This post is about the adoption of the fuel efficient car, specifically the Prius.  I will argue that sales of the Prius (the hostage) are sometimes discouraged by the likes of Arianna Huffington and her supporters (the hostage takers).  I will also argue that this problem can be addressed by the marketer (the hostage rescuer).  To address the problem and the solution we must contemplate diffusion theory, one of the places that anthropology and economics particularly meet. 

Our culture streams with innovation.  But how does "streaming" work? 

Diffusion theories (Simmel in the early days, Rogers in the late) say that innovations "stream" by passing from early adopters to late adopters. Each group has its own motives and its own tolerances for change. Between them, they help draw innovations into the mainstream. 

But how does "passing" work?

Simmel says innovations pass into the mainstream when people imitate  early adopters.  This is the classic operation of the diffusion effect, but there are times when late adopters will not imitate.  This happens when the early adopter flaunts his difference, and rewards himself with self congratulation.  This self-congratulation is read as other-scorn, as if the adopter is saying, "I get it, you don’t."  In this case, the early adopter provokes not admiration but antagonism.  The innovation has been taken hostage.

There is a second case when imitation is not forthcoming, and the innovation is left, in effect, marooned and unassimilable at the far end of the diffusion stream.  In this case, people regard the innovation as puzzling and strange.  Certainly, novelty always has a small current of oddity running through it.  (It would not be novel otherwise.)  But in this case we are talking about innovations that remain opaque, a hostage of another kind.

Simmel’s "imitation" effect does not work in either case.  In fact, the would-be "late adopter" wants nothing to do with the innovation, which remains antagonizing or unsettling.  Or to put this in the language of another marketing model, the innovation is blank of meaning, or inhabited with someone else’s meaning.  Adoption is unlikely.  Captivity is assured.

Marketing to the rescue.  Our job is to find meanings for the innovation that are intelligible, palatable and interesting.  To do this, we could assemble a room full of ad agency creatives.  The other possibility is to see if the early adopters have created meanings other than that of self congratulation.

And this is precisely what was done by Heffner, Kurani, and Turrentine in a recent article on Hybrid Electric Vehicles, specifically the Prius.  H, K and T interviewed 25 Prius owning family, almost all of them in California.  (See the link below for the article and a PDF of the article.  I am still in Warsaw and a little under the gun, timewise. Otherwise, I would break it out for you.) 

Some of the results were predictable.  Some owners drove their cars as a badge of environmental virtue.  And predictably some of them intended their cars as a repudiation of the SUVs with which they shared the highway, a kind of "I’m environmentally sensitive and you’re not" kind of message.  (Actually, sometimes the Huffington driver can send a more strident message, something closer to, "I’m environmentally sensitive, and you are an enemy of the planet.") This is of course precisely the problem, and the thing that antagonizes the late adopter and maroons the innovation. 

But Heffner, Kurani, and Turrentine found respondents cultivating other, less divisive meanings.  For one respondent, the Prius was a compelling choice because it meant that America would sent less money overseas, and gain independence from foreign governments hostile to the US.  This same respondent believed that his choice of a Prius "sent a message" to the American manufacturers of cars, chiding them for having been too slow in developing hybrid technology.  It was also a way to punish the American gas lobby. 

This consumer created meaning moves briskly away from environmental issues into political ones, and there is, I believe, a much larger, constituency for this meaning than there is for the environment.  The marketer could take this up and run with it.  Certainly there is something a little Alice-in-wonderland about promoting Japanese cars on the grounds that it’s good for American interests.  But, hey, it’s for the planet, man. 

A couple was enamored of how quiet the Prius was at low speeds.   They called their "stealth mode."  This is really lovely.  This is a couple out for a little drive, noticing something about their car, reaching for metaphor, and coming back with a little bit of drama that makes driving more fun.  It is for them moment the kind of play that couples share.  (Pam and I have constructed a life out of these little moments, as every couple does.)  But in the right agency hands, this is the stuff on interesting creative, which creatives could "air lift" the Prius out of Huffington self righteousness with a single 30 second spot. 

A third consumer saw his Prius as the perfect car for someone in the technology field, in his phrase, a "geek-a-rific" car.  This consumer was concerned that the Prius would identify him as a "tree hugger" and took pains to emphasize the technological advantage of his car by driving it with his foot to the floor.  Splendid.  In this case, the consumer is actively engaged in the very problem that concerns the marketer.  This may not be the best way of addressing the issue, but it reassures us that our strategy is not altogether mistaken. 

There are several points to make here.

1) That the diffusion effect sometimes comes undone.  Imitation is not forthcoming.  The early adopter has hijacked the the innovation, so to make it cosa nostra (our thing), a party to which others are not invited.  Would-be late adopters are antagonized.   Adoption is slowed. 

2)  When this happens, it is up to the marketer to intervene.  Good ethnographic research will reveal other meanings that "work" for the innovation, but do not have the effect of antagonizing the consumer. We are looking for the acts of symbolic "re-production" with which the consumer has reimagined the innovation.  Now, the communications task is to transship these meanings to the would-be late adopter, running an end-run around the cosa nostra, Huffington gang. 

3) I believe this hunt for palatable meanings is the unofficial practice in marketing.  Certainly, it is a part of  my professional practice as a consulting anthropologist.  I spend a lot of time listening to active consumers talk about the ways they have engaged with the product or brand, that these meanings might be build back into the product or the brand. 

4) So there is a way in which marketers honor this strategy in a de facto way.  But it’s not clear to me that theory has caught up here. Mind you, diffusion theory has been shocking neglected, both in the b-schools and the social sciences.

5) We might think of this as an act of hostage rescue.  What we are doing is saving the innovation from the meanings lavished upon them by the early adopters.  In a way this is fully consistent with the consumer centric mission of marketing, and the conviction that our products and services can’t be "about us" but must instead be about the consumer.  Except in this case, when we say it’s "not about us," we are also struggling to make sure the product or service is "not about them," i.e., the Huffingtons of the world.

6) Come to that, I wonder if this sort of thinking might not prove useful for the Democratic party and it’s presidential hopefuls.

References

Heffner, Reid, Kenneth S. Kurani, Thomas S. Turrentine.  2007.  Symbolism in Early Markets for Hybrid Electric Vehicles.  Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Dais, Research Report UCD-ITS-RR-07-01. here.

Last note:

For those following my travels in Europe, I leave Warsaw today for Kracow, I think it is.  On the other hand, it could be Lodz.  I will let you know when I get there. 

First, it was Mary Minnick, who resigned as The Coca-Cola Company’s VP of Marketing, Strategy and Innovation.  This week it was Esther Lee, TCCC’s senior VP and chief creative officer.  Minnick went into retirement.  Lee is CEO of EURO RSCG Worldwide.

Two fabulously talented marketers, gone. 

And what happens now? According to AdAge,

Chairman-CEO Neville Isdell assumed oversight for Coke’s strategy and innovation group, and marketing moved under President-Chief Operating Officer Muhtar Kent. … Coke’s North American unit was restructured in March, decentralizing marketing and shifting brand stewardship to newly named president-general managers for three business units.

Now Isdell isn’t remarkable for his mastery of marketing.  Kent, well, Kent is an Operating Officer.  This means the Coca-Cola Company appears once more on the verge of compromising its marketing.  Isdell’s predecessor, Daft did this in 2000, casting to the winds a deeply talented Atlanta team on the grounds that there were local marketing teams around the world TCCC could fall back upon.

Without marketing, Coke, the product, the portfolio of products, is sweetened water.  Without marketing to create new meanings and to renew old meanings, the brand begins to wither and die.  And I thought TCCC had a go at this recently.  The category, challenged by water, juice, sports drinks, is shrinking.  Competitors multiply.  Pepsi gets stronger.  The little brands grow more numerous and more nimble.  Is this the time for another disaspora of talent?

The field of marketing is undergoing a revolution that takes it out of the stupidities of the old world into strategies that are new, difficult, and ever changing.  (See the post for yesterday, please.)

This is to say that marketing has always mattered to the Coca-Cola Company, and it especially matters now.  Perhaps this is not the time to replace good marketers with non marketers.  I mean, if I were a shareholder and I discovered that the marketing team was being once more diminished, I would not be happy. 

Come to think of it, Warren Buffett, one of the great champions of TCCC investment, is now famous for having encouraged the Gecko ads for Geico.  What happens if he starts to ask questions? What if he phones to ask what happened to the marketers? 

"Mr. Isdell, I have Mr. Buffett on line 1."

Oh, oh. 

References

Sanders, Lisa and Kate MacArthur.  2007.  Euro RSCG Taps Coke’s Lee as North American CEO.  Adage.  May 2, 2007.  here.

What I’m doing here in Mexico City is trying to save marketing.  No, really.

There was a golden age in the agency world when research, strategy and creativity worked together, and brands were build by smart people working in a happy, reckless free-for-all of creativity.  (Like all mythic creations, this golden age is heavy on the happy.)

Take Chicago just before and after World War II.  Lloyd Warner had taken his position at the University of Chicago in the 30s.  (He’d been a graduate student at Harvard in the period 1929-1935 where he was connected both to the Department of Anthropology and the Business School!  Like that’s ever going to happen again.) Even as Warner was writing books like American Life: Dream and Reality (1953), he was doing commercial work.

With Burleigh Gardner and William Henry, he created a firm in Hyde Park on 53rd street called Social Research, Incorporated (SRI).  This group helped create the focus group, brand image, and other staples of the world of advertising.

Over the next two decades SRI helped to revolutionize the field of  market research, transforming its assumptions, methods, goals, and consequences in ways that quickly redirected the world of advertising…according  to Andrew Abbott, chair of sociology at [the University of] Chicago.

By the time I started doing commercial work in the middle 1980s, things had change, the world had shrunk, joy was largely extinguished. An age of iron now prevailed.  Clearly, dark forces had prevailed.  The free-wheeling days of smart people from different fields working together in the creation of novel approaches, this was pretty much over.  Now people would open marketing meetings with "what’s the hot button here?"

What happened?  Certainly, the b-school continued to treat creativity as an off planet activity.  Most brands were controlled by managers who didn’t know or care about the full value that agencies and research could create.  Wall Street was tightening the screws.  And this discouraged longer term thinking and risk taking.  The agencies themselves often demanded that they be left alone to commune with their gods.  The rich connections and accomplishments of the Chicago world were vanishing.   

"Hot buttons!"  What a grim metaphor.  It casts the consumer has a mechanical device for which the operating manual has gone missing.  How to operate this creature?  Say, let get someone to see if there’s a lever or a button?  Look for something blinking.  Send in the researchers and see.  (There is a Ph.D. thesis waiting to happen here.  Where did the hot button theory come from? Who invented it?  What made the world vulnerable to it?  Surely Warner and SRI would have laughed it out of court.)

In the post-Chicago, post-Warner regime, a cycle of diminishment prevailed. Clients asked less of research, research asked less of the consumer, the corporation asked less of the agency, and of course the consumer was diminished most of all.  Everyone was holding out.  Certain kinds of creativity and innovation were dying out.  Sometimes, I lay the fault with the nuclear winter of positivism that prevailed after World War II.  Everyone was trying to be as much like a scientist as possible.  If marketing professionals could have got a way with lab coats, believe me, they would have.  Science has status.  Marketing was imprecise and pandering.  It is worth pointing out here that it was Chicagoans, academic and industrial, who sustained qualitative methods during the nuclear winter.

At some point, things started to get better.  The corporation came to think of the consumer as a more complicating, interesting, intelligent creature.  Sometimes this was a humanizing gesture.  Sometimes, it was merely a  response to competitive pressure.

Funny advertising happened.  This didn’t mean that the agency or the client cared about sophisticated meaning manufacture, but at least both were now prepared to credit the consumer with a sense of humor (instead of button).  This is the era of Cliff Freeman, among others.  The field of design, thanks to the revolutionary efforts of Jay Doblin made a difference.  Now the consumer was to be consulted (not examined).  Stephen King and account planning happened and eventually found its way to North America.  Some of us began to offer ethnography as a new way to talk to the consumer, and eventually P&G happened, as A.G. Lafley blessed the  method.  And under the stewardship of Russ Belk, Rich Lutz, Philip Kotler, Syd Levy, Michael Solomon, Susan Fournier, John Deighton and Al Silk, to name a few, there emerged better models of the consumer. 

Which brings us to what I think I’m doing in Mexico.  I am in those homes to capture the consumer in some (but not all) of her complexity, to cast the net wide with a series of questions that would horrify the hot button mechanic.  I am asking lots of diverse questions.  I am following the consumer any where she is prepared to take me (by direction or implication).    I am here to advance my clients interests not by finding a hot button, but looking for a match between all of the cultural complexities of the consumers’ life and all the things the brand and the product are or can become. 

Ethnography is pretty good at drawing out the complexity of the consumer.  Not of course in the hands of the bargain basement players or the high-charging methodological pretenders, but when someone knows what they are doing, the method is fecund.  We are going to sit in someone’s home for a couple of hours and listen to them answer a couple of hundred questions.  And every question is potentially a Mississippi.  By asking a simple question, we stumble onto a far tributary and by asking successive questions, we begin to see that we are now moving from detail to "something good."  If we’re lucky, and this only happens once or twice an interview, we end up all the way downstream, connected now to the very delta of this culture.  Now we see what matters.  More important, we know why.  This is the place for the brand to position itself.  This is the place of advantage. 

Will I save the world of marketing?  Well, not single handedly.  But the more we look, the more we find.  And the more we make available to the agency and the client, the better and smarter marketing can get.  Thus does a virtuous cycle replaces the downward spiral.  Everyone gets smarter.  Everyone supplies more value to the next party.  At least, we hope they do. Clients asked more of research, research asked more of the consumer, the corporation asked more of the agency, and all of us, in concert, supply more to the consumer. 

This may seem like an exercise in preaching to the choir.  Surely everyone cares about and has committed to a more sophisticated, value adding marketing!   Um, I’m not so sure about that.  Not if things afoot at the Coca-Cola Company are what they appear to be. Tomorrow, I’ll have a go at this. 

References

Easton, John.  2001.  Consuming Interests.  University of Chicago Magazine.  here.

The Wikipedia entry for Lloyd Warner is here.

Post script:

For those of you who are following my travels, you will note from today’s photo that I am now in Guadalajara.  It has that splashing light of southern California (whereas Monterrey, especially when overcast, had pewter-ish light, which is of course exactly what the heath calls for).   I am received by matrons of the house with the grace and good humor that I received in Monterrey and Mexico City, but I think here, perhaps, people are a little more relaxed.  Still the numbers are too small to risk a generalization of this kind.  One of the joys of interviewing here is that the rooms are usually breezy and bright, the opposite of the Khrushchev kitchens in which the project began, so little, so hot, so little, so hot.   The question is who will win the foot race, the powerpoint deck or the exhaustion that always descends in the second week?   I have my money on the powerpoint deck.