects of their personality.  The rest of us will have to learn them through training and practice.

4) the ability to draw this life into the interview.  Quite substantial adjustments of approach are called for in almost every interview. What is the best way to draw this person out?  What is the best direction to bring them to the topics in question? 

5) the ability to discover the best approaches at any given moment.  How we ask the question is as important as what we ask.  Lots of improvisational work is called for.

6) the ability to shift frame to see the significance of testimony.  This is especially difficult when we have to do it in real time, under pressure, while staying on schedule.  "Shifting frame" here means finding the ideas that make an ethnographic datum reveal its (possible) significance. 

7) the ability to follow things up without losing one’s way.  Occasionally, the ethnographer will hear a possibility.  Now the question is how much to invest in its pursuit and when to "cut and run."  Normally, it is easy enough to identify the moment of diminishing returns.  But when something does not look promising, it may be that we have failed to find the frame that makes it so.

Note, points 4 through 7 are the strength of the method.  The corporation has to contend with unknown unknowns.  It doesn’t know what it needs to know.  (If it did, it could use quantitative methods, which are of course easier and cheaper to manage.)  Ethnography allows "just in time" adjustments.  It allows us to sharpen questions against incoming questions.  In a sense, it is designed to just to look for answers but to look for questions. 

Part 2

Barbara doesn’t have social scientific training.  What she needs, what we all need, are concepts at the ready.  Patterns standing by to serve us in the process of pattern recognition.  I used the example from yesterday’s interview.  We were sitting in a respondent’s home, and I could not help but notice a poster by Hans Sahm (pictured above) on the living room wall. 

Under normal circumstances, this would strike me as a piece of aesthetic misadventure.  But in this case, this looks like grist for the ethnographic mill and this is because I have a concept for what I am looking at.  As it turns out, I’ve read (as you probably have) that essay by Kant on the sublime.  If memory serves, Kant says nature is sublime when it outstrips our sense of proportion and scale and induces in us a sense of wonder, astonishment, and perhaps fear.  The sublime explodes our categories of understanding.

I’m not sure this is a very accurate rendering of the argument, but it was enough to serve me as a frame with which to think about the art in question.  Was this perhaps an exercise in the sublime.  Certainly, Sahm’s art is about an impossible scale and a certain romantic engagement.  (I think if you click on the image, you will get a larger version.  Notice that there is at the bottom a very large river, here represented as a mere trickle.)  I now know what might be operating in the culture of the respondent.  I know what to ask after.  As it turns out, the respondent encourages a Kantian view of her art without being able actually to confirm it.

And that’s ok.  I had a concept and the concept helped me see.  In a more perfect world, we would have, say, 80 of these concepts to aid the ethnographer.  And almost anything will do.  We should have notions of diffusion from Simmel, individualism from Durkheim, structure from Levi-Strauss, convergence from Jenkins, long tail from Anderson, tipping point from Gladwell.  Ideas with which to think.  (Everyone has their own favorites.  Everyone is always on the look out for more.)

This is after all precisely what is missing from the bargain basement ethnographers, the one’s who practice brutish empiricism.  These ethnographers merely report what the respondent says, because they have no concepts with which to see the cultural significance of what the respondent says.  They are mirrors, nothing more. 

Strictly speaking, if Barbara wishes to pursue a career as an ethnographer, she would take a course in one of the social sciences. But you and I know there is lots of dead air in one of these programs. Apparently, contents settle after they leave the factory.    

Part 3

Ok, Part 3 is all about acts of analysis, but you know what I am exhausted.  It’s been a long day.  I am now in Frankfurt and about 11:20.  I would really like to get a good night’s sleep.  So I’ll come back to Part 3.  Yeah, right, sure I will. 

Berlin

Berlin_holocaust_memorial Life on the road is sometimes not so great.  You’re doing 3 interviews a day.  You are fighting to sustain the intellectual elasticity on which the method depends…even as the ethnographic data grows more voluminous and various.  The possibility of pilot error grows and grows. 

There are smaller complaints: jet lag, the compressions of air travel and hotel life, work continuing to come from home, and the club house sandwiches that the hotel staff now know to bring you at regular intervals.  All of these are beginning to take a toll. 

Just when you are ready to wallow in self pity, something happens.  Today, I was standing on the balcony of a worker’s flat in what used to be East Germany.  The mistress of the household is pointing to the place the wall once stood, not 60 yards away.  There are tears in her eyes. 

"It was 17 years ago.  But I still can’t believe it’s gone." 

She’s deeply grateful for her freedom.  Her husband is better placed in the world of work.  He now seizes little liberties he was previously denied: an extravagant beard.  She was able to go to Egypt, and travel the Nile.  Their apartment is smart with new appliances and fashionable decor schemes.

But she misses the wall.  "It used to be our enemy.  And now I think of it as a friend.  It kept things out."  She means noise, foreign neighbors, and the commotion of contemporary life.  This sounds nasty and xenophobic.  But, no, her outpouring was heart felt, genuine, the expression of a thoughtful, generous, sensitive person. 

It must have been the empathy (God knows there has got to be some  good explanation), but I got misty eyed, too.  So did the translator.  (Let me know if you need a translator in Germany.  Barbara is a joy.)  There we were, the three of us, all on verge of tears at the fall of the wall.  I may have had stranger moments as a practicing ethnographers but I can’t think of one. 

Berlin has been full of surprises.  I had an almost visceral reaction as we drove into the city from the train station.  I’m a mid-century baby, and Berlin was a hot point of the cold war.  It’s with me still, as if the "spooks" still haunted the city, as if those people who died trying to get out were still here. 

The downtown was still more astonishing.  Capitalism came in force. The downtown is filled with one design triumph after another…as if to insist on the contrast with the old regime.  Capitalism showing off, making a statement.  As if there was any doubt about who the winner was, or why the winner won. 

And finally, we happened to drive by the relatively new Holocaust memorial.  (I never have time on the road actually to visit anything. I see it through the window of the taxi or not at all.)  The Holocaust, this was the biggest mystery of my childhood.  I was 6 in 1957 and the popular press continued to try to think how to think about the Holocaust.  When you are little, it is always intensely interesting when adults are shocked, wordless, tearful, incoherent. 

Eventually, of course, you see what the matter is.  There is no way to think about the Holocaust.  There is no way to mourn it. You can try.  And then you realize the scale of the horror.  You understand that grief of this order will bend you till it breaks you.  The Holocaust is hard to memorialize.  Trying and failing, that’s, I guess, a way to remember what it was. 

We are 800

Birthday_cake Today marks the 800th post for This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.

Shareholders should know that growth is "trending upwards." According to Technorati, there are 3,750 links from 436 blogs.  We have a couple of thousand page views on most days.  We have 4400 comments  and 388 trackbacks.  We broke 1 million words, finally. 

Mrs. Burton, I regret to say, is no longer with us.  (Normally, Mrs. Burton sees to the celebration, carbonated soft drinks, fireworks, that sort of thing.)  Under the stage name, Flirtin’ Burton, she is now managing a roller derby league in Des Moines.  "Not very different from managing things at This Blog Sits At," she tells me. 

To those who read and those who comment, my devout thanks.   We are nothing without you. 

America as an idea

Img_0128My ethnographic interviews in Hamburg are going really well.  There is "gold on the ground," data everywhere, there for the asking, easy to get, easy to think.  Can this be one of the reasons that the social sciences were largely invented here?  Probably not.

In one happy moment, a perplexed respondent complained that she had learned a new English word, but couldn’t find it anywhere in the dictionary.  What, she wanted to know, does "bleep" mean?  We eventually encouraged her to understand is that is stands for a great many other words, as long as they are rude.  But when you think of it, it’s a fair question: is this a word?  And if it isn’t a word, what in the dickens is it?  This is the kind of thing the God-like Michael Silverman could dispatch in a couple of sentences.  Me, frankly, well, I leave it to the likes of Silverman.

It is interesting to hear Europeans talk about the US.  They have a hard time of it.  America, is that dream factory of Hollywood or a great university like Princeton, is it Las Vegas or hip hop, is it street people or Disneyland, is it Alice Waters or McDonald’s?  What they don’t say (not yet anyhow) is that America is all these things.  You can see them shuttling back and forth between partial accounts.  Apparently, to call America various is to fail the work of description.  Countries can’t be everything. 

Clearly, Hamburg respondents are not the only ones to find America’s plenitude a taxing problem.  It’s a little like the "bleep" problem.  How can one term stand for many terms?  The solution  for the post-modernists is delightedly to declare the death of the category and the ability of the generalization.  But this is as intellectually pointless as insisting on a single-term approach.  We need new ideas here.    

Ethnology: a tiny state of the art review

Img_0108 Hello from Hamburg.  Here’s a forward that someone asked to to write and then decided not to use.  Actually, I think it was editor who decided that I was impolitic.  Thus does the old media treat the new media.

Here, then, is the forward:

Ethnography found its way into the world with difficulty.

In the early days ethnographers were very like immigrants, obliged to take the jobs that other wouldn’t or couldn’t do. When Chrysler phoned me in the middle 1980s, they did so because the other methods had failed. In the early days, ethnology was a method of last resort. 

Practitioners had doubts of their own. Ethnography sounded very well: getting closer to the consumer, doing the work in home, working one-to-one instead of through the glass. We made our promises with a brave face. And then we had to think, “how in the dickens am I going to make this work?” Improv was the order of the day. Projects took on the character of a Kontiki expedition, with parts repurposed in a constant rebuilding even as we pressed into service anything floating by.  There are late practitioners because there were early practitioners.

It was also necessary to pass Scylla and Charybdis. The former were the anthropologist still resident and reproachful in the university. For this group, the very idea of commercial application was an outrage. These people who informed me of their hostility with a string of insults, and in one case, a loud, hysterical accusation in the middle of a cocktail party. It didn’t matter that these academics had remarkably provincial ideas of capitalism and the marketplace. Their hostilities still stung.

Charybdis took the form of business school professors. The business schools were in the 1980s still filled with positivists, for whom ethnography was merely a happy face to put on imprecision and methodological self indulgence. We were the enemy at the gate, a threat against rigor at the very moment the marketing “sciences” seemed poised to achieve it. In one particularly memorable cocktail party, George Day, then the president of the Marketing Science Institute, discovered suddenly who he was drinking with, and prompting went on a tirade that must have last a full 8 minutes. Anthropology and ethnology, I began to gather, were the work of the devil. This made me the devil’s apprentice.  (There was awhile there when it seemed best for ethnographers to avoid cocktail parties altogether.)

Now the field has as much to fear from its proponents as its enemies. We have practitioners who operate from on high. They charge the earth and deliver only telegraphically, leaving behind them small, mantra-like phrases that claim, in a small, mantra-like phrase, to “crack the code.” In this case, charisma must do the work of thoroughness, rigor, nuance and profundity. If we demur, chances are we are met with some variation of St. Augustine’s dictum: do not seek to understand that you may believe. Believe that you may understand.  That’s, I guess, what the charisma is for. 

And then there is the “commodity basement,” and the practitioners who bang the stuff out, using small bands of willing but unsophisticated undergraduates. Some of these sweat shops may produce value, but if we believe that some part of the power of the method comes from it’s ability to craft the interview in real time, it’s hard to see how. These observers cannot be much more self guided than the bots and spiders of the internet. They may canvass the world widely, but they are hard pressed to do so with the ethnographer’s “just-in-time” responsiveness.

In between is the pretender practitioner. Those are the people who now retail ethnography without actually having an anthropologist or an ethnographer on staff. For some reason, many quite reputable agencies and design firms thought it was “ok” to sell ethnographer-free ethnography. Others did have an ethnographer on staff, but on finer scrutiny it proved to be the case that the ethnographer was “self trained.” This is I think the thing about experts and professionals, doctors and engineers, say. In general, self training is the very reason we demand training, discipline and a little conscience when it comes to how the terms are used. Shamed, some firms went out and bought an ornamental ethnography, someone for the mast head, and continued to use amateurs to do the bulk of the work. This is “bait and switch.”

But I guess we should be grateful that ethnography survived its infancy. Not so long ago it received a papal blessed from A.G. Lafley, the CEO of P&G. And with this CEOs and CMOs everywhere began to give the attention new attention. This is, in other words, a crucial moment in the history of the method. It will either grow up to dispatch the larger and more important responsibilities is now assigned. Or it will continue its descent into naïve empiricism, charismatic performance, or the commodity basement.

We are badly in need of a clearer idea of the method’s true practice and potential, the better to instruct pretenders in what it is they should be doing, and to move the rest of us to sit down and recraft our method and redouble our efforts.

Please help II

EuropeI leave tonight for 3 or 4 weeks in Europe and am hoping to recruit 9 readers of this blog as expert respondents. 

What I am looking for are people who can tell me about food, culture, Europe, home life, cooking, meal time, the family, and the present state of consumer taste, preference and inclination. 

The interview will take a couple of hours.  The fee is $200.oo American.  And it should be an opportunity for a rousing conversation.  Interviews will be conducted in Germany (week 1), Belgium (week 2) and France (week 3). 

Generally speaking, I am looking for account planners, social scientists, bloggers, journalists, trend watchers…that kind of person.

So if you are expert on these matters, please let me know.   I only have 3 slots for each country, so please forgive if I am unable to include you in the research project. 

Other readers:

It’s going to be a busy time.  Please accept my apologies if blogging proves intermittent. 

Account planners and fearless noticing

Blueprint Yesterday I was in Chicago.  In the afternoon, thanks to an invitation from Mike Ronkoske, I did a presentation for a group of planners and clients at Energy BBDO. The theme was anthropology and ethnography. 

I was attempting to describe how an anthropologist notices, and how he gets from noticing to insight. 

One of my talking points was a weird thing I noticed on the Connecticut train.  Guys were reading papers and magazines, and snapping each page as they went.  In and of itself, this sort of thing is annoying and banal in equal measure, the sort of thing we notice only to dismiss.   

But in this case, I found myself wondering, why snapping? Almost nothing is actually nothing.  The surface of social life is littered with tiny but telling details.  The anthropologist’s job is to notice and notice and notice.  So I noticed snapping.

And at this point in my presentation I actually got a little tearful, I have to tell you, and, as I don’t have to tell you, there is no crying in anthropology, so I kinda had to get a grip.  But I found myself telling these young planners about the time I sat beside Marshall Sahlins, professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, as he read one of my papers.  Professor Sahlins was traveling at speed through my paper, not because it was well written but because not even bad writing could slow him down.  Suddenly, he stopped absolutely dead in his tracks and said, "hm, I wonder why that is."

I was watching a very smart man acknowledge the limits of understanding.  You could almost hear him thinking, "why can’t I think this?"  This is the secret of noticing.  Spotting things that defy expectation, things that don’t "compute."    The temptation for the rest of us is to "fake the results" and assimilate the anomalous to existing categories.  Good noticers are fearless noticers.

Once we notice, anthropological or plannerly things can happen.  It is not too late for us decide that what looks like something is really nothing, in Sahlins’ case merely an artifact of a student’s rhetorical incompetence.  But we can also decide that the puzzle is genuine.  Now noticing leads to the possibility of insight and this will engage the redeployment of old ideas or, more remarkably, the creation of new ideas.  Potentially, every puzzle is stowaway with mutiny in its heart. 

The anthropological, the Sahlinsian lesson: Notice everything and pay attention to things that puzzle.  Pay attention to things that demand your attention and then refuse your understanding.  Pay attention to the failure of attention.  Yikes, it felt like I was passing a baton.  I am sure the planners in question just thought, "what I am noticing at the moment is that this guy has stopped talking and appears to be a little misty eyed.  Weird!"  But for me lots of Chicago, Warnerian continuities were suddenly visible to the naked eye. 

Anyhow, I was talking not just about Sahlins but also about guys (money managers, most of them?) sitting around me on the train, snapping their way through their magazines.  After the perceptual comes, we hope, the conceptual noticing: what are they snapping?  They don’t have to snap. This is patterned, in some sense deliberate, behavior.  Let this ordinary detail of everyday life test your powers of comprehension

And the thing that came lumbering into mind was a documentary I had seen years ago about autistic children.  Some of them were shown hitting themselves in the head, or hitting their heads against walls.. In the language of the documentary, these kids are "stimming." To be honest, I can’t remember what the documentary said was the cause of stimming, but I have come to think of stimming as a way of making and keeping boundaries.

For those guys on the train, snapping might be a way of marking "this page done."  It might be a way of setting a pace.  People seemed to be snapping at regular intervals.  Money managers, if that’s who they were, are driven people.

It’s even possible that by snapping the pages of the magazine seem to be asking us to observe how expeditiously the dispatch the task of…turning a page.  These guys are judged by results.  And the issue of performance may be so pressing that they feel obliged to show with what skill and speed they assimilated the contents of the magazine.

But I think at its most rudimentary stimming is a call for feedback. Banging a drum proves the existence of the drum and the drummer.  The sound of the drum comes precisely when the hand makes contact with the drum.  Efficacy.  The sound of the drum resonates in the room and the skill.  Reminder.  For someone who is not entirely certain of where they are in the world, and where they stop and the world starts, stimming is a very useful device.  I drum.  I exist. 

Does any of this apply to money managers?  Who knows!  Probably not.  Never mind.  Now, we have something with which to think.  A odd, little idea that we can keep posted on the inside of our heads.  Might be useful.  Might not.  The important thing is that we noticed and noticing lead to…something.  As Lear said, nothing comes of nothing, so even this, a small noticing, and a hazy, implausible explanation, are good. 

This is the job of the anthropologist.  To notice and notice and notice some more.  And propose, wrestle, reckon and conjure with the results.   Eventually, one of these roads will get us back to Rome.  One of our efforts to notice and noodle over snapping on the train will give us something we can use. 

And so it did in this case.  There were, people from Wrigley’s in the audience, and this helped surface the interesting possibility that we might think about gum chewing as a kind of stimming.  It’s ok if this is wrong, just so long as it opens up new ways to think about gum.  Almost certainly, we will abandon the metaphor eventually.  The question is whether engaging with it leaves us with a genuine insight. 

Anyhow, that evening a gave a speech during the marketer’s dinner at the Promotion Marketing Meetings.  (Thank you Rob Fields of PMA, for the opportunity.) And there I was addressing the issue of how it is a corporation can live in a tumult of change created by the three storms now upon us: technological change, sudden shifts in taste and preference, and the fact that all good corporations are now in the innovation game.  I was arguing that we are now fully apprised of the fact that we most live with a new order of dynamism, but it is not clear to me that we have even started to build the system that allow us to contend with this world.

I suggested that we think about the creation of a "big board" with which to identify trends early, and track them as they come to market, and I reviewed 4 blind side hits that proved vastly expensive for the corporation in question. This is pretty much from Flock and Flow.  But I also offered some latter day thinking, and I began with an acknowledgment that big boards are expensive to create and sustain, and that in the meantime we need culture camps and culture coaching.  And here I was of course hinting with no subtlety that these CMOs should hire me to create culture camps and to serve as their culture coaches. And then it occurred to me that the CMO would just as well to build an enduring connection with an account planner, someone who notices things and thinks for them.

It’s a nice pairing.  As I understand it, planners have been very much agency side.  Culture coaching and camping, this gives them access to the C suite and especially the senior marketers, and more important, the C suite to them.  The corporation needs more fearless noticers and noticing.  Especially now that it must learn to live with real dynamism. 

Creative women and the beast called sexism

Revolution Yesterday, Wal-Mart countersued Julie Roehm and we were reminded of the precarious existence of the female CMO. 

But there was a second story that caught the eye, and it might be related.  You decide.   

The New York Times reported that Julie Taymor was recently surprised to learn that her recently completed film, Across the Universe, has been edited without her permission or knowledge.  The culprit was no other than Joe Roth, the creator of Revolution Studios, the production company for which the film was made.

Ms. Taymor issued a response that the Times calls "carefully worded."  It is more than that.  It is temperate.  For his part, Roth speaks with care as well. He praises Taymor as a "brilliant director" who has made a "brilliant movie."  He says his intervention is completely unexceptional, part of the way that movies are made today. 

And then he makes a mistake.  He offers "No one is uncomfortable in this process, other than Julie."  Really? 

Waxman of the Times pounces,

…it is rare for an executive to step in and cut the movie himself.  Ms. Taymor was still making her own final edits to the film when she learned several weeks ago that Mr. Roth had edited another, shorter version.

Having your movie editing by the studio head without your permission or knowledge, this is perhaps not at all business as usual.  But Roth persists, arguing that his re-editing is in the nature of things.  "It’s ‘show’ and it’s ‘business’." 

And then he really puts his foot in it.  He warned the press that it should not "work off her [Taymor’s] hysteria."  Hysteria!  Oh, don’t go there, girlfriend.  You did not just say "hysteria." This is a loaded word and the unmistakable relic of a sexist regime in which women were excluded from film making and marketing, among other things, on the grounds of emotional instability.  "Hysteria" has a long history in the world of psychology and medicine, a diagnostic wound inflicted by a largely male profession on its female "patients."

The question is whether women entering the creative professions, and not just marketing, are playing the game by a new set of rules.  Or, and this is the feminist suspicion, it is possible that the beast of sexism is alive and well amongst us, and women are being constrained by an old set of ideas. 

Roth may be practicing the studio game in a conventional way, but he is using language that suggests otherwise.   Or why not go for the cheap hit: Revolution Studios may not be so revolutionary after all. 

References

Sampey, Kathleen and Aaron Baar.  2007.  Wal-Mart Countersues Julie Roehm.  BrandWeek.  March 20, 2007. here. subscription required.

Waxman, Sharon.  2007.  Film Has Two Versions, Only one Is Julie Taynor’s.  New York Times.  March 20, 2007, pp. B1, B7.

Who gets to say what this woman is doing: Douglas Coupland or McDonald’s

Mcjob One of the lessons of the 1960s was that certain kinds of cultural innovation were actually "matters indifferent."  New and strange lifestyles could be allowed to flourish, sexual expression could grow more explicit, every kind of speech could become more free.  Cultural tumult and experiment didn’t turn out to have structural consequences that would threaten the order or good government.  The youth cultures of the post war period, the ones driven by Bill Haley, and Elvis, would actually not run riot.  Only the Mayor of Chicago seemed not to grasp this new truth.  The rest of the world shrugged and said, "well, as long as it doesn’t happen on my lawn, knock yourself out."  In retrospect, we didn’t have to crucify Lenny Bruce after all. 

[This turns out to be an amazing anthropological experiment.  It was easy for liberal mavens to dismiss the anxieties and the hostilities of the mainstream, but in point of fact, I don’t think anyone knew for sure whether the cultural ferment of the post war period wouldn’t threaten order and good government.  It was a remarkable finding.  Now we know. Before we just didn’t. 

And the experiment continues.  What is the minimum order of agreement, or cultural consensus, that called for.  Was it Vance Packard who called us a "society of strangers."  The question is how strangers can the strangers get before really something necessary condition is violated and mutual estrangement takes us to the breaking point.]

But as the mainstream grew more tolerant, it was merely catching up to capitalism which had always ignored challenges from the margin.  Riesman and others so lovingly documented by Carey brought every kind of charge against capitalism in general, and marketing in particular, and no one to my knowledge, bothered to reply.  They arrested Lenny Bruce.  They ignored David Riesman. 

But now it looks like capitalism is fighting back.  It’s a small example but it might be an indicator of a larger trend to come.  According to today’s Financial Times,

The UK arm of [McDonald’s] is campaigning to get British dictionary publishers to revise their definitions of the word "McJob," a term the Oxford English Dictionary describes as "an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector.  McDonald’s says the term is "out of date, out of touch and … insulting."

The Financial Times says that the term was merely disseminated by Douglas Coupland in his era-shaping novel Generation X.  I had thought (assumed, really) that Coupland had invented it.  In his column, Stern suggests the McDonald’s protest is futile, a gesture worthy of King Cunute.  But I am less sure. 

There is a larger issue here.  Specifically, who gets to say who and what we are.  Still, more specifically, the question is who gets to say describe the job that millions of employees at McDonald’s perform each day.  It may suit the novelist to dismiss this labor from on high.  After all, he works a word processor, an instrument we regard as vastly more interesting than a fryer.  And sometimes, we do suppose that writers should decide on matters of this kind.  But if I was a fry cook at McDonald’s and someone called my labor a "McJob," I would have some questions.

References

Carey, John.  2002.  The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939.  Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers.  The Amazon.com page here. 

Newman, Jerry.  2007.  My Secret Life on the McJob.  publisher unknown.

Stern, Stefan and Jenny Wiggins.  2007.  McDonald’s Unit Spreads the word to change dictionary definition of "McJob."  Financial Times.  March 20, 2007., frontpage, p. 2.   [The quote above comes from the front page of the FT which excerpts the article cited here from p.  2.  The  quote within the quote comes from David Fairhurst, senior-vice president and chief people officer for McDonald’s.]

Stern, Stephan.  2007.  McJob: n., slang, C20, a fulfilling role with great prospects.  Financial Times.  March 20, 2007.  p. 7.

help, please

AirplaneA client has me doing a project in France, Germany and Belgium in the next few weeks.  This means I will be conducting ethnographic interviews in the home with the EU consumer.  This will be a 3 week anthropological fly over of a world that I need to know better.   Should be fascinating. 

But here’s the deal.  I need someone to help translate these interviews, linguistically and culturally. 

It looks as if I might have someone to do the German translation.  (This thanks to Russell Davies, who very kindly posted a "help, please" notice on my behalf.  And if I lucky enough to get the guy who stepped forward, I will be thrilled.  He is sensationally qualified.  This makes it official.  Russell knows the most interesting people.   And this too is now confirmed: planners are curious, observant, thoughtful, and inventive and we should all now be stocking our networks with them.) 

But I still need someone to help translate in France and Belgium.  If there is someone who has really good translation skills and wants to spend a couple of weeks in Europe, please let me know.  It should be amazing fun.   

The Gatorade Propel Ad

Leviathan Gatorade’s Propel introduced a new ad on Monday during 24.  It shows a giant running through the streets of San Francisco.  The giant is a loose assembly of  traffic signs, post-it notes, taxi cabs, jack hammers, phones ringing, TVs on loud, people shouting, a baby screaming, a boss exploding.

Eventually the giant begins to break apart and things fall away, until finally he is an ordinary man running in a singlet and shorts.  He pauses, finally, drinks deeply of the Propel bottle and a voice-over says,

Fit has a feeling and a water.  Propel, the fitness water.

Propel, and the agency Element 79 Partners, calls this spot the "stress monster."

It’s easy enough to "reverse engineer" the marketing here.  Stress Monster is dedicated the simple proposition that exercise makes stress go away.  This is well established as an understanding in our culture. It’s well established as a reality in the lives of millions of Americans.   

Meaning management sometimes goes like this.  The idea is not to find a new meaning for the brand.  The idea is go after an existing meaning with new vigor and skill.  In the language of marketing, the idea is to "own" an idea that is already out there. 

When we say we "own" a meaning, we mean we have discovered it’s most essential, powerful properties and made these as our own.  This is hard to do well, but when it works the brand (Propel) and the meaning (stress reduction) are mutually presupposing.  When they’re done really, really well, it is now impossible to think about one without thinking about the other. 

And that’s the way, I think, to think about Stress Monster.  It is part of Propel’s effort to own stress reduction.  Does this ad succeed? I have to say they made a pretty good run at it.  (No pun intended.)  Pam and I were dozing when it came on, and we looked at one another and just laughed with wonder and admiration.  Look what just charged through the living room!

If I have a complaint, it’s that the ad insists on a certain literalism.  The stress is represented by showing things that cause stress.  And running is shown quite literally to make these fall away.  And the man takes a drink just as the voice over claims glory for the brand.  And the song we hear is the Queen and David Bowie version of Under Pressure. ("Pressure, pressing down on me, pressing down on you.") 

I shouldn’t complain.  Because all the pieces, and especially the song, work to perfection.  We might just as well say that these simple devices are good bones, and the stuff of a marketing clarity. Or, to put this another way, this literalism adds up to so much more than the sum of its parts, that we have no real grounds for complaint.

Someone who was trained in the anthropology of James George Frazer, and his great work, The Golden Bough, might want to point out that the composite man evokes several folkloric creatures, the Leviathan, the Golem, the Chimera, all of them, as he is, desperate, haunted figures, cursed by their complication, feverishly in need of release from same.  But then I am not trained in the anthropology of James George Frazer, so never mind. 

As I have tried to argue here before, we are compilations of influence, contacts, ideas, loosely assembled and not always well organized or articulated.   Stress Monster is the unhappiest face of this new form.   

References

Lazare, Lewis.  2007.  Element 79 waters down ad monster.  Chicago Sun-Times.  March 15, 2007. here.

There is one version of the ad from Propel itself.  Click on "Stress Monster" once you’ve gone here. 

There is a much clearer reproduction at ‘boards.  here.

Hats off the team responsible for Stress Monster:

Agency: Element 79 Partners
Producer: Tom Cronin
Creative Director: Doug Behm/Jon Flannery
Writer: Ron D’Innocenzo
Art Director: Doug Behm/Jon Flannery
Production Company: Harvest Films
Director: Baker Smith
Editorial Company: Lost Planet LA
Executive Producer: Betsy Beale
Producer: Romi Laine/Wade Weliever
Editor: Paul Martinez
Assistant Editor: Ryan Dahlman
Colorist: Stephan Stefan Sonnenfeld, Company 3 LA
VFX: Asylum
VFX Executive Producer: Michael Pardee       
VFX Supervisor: Mitch Drain             
Senior VFX Producer: Stepahanie Gilgar      
CG supervisor: Sean Faden               
Lead 3d Animator: Matt Hackett         
Online Artist: Robert John Moggach
Mixer: Loren Silber, Lime Studios
Sound Design: 740 Sound Design, Exec Producer Scott Ganary

c-school for the rest of us?

United I spent yesterday morning working with a designer on the cover of my new book.  I used to let the publisher handle this but the results were often….well, I don’t want to get all Simon Cowell here, but the results were sometimes disappointing.  No, that’s too Paula Abdul.  Let’s just say some of these covers were bad enough to make an author wake up screaming in the middle of the night. Sometimes.  Not always. 

This designer, Perry Seelert, of United*, is great.  I liked the company name immediately, the design reminds me of the days when air travel was glamorous and destinations were still exotic.  It’s a pretty good metaphor for a design firm.  And the asterisk is perfect, it says, "there’s more," a little like the "Plus Ultra" motto of the early modern Spanish court.  Perry himself is charming, and looks at you with the most alarming sincerity. (Canadians believe in sincerity as a moral good and a national resource, and this makes us perhaps a little sincerity-sensitive.)

But still client and designer approached one another with caution.  You could see the thought bubbles.  The one over Perry read:

Does this guy really get design?

The one over me read:

Does this guy really get the concept of this book?

These are ancient, tribal suspicions.  They will never go away.  Designers will always hope for great clients and suspect the worst.  Clients will always hope for brilliant design even as they nurture the suspicion that they are about funding work that celebrates the designer more than the brand. 

As Virginia Postrel makes clear in The Substance of Style, this skepticism is in remission.  Everyone, even the most unsophisticated client, gets design, if only because this client is now almost always surrounded by it.  All boats rose with that tide.  For their part, designers came to know more about business and at some point, they stopped thinking of business as something morally dubious and aesthetic bankrupt. 

Indeed, designers have done so well mastering business that they now supply idea generation, innovation, and cultural knowledge as well.  In the process, they compete well against the agency world, the research supplier, and the consulting world.  They "got with the program" mpressively.

The corporate world stopped seeing design as a cost center, a necessary evil, a place to make economies, and started to see it as something that could add value, draw media attention, manufacture meaning, win share, and garner profit.  Now, that’s a sea change.  There was something organic about this movement, but there were tipping points, including the rise of Target and the revolution created by A.G. Lafley at P&G.  (The b-schools haven’t quite signed on but there is evidence, especially from Stanford, that even this might change.)

Bully.  So design has a place at the table.  My question, when does this happen for culture?  This remains a factor that must be reckoned with when keeping track of consumer taste and preference, it remains a source of innovation and creativity, it remains the source of blind side hits that can tilt the corporation to the very water line, it remains the sea in which the corporation must swim if it is to flourish.  But there is no systematic survey of what it is, where it stands, where’s it going and how it might be managed.

This used to fall to agencies.  And this was fine when trends moved through the market place like big, fat breakers at Wikiki.  You didn’t need early notice.  You didn’t need fine linkage.  You didn’t a comprehensive view.  You just needed not to be not aggregiously off trend and out of step.  This meant the agency would occasionally put the corporation on notice that the world had changed, and adjustments were, reluctantly, forthcoming.

I talked recently to a CMO type guy who told me that the agency are just as frustrating as they ever were to work with.  Yes, they have hovered up the little firms that give them a hand in the new media, innovation, buzz marketing and so, but this had actually made it more difficult for the agency to coordinate its efforts and for the corporation to make contact.  This guy was speaking admiringly of the new relationship that AT&T was demanding of its agency: a small group of people, hand picked from the empire, with the larger organization and effort concealed from view.

If the agency was bad at serving the corporation as a conduit on culture, recent changes may have made things vastly worse. 

Yes, the design firms have stepped up here, and I have seen them do great work.  But I don’t believe any of the d-schools teach a deep knowledge of culture anymore that b-schools do.  They could but they don’t.  Well, you might say, design has embraced ethnography, and this is a method that allows them to say that what they don’t know, they can find out.  Right again, but some of the worst methodological pretenders are working in the design field, and industry standards are, by this measure, not high.

Again, the d-school at Stanford is most promising and I am looking forward someday to getting the 411 from Bob Sutton or someone. 

B-schools are certifiably hopeless on this issue, and continue to operate the instruction and the problem solving as if economics assumptions will do.  (There are some exceptions here and the Schulich b-school at York would seem to be one of these.)  If ever there were a place in the theoretical world were an urgent, air lift, emergency relief effort were called for, it is here.  In a more perfect world, they would put a bunch of us in the dessert with the stern warning that "no one leaves till you solve this problem."  The problem is this: can we save the economics paradigm from itself?  Can we make it capable of capturing and comprehending the cultural factor?  Or are substantial renovations/revolutions called for? 

Anthropology departments on campus might have made themselves useful, but the field now cultivates a morality, a politics and an epistemology that makes this impossible.  Sociology not so much and not so bad.  Still, with a very few exceptions, it is difficult to identify departments of any social science that are fountains of cultural knowledge.   (Sociology at Princeton looks like a spectacular exception.)

So the question is when does the corporation make good on this issue?  When does it build culture in?  The existing suppliers are not good enough. And this means we will likely have to start from the beginning.  What about a "culture school," a c-school to put beside the d-school and the b-school?  Russell Davies has created an Account Planning School of the Web.  This is promising.  There are schools that promise to train "future watchers."  Without a deep knowledge of contemporary culture, this is ludicrous and a little like asking pet owners to be lion tamers. 

Do I really think anyone will create a c-school.  Of course not.  The corporation will have to solve this problem on its own.  Maybe its time for us to create culture camps.  Today I am adding a new piece to my consulting business, a "culture coach" kind of thing.  I will sit down with senior executives and CMOs and take them through where things stand and why, what we see on the horizons, what we can expect.  I mean, otherwise, the world becomes increasingly astonishing. The corporation finds itself assaulted by the blind side hit. Levi-Strauss misses hip hop.  The furniture discovers women redesigning the family through the great room.   The artisanal trend overwhelms Kraft.  A new notion of pets surprises Purina.  Without a c-school or a c-camp, or a c-coach, the world is just one damn surprise after another. 

References

Postrel, Virginia.  2004.  The Substance of Style.  New York: Harper. here.

A Valentine 30 days late

My new ThinkPad arrived today, and in stolen moments, I’ve been configuring it.  It really is a joy.  It’s slipper light, the key board is perfect, the screen is miraculous, the hard drive, finally, capacious, the configuration software intelligent, the battery trans-Atlantic. I know this is irrational, but I feel about ThinkPad the way people used to feel about their Fords, their Coca-Cola, and their Levi’s.  I’m telling you, I am this far from burning a logo into my arm.

Overheard in New York

Duelling_1 Overheard in New York is one of the jewels of the web.  People hear things being said on the street, and post these on-line.

A little fragment of conversation comes drifting over the transom, ethnographic data for free.

Here’s a fragment now:

20-something girl with mom, hands full:    
            Could you hit One for me?

Man, pushing button:    
            You’re welcome.

20-something girl:          
            Oh! Thank you.

Man:                                                      
            Learn some manners.

20-something girl:                                  
            Man, I’d tell you to fuck yourself if my mom wasn’t with me.

(Overheard in New York City at 20th St & 1st Ave.)

New Yorkers survive the compression of urban life by agreeing to a set of rules.  These rules allow an amazing mutuality. The other day I was walking from a train in Grand Central to the subway under Grand Central.  It’s about a hundred yards.  As you go down the stairs into the subway, a group moving 10 across slows and funnels to become a group moving 5 across.  There was almost no room in front and almost no room beside. But I didn’t touch anyone and no one touched me.  Miraculous.

But it doesn’t always go this well.  Sometimes in the streets of New York, there is slippage.  Rules are unclear.  Interpretations are inconsistent.  Differences flourish.  Some New Yorkers exercise a courtly grace and solicitude.  Others suffer the delusion that the city belongs to them alone, that there are no other  New Yorkers.  The sidewalks take on a "rock ’em sock ’em" roller derby quality. 

In the conversation above, between two passengers in an elevator compartment, things start out well enough.  Passenger 1 calls for Floor one.  She puts this in the form of a question, and apparently Passenger 2 takes her at her word.  When he complies, Passenger 2 believes himself in possession of a marker or a debt.  What he hopes for, apparently, is a "thank you."  In most cases this is how these debts are discharged. 

But, no.  Passenger 1 is not forthcoming.  Passenger 2 reminds her of her debt by pretending that she has discharged it.  "You’re welcome," he says.   Passenger 1 tries to make amends: "Oh, thank you."  But this is not enough.  Passenger 2 is not mollified.  The debt remains.  "Learn some manners," he tells her. This is a calculated punishment.  It says, in effect, you have no manners.

Now it is the turn of Passenger 1 to take umbrage.  As a good New Yorker, she’ll be damned if she is going to take direction from a perfect stranger.  Passenger 2 has overstepped his bounds, and now it’s his turn for punishment.   

But there’s a problem.  Passenger 1 is with her Mom.  And this complicated things wonderfully, because mothers are the single most influential source of a child’s knowledge of, and instinct for, social rules.  Changes are Passenger 1 believes that her mother will by unhappy with the punishment she wishes to unleash. 

What to do?

Passenger 1 resorts to a strategy that is both crude and effective.  It is the equivalent of covering her Mom’s ears.  "Man, I’d tell you to fuck yourself if my mom wasn’t with me."  Propriety is satisfied.  Punishment is rendered. (I believe linguists would accept this as a case of diplomatic non-indexicality.)

We don’t know what happened next, but we can be certain that violence was out of the question.  Passenger 2 gave Passenger 1 a "look," and the contretemps was over.  The theater of disagreement is elastic enough to allow both parties to let fly and leave the field of combat with the sense that honor, their honor, has been satisfied. 

If my way from Grand Central to the subway is governed by an invisible, unspoken, emergent order, there are lots of occasion in which the rules must be stated and upheld…and New Yorkers are just the people for the job.

For the "overheard in New York" website, and this conversation fragment, go here. 

the end of accidental networks

Networks Think of the most influential kid you knew in high school. Think of the friend who had the biggest effect on you in college.  Who are you because of them?   What difference did their difference make?

Ok, multiply the "influential friend" effect by 5.  Who are you now?  I bet you are unrecognizably different. 

the old world model

In the "old world" model, we make friends by accident.  Our family is from Seattle, so that’s where we were born.  Or, our Dad got a job in Chicago, so that’s where we went to school.  We like to ski, and that’s how we ended up in Vermont.  Accidents of birth, occupation, inclination, all of these constrain the set of people with whom we can be friends. 

Once in place, some channeling takes place. We’re grew up in Seattle, say, and as it happens we lived in a neighborhood called Laurelhurst.  This increased the chances that we would go to Lakeside School, and this, in turn, is why we know Bill Gates on a first name basis, and this, in turn, is the reason we retired from Microsoft some years ago to work on our golf game.  (And this is why people struggle to get into the right neighborhoods, clubs and schools…to tap channeling and improve on accident.)

But even within the channeling, there is accident.  It just turns out that we end up with a locker beside Bill Gates at Lakeside.  Or, no, this advantage goes to some guy called Paul Allen.  Our "best" friends will be supplied by serendipity.  We will never know that these kids are not nearly so interesting and formative as three kids in a grade ahead of us.

the new world model

One of the things that the internet extinguished was the need for accidental sociality, for post-kinship connections that depend on spatial or institutional proximity.  And if there is a mission for the next generation of the internet, Web 3.0, as it were, it is a magnificent sorting of the world that identifies people with whom we are most likely to see eye to eye, meet idea with idea, draw innovation from creativity in a pell mell rush to revelation.  I mean, that’s what the world could look like.  In the short term, it will be nice if we build these networks.  In the longer term, it will be obligatory. 

Linkedin does a very bad job at this.  People use MySpace and Facebook to "audition" friends and I would love to hear about relationships so discovered.  As it stands, machines can sort the social world for us, they can begin to craft more interesting networks, but so far they haven’t done very much of this.  As I was saying in a previous post, I have met new friends through the internet.  But machines didn’t find them.  I did.  (Unless we consider blogging a great sorting exercise, and this might be exactly what it is [among other things].) 

My guess is that machines once they are dedicated to this purpose will do a much better job of building social connections than I could do even if I were to devote all my time to it.  It can detect patterns in the stuff I put on line, and find hidden resonances with the stuff others put on line.  And this would be interesting.  It would be fun to get an email that says "we’ve found a match."  I get these know from the DNA databases that Andrew Zolli persuaded me to join.  There are a couple of people out there with whom I am virtually identical from a genetic point of view.  No, it turns out we don’t have anything else in common. 

But this much is clear.  One of these days our descendants will be astonished to hear that we build our social networks by hand out of accident and coincidence (aka randomness, chance and probability). "What," they will want to know, "that was enough for you?"