Monthly Archives: September 2005

Marketing in the doldrums?

San_antonioI am in San Antonio for the Association for Consumer Research meetings. Last night, I had dinner with several old friends: John Deighton (HBS), Rob Kozinets (York), John Sherry (Northwestern and now Notre Dame), Craig Thompson (Wisconsin). I am not sure who said it but we were talking about the state of marketing theory, research, education and practice, and noting that it seemed less interesting, fun, imaginative, and risk taking than it used to be.*

We fell to talking about the more free wheeling days of marketing when both the academics and the practitioners had a more free wheeling quality to them. For me, the key players here with people like Lloyd Warner and Burleigh Gardner, guys who moved back and forth across the border between theory and practice, helping to form both domains, and launching an intellectual enterprise in the process.

Maybe this is the hazard of hindsight, but it feels like these people were prepared to try anything. The notion seemed to be, we’re smart, we’re mobile, we have very good improv skills and if something goes badly, we’ll just change it. How very different this is from the white knuckling that sometimes dominates in the marketing world now, where people are afraid to takes chances.

It’s as if we have lost our courage and most of all our self confidence. Somehow it feels like we’ve decided we live in a "I’ve fall and I can’t get up" kind of world.

It could be that marketing is now like any mature industry. All the big innovations have take place, all the key players are in place, margins are shrinking, and it’s now a race to the commodity basement. This is a joyless world, one that is so perfectly well mapped that there is no place for big ideas or big risks.

Well, maybe. On the other hand, some much has changed on both the production and the consumption side of things that it seems to me the maturity model cannot apply. Take the world of food. On the innovation side, we are looking at a steady flow through of novelty. (Chipotle! sp?). Retail is reinventing itself at a furious pace. (Whole Foods, and still more impressively, Central Market.) On the consumer side, we are seeing a new curiousity, a breadth of interest and diversification of taste (even within a single family!), and a constant willingness to experiment.

This doesn’t look like a still, a conventional, a well mapped world. This looks like a world demands the free wheeling approach of Lloyd Warner and Burleigh Gardner. (There are of course thousands of names from the history of marketing that could go here. These are my personal heros.) Indeed, it looks like the world that demands a self confidence and a willingness to experiment. Or to put this another way, it’s never failure of it comes risk. It’s only failure if it comes from cowardice.

Excerpts from:

Easton, John. 2001. Consuming Interests. University of Chicago alumni magazine. Vol. 93, Issue 6.

http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0108/features/

Warner, who joined the U of C as a sociology professor in 1935, had taught SRI’s other two founders, Burleigh Gardner and William Henry, PhD’44. An anthropologist by training, he’d spent three years as a graduate student doing field work in Australia, scrutinizing the social structure of an aboriginal tribe. But he grew less interested in "primitives" and increasingly convinced that the tools of social anthropology might better be applied to modern American society-an idea that would not become popular until the 1970s.

"His platform," recalls SRI colleague Lee Rainwater, AM’51, PhD’54, "was that all human life partakes of the same basic species behavior." If so, then the tools used to understand sacred tribal rituals or daily routines should work just as well to understand the Fourth of July or breakfast cereal. When Warner returned to the U.S. in 1929 to take a position at Harvard, he decided not to finish his dissertation on kinship among aborigines thousands of miles away but to focus instead on the social systems of a nearby small town.

…

BY THE TIME the first Yankee City volume appeared, Warner had been lured away from Harvard by Chicago’s greater enthusiasm for interdisciplinary work. He was followed by Burleigh Gardner, a country boy from Texas who had come to Harvard to study anthropology and wound up working on the Yankee City studies. Described by Packard as a "mop-haired, slow-speaking, amiable man," Gardner was ill at ease with scholarly pretensions and preferred life on the fringes of academe. But in 1942 he was enticed into teaching in Chicago’s newly created Committee on Human Relations in Industry.

…

[I]n 1946-this time with backing from Sears, Roebuck-Warner and Gardner formed their own consulting group, SRI, to help companies investigate employee and customer attitudes. They brought in Henry, who had joined the Chicago faculty in 1944, to run the psychological testing. Gardner, who had quickly tired of academic politics and meetings, resigned from the University to become SRI’s executive director.

…

Sidney Levy, PhB’46, AM’48, PhD’56, another insolvent grad student who arrived at SRI in 1948. By the early 1950s, the core staff was in place. Moore, Levy, and Lee Rainwater, who came in 1950, formed a close trio. Key members Ira Glick, AM’51, PhD’57; Richard Coleman, PhD’59; and others soon followed. The professional staff never grew very large, however, topping out at 17 in 1957.

The period, said Levy, was "the most exciting and intensely absorbing in my life. We lived SRI from breakfast until bedtime, brooding over methods and data gathering and seeking penetrating insights."

"Much of the excitement," notes Karesh, "followed from the feeling on the part of those involved that they were part of a pioneering team composed of brilliant minds exploring new intellectual terrain." Because Gardner had a tendency to accept assignments without knowing whether SRI could perform them, its members had to be especially creative. "New concepts and methods were generated internally," says Karesh, "or borrowed from the University and then combined and applied in novel ways."

It was the ideal arrangement, argues Karesh. Informally connected but formally separate from the University, SRI could "acquire the latest conceptual and methodological tools in the social sciences and apply them to commercial ends."

The company quickly made a name for itself in the emerging field of consumer motivation research, pulling together Gardner’s interest in commercial applications of social science, Henry’s expertise in psychoanalytic testing, and Warner’s faith in the crucial importance of social class.

*Last note:

The participants in the conversation may or may not approve any or all these ideas or my expression of them.

Thanks to http://www.jmadden.info for the photo!

My Elizabethan summer: book report

Elizabeth Summer’s well over. There’s no use kidding myself. My book report is now due. I have to write it. Here it is.

I had a theme this summer: Elizabethan England, and three books: on Shakespeare, Drake, and Walsingham (playwrite, explorer, and spymaster respectively).

Why Elizabethan England? They’re a lot like us. Lots of assumptions suddenly in question and up for grabs. The nature of man, God, the state and nature, the rules of inquiry, the intellectual, cultural underpinings of the enterprise, all of these were being reworked.

One thing was clear: Elizabeth. So was another: that England was the object of continental ambitions and the antipathy of Rome. This little nation of 6 million people was large enough to look worth taking over or putting down, but not large enough to defend itself reliably. It had something like a navy and nothing like an army. If the Spanish could make it to shore, the invasion would be a route.

I’m no expert but I get the sense that the English went about the renovation of their world roughly the way Microsoft used to write code. Everyone worked on their own little corner of things, and leaves to someone else the task of threading everything together. Of course, this is consistent with the way the English do lots of things still, including gardening and the law. But it does mean that no one, as near as I can tell, is asking (go figure) what we might call the French questions: what difference do all these differences make? What changes if these things hold? What holds if these things change?

And it’s surely a good thing. If every Elizabethan was fully informed of the innovations being undertaken by all other Elizabethans, some of them would surely have lost their nerve, and not even the genius of Elizabeth, her courtiers and counsellors, could put humpty dumpty back together again. Cunning and courage, there was lots of that, and that was going to have to do it.

I was looking for patterns and nothing worked till I put Bacon into the set. He and Drake make a pair. Bacon used exploration as his metaphor for the new knowledge: that it would break out of the Mediterranean, once a figure for classical knowledge, but he uses the metaphor to say that only when explorers are prepared to let concept follow percept as it were, was the new knowledge possible. Shape knowledge to the world, not the world to knowledge, that kind of thing.

And Bacon really is the guy here, a man who uses a logic so contemporary you get goosebumps reading him. Everyone calls him the "father of science" but this misses it. Bacon understood (perhaps he was the first to glimpse) what Virginia Postrel calls the verge. He gets that his culture would eventually be in a state of constant reformation. He insists that the limits of what is known, done, thought and thought possible, all of this is not for stopping at but for passing trhough.

Enter Sir Francis Drake captains the little ship that Bacon puts on the edge of knowledge and he pilots it around the world, breaking out virtuoso acts of seamanship (especially coming around the horn), working his way up the west coast of the new world, well up the coast of what we now call Canada, helping himself to Spanish gold and silver as he goes. This latter he "returns" to Elizabeth who uses it to build up her navy so that when the Spanish do come finally in 1588 they are find themselves contending with the wealth they stole from South America. (It was a great time for conversions of this kind.)

Shakespeare and Walsingham make another pair (a "correspondence" in local lingo), both of them investigating the properties and the limits of a new, emergent, human nature. Shakespeare’s goal of course was entertainment, first, not foremost, but Walsingham examined men’s souls for another reason, to find out the spies that threatened England, the first invaders, as it were. And they say of Walsingham that he had a strange patience. While the Inquistors were famous for their instruments of torture that would break the vessel that kept a secret (and of course those that didn’t), Walsingham was more restrained, seeming almost to believe that if you took away their liberty, men would eventually interrogate themselves and spill…as if there was an indwelling, involuntary, (Baconian?) skepticism that could be used against the spy. It’s even possible that he entertained the possibility of a possessive individualism and the notion that men would give up their secrets to protect themselves and that you had better leave them something to protect.

When Shakespeare examined the souls of men, he found new complexity, new self awareness with which to think about it, and still less often new agency with which to make choices. His characters were not the bold portrayals of this passion or that vice. They were Lear, a man who gets to contemplate his demotion in the large scheme of things, and decide whether it means and what it means and to endure an intractible universe (his own daughters!) that does what it wants in any case.

The way Greenblatt tells the story it sounds as if the world was conspiring to give this yokel his shot at greatness. All these conditions were bestowed upon him. All now seem critical:

that he lived in the country gave him access to bodies of knowledge and points of view he might not have seen as a city boy

that his father was a mayor meant that visiting threatre companies were obliged to call on his house and ask his father for permission to play. Masterless men were feared in this period. Unless a company moved swiftly to dispell the impression, they would be taken for men inclined to mischief or worse. (Lock up your daughters.) They were in this fluid countryside a little like pirates without ships. But what Will saw, we may suppose, were adults asking permission to act like children by promising not to act like children. And this might have been proof for young Will that there were some professions in the world where childhood could be carried into maturity and, more delectably, that there were inventive exercises in which someone could bend the world to their will (sorry) with nothing more than an imagination and a band of men masterful and masterless in roughly equal proportion.

that his father suffered a sudden change of fortune and demotion in the world, which meant that Will was not shipped off to Oxford where his talent would hvae been spotted and commandeered by the church or the law.

that his family had Catholic sympathies which Greenblatt suggests got him a teaching job in the vast household of a great northern family, an enterprise so vast that it sustained its own company of players where Will, we gather, could see a theatre in small play out in a world in little.

I believe it’s correct to say that Shakespeare, Walsingham, Drake and Bacon were active in the 1580s.

References:

to be supplied when I get home

please forgive the choppiness of this post and the fact that I do not yet have a resounding finish. I have 8 minutes to catch my flight.

Launched!

Tug_boat_1 The launch of Culture and Consumption II went well, considering.

We pushed the book into the east river and then had it tugged out into the harbor.  Everything was fine till we moved  out of cell phone range and everyone said we had to turn around and come home. 

We were boarded by the Coast Guard who said that our citation style didn’t conform to the new Homeland Security code and that there were, in the words of one officer, "Way too many footnotes and other intellectual affectations.  Just get over yourself." 

Still, I believe this book is the only entry in the field of marketing and branding that manages to talk about the economics of Drew Bledsoe’s home, the fins on the cars of the 1950s, how people turn houses into homes, how museum’s mistake the consumer, the mechanics of celebrity endorsement, how marketers make meanings for the brand, and other breathlessly interesting topics. 

I have a hang-over the size of…something really large.  So "light blogging" only today, doctor’s orders.

Disney and other mysteries of the brand

Astrolab_1In just four days, Robert Iger will take over as CEO at Disney.

Share holders did not rally round news of his appointment, but they will be pleased to hear that he is already restoring the relationship with Steve Jobs and Pixar that Eisner did so much to damage. Blockbusters like Toy Store and The Incredibles are good for business.

But there is bad news, I think, from BusinessWeek. Apparently, Iger intends to "distribute Disney films and TV shows digitally on phones and directly to homes." This kind of distribution is desirable, not least because it is, of course, inevitable. But I think there is a failure here to reckon with the real power of the Disney product and the Disney brand.

There is something about the thing itself that we, in marketing and in anthropology, do not fully understand. There is something about having your hands on the movie, even when this comes to you in the form of a cheesy plastic package. Parents and kids want their homes stocked with Disney favorites and they want them in a material form.  We’re not sure why.  (But this is a small part of that larger mystery that saw people buy DVDs that they would not watch more than once.)

Is this tangibility, touchability, holdability?  Is it a matter of having it there on the shelf?  (DVDs do furnish a room?)  Is about having to load it up instead of dial it up that makes the difference? Is it about having the DVD in the event the cable feed fails us?  The marketer’s curiousity is aroused.

We got early warning of this effect from the museum world about 20 years ago. It became possible to make a copy of Champlain’s astrolab (above) so perfect that even experts are sometimes fooled. Surely, this is good enough for display. Surely, this gets the job done.

"No," said the museum visitor, "I need to see the real thing." There is something mesmerizng here about the thing itself that does not "cross over" in the moment of duplication.  (People with New Age convictions believe that this irreproducible difference is to be found in the "vibe" of the object and we would periodically find people in the museum running their hands over objects in order to, as one of them put it, "hoover up the vibes."  Yeah, I know.) 

Clearly, a factory product does not have this "real thing" power, but still there is still something important about having our Disney favorites in their material form. Indeed, many of us would rather have limited access to the real thing than constant access to Disney-on-demand.  All of this is another way of saying that there are some qualities of a commercial artifact that do not reproduce in a "mechanical age."  (Poor guy, he was wrong about this, too.) 

In sum, Disney creates value that does not get recaptured when things are distributed digitally.  And this suggests a certain marketing naivete on the part of the new CEO.  And this bodes ill for Disney’s future performance and its present share price. 

Hey, but what do I know.  I’m still using an astrolab.

Post script:

Tonight’s the night for the launch of Culture and Consumption II.  Thanks to everyone who responded to the invitation.  I am looking forward to seeing you from 6 to 8.  For the rest of you, if you leave now, you can just make it.  (Email me for the GPS coordinates.  We will clear the roof top for those of you coming by hot air balloon, light aircraft or helicopter.) 

References

Grover, Ronald. 2005. Calming the Crowd after Eisner’s Thrill Ride. BusinessWeek. October 3, 2005, p. 37.

cultural illiteracy and the WSJ

Wsj There was a great story about the Hollywood producer Scott Rudin in the weekend Wall Street Journal.  Mr. Rudin is famous for treating his assistants with tyrannical disregard.  He goes through them at the clip of 1 every 6 weeks.* 

Mr. Rudin may be a monster but he is a well informed monster.  And the WSJ article touches on a favorite theme of this blog: the cultural illiteracy of the corporate world.  Mr. Rudin says he is "regularly shocked by the lack of cultural knowledge" of his staff. 

What’s odd is that the article itself manages to miss the single most illuminating comparison invited by the phone-throwing, insult-delivering, threat-shrieking Mr. Rudin.  Kelly and Marr fail to mention Swimming with sharks.   (All references below.)

If I may indulge in a little tantrum of my own, anyone who has been paying attention in the last 20 years knows that movies are the lingua franca of our culture.  (This especially annoys the intellectuals who devoted their educations to print, and love nothing more than literary references.  Yes, fine, I made one to Malamud on Friday.  I am deeply, deeply sorry.)  Referencing movies (or TV) is the single, most powerful, most dependable means of communicating in our culture. 

If there is a filmic reference to make, that is to say, you simply must make it.  The journalist who can refer to Swimming with sharks must refer to Swimming with sharks.  A circuit is opened and the reader leaves the WSJ article for the movie memory and comes back again illuminated.  Now we know the kind of man Scott Rudin is with a depth and nuance we can’t have had any other way.   (Mr. Rudin, by others’ movies, we shall know you.) 

This is the newspaper and the movie world working together.  Think of it as one of those crazy division of labor things that so surprised us during the dot.com explosion.  Print didn’t disappear, bricks and mortar retail didn’t disappear.  We just found several ways to combine them with the Internet.  We discovered the internet "plays well with others."

It is possible that Kelly and Marr haven’t heard of Swimming with sharks.  But if they are under 35, this is improbable.  There is one chilling possibility here: that an editor refused the Swimming with sharks comparison on the grounds that, "no one will get it."  Oh, dear, how very depressing.  This is, after all, the new WEEKEND edition of the Wall Street Journal, the very occasion when the WSJ might think about cultivating the reader and addresses this great deficit of the corporate mind set. 

The Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition is now two weeks old.  There is, so far, no evidence that it will address the issue of cultural literacy.  Instead, this weekend’s edition offers detailed advice on hiking.  Surely, this is the place where we might hope this august journal to create a column on the 44 films the well informed executive must know about.  (Create a NetFlix link, and these films can begin to roll into all those Connecticut households.)  This column should probably be written by one or both of those paragons at Entertainment Weekly (Schwartzbaum and Gleiberman).  Once this has run it’s course, there should be another column, this one about the 55 players in Hollywood who matter (e.g., "What John Cusak means to Hollywood").

When will Wall Street understand that cultural literacy isn’t a matter of ornament and it certainly isn’t a matter of cool, but that it is one of the bodies of knowledge on which managerial success depends?  I guess Wall Street will get when the Wall Street Journal does.  So when is this going to happen?

References

Huang, George.  1994. Swimming with sharks.  Keystone Pictures.  (stars Kevin Spacey, Frank Whaley and Benicio Del Toro.)

Kelly, Kate and Merissa Marr.  2005.  Bozz-Zilla!  Movie producer Scott Rudin may be the most feared boss in Hollywood.  But the young and ambitious line up for a chance to work for him.  Wall Street Journal.  September 24, 2005, pp. A1, A6, p. A6

Post script

* my estimate.  Assistants believe that Mr. Rudin has gone through 250 assistants in the last 5 years.  Mr. Rudin sets the figure at roughly half that. 

The Malamud effect: ideas and the corporation

Razr_2There’s a wonderful story by Bernard Malamud about a painter who manages in a moment of inspiration to create a work of greatness. All his neighbors say so. The painter works through the night, burnishing, perfecting, and as the light of dawn fills his studio, it’s clear what he’s done. He’s ruined it. His neighbors all troop back in and everyone agrees. "Yes," they say (something like), "It’s true. You screwed it up."

This story sprang to mind when I was reading Scott Anthony’s treatment of the Razr, the phone that restored Motorola to its accustomed place of grandeur in the cell phone market. Anthony doesn’t say it in so many words, but you are left with the impression that one of the secrets was the sheer speed at which Razr was allowed to pass through the Motorola system.

The Razr idea was a great idea. The trick for Motorola: to get out of its way. Bless them, they did. When the dawn stole into the product development lab, there it was, a new phone, close enough to perfect to do astonishing things for the brand, sales and shareholder value.

Why do corporations inflict the Malamud effect on innovation? I think we know some of the answers here. I wish to read into evidence my experience as an employee of the Royal Ontario Museum, a great python of an institution, one through which, when I was there, innovations moved slowly, if at all.

In the early days, Royal Ontario Museum did a particularly good job of making itself up as it went along. But as it went along, the place began to discover the pleasures of stasis and to indulge itself in a particularly nasty combination of cowardice and bloody mindedness. By the time I got there, it was if the very achievements of the institution, its power and majesty, were being used to protect it from new ideas.

How bad was it? I told one of the incoming heads of the institution that he was about to assume leadership of a "culture of no." He laughed, very nearly patted me on the head, and said something like, "Just watch me."

Several years later, over moody drinks in the member’s lounge, he acknowledged that he was presiding over an institution that wished to perpetuate itself unchanged.

Sometimes the museum’s spirit of resistance was just laziness. Change, especially change in the deeper assumptions and processes of the museum, this would take work…and who wanted that?

Sometimes, it was stupidity. Change takes a certain imaginative power and intellectual mobility, and the Museum had made some terrible HR decisions over the years. Some employees were willing to participate in a new Museum, but they were simply too dim to grasp what was being asked of them.

But sometimes the "innovation jamming" stemmed from the cunning understanding that a swifter, smarter, more engaged Museum must necessarily create an environment antithetical to job security. The time-serving functionary knew this new Museum would make him look bad just about all the time. Surely, idea infanticide was not such a bad thing, especially it could forestall patricide down the road. (Kill the innovation before it grows up and kills you.)

Sometimes, innovation jamming came from a motive deeper still. Many members of the institution were deeply wedded to the "identity capital" that accrued to anyone working at the Royal Ontario Museum. They lived for that delicious pause at a cocktail party that followed their answer to the question, "and what do you do?" The very mention of the ROM made people stop a moment, and this pause is the Canadian way of giving deference. No one wanted to mess with this.

We have all seen this kind of corruption at work. It’s not peculiar to the ROM, the museum, not for profits, or the corporation. Every organization has a system. This system works as a ballast, a bulwark, a benediction against chaos.

But, thanks to the Malamud effect, the system is also the way good ideas turn into moronic, or merely ordinary, realities. What we need is a formula that shows that the value of a new idea (to the brand, to volume and profit, to shareholder value) is diminished the more time it spends in process, in committee, in corporation. The faster we bring a new idea to market the more likely it is to deliver real value there. Speed of delivery doesn’t very often feel like the sensible thing to do. But it is sometimes the only way to escape the Malamud effect.

References

Anthony, Scott. 2005. Motorola’s Bet on the Razr’s Edge. Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. September 12, 2005. here.

Bernard, Malamud. [I read this 30 years ago. Grateful if anyone can identify it.]

Celebrity endorsements IV

Kate_mossOnce you start looking, they’re everywhere!

Gwyneth Paltrow for Damiani
Courteney Cox for Kinerase
Cindy Crawford for Omega
Pierce Brosnan for Omege
Felicity Huffman for QVC
Kate Moss for H. Stern
Nelly, Nia and Ivana for Judith Leiber
Emily Procter for Charriol
Charlize Theron for Raymond Weil
Tea Leoni for Neiman Marcus and UNICEF

And the big "endorsement" news of yesterday: Kate Moss was photographed apparently snorting cocaine by the British press. 

H&M, the fashion chain, dropped Ms. Moss like a hot potato.  From the WSJ yesterday:

The retailer initially stuck by the 31-year-old Ms. Moss.  On Saturday, the company told the Associated Press that Ms. Moss had acknowledged her drug taking and apologized for breaking her contractual obligation to be "healthy, wholesome and sound."  H&M was giving her a "second chance," an H&M spokeswoman said, and would continue to use her in its ads.  […]  Two days later, H&M decided to cuts its ties with the model. 

Contractually obligated to be "healthy, wholesome, and sound"!

H&M, you flaming hypocites!  Clubbing till all hours of the morning.  Suffering the presence of Pete Doherty.  Consuming illicit substances.  Forsaking most of what is healthy, wholesome and sound, this is what Kate Moss does for a living.  This is the way she manufactures meanings for a brand like H&M. 

If you’re Kate Moss, your job is to live fast without actually dying young.  If you’re H&M, your job is to make a connection to someone with this kind of glamor and credibility.  Coax them out of the forest is you must, but you are going to have to lie down with the beasts of the fashion world.  Otherwise, you are just an overlit box of borrowed ideas and fabric on hangers.  Derivative, opportunistic and a little sad.   

H&M is a leveraged enterprise.  It must somehow borrow some of the wilderness of the fashion world, or what it brings to market are the objects of fashion but not the meanings of fashion.  It must borrow, that is to say, the very qualities Kate Moss has lived, quite conspicuously, since Calvin Klein ads helped make her the poster child for "heroin chic."  H&M might find some celebrities who are "nice and safe," but then it’s not clear these people are well chosen.  It is, finally, a simple transaction.  If H&M wants credibility with its celebrity, it is going to have to endure moments like this.  So, buck up.  Restore the contract.  Yes, you will lose some customers.  But the good news, you get to keep your credibility. 

As to the larger question: is celebrity endorsement back?  I think the evidence says that it must be.  A lot of the current endorsement activity is the kind of thing that used to be practiced by American celebrities secretly (and shamefully?) in Japan. So what changed?  I remember seeing the TV work done by Susan Sarandon.  I am guessing (and forgive me if this is unfair) but I think Ms. Sarandon is the kind of Hollywood liberal who believes that the market place is the plaything of the devil and that for many years she believes that the valley of celebrity endorsement was littered with the bones of Hollywood careers. 

"Yikes," I said to myself, "If Susan is prepared to do endorsements, then someone must have sounded the "all clear" signal.""  So what happened?  Does anyone know what celebrities are now saying to one another?  (Besides, "show me the money?")  Surmise (sheer or otherwise) is most welcome. 

References

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  Who is the Celebrity Endorser?  Culture and Consumption II.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 

Patrick, Aaron O. 2005. Moss Proves Too Edgy for Retailer.  Wall Street Journal.  September 21, 2005. 

Burning brands, or, the new marketing thugs in Silicon valley

Microsoft_1I am working on a brand new computer and I have now tried several times to change my Explorer home page.  I want to use Google/ig, my new portal to all the things I care about on-line, including, of course, the Google search engine.  Guess what? Microsoft won’t let me.

I have tried to make the change now for two days.  I have tried every option available to me, and my browser always resets to msn.com.  This problem was always a problem.  In my experience it always took a few days for this setting "to take."  (I understand that this is not how computers work, but I am not sophisticated enough to give you a more sophisticated account.)

Really, is this not saddest thing you have ever heard?   Microsoft knows perfectly well that Google is the new home page/portal of choice.  Have they now resorted to cheap tricks to prevent this from happening?  How low can they go?  How complete do they wish to make their humiliation?  So far, they are well on course for "Laughing Stock," New Mexico. 

Silicon Valley has never been the birthplace of great branding.  But it is filled with lots of smart people.  How bright do you have to be to understand that some consumers are going to resent this sort of thing?  The rest of us (and eventually, the rest of them) are going to rethink who and what you are.  If we’ve invested any "trust" or "good faith"  in your brand, these we will cash in immediately. 

I have been running the numbers anthropologically, consulting that is to say the cultural factors that need to be reckoned with here.  The conclusion is clear.  Short of having their physical liberty taken from them, there are few things that members of the 1st world dislike more intensely than being having their realm of personal choice narrowed or forced.  They might go along in the short term.  They will make a point of making you pay, in the long. 

So, let’s engrave this in the marketing handbook, shall we.  (You know, for those not bright enough to work it out for themselves.)  Consumers are to be treated with respect and courtesy.  They may not be coerced, constrained, or manipulated.  There may be some small benefit in the short term.  But the damage to the brand will be formidable.

Burning man?  How about Burning brand.  Just get everyone is those shiny cars they like to drive at Micrsoft and head for the Nevada desert.  Construct some facsimile of the brand.  Now, burn it down.  Or, blow it up.  Take brand equity and scatter to the four corners of the desert and drive your shiny cars home.   

There is a punishment for bad marketing beyond the ridicule you visit on the corporation.  Some of what you just destroyed in the desert was share holder value.  Yes, I thought that might get your attention.  Consumers?  We don’t need no sticking consumers.  We, Microsoft, has an immense installed base.  But share holders?  They are mobile, and you diminish them at your peril.

I have directed this criticism to Microsoft but it’s clear that there are several players who are equally offensive.  Yahoo is apparently deeply implicated in adware mischief.  Do need seek advantage by being tricky.  Eventually, you will be found out.   

Microsoft and Yahoo, it’s time to choose.  You can be a bully.  Or you can build brands.  These are mutually exclusive activities. 

Post script.

Last night, we tuned in "My Name is Earl" and watched it jump the shark in the scene where Earl goes back to apologize to an old friend of highschool.  What is clever in this show is entirely charming.  What was broad was way too broad.  I get, and admire, the marketing issue at issue here: can you capture a 90s sense of humor even as you capture something much broader, and there always was a common ground here.  But you have to work them like those little side by side circus ponies.  One was allowed to stray.  (No cards or flowers, thank you; I think I’ll be fine.) 

Post script II

I understand that one of the solutions for this Explorer problem is just to move to Mozilla and I did that some months ago.  The use of the right click key, however, drove my crazy (I badly need to click and paste without interference) and it drove me home.  "Home?"  Microsoft, why it’s not home any longer.  It’s a cheap motel I am looking forward to vacating as soon as possible.  Especially, now that I know branding decisions are being made by a shifty looking fella who always orders lotto tickets and a tall boy way early in the morning.  (Hey, if my competition were Google, I’d be cashing my Microsoft stock in for Lotto tickets, too.) 

Celebrity endorsements III

Uma Ok, so the presentation yesterday went well enough that I am pretty certain that the client will not bring legal action against me.  And that’s a relief. 

Is it me, or is celebrity endorsement back?  There was a time when it seemed to flourish, then a moment in which it fell from favor.  And now it seems to on the climb again.  Too bad we don’t "get" it any more successfully that we did the last time it made itself a feature of popular culture. 

For the train ride home, I bought a copy of Interview Magazine.  What a brainless exercise this is.  The notion, devised by Andy Warhol, is that celebrities should interview celebrities, and in the present issue, Mark Wahlberg interviews Andre Benjamin and Hugh Jackman interviews Rachel Weisz. 

I am quite sure that Mr. Jackman outstrips me on every dimension known to man and God, but interviewing?  Good lord, his interview of Ms. Weisz is pretty awful: good hearted when it should be forthright, celebratory when it should be a little more Martian, but worst of all, it manages to render the mysterious banal. 

Is there a more precious resource for an actor?  Is there anything more life giving, more artistically endowing than indeterminacy?  The moment I believe I know exactly who Rachel Weisz is, this is the moment when there are some roles she can no long do, some places she can no longer go, certain powers she can not call down from the heavens.  Oh, Hugh. 

Which brings us to celebrity endorsement.  I scanned the WSJ and found an ad for Lincoln Financial Group that featured Donovan McNabb.  It’s really quite good. And let’s face it, any ad that can transfer meanings between an NFL quarterback and the princes of capital has really got the gods of metaphor working over time.  (Of course, they consult.  You knew that.) 

But the copy of Interview Magazine.  There is Uma Thurman for Louis Vuitton, Demi Moore for Versace, and Juliette Lewis for J. Lindeberg.  First, this threesome makes it clear why endorsement is so much more powerful than the work of mere models.  There are all those meanings rushing about that models cannot have: erupting from the personal life (Ethan Hawke then Quinton Tarantino, Bruce Willis then Ashton Kushner), previous roles (Kill Bill, Charlie Angel’s and the sensational movie in which Juliette Lewis worked with Uma Thurman, and between the two of them they managed to map and capture aspects of life in New Jersey, some of which would not otherwise ever have made it onto celuloid), the position all of them end up taking and helping to define in contemporary culture.  In fact, each of these women defines aspects of femaleness we haven’t seen before.  (Not bad.  And we call them merely celebrities.)

In sum, each of these brands gets to lay claim to cultural meanings that are rich, interesting and very much in process.  We grasp who each of these women is, and we have a vague sense that we know where they are going.  But finally, there is a quite marked indeterminacy here.  And this is a brand property that we have yet fully to think through.  We have been so busy trying to be unmistakably clear, we have yet to learn how to work indeterminary as any great actor has always done. 

And the actresses?  Did they give more than they gave?  Did they, curse of the errant interviewer, actually have to give up indeterminacy to lend face, name and meanings to these brands?  I think actually that Demi Moore might have done this.  The ad is trying as hard as it can but I detect no meanings flowing from celeb to brand.  Moore is made to hemmorage meanings.  (And this is odd.)

Thurman and Lewis on the other hand appear to come out of the deal pretty well.  The Thurman treatment is a little arch and the Lewis one, a little predictable, but otherwise, there is something happening in the moment of endorsement that makes them more present, more interesting, than they would otherwise have been. 

But enough flannelling on.  This evening Pam and I must fight a battle for the remote control.  She is keen to watch, House, a local favorite.  I would like to look in on My Name is Earl.  Perhaps we will skip back and forth between them.  Hugh Laurie and Jason Lee are celebrities making meanings they will someday make available to the brand.  It’s good to get there early.

Post script

This is not a memorial that befits him but we must somehow remember the man who helped us to remember.  Simon Wiesenthal died today in Austria.  He was 96.  He was a survivor of five concentration camps and two suicide attempts.  He was a scourge of fugitive Nazis. 

Celebrity endorsements II

Ellen_1 Speaking of celebrity endorsements (as we did Thursday), I wanted to say a couple of admiring words about the “My Card, My Life” campaign from American Express. 

It features Ellen Degeneres, Robert DeNiro, Kate Winslet, Laird Hamilton, Coach K, and Tiger Woods.  The Ellen Degeneres “Dance” spot is particularly funny.  It’s true to Degeneres (and a theme of her talk show).  It’s a successful excavation of the gag (Degeneres dances to the music of a ring tone and an ice cream truck).  Finally, it’s not like any of the other spots.  DeNiro’s spot is a sentimental Valentine to New York City, Tiger Wood’s is a wry thank you to rainy days (when he doesn’t have to play).

How can these endorsers all speak for the same company?  How can one company want this much individuality rehearsed on its behalf?

The answer is clear: American Express is trying to solve one of the single most pressing problem on the marketer’s blotter: how to be many things to many people.  And to solve this problem, they look to their endorsers not for the usual witless witness, but for their difference.  In fact, these spots are about the depths of their differences.  If celebrity endorsement is about moving meanings from the celebrity to the brand, the meanings in question here are particular, almost maximally differentiated.  This is what endorsement looks like in the market of the long tail, in a culture of plenitude. 

Naturally this raises many marketing problems even as it solves.  What is the brand when it is a thing of threads and patches?  What is the architecture that makes all this diversity go together for strategic purposes?  Indeed, is architecture a desirable metaphor, or even a plausible one. 

But this approach to endorsement does have happy consequences for the star and for contemporary culture.  The old bargain was zero sum, the star gave up some credibility to augment the brand.  And this is why they were so handsomely paid.  Compromise made for scarcity, scarcity made for a big, fat pay day. 

The new bargain is win-win.  The brand is augmented and so is the celebrity.  This should mean that more celebrities want to participate and we should expect endorsement fees follow suit.  (Mind you, even if all celebrities want to participate, there is still only one DeNiro.)

It’s win-win-win, actually, because contemporary culture is now the beneficiary of more interesting advertising which in turn serves as an inducement to more difference.  I am not talking about Degeneres’ sexual identity but about a white person’s willingness to dance in public.   Whatever else these ads are about, they celebrate personal expression.  Thus does some plenitude make for more plenitude. 

References

The campaign can be called at www.mycardmylife.com.  Or it might be www.mylifemycard.com.

Post Script: Thanks for your well wishes.  The presentation (noted in Friday’s post) is in hand, and I am in Philadelphia.  I think it’s ok, but if you never hear from me again, you can assume that the client was not pleased. 

Story time 9: contents under pressure

River Story time is usually a chance to recount some telling episode from the ethnographic notebook, and show  the anthropologist-as-marketer in the field.  And I was working on something along these lines when suddenly I thought to myself, "Hey, this is not the story.  The story is the feeling in the pit of your stomach."

By the end of Sunday night, I have to have a flawless presentation in hand.  I present Monday at 3:00.  It has to be perfect.  There is tons of data, collected in Philadelphia, Dallas and Atlanta in August.  The task is a species of product development I haven’t done before.  The pressure is mounting.  The anthropologist is up against it. 

My results are taking shape nicely.  I won’t go in empty handed.  But every project begins with the dread that this will go badly.  This time I’ll come up empty.  At some point, the BFI emerges (first word: big; second word: insight.)  The relief is palpable.  You start on the presentation and at some point, you think, "got it, I could go with it."  More relief.  Now, you’re fine. 

On the present project, I have my BFI, but it will take all weekend to turn it into a compelling presentation.  The client is plenty smart enough but I want to take them places I do not think they want to go.  Perfect clarity is called for.  A deft feeling for when to insist and when to pull back, this would also be a good idea.  The trouble is that some of the insights and all of the presentation in this project emerge only from steady application.  Are the remaining two days really enough time?  I tend to sleep badly under this kind of pressure and that means two nights of low grade sleep.  It’s going to be a long weekend.  If only it were not so short. 

This is the consultant’s life: the darker side of the happy, lucky, one hopes, funny stories one would like to tell.  Some day we’ll laugh and laugh.  Just not this weekend.

Angelina Jolie: celebrity endorsement gone wrong?

Angela_iii

Angelina Jolie is the new face for St. John Knits, a cause for surprise in some circles. St. John is famous for clothing the senior executive. Their suits are favored by Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. Was Angelina Jolie exactly the right choice?

Allen Adamson at Landor thinks so.

"Angelina is hot right now, she’s fashionable and she’s edgy. Maybe she’s not as nice as some of her fans would like her to be. But in branding it’s better to have a bit of an edge, because you get more attention."

There is a systematic way to think about this. A celebrity endorsement is a little like a metaphor. Meanings from one term, the celebrity, are proposed for the other term, the brand. If the audience finds the comparison plausible, transfer takes place. The meaning of the brand is changed. For better or worse.

So what meanings does Angelina Jolie make available to St. John Knits? Normally, we would answer this question carefully, thoughtfully, and with the benefit of consumer and cultural research. But this is the seat-of-the-pants world of blog construction where things happen with the speed of day-time television and shameless ad-hocery of the soap opera producer. ("I know! Let’s just say he didn’t die after all!")

Hastily, then, we could say that Angelina Jolie stands for a couple of things. First, she appears to be an old fashioned Hollywood star. People do keep using this phrase, applying it to actresses as diverse as Annette Benning and Catherine Zeta Jones. Jolie’s version of the old time Hollywood star makes her a return of the voluptuous. She is an act of physical, social, and emotional extravagance. She is out of scale. Lips, hips, breasts, eyes, hair. Sometimes the actress dwarves even her roles (even when these are Lara Croft). In the 60s, we seemed to be asking that our stars return to human scale. Then we snapped out of it.

Second, the out-scaled quality of this star carries off the screen into her private life. Jolie lives large. She experiments with her sexuality. She fights with family members as if reenacting Greek myths. She plays the guardian angel to the children of the third world. She steals husbands even when they are an American sweetheart. She wrecks even the special families thta everyone wishes well. She is indifferent to bourgeois rules and regs, and happy to take her leave of them.

Third, there is to her character, on screen and off, a certain knowingness. There is none of the simple generosity that Marilyn Monroe manufactured. There is none of the matter of factness with which Pamela Anderson says she is just tagging along with her breasts. Jolie is fully observant, well informed, pretty intelligent and unforgiving witness to it all. She may mean it. She may not. She’s got that 1990s irony thing down cold. Madonna with a heart. Courtney Love with a brain. There’s someone home.

On balance, and until someone pays me a breathtaking sum of money, this can only be surmise, Angelina Jolie does not look to me the perfect choice for St. John Knits. Sure, they are trying to recruit a new consumer, someone a little younger than their present loyalist who’s about 55. But, according to Agin’s story in the WSJ, St. John wants to keep the existing constituency, women of wealth and power. For this group, I’m guessing, Jolie is a bull in the china shop. A lovely bull, but a dangerous one.

Now, in marketing, as in all else, the devil is in the details. The art of marketing is to create campaigns that help select (and exclude) certain of Jolie’s meanings so that only some of them transfer. There is "wiggle room" here. But it feels like the heart, the centre of these bundle of meanings is well off the mark.

References

Agins, Teri. 2005. A Fashion Conservative Teams Up With Tattooed Starlet. Wall Street Journal. September 15, 2005.

McCracken, Grant. 2005. Who is the celebrity endorser? Culture and Consumption II: Markets, meaning, and brand management. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 97-115.

Self authorship

Lady_marmalade“They don’t grade fathers, but if your daughter’s a stripper, you fucked up.”

“We independent women, some mistake us for whores
I’m saying, why spend mine, when I can spend yours?
Disagree? Well, that’s you and I’m sorry
I’m a keep playing these cats out like Atari.”

The first quote is from Chris Rock. Rock’s view is the conventional one. Stripping? Bad choice. You, or your father, fucked up.

The second is a lyric from the song Lady Marmalade. It captures something tough to reckon with for the anthropologist interested in contemporary culture. In our culture, there is, whatever the conservatives insist, no single grounds, no Rock, for criticism.

We can say stripping is bad. All but zealots are inclined to give over to the sneaking supposition that this is finally for the individual to decide. These people are the authors of their lives. What stripping or prostitution means, that’s for them to say (and us to find out). We can disagree with this as much as we want, but Lil’ Kim says, with aplomb, bordering on indifference, "well, that’s you and I’m sorry.”

This isn’t relativism. I am not saying that the individual has the right to create or insist on values of their own. I am saying the individual has something like rights of ownership and with those come rights of definition. They are who they say they are. They do what they say they do. Values may or may not enter into it. The prostitute may or may not care to make moral claims about what prostitution is and isn’t.  But finally the locus of the meaning of “stripping” or “prostitution” is in the performance and the experience of the event. The actor decides, not the playwright, not the audience, not the theatrical tradition, and certainly not the critic.

My guess is that most strippers and prostitutes are not self possessed enough to exclude the conventional definitions of what they do. For some reason, I am pretty certain that there are some strippers and prostitutes who are plenty strong willed and self defined enough to insist on their own terms of reference. And to them I defer. Having to choose between my certainty and their certainty, well, they are inside the moment and they have the incumbent’s advantage. (And this is of course a recipe for that classical confrontation: the outsider who “knows” what stripping and prostitution is who finally confronts the practitioner off of whom moral certainties bounce harmlessly like so many stuffed animals. Hah, now where are you? (To be honest, my ethnographic research with these two occupational categories is non existent. But I have meant people off of whom moral certainties bounce harmlessly. I think anthropologists love these moments the way linguists love puns.)

We have lost control of this one. Polite society, church elders, teachers, artists, and other arbiters, they don’t get to say what a person is, what an action means. The right to create social identities, once the exclusive right of these several “mints,” has found its way into other hands. Try as we might we can’t get this cat back in the bag.

References

Crewe, B. and K. Nolan. n.c.,. Lady Marmalade. Additional lyrics by Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, Mya and Pink.

Chris Rock in Poniewozik, James. 2005. A Tale of Two Sitcoms. Time Magazine. September 19, 2005, pp. 67-68, p. 68.

What kind of Christian is George Bush?

Nagin

I discovered today that George W. Bush is a better leader or a better Christian than I knew.

Here he is facing a barrage of Katrina criticism, some of it almost surely coming from the people who helped create the Katrina crisis, and what does he do?

He reaches out and thanks these people for their criticism. After his meeting with Bush, the mayor of New Orleans, Mr. C. Ray Nagin, said, "If anything, he told me he kind of appreciated my frankness and my bluntness."

This might be the triumph of a Christian generosity, a turning of the cheek. It’s hard not to notice that no one takes Bush’s Christianity seriously, unless, in my opinion, they take it too seriously. No one seems ever to read Bush’s behavior as if he were being animated by Christian beliefs or practices. Instead, people treat his Christianity as if it were somehow "part of the act," an opportunistic play for sun belt, heart land, anti-coastal voters. No one seems to believe that George W. Bush is ever actually listening when in church. He’s there as part of the theatre of his presidency, to show that he stands with certain conservative verities and against the godless Dems.

I, for one, can’t believe how sloppy, self serving and just plain reckless this is as a piece of analysis. Hey, it might be right…but I don’t believe I have heard anyone make the argument, let alone demonstrate the case. It’s as if people want this to be true so badly they mean to repeat it until alternative ideas are rendered unthinkable. (This is one way of making sure the "truth will out," by killing, that is to say, all competitors. Call this the Tudor model of the social construction of reality.*)

The key strategic question: what if you are wrong? You have given up one of the great opportunities for decoding the present presidency. (Do we know the substance of the sermons Bush hears each week? And, if we don’t, isn’t it vertiginously strange that we don’t? What, we don’t think this makes a difference? Are you kidding me?)

Or Bush’s response to the mayor of New Orleans might be a triumph of a leader’s pragmatism. It says, effectively, “your criticism helped me see the work we had to do. Thanks.” This is the selflessness of leadership. The leader accepts that people will behave badly. He/she accepts that people will behave badly at his/her expense and the expense of his/her presidency. The leader might engage in a blame game, but, really, what would that accomplish? A leader "takes the hit" and moves on to solve the problem.

Here too there is something sensationally transgressive about using the name “George W. Bush” and the word "selfless" in the same sentence. We just don’t think this way. We "know" that George Bush is a man of small motives, a man incapable of personal sacrifice, a man who seeks and uses his office to augment, never to diminish, himself. Again, how do we "know" this? Are we sure?

I know it’s not fashionable to talk this way about George W. Bush, but that should give us pause. Actually, the problem goes deeper than that. It is indeed barely intelligible to talk about George Bush this way. To refer to the kind or effect of his religious feeling, do we ever do this? To refer to the selflessness of his presidency, this too trembles on the verge of incoherence. In sum, we have read certain interpretive possibilities out of analysis before analysis has begun. And we all did it. Intellectuals all did it.  Intellectuals all did it.  (It always astonishes me to see that the intellectual is first and foremost a pack animal.)

George W. Bush, maybe for all of his take-charge, Texan, just-folk transparency, there are complexities we have not discovered. Discovering complexities, I thought this was what the chattering classes were for.

References

Johnson, Kirk.  2005.  45 Bodies Are Found in a New Orleans Hospital.  New York Times.  September 13, 2005.  here. 

(*  Henry VII is said to have secured the Tudor claim to the throne as much negatively as positively.  He eliminated almost everyone with a competing claim.)

Unknown unknowns, 9/11 and a useful anthropology

A caveat:

This post is inspired by the memorials, performed yesterday, for the victims of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Some readers will say that the appropriate thing to do on this occasion is to honor the memory of people who lost their lives. I respect this view. I believe this might also be an occasion for addressing the causes of terrorist attacks. It turns out, the two issues are connected.

One place anthropologists can make themselves useful is military intelligence. (That most don’t want to, that’s another question.) They can be particularly helpful with what Secretary Rumsfeld calls the “unknown unknowns.”

Unknown unknowns, these are factors we don’t know we don’t know. They are the Achilles heal of any decision making system, military or managerial. We can’t factor what we can’t fathom. We must fear things excluded from the problem set.

Sometimes, perhaps most perilously, the unknown unknowns are the assumptions with which we think. We don’t see these assumptions because, well, we’re assuming them.

That’s where anthropology comes into it: most of what the anthropologists wants to know are the cultural assumptions in the respondent’s head…hence a certainly disciplinary skill in finding these  out.

Invisible assumptions, the most pernicious unknown unknown, are trap doors an enemy may use at their discretion, a place of weakness that will never be defended against because it literally cannot be seen. Invisible assumptions played their part in the terrorist attack of 9/11. Douglas Porch and James Wirtz note that the bin Laden terrorists had discovered an invisible assumption, an unknown unknown. 

[T]he notion of "suicide bombing" is so alien to the American —indeed the Western—outlook, that we find it difficult to fathom the mindset of enemies prepared to conceive of an operation of such horrific proportions, one in which they are prepared to immolate themselves…

The 9/11 attack was hard to defend against because it violated an assumption of the American outlook.  It made combatant self sacrifice a systematic part of the attack.  Wedded as we are to the value of the individual, it was almost impossible to imagine this and other threats. 

Military intelligence cannot see some of the assumptions it entertains.  Consider the report that said some flight students were concentrating on take-off instructions and ignoring landing instructions. 

When the analyst is “crunching” vast bodies of data, each particular finding must respond almost immediately to scrutiny.   (Blink!)  The more it springs from alien assumptions, the more probably it will read as noise.  To capture the significance of the "flight student" report, the analyst would have to perform a kind of intellectual self surgery.  He or she has find and then replace the one assumption that prevents him or her from seeing the significance of the datum at hand.  And again, this has to be done in the real time race through the data that is every analyst’s necessary modus operandi. 

But this of course formidably difficult.  Chances are flight students who appear more interested in take off than landing does not “compute.”  As long as we assume the value of the individual, this datum is odd, counter intuitive, and probably noise.  The moment we make the unknown known (more exactly, the unthinkable thinkable), this piece of intelligence can now “ring a bell.” Now, the defense community is in a position to factor in, and to begin to scan for, the possibility that planes might be used as bombs. 

An American, and extra-American, point of view values the individual extraordinarily.  This was clear yesterday. Every victim of the 9/11 attacks was acknowledged individually and by name. Roughly one in five of them were acknowledged publicly, nationally, and by a member of their family.  This may be taken as a measure of the essential decency of the American approach.  But it is also the very thing that so confirms certain of our assumptions that they become unknown unknown. (Clearly, no  criticism of the memorial is intended. This is a simple  relationship: the more we use certain assumptions, the more we assume them.)

Most of what we know about invisible assumptions tells us that they are almost always impossible to identify and correct on an ad hoc, on the fly, basis. Very, very, very smart people can do this (“Santa Fe Institute smart,” probably), but the rest of us cannot capture and swap out troublesome assumptions to correct the unknown unknown problem, especially not on the fly.

The only systematic way we can deal with this problem (and I guess we can assume the Pentagon is working on this) is to task a team of people and to train them to “think like the enemy.”  It is only by routing out certain assumptions and replacing them with new ones that we can make ourselves the equal of the challenge and escape the real problem of unknown unknowns.  The anthropological task begins be decoding the enemy, discovery the assumptions he makes, building these into the skunk works team, and then recording what the team delivers as new threats that must be defended against. 

I leave for another time the dynamic version of this system, and the more daunting challenge: the system that is capable of finding and mocking up assumptions, as they shift in real time.

References

Porch, Douglas and James J. Wirtz. 2002. Surprise and Intelligence failure. Strategic Insights. I (7 September) here.