Archive for September, 2008
Culture is our export
Posted by: | CommentsThis will be section 3 of the compendium of posts forthcoming on this blog. The compendium will be called "How to be an anthropologist (for hire)."
1. Culture Matters I
In this post, I try to show that and how culture matters by calling it the software of contemporary life. I offer my "Annapok experiment," in which we contemplate the experience of an Inuit man called Annapok who must go to Manhattan without the right software. (See the post here.)
2. Culture Matters II
As the software of contemporary life, culture is essential to marketers. Here we look at branding work by Acura, Disney, Rache Ray, Volvo, and department stores. (See the post here.)
3. Culture Matters III
Culture is essential for marketing and marketers but in fact it is routinely dismissed or derided by many experts. In this post,I Iook at Clayton Christensen, Clotaire Rapaille and trend hunters. (See the post here.)
4. The Devil Wears Durkheim
Culture does not descend to us from on high. It is often the outcome of commercial forces. (This is one of the reasons it is so various and so responsive.) In this post, I look at how the fashion industry helps shape our culture. My talking point is a key scene from the movie the Devil Wears Prada. (See the post here.)
5. Prefab culture
Culture created by the fashion world, by the movies, by marketing, by fiction and theatre, sometimes delivers itself straight into the details of everyday life. This post looks at the phrases liked "what’s up!" or "Oh, behave" that start as commerce and end up as culture. (I take this as a demonstration of how often commercial forces create our culture and in the process us.) (See the post here.)
6. How to be a self-funding anthropologist
This is my career advice to a young man who wrote me from Mumbai to ask about how to learn about culture. Please note my distinction between culture above and culture below. There are two parts to our export, short term trends and deeper, longer continuities. It is our attention to the last that distinguishes the anthropologist from many people who are also interested in culture. (See the post here.)
7. Anthropology, the business model
This is my effort to treat the more general, and perhaps the most important, project an anthropologist can undertake to make him or herself useful to serve the world. This post is about watching things change in our culture, detecting new patterns, and proposing a new architecture. here.)
Anthropologists and others
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This essay will be part of the blog compendium called How To Be An Anthropologist (for hire), coming to this blog soon.
Anthropologists are not the only ones trying to make sense of markets and meanings. There are several parties with which it competes and collaborates. In this section, I am in a competitive frame of mind. I look at how engineers, economists, managers, CEOs and university presidents ignore the cultural part of the equation.
1. Culture and engineers I
In this essay, I talk about one way to present culture to engineers. (See the post here.)
2. Culture and engineers II
When people started using social technologies like Twitter and Facebook to tell their friends things like "I just fed the cat," engineers threw up their hands. We give the world this new way of communicating and what do they do with it? Engineers went so far as to call these messages "exhaust data." This was another way of saying it was message without content, data without significance.
But there’s a better, anthropological way to look at these data, I think. It is to see it as "phatic communication." (See the post here.)
3. Culture and economists I
This post is my reply to Steven Levitt. I think there is a better, more cultural explanation for the urban issues he has been examining. I think we are called upon to look at the social context, the rise of hip hop and the transformation of popular culture. These are almost always the things excluded from consideration by the economist. So of course I was going to reply. (See the post here.)
4. Culture and economists II
This is my reply to behavioral economists. I argue that the notion of rationality must be defined broadly enough to capture cultural knowledge and not just the calculation of benefit. (See the post here.)
5. Culture and managers
Scott Berkun was kind enough to interview me for his blog at Harvard Publishing. I found myself attempting to define the value of culture for managers. See what you think. (See the post here.)
6. Culture and CEOs
It’s my conviction that virtually every CEO has a great big hole in his or her knowledge. What they are missing in an understanding of what culture is and how culture works. More to the point for some, what is missing is a nuanced and thorough knowledge of what is happening in culture now. Here is a post on Michael Eisner, a guy who apparently believes that just living in our culture gives us a sufficient knowledge of our culture. (See the post here.)
7. Culture and university presidents
I believe that the man who was the President of Harvard might have survived controversy and remained in office had he had a deeper understanding of the culture (and cultures) that flourish at his university. This post was my advice to him, a kind of open letter. (See the post here.)
how anthropologists make a living
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I am preparing to mount another blog compendium. See the first one of these, eyes right, called Branding Now. This second compendium will be called How to be an anthropologist (for hire) and it will draw together posts from this blog that treat the theme.
What do anthropologists do to make a living?
1) Pit bulls in Chicago
The most common thing that anthropologist do is to serve as "eyes and ears" for someone. The client (often but not always a corporation) needs to get in touch with the people who buy its products and services. They have many ways of doing this. One way to hire an anthropologist to talk directly to the consumer. These are called "ethnographic" interviews
In the case of this post, I was in Chicago talking to people on behalf of a financial services company. Normally, ethnographic interviews are done in undistracted circumstances, someone’s home, perhaps an office. But in this case, we were talking about money. And many Americans would rather talk about their sex lives then their financial circumstances. (This is an interesting cultural puzzle all on its own.) So it made sense to interview respondents in public. This is where I met the pit bull. (See the post here.)
In any case, this ethnographic interview is the standard thing an anthropologist does for a living.
2) How Fieldwork works
Here I am toughing it out in the field. This post will also give you a sense of the mechanics of the ethnographic interview. I have quite a few posts on this blog on ethnography, and I hope to create a compendium called Ethnography: how to do it. In the meantime, treat this post as your introduction to what ethnography looks like. (See the post here.)
3) Decoding culture
A second way to serve the client is to x-ray a new development in the marketplace. Quiznos might hire you to tell them about the artisanal trend in bread and chocolate. Detroit might ask you to find out about the new trend in customizing autos. The USA Network may ask you to figure out why Rachel Ray is such a big hit. These questions have anthropological answers. And in this case we supply them not be talking to consumers, but by examining culture. (See the post here.)
4) Building Brands
A third way to serve clients is to help them build the public image, the public face, the public meaning they present to the world. I do not have a particular post here. No, I have 40 posts here. You will find them organized as a blog compendium at www.cultureby.com. Looking for the book covered with the title Branding Now. This is the anthropologist’s view of what a brand is, how this is changing and now an anthropologist can help.
5) Preventing the blind side hit
The corporation lives increasingly in a dynamic, unpredictable world. In order to protect itself from the "blind side hit," it will sometimes hire an anthropologist. His or her job is to figure out the points of vulnerability. This exist where the corporation makes a Here’s another way for the anthropologist to serve. Sometimes, the corporation won’t use him or her to talk to consumer but to identify risks or to solve problems. In the case of assumption hunting, the anthropologist is hired to find out where the corporation is most vulnerable to disruptive change. (See the post here.)
6) Ferret Mode
Sometimes, the corporation knows it has a problem but it can’t quite tell what the problem is. This is the time to send the anthropologist in in "ferret mode." The corporation says, "Have a look. Let us know. Tell us the best way to define and approach this problem." This puts a premium on the anthropologist’s powers of pattern recognition. (See the post here.)
7) Anthropology’s broadest responsibility?
This post is a very general treatment of what anthropology "brings to the party." I think of this as a statement of the anthropologist’s biggest intellectual responsibilities: helping our culture and our commerce think see the new fluidity of the contemporary world, and helping to propose new ways for us to think about culture and commerce now that fluidity is upon us. (See the post here.)
Topic stack # 4
Posted by: | CommentsAnother topic stack. Please make of these what you will. Feel free to borrow, steal, repackage, republish, illuminate and otherwise add value.
1) narrative perfume
Thanks to a friend at Saatchi, Mary Mills, I am informed that someone in Paris is making narrative perfume. The idea is not to smell good. The idea is not even to evoke any of the traditional meanings invested in perfume: wonder, mystery, romance, the sublime, voluptuousness, abandon, etc. No, the idea in the case of a company called Etat Libre D’Orange is to tell stories. A perfume called "murder" smells of metal and blood, eloge du traitre’ tells the story of a traitor. This really does open up the expressive range of a consumer good that for a very long time had its semiotic range well capped.
2) managing scarce resources
I was on the train last week, coming back on the Acela from Philadelphia. The great thing about the train is that it is easy to eavesdrop. It’s as if someone is doing your anthropology for you. All you have to do is sit there wide awake, or as Melville says in Moby Dick, "broad awake," and the data comes to you. In this case, I was listening to a manager managing. I only had access to half the phone conversation, but it was pretty easy to piece things together. I was listening to a senior manager managing a junior manager. It was clear that Senior was having to indulge Junior. Junior was telling Senior much more than Senior needed to hear. And you could hear the calculation running in Senior’s head. This kid is talented. This kid’s a keeper. So I let him run…and run…and run. Clearly, there was a clock ticking in Senior’s head. How much time could he give to this employee? How much time should be given as an investment? Now much to sustain the relationship? And how much was too much. Because management is always about choice. As long as there is more to do than humanly possible to do, you have to choose. On really hectic days, you are hoping you have done "just enough," exactly as much as is called for and not a jot more. You could hear this manager trying to make his "just enough" decision.
3) Beauty on the train.
Sometimes on the train, you don’t just listen in, you also participate…in that odd way we participate in urban life. Speaking of broad awake, sitting across from me was a women, a well appointed, somewhat angular blonde, the kind who sends a little thrill through you (well, ok, me) top to bottom, burning slow but true, not a vast, reckless explosion of the kind you get from some women, but something else.
And then, darn it, she sees me seeing her, and flush with this triumph, she communicates something new to the guy she’s sitting with, a CEO type, her husband, by the looks of things.
And now they go from not talking to one another at all to vibrating for one another, little eddies of gaze, conversation, phatic murmurs running back and forth. They are chuckling and enjoying one another. They are what Goffman would call more emphatically a "with."
So here’s how it goes in the pin ball game that is urban life. She picks up my (very quiet) admiration. (Honest.) And she feels differently about herself. And her husband picks up her new self admiration. And this converts to his renewed admiration for her. And she plays this back as a renewed admiration for him.
Anthropologists. We do what we can.
4) Boutique banks
There was a little protest here in Connecticut as small town merchants began to protest the intrusion of lots of new banks. And sure enough a town like Darien has an intrusion of banks. And this is odd, and I wondered if we are now a kind of micro brewery trend in banking. Or is there such a thing as artisanal banking? Has small come to the ultimate big? And how will we feel about banking and bank branding once we recover from the present difficult?
5) Branding
I found wondering whether brands may have moved from oration to aeration.
6) I have the name of a sensationally good Moscow contact for anyone who is doing research there. Let me know. Happy to share this order of talent.
Topic stack # 3
Posted by: | CommentsI am suffering a build-up of topics and so I am going to note a few of them here. If someone would care to write them up into something intelligible and interesting, that would be great.
1) Interesting vs. Interesting
One of the differences between Interesting2008 NYC and Interesting2007 London might have been that the English did a better job of giving presentation the outcome of which was unpredictable. This really is discourse released from genre, and it was fun to listen to especially because there was a "no looking ahead" rule in place. The presentation was, in this case, a shaggy dog story. What the Americans did that the English did not was present from within someone else’s persona. So we had a great visit from Bud Melman from the Mad Men mailroom. Azita Houshian appeared as Jane Eyre.
2) Paranormal romance.
Someone mentioned this over drinks at Eric Nehrlich’s good-bye party as a new category in fiction. And this is when you know women are really giving up on men, when they begin recruiting creatures from other worlds. The new TV show that features vampires would fall into this category. I am not sure what else is intended. This is flat out interesting and a thesis waiting to happen for the anthropology student who is up for the challenge.
3) livery in America.
A livery is a uniform or other sign worn in a non-military context on a person or object to denote a relationship with a person or corporate body, often by using elements of the heraldry relating to that person or body, or a personal emblem and normally given by them. It derives from the French livrée, meaning delivered. Most often it would indicate that the person was a servant, dependent, follower or friend of the owner of the livery, or, for objects, that the object belonged to them. (Wikipedia)
Favre’s No. 4 shirt already is the NFL’s all-time best seller and current No. 1, according to NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy. NFLshop.com so far has taken 1,250 orders for the jerseys, which cost $80 each, a one-day sales record. Revenue from licensed merchandise sales is split among the NFL’s 32 teams, with a portion going to the player. (from the official Favre site)
4) The SDG (self dramatizing gesture)
"Oh my God!" As uttered by a teenager, this is a little linguistic designed to seize and hold the attention of the group. Ever so fleeting, it is a way to make the social self more vivid and present.
This too is a thesis topic waiting to happen. I wrote about it a bit in Transformations but I don’t think I got to the bottom of it, by any means.
One further thought. In any hierarchical system, things trickle down from high ranking parties to low ranking ones. And we could say that the SDG is a way that teens cut themselves in on the celebrity culture. For that one brief second, they are the star.
5) Being black in America
The cultural idea of who an African American is has changed with fantastic speed since the 1960s. Youth cultures assigned African Americans special properties: a particular authenticity, an entitlement, a currency, and in some cases a thugishness. I am thinking here of a particular kind of hip hop. White Americans knew who Black Americans were with such certainty that it looked from time to time that racism had not so much disappeared as changed its valence. People, black and white, were still prepared to insist on defining the African American, and too bad that someone acting in a manner that defied this definition. For instance, God help the kid who wanted to be a poet when everyone else thought he should be a thug. These wobbles in our culture are acutely uncomfortable, but typically they stimulate inventiveness. As an anthropologist, I am prepared to guess that people have risen to the occasion and cultivated a fantastic versatility, the better to take advantage of all, even the most contradictory, selves they are supposed to inhabit.
Morgan Friedman, turning flaneurs into planners
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In some circles, the "flaneur" is a key idea. The flaneur is a person walking, watching, stopping to pay attention and otherwise engaging with the city as it presents itself to someone in motion and on foot.
It’s an idea discussed by some of the most gifted observers of contemporary life: Baudelaire, Simmel, Benjamin, and Sontag. Indeed, it has become so fashionable that it has become a kind of pose. (Baudelaire’s great fear realized.)
The cost of the pose is high. Some of the hard and most urgent work of noticing in the city goes undone. Some flaneurs are so busy posturing and so very scrupulous about what they notice (the post modern list is a short one), they can’t actually see the city very clearly. Thus does our self-impoverishment perpetuate itself. Some of the people blessed with the time and education to noticed the city particularly well have been removed from usefulness.
Compare if you will, Sontag’s concept of the city as a "landscape of voluptuous extremes" and the somewhat more practical advice of our own Morgan Friedman, above. It’s a slide from Morgan’s presentation at Interesting2008 at FIT in NYC on the weekend.
While the flaneur is busy swanning the city scape engaged in acts of self exaltation, the Friedmanesque observer is running the city down, seizing every opportunity it gives for further investigation. Here (image 2) Morgan suggests we take advantage of the people with time, the knowledge, and the incentive to act as our guides.
Thus while the flaneur is posing moodily at a local cafe, hoping that someone will mistake the laundry list before him for a poetic expression of his delicate and yes, of course, heroically tortured sensibility, Morgan and those of us who walk in his footsteps are chatting up a fixture of the neighborhood who has the unforgivable temerity of being badly dressed, and, actually, wait for it, old.
Everyone retired to the Black Door for drinks after the conference and Morgan and I fell into conversation. And this is when I learned he’s the guy who created Overheard in New York, that magnificent website that allows flaneurs to pool their observations of city life. Brilliant. See below my poor effort to take one of the conversations that Morgan has retrieved from city life, and convert it for analytic purposes.
I fell to wondering what else we could do to bind people together in the more thoroughgoing, less fashionable, investigation of contemporary culture and city life. In a manner of speaking this is what Pepys did in the 17th century. It is more or less what Lewis Henry Morgan did when he reached out to people in the 19th century. It is what Mass Observation did in Britain in the 20th century.
The good news is that our noticing skills are rising. We have superbly gifted noticers like Morgan, Eric Nehrlich, Jan Chipchase, and Russell Davies… well, the list is a long one. (See Davies’ superb noticing on behalf of bacon and eggs.) We have the makings of a noticing conspiracy. Morgan came very close to recruiting everyone at Interesting2008, turning all us planners into flaneurs. Now if we could only persuade flaneurs to act like planners. Morgan Friedman offers a path to redemption.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2007. Overheard in New York. This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. March 13, 2007. here.
More on Friedman and his several projects here.
The wikipedia entry on the flaneur here.
Jan Chipchase observes how a city wakes here.
See Walking Paris with Henry Miller here.
Acknowledgments
Images are from Morgan Friedman’s presentation at Interesting2008 as taken by Michael Surtees here.
Anthropology: The Business Model
Posted by: | CommentsI had the good fortune to participate in a call organized yesterday by Jerry Michalski and Pip Coburn. This is an open discussion, the Yi-Tan, they hold by phone, addressing the big issues, intellectual and otherwise, that vex and test the tech community.
These are two sublimely smart guys, but it was clear they weren’t sure exactly what to ask me. Join the club. I mean, what, finally, does an anthropologist bring to the party? No one is exactly sure, not even the anthropologist.
Ethnography, that’s the easy answer. This is the method of anthropology, so, hey, if you need an ethnographer, you probably need an anthropologist, and now that A.G. Lafley, M.S.I. Kodak, IBM, and Campbell Soup use ethnography, anthropology has a place in the world.
But what else? Is there something to anthropology beyond ethnography?
Anthropologists are good at recognizing patterns in social and cultural data. My clients get this about me. They used to ask me to find the solution. More and more, they ask me to find the problem. How, they ask, should we be thinking about this? Anthropologists are good pattern seekers, good assumption hunters.
Jerry and Pip were kind enough to ask if I would join in the call. Please them for this confidence. And here are the notes I scratched out for myself. You may determine for yourself whether they identify a problem worth thinking about.
If we look at culture and commerce from a pattern-seeking, assumption-hunting point of view, we see two things:
First, a clarity is giving way to a fluidity. I grew up in a world that for all of its modernist momentum had a certain order. It was like something defined by a mechanical engineer: parts and wholes, relationships and processes, outcomes and feedbacks, all of these were relatively clear.
This clarity is now at issue. What are the parts? What is the whole? What are the relationships and processes? Can we predict outcomes? Are there feedbacks?
What, for instance, is a corporation, now that it contains so many different moving parts, now that it changes so much and so often, now that it has, often, many objectives instead of one. Does it have a boundary? Or is just more porous? And if it is porous, has it found a way to manage its new fluidity.
A friend and I were talking yesterday how much the corporation has changed inside, swapping personnel in and out, refashioning the employment contract now that "one size" no longer fits all.
What is a "brand" now that consumer are let into the moment of creation, now that the corporation spends so much more time out and about, sensing and responding to the world "out there?"
What is a "self," now that each of us is so crowded with diverse interests and the ability to negotiate the complexities of a dynamic world?
Each of these things has in a sense "gone global," embracing more heterogeneity in a more dynamic mix, trading clarity for fluidity.
Fifty years ago, the specs for each was pretty clear. Intellectuals were unhappy with some of the design particulars but the rest of the world just got down to business and got on with life. Now, it looks as if someone had a Starbucks accident. Blueprints drip with coffee from Sumatra, not to mention that latte and cinnamon. Boxes and arrows run and blur. Fluidity, to be sure.
Second, it’s not clear that we have come up with a better way of thinking about a world like this, despite the fact that we have been on notice since the work of the Tofflers in the 1960s. There are small inklings here and there, the Long Now Project, the complex adaptive theory that comes from the Santa Fe institute, the call for dynamism that comes from gurus like Tom Peters. A big tech company recently asked me to rethink the B to B relationship. But these are all mere inklings, and nothing like a formal shift.
As I say, not everyone sees this as the anthropological "value add." And that’s a shame. Because the world is getting complicated in ways that anthropologists know how to reckon with. As people survey the fizzing, teeming confusion of the contemporary world, they ought to be saying, "where can I find an anthropologist to help me think about this. "
Value Tax, and the trouble with Vista
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Here’s what happened when a guy moved to Vista.
The worst problem is drivers. It took me hours to get the right combination of drivers to get my scanner working again. I’m pretty upset that my HP 5150 printer software no longer works. The driver works fine, but the software that allows me to clean the inkjets fails so now I have horrible looking printouts. You’d think with all the time Vista has been in development that this wouldn’t be an issue. My Logitech mouse driver doesn’t install and, believe it or not, it didn’t even install the software for my Microsoft keyboard. I had to search Microsoft to find it.
And here’s the reply he got from someone on line.
Vista is prime time ready period. It is not Microsoft’s responsibility to make your HP printer drivers work properly. It is HP responsibility and HP responsibility only. It is not Microsoft’s responsibility there are no drivers for your mouse. It is Logitech’s only. Microsoft has published detailed info on how to make drivers and software compatible with Vista. They had the beta and release candidates out for a long time plenty of time for non Microsoft I repeat non Microsoft companies to get their stuff right. Microsoft has done everything they possibly can do to help other companies make their products compatible. So if HP sits on their rear with drivers for your printer it is HP fault not Microsoft’s. Learn to blame the right people.
"Learn to blame the right people." Hmm. That is the problem, isn’t it? Where does responsibility fall?
When I used Outlook a few years ago, I would spend some time everyday weeding my in-basket, getting rid of the spam. Apparently, Microsoft believed that spam was my problem.
Enter Gmail. Google believed that spam was their problem and they created a way to solve the problem. Instead of 10s and sometimes 100s of spams a day, I now get one or two.
I perfectly understand Microsoft’s point of view. They are drawing a line in the sand. This is what we expect corporations to do. This is what makes them rational economic actors. Right?
Well, this is not clear. What is happening here is a weird value scrape back. Microsoft makes magnificent software in the form of Outlook and Vista, software that creates tremendous value for the consumer, and then it scrapes some of this value back in the form of a value tax.
And this is of course precisely what Apple and Google have learned: when you create value, you can’t recall any of this value. You cannot ask Grant to give up several minutes everyday weeding spam. You can’t ask the Vista customer to spend a weekend hunting for drivers. You have to build the product so that it doesn’t expose the consumer to any value tax.
It is finally a question of boundaries. And, yes, drawing a line in the sand is the thing that corporations do well. This is the thing we ask them to do. We don’t want them to solve all the problems in the world. We are not asking that Vista come bundled with an answer for world peace. We are merely saying a consumer good can’t get in its own way. It can’t impose on us a value tax.
References
NGC457. 2007. Vista is Ready For Prime Time Period. A reply to Silver-Surfer57. here. (No permalink. Please scroll down.)
Silver-Surfer57. Windows Vista Ultimate: Not Ready for Prime-Time. CNet Reviews. January 25, 2007. here.
Acknowledgement
Thanks to Wordle for the image.
Interesting2008 NYC
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I wanted to remind you that Interesting2008 is meeting in New York City on Saturday.
This is the Wordle that Rick Liebling created for the event.
I am talking about how you, dear reader, have Asperger’s syndrome. I really feel you should be there.
It’s only $35, pretty good value for an anthropological consult and diagnosis. We will repair to the Black Door about 6:00 where self medication will begin immediately.
For details on time and place, go here.
Seinfeld, Gates, and Microsoft: brand rebuilding
Posted by: | CommentsThe new Microsoft ad featuring Seinfeld and Gates has arrived. People are using words like "dud," "misfire," and "bomb," but I thought the spot was brave and interesting.
More particularly, people are saying the spot is confusing. Russo of the LA Times says,
"many … viewers are leaving a trail of rancorous confusion all over the web. People are asking, nay, demanding to know what the minute-and-a-half spot is trying to convey.
Peter Collins offers this case in point:
I watched the commercial this morning online–I may be stupid but I just didn’t get it! What was the purpose. What did it have to do with selling computers. And Microsoft is supposed to be paying $300 million for this series ???????
Peter, I have bad news. Please sit down, and we can call your wife in from the waiting room, if you’d like, but you must listen to me very carefully. Your self diagnosis is exactly right.
The Microsoft spot has a clear task: to rebuild the Microsoft brand. It is using Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Gates and a particular situation to perform an act of meaning manufacture. We can say it is good meaning manufacture. We can say it is bad meaning manufacture. But we can’t be mystified a) that this ad exists, b) what it means to do, or c) what it has to do with "selling computers."
Microsoft has dug itself a very deep hole. It is seen to be smug, arrogant, monopolistic, and indifferent to consumer wishes. What was left of the brand after this misbehavior was pretty much finished off by those brilliant Mac vs. PC ads by TBWA\Media Arts Lab. So, hey, Microsoft had to do something.
What they did was call Crispin. I haven’t been persuaded by all the work of CPB. Some of the Burger King work seemed to suffer a Steve-O fascination with stunt marketing. But this spot is interesting.
Simplifying, we would say that Crispin’s job was to move the brand from the PC side to the Mac side of the TBWA\Media Arts campaign. So, what do you do? Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at Crispin as they ran through their options! Oh, to have taught this as a case as a bschool or dschool challenge! Me, left to my own devices, I got nowhere. I ran this experiment in my head when I heard that Crispin had been hired and eventually just threw my hands in the air. I couldn’t think of anything even remotely convincing. Microsoft seemed to me a little like a meteor so utterly wedged into the surface of a planet that you really don’t have much choice but to leave it there. But the new Microsoft spot actually manages extraction. The brand is not saved. It’s not repaired. But it is mobilized a little, and this is a Herculean accomplishment. This may not be a sufficient act of brand rescue. But it is a necessary first step.
Frankly, I didn’t think hiring Jerry Seinfeld would help. I mean, for all his centrality to our culture in the 90s, his star had faded, his moment passed. But here he is replaying Jerry from the TV series, that goofy guy who believes he has all the answers and is just smart enough to be right some of the time and interesting all the time. Mr. Know It All, this was Jerry and especially George on Seinfeld. Often wrong but never in doubt. These are guys who believe they can beat the system, only to watch their best efforts spin gently out of control in a slow motion Rube Goldberg disaster that brings embarrassment to everyone. This is the Seinfeld Crispin recruits for the ad.
The meaning mechanics of the ad are wonderful: Jerry’s shoes squeak like a cartoon character. A store called Shoe Circus. A family gathered outside the store window in solemn and learned reverence for shoes within. The meaningful glance between Jerry and Bill that makes no sense. Seinfeld’s lunatic advice that Bill try wearing his clothes in the shower. The starring role give churros. The idea that anyone would want to earn points in a store like this, especially when the card calls them a "shoe circus clown club member." The idea that computers could ever be "moist," "chewy," and edible. The idea that Jerry suspected this "all along."
In a more perfect world, Crispin might have put Microsoft into company with something like the Wes Anderson movie The Life Aquatic, the one that starred Bill Murray as Steve Zissou. But there were two problems: Microsoft is utterly out of touch with contemporary culture, and Bill Gates is, as someone once said of Dick Cavett, "spectacularly gentile" which is to say utterly out of touch with contemporary culture. The Aquatic Life was a world too far. Some day. Perhaps someday this will be the "sufficient" act of meaning management.
Well, what does this have to do with selling computers? I am going to have replace my laptop in the next few months, and despite the fact that I have been an intensely loyal Thinkpad and Windows guy for more than a decade, I am thinking for the first time of an Apple conversion. And I have to say that this ad, for a very brief moment, actually gave me pause. Maybe, I thought to myself, Microsoft is not an embarrassing relic after all. Briefly, very briefly.
And so what is the act of meaning manufacture? Crispin manages to mine Jerry Seinfeld, a very particularly Seinfeld. Crispin transfers Jerry’s off kilter way of seeing things to the brand, and this makes Microsoft seem more human, more actual, funnier and more companionable. and most of all, more present to the world. Is this a good thing? Ladies and gentlemen, we are talking about a brand that had made itself the paragon of the humorless and the monolithic. I would say this is work well done. Crispin earned its dough and then some. It’s just a start, but what a start.
The meaning passes through a series of intermediaries. It must pass from Jerry, this Jerry, and the ads particulars (as above) into Bill and from Bill into the brand. And Bill plays his part very well, considering. He seems in every way hip to the joke here. And this anthropologist is inclined to suppose that some of this ad is a mystifying to him as it is to poor Peter Collins (above). But Crispin, to their credit, brought him into the ad and found a way to make him work. (We can imagine how Bill calculated the risk: if Jerry thinks it’s funny, it’s probably funny, and, if Jerry is prepared to share the risk, it’s probably not so risky.)
So everyone hates the new Microsoft ad? We shall see. It represents an act of meaning management by one of the best agencies at the top of its game. It is a powerful first effort to rebuild the brand. Let’s hope Microsoft sticks to its guns and gives the campaign a chance. This thing could work.
References
Russo, Maria. 2008. Seinfeld and Gates’ Microsoft Misfire. LATimes: Webscout. September 5, 2008. here.
See the Seinfeld-Gates Microsoft spot on YouTube here.
See the Microsoft PR backgrounder on the campaign here.
Second Life, anthropologically
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In Coming of Age in Second Life, Tom Boellstorff argues that virtuality is an ancient human practice. Many media have given us leave of the here and now: Cave paintings, Austin novels, Nemerov poems. We are pretty good at saying how these things accomplish their transportation. The task for Boellstorff is to tell us what difference new media make. What happens when virtuality is individuals interacting in a machine space that exists online? I think Boellstorff fails us here. It’s not his fault entirely. He is an anthropologist. There is much to admire in this book. Boellstorff writes clearly, even gracefully. He is thoughtful, genuinely curious, and quick eyed. Where many of his colleagues insist on making a mystery of things that are straight forward (so to neglect mysteries real and pressing), Boellstorff is a likeable, generous, accessible voice. But his anthropology makes for two problems. The first is that anthropology has largely neglected the study of its own culture. Most of the meanings of Second Life have been smuggled in from this culture. Thus when the Second Life inhabitant present herself as an elf, a chipmunk or a flaming goddess, she is using cultural categories and understandings from “away.” It is easy enough to say, “oh, but we all know what an elf, a chipmunk or a goddess is,” but this is precisely where the anthropologist is supposed to be scrupulous (as we may expect a philosopher to be scrupulous about claims to knowledge or judgment). Boellstorff takes these and other importations at their face, and as a result much of what ought to be the object of study disappears from view. If anthropology isn’t about its own culture, or increasingly, any culture, that’s because it is increasingly about itself. Anthropology is now an inquisition, ferreting out epistemological, moral and political error. But Second Life is a florid place. Strange and wonderful things are to be found everywhere. The data are voluptuous, the opportunities for study extraordinary. And I can’t help wondering whether this anthropologist was the one to send. Boellstorff is abstemious when we want is a glutton. Still Boellstorff is not quite as precious as his colleagues. This book, once it gets down to it, does truly offer a detailed and deeply interesting investigation of Second Life. The best moments come when Boellstorff is puzzling out inhabits puzzling out the meanings and new rules of social discourse. But here too there may be a little too much puzzling. Sometimes the reader thinks, ‘pray, just get on with it.’ Boellstorff never takes a step without casting a concept before him. This has the effect of actually making Second Life banal and his anthropology an apparent failure of the imagination or the nerve. It might have been better to follow the anthropological convention of entering a new world suspending, for the first moments, one’s anthropology. That Boellstorff is prepared to take up this topic at all tells us that anthropology is restless in its slumber, that it may be preparing for bigger things. But it also suggests that, in the short term, it must remain the captive of its self absorption. Anthropology might have a second life, but I think it’s clear we can’t get there from here. 
Here’s my review of Tom Boellstorff’s new book on Second Life. It appeared in the pages of the Times Higher Education Review a couple of days ago.
My Contagious Interview
Posted by: | CommentsPaul Kemp-Robertson was kind enough to interview me for the British magazine called Contagious. He was following up on the FutureFlash conference at which we both spoke in the spring.
Here is the first page.
Here is the second page:
Thanks again for Paul for including me in the pages of Contagious.
References
Kemp-Robertson, Paul. 2008. Abandon ‘Consumer,’ An interview with Grant McCracken. Contagious. Volume 16. Third Quarter, pp. 28-31.
Branding now, a brand blog compendium
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Whew. It’s done.
Faithful readers of this blog will have noticed a new strategy here on This Blog. It is, as Leon Jacobs noted, a little like a sit com flash back.
But, no, here’s what I had in mind. I have published around 1.4 million words on this blog, and that makes any particular set of posts hard to find. Yes, you can do a key word search. But you still end up with a long list of posts and no clear idea of their relationship one to the other.
How, I wondered, could I do a compendium of posts organized for easier access. Organized in a PDF file, what you get is a single page that gives you a jumping off point for 40 blog posts. (Be careful to come back to the PDF by way of your "return" button.)
I like the way MindManager organizes things in a tree diagram. And that’s what I used.
Here’s is the file I have created. You may download it here.
Download branding_now_blog_compendium_grant_mccracken.pdf
I am trying to post it to the sidebar of this Typepad site, but I really don’t understand Typepad programming (or even, shame of shame, HTML). Anyone with suggestions, please let me know and I will keep tinkering.
Lots of people have lots of content on their blogs. This is one way to extract and organize this content. I am sure there are others. Would love to hear your comments, dear reader, on this and other options.
Thanks to Wordle.net for this and several images for the Branding now, blog compendium.
Branding now (a last word on the Brand Now compendium)
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The Coca-Cola Company spent more than $4.1 billion on branding in 2007. That’s one brand in one year. The collective expenditure by American corporations each year must run to a breathtaking sum.
But the art and science of branding remains messy and imperfect, filled with bad ideas, snake oil salesmen, silly trends and sloppy practice. The time has come to clear the decks and see what we can say. I offer these 40 essays. I don’t say they are the definitive word on branding. I do hope they help a little. Let me sum up.
Broadly, the brand should reflect the CEO’s vision, the consumers’ wishes, and the real capabilities of the product line. It should help transport the enterprise from the commodity basement into the heavens where real value is made and captured. It should be responsive to trends in consumer taste and preference (i.e., culture above). It should be responsive to the fundamentals that shape our culture over the long term(i.e., culture below). It should produce content that consumers can use as they build and feed their social networks. It should enable consumers to produce content for the brand and the social world. It should strip out any "value tax" inflicted on the consumer. It should engage in a process of value creation that benefits consumers, communities and cultures almost equally. (Enough of Microsoft’s zero sum bullying.)
Narrowly, the brand is build out of meanings. The art of meaning management turns on choosing the right meanings, in the right form, and how best to communicate and claim them. In the compendium, the Volvo case serves as standard practice. But, sometimes, meaning making is made easy by the competition. Microsoft effectively helped build the brand for Apple and Google. Martha Stewart made things easier for Rachel Ray. More often, the brand has to make meanings by its own efforts. In the case of Volvo, this meant a conspiracy of good marketing, as strategists, planners, creatives, to capture the meaning "safety" in the form that mattered most.
The meaning manager has an entire culture from which to source meanings. In this compendium, we noted, HP claim dynamism, Coke claimed women and self transformation, Starbucks claimed the generosity of strangers, to name few. But we note that many brands continue to behave quite badly, proof, I believe, that marketing is still so bad at meaning management that "rookie errors" remain common.
This compendium also demonstrates that there is plenty of room for experimentation and innovation in the world of meaning management. Brands are becoming more animated, more charismatic, and more playful. They are learning to be many things to many people, to include the consumer as a brand creator, and to master more, more subtle meanings. Finally, they are learning to use transmedia, brand theater, social networks and an emerging range of expressive opportunities.
As Tom Guarriello once said to me, "Hey, it’s true that they say about marketing. It’s not rocket science. It’s a lot more complicated than rocket science."
References
The statistic in the first paragraph comes from the 2007 Annual Report for The Coca-Cola Company here.
Click here
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I went to lunch with a friend recently. He manages a big brand. We surveyed the state of branding and before long we were shaking our heads.
Bad ideas flourish. Bad thinkers flourish. Good practice never seems to drive out bad practice. The world of branding just churns.
Marketers have been doing branding professionally for about 100 years now. But branding is anything but professional.
I came back to my desk and wondered what I could do. I’ve written some 1.4 million words on my blog, some of them on branding. Why not, I wondered, make these more accessible? Hence this "blog compendium." Here on 40 posts of branding.
I have a point of view of branding. I call it "meaning management." Think of it as a cultural, an anthropological approach to marketing. I think these 40 posts capture a consistent, practical point of view. I hope readers will let me know where and when they work in practice.
Here’s how to read this document: Click on any rectangle here and it will take you to a post. Close the browser and you will be returned to this file. Click on the big rectangles for each section, and you will get an overview of the section. (For those who’re interested, I prepared the document using MindManager and Acrobat PDF conversion.)
My credentials: I have a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago. I was the Director and the founder of the Institute of Contemporary Culture. I have taught at the University of Cambridge, the Harvard Business School and M.I.T. I have consulted to many firms, including The Campbell Soup Company, The Coca-Cola Company, IBM, and Kimberly Clark, to name a few. I have written several books including Culture and Consumption I, Plenitude, Culture and Consumption II, The Long Interview, Flock and Flow, and Transformations. I am a member of the I.B.M. advisory council on Social Networking and a research affiliate at M.I.T.
Acknowledgments
To Wordle.net for the image.
