Archive for Marketing Watch
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.
Marketing reimagined: revolutionary implications of the Watts-Thompson reply to Gladwell
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Last night I went to the Fast Company office in New York City to hear Clive Thompson interview Duncan Watts.
Duncan Watts (a research scientist at Columbia and, for the moment, Yahoo) argues that "influencers" are less influential than Gladwell’s Tipping Point model would have us believe. He argues that news travels as readily through ordinary people as influential ones. This means that our world is not "hub and spoke," with some individuals acting like O’Hare and the rest of us like Cleveland or, pause, Dayton. No, as Thompson put it, networks are democratic. We are just as likely to "get the news" from a friend as we are from an networking paragon.
The argument seems to me compelling. And these two, Watts and Thompson, make superlative pitchmen on its behalf, the first as a cautious but quietly charismatic academic, and the second acting on the evening as a kind of "key light," stepping in occasionally to make certain points "pop." But it also seems to me that the Watts criticism should not be given rights of free passage anymore than Gladwell’s argument. (The latter is now used so freely that it threatens to become the marketer’s all purpose conceptual tool.) We must resist the temptation to generalize. (Occasionally.)
Watts’ arguments seems to me to apply to the network as "transmission device," i.e., when it serve as a way of moving something from one place to place in the network. In this case, one link is pretty much as good as another. But clearly networks sometimes serve as a "thinking machine"…as when ideas ricochet from blog to blog, and the wisdom of crowds assembles itself to identify the problems we care about and the answers we think plausible. In this case, surely, links are not all created equal. In this case, Clay Shirky’s opinion matters much more than mine. (The bastard). And so it should. (The bastard.)
Never mind. Even in this narrow form, the Watts-Thompson argument has revolutionary implications for the world of marketing. If their argument is true, it feels like we are looking at a turning point, not a tipping one. Many marketers thought that Gladwell’s model gave them a way to "game" the diffusion effect. All we had to do was influence the influencers and entire markets will fall before our approach.
There is always a substantial part of the marketing community looking for that open sesame, the magic formula, the hidden panel, the hot button, the wand and incantation that will allow them to trick the consumer. These marketers are in effect looking for a cheat. In the place of an intimate knowledge of the consumer and the market, in the place of a superlative productive or service, they look for a shortcut. Let’s call these people "mechanistic" marketers. They want to "operate" the consumer automaton by divining the secret levers within.
How grim. If marketing learned anything in the 20th century, it is that consumers are smarter than this, that there are no tricks in any case, that the world is not about process, it is stubbornly about content. If the marketer wants influence, the solution remains what it has always been. The answer is to build great products, brands and messages. It is these, and not "memes" or "viruses," that capture attention and prompt choice.
It turns out, hey presto, that consumers like things because they like them, not because someone told them to like them. Consumers like things because these things are a lot like consumers themselves: smart, creative, interesting, lively, topical, winning or otherwise engaging. And if the consumer doesn’t like a product or a service, it doesn’t matter how hip, authoritative, or viral we make them or our agents. They don’t like them. End of story.
Mechanistic marketing threatens to be cheap trick marketing. Worse than that, it threats to be lazy and insulting marketing. It’s diminishing, not just to the consumer but also to the marketer. There is no substitute for getting to know the consumer, building products and brands they care about, making and managing meanings well.
Well, forgive my bad temper and the eagerness with which I embrace this point. Clearly it is self serving of me. If Watts is right, it’s good news for anthropology. Now the first objective of the marketing game must be to get to know consumers and the culture from which they come. Why is this a lesson we have to keep learning? When do we learn to resist the siren call of the cheap trick and simply apply ourselves to thoughtful, passionate, engaged discovery?
References
Thompson, Clive. 2008. Is the Tipping Point Toast. Fast Company. Issue 122. February. here.
Product placement and the FCC
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Kevin Martin, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission says he wants to examine product placement on TV.
"I believe it is important for consumers to know when someone is trying to sell them something and that is it is appropriate for the commission to examine these issues."
Hmm. The thing about product placement is that it’s not clear there is any selling going on. Marketers are so unhappy about being TIVOed out of existence that they are happy merely to get things on TV. They don’t get to control how products appear there. They don’t get to build a brand proposition. They don’t actually make a pitch of any kind. They merely to get the product on TV. Marketing, it’s come to this.
As I say, there’s no selling going on.
References
Teinowitz, Ira. 2007. FCC May Examine Product-Placement Rules: Chairman Kevin Martin Proposes Inquiry as Networks, Marketers Increase Integration. Ad Age. November 29, 2007. here.
Celebrity sighting
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I think someone said of Gerald Ford that he had the ability to make
people around him less interesting.
I had the chance to watch Faith Popcorn at work today, and I was impressed with her ability to do the opposite.
Everyone seemed to get a little smarter, a little more imaginative. Clients, participants, the BrainReserve team, all boats rose on the charismatic tide.
Ms. Popcorn managed somehow to oxygenate the room. You felt you had permission to think ambitiously, to cast the net wide, even as something in her clarity made you understand that sloppy thinking or intellectual self indulgence were not to be indulged.
Acknowledgments
To Riccardo Vecchio and the Stanford Medicine Magazine for Vecchio’s remarkable rendering of Popcorn. You may see the image in its original context here.
Marketing’s Great Chain of Being?
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Pam and I stayed in a NYC hotel this week. She was recovering from
surgery in Manhattan and we didn’t want to move her. (The surgery went
well and she is recovering nicely, thank you.)
Sitting on a shelf in the hotel bathroom, I found something the size of a business card. There it is to the right. The card reads:
TRANQUILITY TIP
This reflects a couple of things at work in marketing and capitalism:
1) the movement from utility to meaning
Capitalism used to be about making and selling things, useful things. Marketing helped sell these things. The sale was about trumpeting the usefulness of the thing. Marketing was about information. In the 1980s, some of us, following the lead of Syd Levy and Irving White, proposed a broader view. Goods were about meanings, meanings the individual could use to help construct the self, the home, the personal world.
2) the movement from the sale of objects and services to the sale of experiences.
Capitalism used to be about making and selling things. Marketing helped sell these things. Now marketing imagines grander things for itself. We can thank Pine and Gilmore and their book, The Experience Economy, for this development. Things are mere props, part of the theater the brand supplies.
3) the movement from engagement to the restorative.
The real deliverable, this approach says, is relaxation so deep it amounts to restoration. To dive so deeply into an experience that the world falls still. To detach from the furious pace of contemporary life and reset all our activity clocks to zero. In the words of hotel wisdom, to become "grounded" again.
4) the movement from the mundane to the enchanted.
Several companies with whom I have worked can hear the siren call of the new age movement. They now to seek to offer the consumer something like enchantment. They see the consumer climbing to spiritual heights, establishing contact with planetary harmonics, and/or their inner child. (This is enough to make my inner child throw a tantrum, but never mind.)
Thus does marketing accommodate the changes taking place in our culture. Thus does our commerce stay in touch with our culture.
And while these lofty missions are pursued, many marketers wrestle with the problem of commodification: the ability of competitors to duplicate a product and shave its price. Brands turn back into products. Margins begin to shrink. A newly powerful channel (Amazon.com on line and Wal-Mart at the mall) demand discounts and more price cutting. Margins grow slimmer still. Before long, competitors are locked in a "race to the commodity basement."
Many brands are caught between hell below and heaven above, between the nether world of commodification and the intellectual challenges and profit opportunities that come from selling meanings, experiences, restoration or enchantment.
We might even go so far as to say that the marketer is caught in a great chain of being. In the Renaissance case, here’s how the "chain of being" worked. At the apex of the hierarchy stands God. God is pure intelligence. Next in the hierarchy are Angels, creatures who have pure intelligence. Then came earthly creatures: Saints, the hierarchy of the church, blessed with elevated intelligence. Man, stood in the middle of the hierarchy, a kind of linch pin, capable of intelligence, but always distracted by the passions and inclined to error. As we continue down the hierarchy, we move ever further away from intelligence. Animals have no reason. Inanimate objects are insensate. (This is imperfectly remembered, sorry.)
In this hierarchy, man was mobile. As he exercised his reason, as he devoted himself to spirituality, he moved upwards in the great scheme of things. As he refused his gift of reason, he moved downwards, becoming finally like unto a beast.
Marketers are mobile too. As our brand succeeds, we move upwards into the realm of ideas, concepts, experiences. If we hold parity, we play a game of optimization, tinkering with our positioning, but without resources to contemplate experiment or much in the way of risk taking. As our brand fails, we descend into a commodity hell, we are destined to slug it out with promotions and channel play.
We are caught between heaven and hell. The higher we climb, the closer we get to the realm of pure idea. The more we are called upon to exercise a our intelligence, creativity and strategic sense. The lower we fall, the closer we get to something brute. We are now in a reactive mode. (This is of course unfair. Plenty of brain power and strategic sense is called for here. I am letting the metaphor do the talking here.)
Could there be a great chain of being in the marketing world?
References
Lovejoy, Arthur O. 1950. The Great Chain of Being: the study of the history of an idea. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (acknowledged here with all due apologies for my imperfect recollection and liberal use)
McCracken, Grant. 2005. Culture and Consumption II: markets, meanings and brand management. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Pine, Joseph and James Gilmore. 1999. The Experience Economy. New York: Harvard Business School Press.
Marketing and convergence
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A Canadian journalist asked me to comment on advertising in social
media. My reply got more elaborate than I had planned, and I share it
with you here. (Happy to name the journalist in question, if she’ll let me.)
My reply:
Thanks for your note. Here are a couple of thoughts scratched out in haste while I get ready to go to the airport.
I think we are beginning to understand that people in their 20s and their teens now live as much on line as they do off, that their lives are shot through with virtual media and digital messages, that their sense of self and group are taking on new structural properties. As "content creators," and "content consumers," they participate in a new culture and a new economy. (In the language of my blog work, our world is getting cloudier.)
Marketers and designers are trying to figure out how to find these people and how to speak to them. Many of the old rules, especially the K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, stupid) logic of marketing no longer applies.
The old days
In the old days of network television, there were the people who made TV, there were the people who watched TV and there were the people who made commercials for TV.
Three, quite different groups engaged in three quite different activities. Then something remarkable started to happen. These activities are beginning to look more and more like one another. This is what Henry Jenkins would call convergence.
Stage 1
In Stage 1 of this convergence, consumers started to become more like producers of popular culture. They mastered the grammars and technologies of pop culture and they began to produce like crazy. (All Your Base Are Belong To Us was an early indicator. The flood of video that pours through YouTube every day is the latest one.) Now the consumer and the producers of TV were engaged in something like the same activity. Both parties are participating in the same culture, as consumers and especially as producers.
Stage 2
Stage 2 is now upon us. Marketers now understand that they are having to become more like the producers and the consumers of TV. They too must become producers. To participate in the new media, they have to begin creating this culture (as opposed to commercial messages, narrowly defined).
What they can’t do any long is practice is the old model of marketing. This is one that has the marketers firing big simple messages into the life of the consumers with cannons called big advertising campaigns. Well, there is still a place for big campaigns, but these work not as vehicles of persuasion, but a cultural convictions so interesting that everyone is pleased to watch them, work with them, and send them speeding on their viral way.
Marketers understand that if they want a place in the world that matters to consumers, they have to act like these consumers, manufacturing interesting, clever, quirky content that will help increase and speed the mass of messages that pour through the internet each day. No more firing big fat messages at a stationary target. Now the idea is to take part. The idea is to converge.
Now, this is not as easy as it looks. Burger King’s subservient kitchen is to me the limiting case. It is wonderfully viral. People were pleased to look at it, and pleased to pass it along. But it did not have very much to do with the brand. And the other extreme is to force people to see the brand theme song, as Oreos does. This has too much to do with the brand. The secret is a Aristotelian (or Goldie Locks) mid point and this is something we are searching for still.
