I don’t say these are the best ads of 2006. They’re the ones that impressed me as great pieces of marketing.
There is a good deal of chatter about the "revolution" taking place in advertising as a result of new media and new messaging. But I believe we have yet to understand the cultural content and power of the more traditional venues, and especially the 30 second TV spot.
Here’s my salute to my favorites.
ad: Rosie client: Volvo agency: Euro RSCG Worldwide for more details: Meet Rosie, scourge of the new advertising (here).
ad: Light It Up client: The Coca-Cola Company agency: Foote Cone & Belding New York for more details: Lighting it up at the Coca-Cola Company (here).
ads: The LeBrons client: Nike agency: Weiden + Kennedy for more details: The LeBrons (here).
ad(s): All the Geico spots running in 2006 client: Geico.com agency: The Martin Agency for more details: Craig Ferguson (brand exemplar?) (here).
ad: Working Wealth client: Smith Barney agency: Hill Holliday, New York for more details: Parsing the symbolic language of the Smith Barney ad (here).
ad: Where the bloody hell are you? client: Australia agency: M&C Saatchi, Sydney for more details: Marketing Nations: Good News From Australia (here).
ad: Intel chips inside client: Apple agency: TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles for more details: Branding Brilliance from Apple (here).
ad: Peyton Manning as a fan client: Mastercard agency: McCann-Erickson New York for more details: Peyton Manning: The man and the brand (here).
ad: My Life, My Card: M. Night Shyamalan client: AmEx agency: Ogilvy for more details: Branding, Cocreation and Amex Theater (here). Oscar advertising (here).
ad: Chevy Cocreation website client: Chevrolet/General Motors agency: Campbell Ewald for more details: Chevy cocreation (here).
[the last of a 3 part series on innovation and the university]
I think d-schools (design schools) have a good shot at helping the university turn out capable innovators. They are better positioned, for instance, than the b-schools discussed yesterday.
For one thing the d-schools believe in consulting carefully with the consumer. Thanks to the pioneering work of Jay Doblin, the design field believes in ethnography, and this method flourished there well before its present popularity in business research circles.
For another thing, the d-school believes in culture.
As it stands, the b-school tends to think about the product or brand in terms of utilities, functions or benefits. Brands and products create value by doing work in the world.
For one expression of this position, here are Christensen, Cook and Hall on the "function brand."
a simple rule has been forgotten. To build a product that people want, you need to help them do a job that they are trying to get done.
the marketer’s fundamental task is not so much to understand the customer as it is to understand what jobs customers need to do — and build products that serve those specific purposes.
What gets lost in all of this is the other face of the product or brand. "Meanings and associations" are neglected.
In the famous HBS case study discussed yesterday, Black and Decker discover that their success in the consumer category has diminished their appeal in the professional category. More simply, construction workers who use a Black and Decker toaster at home want a more robust brand of tools at work. Still more simply, a Black and Decker sends the wrong message. One of the tradesmen quoted in the case study says,
On the job, people notice what you’re working with…if I came out here with one of those Black and Decker gray things, I’d be laughed at.
In his teaching note for the Black & Decker case study, Dolan says,
[The tradesman] wants tools that won’t get him laughed at by other workers on the job site. His tools are a badge – he sees status – with potential clients and peers via his tools. Also, just as some clothing brands yield self-esteem, so do the "right" tools. Having the "Right Stuff" gets you membership in the club of real professionals. [New paragraph] These benefits can be delivered by the product and the brand.
Bob Dolan is one of the smartest guy on the planet. I mean, to honor his native Boston, he is wicked smart and then some. But this is NOT the way to think about what is going on here. The The meanings of the Black & Decker product at home (domestic, daily, female) has leaked into the Black & Decker brand on the work site. What ought to be industrial, exceptional and male (and at the limit, heroic) has taken on new cultural meanings. The Black & Decker response, in the creation of the DeWalt brand, is unmistakably about regendering the Black & Decker offering, so to restore it’s industrial, exceptional, male and heroic meanings. (There is another level of meanings here but I leave that for another discussion.)
It does not help to call this brand a badge. It actually muddies the waters to say this is about status. It is not about status. This is one cultural meaning that is not active here, except distantly. This is a wonderful case, not least because it makes for great classroom theater. But even a guy as smart as Bob Dolan proves incapable of identifying the real issues at issue, and this, I would argue, is because culture does not a place in the explanatory heavens of the business school (however, active it might be in the heads of b-school students, see my reply to Deighton’s comment on yesterday’s post).
What I mean to say is that this jewel of the case study rotation is intellectually and pedagogically flawed. And further to the theme at hand, when Black & Decker created the DeWalt brand, it did the right thing for the wrong reasons. This innovation was stumbled upon when it could have been embraced sooner and more exactly.
Enter the d-school. A good d-school graduate would have "cracked" the Black & Decker/DeWalt issue before the end of the first interview. I had a chance to hear IDEO’s Jane Fulton Suri and Suzanne Gibbs Howard at the Advertising Research Foundation meetings in San Francisco this month, and they were superb. At one point, they showed how they used what they learned in a NASCAR pit to redesign the Emergency Room of a hospital. Brilliant! One part of culture made available to another, because these innovators are a citizen of the many worlds that make up our world.
D-schools have a natural advantage here. They situate themselves across the divide we observed above. The d-school grad, if I understand him or her, assumes from the outside that the product and brand will have both sets of properties, functional and meaningful. Indeed, the better schools will persuade him/her that this distinction is for some purposes unnecessary and gratuitous. In effect, the full complexity of the brand and product is restored through the intervention of a profession that takes for granted that presence and mutuality of benefits and meanings.
By bridging what b-schools put asunder, the d-schools can steal a march on the b-schools in the area of innovation. Indeed, this may have happened already.
To make their business culture more innovative, managers are hiring thousands of new people who can think and act more creativity. More and more, recruiters ask if people with a degree in "administration" are up to the task.
If engineering, control and echnology were once the central tenets of business culture, then anthropology, creativity, and an obsession with consumers’ unmet needs will inform the future. (Hempel and McConnon, BusinessWeek)
The former Dean of the Harvard Business School, Kim Clark, used to say that what kept him up at night was the possibility that HBS might lose its position of preeminence to a new, more virtual, business school. But, who knows, the real challenge and the real possibility of eclipse may come from a more modest, much less technological threat, the failure of business school to embrace the full complexity of consumers, producers and the marketplace.
Some business schools are replying to the challenge. The most conspicuous of these is the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto run by Roger Martin. Some years ago I had a look at the program and it did not seem to be to satisfy even modest anthropological ideas of culture or method, but that may have changed. Indeed, it is not clear to me that the design schools always have a fully realized idea of culture. I don’t know of any design school that teaches a course in American culture of the kind that would prepare graduates to exhaust the analytical and creative options it makes available.
But we can say at least, that the d-schools are at least open to what the b-schools continue to "read out" of the problem set. Of course, it remains to be seen whether the d-schools can master the analytical skills that b-schools are now so good at.
Christensen, Clayton M., Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall. 2005. It’s the Purpose Brand, Stupid. Wall Street Journal. November 29, 2005; Page B2.
Dolan, Robert. 2005. The Black & Decker Corporation (A): Power Tools Division. Harvard Business School Case Study. 9-595-057, Revised June 20, 1995.
Dolan, Robert. 1998. Black & Decker Corporation Series. Teaching Note. Harvard Business School Teaching Note. 5-598-106. February 12, 2998.
Fulton Suri, Jane and Suzanne Gibbs Howard. 2006. Human Insights and Creativity. The Advertising Research Foundation conference: Advertising, What’s Next? Held December 13-14, 2006. San Francisco.
Hempel, Jessi and Aili McConnon. 2006. The Top Design Programs. BusinessWeek. October 9, 2006, p. 66.
McCracken, Grant. 2005. And Stop Calling Me Stupid. The Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. November 30, 2005. here.
If the University is no longer so vital as a center of innovation (see yesterday’s post), does it still create innovators?
Call this the "Canada" model of innovation where an institution/country that is bad at innovation still manages to export people who are good at it.
The University is, of course, a house of many mansions. I will look only at the professional schools: the b-school, d-school, e-school, and the law school. (Though I will say in passing that the liberal arts continue to supply exemplary intellectual training even as they too often insists on political and epistemological orthodoxy that renders the liberal arts grad next to useless when it comes to innovation. And here I define innovation as IBM’s Sanford does: creativity plus insight.)
B-Schools
B-schools are good at some aspects of innovation training, and really bad at others. That "easter egg hunt" called the case study is very good at giving students the ability to see through a confusing tangle of factors to the things that matter. But this is a decompositional ability. It is good at breaking down, and much less good at building up.
If the culture of Microsoft has a problem when it comes to innovation, it is precisely this. Not so long ago, I listened to Microsoft managers interrogate potential innovations, demanding to know how they could be monetized! Most innovations begin as inspirations and we should treat them as the Inuit treat newly born children, as gifts who must be treated with solicitude for fear they will return whence they came. Spare inspirations the ROI rack…at least for a little while.
This is a long standing problem for the corporation and the b-school. Both are so keen on a tough minded pragmatism that there are often insufficient intellectual resources or inclinations with which too nourish or embrace the new. After all, the new begins as something barely thinkable. It is too much to ask that it make itself immediately practical. Both the b-school and the corporation have to get better at ideas that are almost completely weightless and quite without utility.
The further problem with the business school is that it continues to treat the consumer and producer as economic actors and the market place as the sum and total of the transactions creating between these actors. All the larger, collective contexts that establish value, create context, supply meaning and motivate purchase are dismissed or diminished. Culture never gets talked about in a systematic way.
When I was teaching at a business school we taught a cases on DeWalt power tools and Land’s End merchandising, both of which turn on the cultural specifications of gender. (Briefly DeWalt repositioned a brand by regendering it. Land’s End was gifted a new segment of female consumers because cultural ideas of women and women’s clothing were changing.) These cultural specifications were never mentioned. When I raised them as possibilities people looked at me as if I were mad. (I hasten to add that I am not one of those social scientist who wants to neglect or exclude "economic man." The challenge for anthropology is indeed how to make him feel as welcome as an Inuit child.)
B-schools were founded and largely staffed by economists. Over the years, the economists were displaced and a supra-economistic understanding of the consumer, the producer and the marketplace were smuggled in. The work of this transformation is however not complete, despite the fact that the intellectual work has been in place for some time: Durkheim, Polanyi, Sahlins, Granovetter. Let the revolution continue.
In sum, the innovators produced by b-schools are hampered in two ways. First, the b-school discourages the the full creativity that innovation requires. Second, it artificially constrains the problem set, so that students are discourages from combining creativity with insight, that is, with a full reckoning of the world in which the creativity must make itself useful. (I refer once more to Linda Sanford’s distinction.)
I have run out of time but by this first reckoning it looks as if the University might be failing in the production of both innovation and innovators. This is scarier, still.
Tomorrow: the d-schools and innovation
Reference
Sanford, Linda. 2006. Building an Innovation Company for the 21st Century. MIT-IBM Innovation Lecture Series. October 17, 2006. here.
This is a bit scary. The academic world is losing it’s place as a center of innovation.
Linda Sanford gave a presentation at the MIT-IBM Innovation lecture series this fall. (Sanford is the Senior VP Enterprise On Demand Transformation and Information Technology.) It was an impressive performance. Sanford supplied a "big picture" treatment of the changing tectonics of the corporate world, noting especially:
the shift away from cost-cutting as the chief preoccupation of senior managers
the new interest in top line growth
the creation of a less silo-ed, less hierarchical, less boundaried, less self sufficient, less top-down corporation in a newly horizontal, collaborative, open world
the new commitment to innovation as a first order of business
This raised the question of where innovation comes from, and Sanford reported the result of an IBM survey of corporate CEOs. (I am not sure of the timing or the dimensions of this study.)
Sanford pointed out that the 20th century CEOs would likely have identified the university world as an important source of innovation, even as they gave pride of place to their own internal research and development departments. This has changed. Now both come in at the bottom of the array.
I would be surprised if there was a journalist at this presentation, but, hey, this looks like a story to me. The annual investment made in the academic world is very large. And now it looks as if the R-O-I (return on investment) is beginning to disappoint.
How do we fix the university?
Tomorrow: b-schools, d-schools, e-schools and innovation
Reference
Sanford, Linda. 2006. Building an Innovation Company for the 21st Century. MIT-IBM Innovation Lecture Series. October 17, 2006. here.
Acknowledgment
The graphic above is take from Ms. Sanford’s IBM-MIT presentation. It is used without permission. I am hoping IBM’s commitment to collaboration and openness extends far enough to allow me to reuse this graphic here.
Are TV talk shows a laboratory for branding? Do we have something to learn from Jay Leno, David Letterman, Jimmy Kimmel and Craig Ferguson?
Well, surely, we don’t want our brands to look like Jay Leno’s The Tonight Show, that exercise in the painfully agreeable. Jay Leno used to be a comedian:
"President Bush is recovering after an illness in Japan. His medical advisers were very clear. They said to the President, "Get plenty of rest and drink lots of fluids.""
"Plenty of rest, lots of fluids? I thought that was Congress’s job."
Now, Jay uses EZ humor. Retirement happened a while ago. We’re just waiting for him to leave.
Jay’s story is the story of a several brands. They begin with edge and intelligence and then trade this away for growth. They grow large without even as they wither within. EZ branding, it’s everywhere. Big simple branding propositions. Repeated endlessly. Argh. Retirement can’t come soon enough.
Jimmy Kimmel is another story. I liked the fact that he promised his talk show was going to be a "funny version of the Tonight Show." And I like the fact that he manages to express two very different parts of contemporary culture: wicked clever and Man Show stupidity. The person who can pull this off is a genius or the head writer at a Frat house. The brand that can pull this off, well, name one. ESPN, maybe. Apparently, Kimmel is up 17 % among adults 18 to 49, so a lot of brands ought to be taking notice.
But there is trouble in this little paradise. Kimmel is making a host of compromises. He now wears a tie. The show is no longer live. He dutifully stands up for his monologue. Yes, the numbers are growing, but it is not clear that the potency of the proposition can sustain itself.
This is an old story, the trading away of credibility to get to success. It looks as if Entertainment Weekly may be engaged in something like this. (The current cover showing Matthew McConaughey under the desperate title "Sexiest Man Alive or Serious Actor?" is but one indication.) It’s always the same. The compromises begin to accumulate, the numbers spike nicely, and within a year or two the thing has jumped the shark.
The lesson from Jimmy Kimmel and his handlers may be this: take grow only if you can have it without compromise. If you need bigger numbers, start another brand.
This week I’ve been watching Craig Ferguson on The Late, Late Show, and I wonder if he is a new model of the talk show host…and perhaps the brand.
First, Ferguson reverses the trend. We are now accustomed to actors who started as comedians (Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Ray Romano, Martin Lawrence, Will Ferrell, the list is long). Ferguson is a comedian who started as an actor.
Second, Ferguson is the picture of animation. If he were any more animated, he’d be a cartoon character. I counted 15 vivid, distinct, arch expressions and then gave up. This guy just loves to mug for the camera and he manages to get from "fiendish glee" to "mock horror" in the blink of an eye. This may be his acting training. In any case, there is no such thing as dead air in this show. Even when the guest is shambling along, Ferguson is furiously digging around them for comic material with the joy and accuracy of a truffle pig.
Third, Ferguson builds an interesting relationship with the audience. He actually opens the second segment by saying, "Welcome back, my cheeky little monkeys!" I tried and tried but I just could not image David Letterman ever saying anything like this to his audience. (No mugging for Dave. His is a kind of Protestant, Midwestern, Carsonian theater of the small gesture and restrained reaction.)
Somehow, Ferguson has got around the "tell a joke" model and creates the impression that everyone in the studio is already party to a joke in progress. In the process he creates an irresistible bonhomie. No need to get the party started. It is already well under way the moment Ferguson starts talking. He insinuates a co-conspiracy and we the audience, go, "well, ok, fine, you’re on." The on-air relationship is, in the words of our favorite linguist, Michael Silverstein, maximally presupposing. It assumes what other comedians must labor to create.
Fourth, Ferguson is actually a pretty good interviewer…this separates him from most of the competition and especially David Letterman who is certifiably hopeless. And being an interviews lets him open up the guest list to include guests as diverse as Edward Norton, Ming Tsai, Xzibit and Paula Poundstone. Norton showed distressing signs of taking himself seriously as the auteur and grand actor, but dear old Ferguson just kept beaming good humor at him till he loosened up. He got Xzibit to make fun of himself and talked Ms. Poundstone down off the ledge of career insecurity. Ferguson proves to be as engaging with guests as he is with the audience.
It’s all very Scottish, this humor is. I have seen something like it before in a little pub several miles outside St. Andrews (aka the middle of nowhere) where people would entertain one another with playfulness, wit and dexterity that left yours-truly silent with awe. There are elements of the music hall at work, with people vamping and camping their way through cheeky, off color jokes and stories. And it is completely inexhaustible in what we might otherwise think is the Fergusonian style.
So it’s not as if young Ferguson has made all this up on his own. But, to be sure, he has, by this time, made it his own, and his opening few minutes of stand up are an exercise in effortlessness and sheer comic facility. He’s very good at this. It’s as if the American comedians have made a fine art of taking things out, baring things down, searching for the mot juste and then timing delivery to within a millisecond of perfection. Ferguson appears to subscribe to the Grand Central Station idea of train travel. Missed a joke? Never mind, there’ll be another one along in a moment.
What does this have to tell us about branding? I think the Fergusonian brand is one that brims with lots of things, and shows itself more interested in vividness than consistency, majesty, or even clarity. A Fergusonian brand is playful, a little surreal at times, vivid, changeable, unpredictable, insinuating, co-conspiratorial, and a little hyperactive. A Fergusonian brand breaks out of the "keep it simple, stupid" rule book that governs many marketers. Most of all, the Fergusonian brand works from an abundance model. It’s not about crafting a couple of words and delivering them with surgical perfection. It’s about more, and then more, and then more of that more. Marketing by profusion. Not everything will work. And that’s ok. Now we know. It’s kind of the way Hollywood used to make movies, and the way Jerry Lewis used to make jokes.
If there is a brand in the world that captures the Fergusonian approach, it is, I think, Geico.com. There seem to be lots of Geico ads running at the moment: the gecko, stone age man, the workout parodies, the tiny house bit, the geico squirrels, the interpretive spots starring Mini-me, Little Richard, Peter Graves, Charo, and the guy who does the voice over for action-adventure ads. It’s hard to believe all this stuff comes from a single agency. (As far as I know, it does, from the Martin Agency in Richmond, Virginia.)
I mean, surely, there will come a time when the brand will want to gaze out on its customers, and salute them with a fond "hello, my cheeky, little monkeys."
Reference
I couldn’t actually find anything on YouTube that was guite as good as the Ferguson I got to see this week, but here are a couple of examples
Yesterday The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the official poster for the 79th Annual Academy Awards. The poster features phrases that have lept from the screen into life:
Here’s looking at you, kid.
How do you fight an idea?
Rosebud.
The horror. The horror.
You can’t handle the truth.
I’ll be back.
What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.
Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.
Snap out of it.
Stella!
If you build it, they will come.
This is a brilliant bit of brand building, isn’t it? Hollywood ceased to be a matter of mere entertainment a long time ago. It is now the supplier of basic cultural materials, the very stuff of our self and collective definition. Good on the Academy for reminding us that Hollywood writers write for all of us, and that Hollywood directors direct even the details of our personal lives.
Two ethnographic notes.
1. A couple of years ago, I was searching for the ghost of Mordecai Richler in the bars of Montreal. I had found one of his favorites, a quiet, smoky place, dark wood, good scotch, and, bang, the door swung open and a man entered shouting, "yeah, baby!" If I had been visiting from the hinterland of Ethiopia, say, this might have been a baffling cultural moment. What was the shouter shouting? Why was the shouter shouting?
Everyone else knew exactly what was going on. This man was performing a phrase from an Austin Powers movie. And the odd thing was this didn’t seem the least bit odd. It wasn’t even irritating. It was our culture of the moment. All of us in the bar, even those pretending to be sophisticated Richler readers, had tried the phrase out, perhaps not at this volume or so publicly, but the phrase was part of our vocabularies too.
2. The other day I caught myself in a bit of borrowing of my own. I was reading something really stupid, and my reaction was to make precisely the sound that Alan Arkin, as Dr. Oatman, makes in Gross Pointe Blank (1997) when he’s finally had it with Martin Q. Blank. It’s a low, small phatic grunt that mixes exasperation, resignation and repudiation. What’s odd is that this proved to be EXACTLY the thing I need to "say" at the moment, despite the fact that I knew I was borrowing from Hollywood. How strange that a fragment of a movie should have lodged in me in such a way that I could summon it at the very moment I needed it. (I should say that because this is a favorite film I have seen it several times. I don’t think I ever "channel" films I’ve only seen once.)
Cultural caveat
Of course, we don’t like the sound of this one bit. We treasure the idea that we are as cultural actors autonomous, self created, self directing, self authored. The idea that we should all be captive of a phrase like "Yeah, baby" seems unlikely and offensive. The idea that some part of my personal life should have been written by Tom Jankiewicz, directed by George Armitage, and crafted by Alan Arkin, this doesn’t sit well. A little voice within takes umbrage. No, no, I am the author of Grant McCracken! Aren’t I? If I borrow from Hollywood, what does that say about my precious selfhood?
The fact of the matter is a river runs through us. (There, it happened again.) We do not just swim the media stream, it pours through us. I believe that phrases and gestures are crucial to the way we stay in touch with our dynamic culture. In the 1980s, David Letterman’s characteristic "yeah" complete with pumping hand gesture became a way that people showed their identification with the new values of the moment. The phrases, "snap out of it," and "get a life" performed this work as well. In the 1990s, a new semiotics was installed. New films prevailed.
But we appropriate gesture and language secretly. A friend of mine in Montreal openly admired how well a friend of hers could do the noise made by Martians in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks. Oh, but her friend was not pleased. It was as if my friend had accused her friend of fakery or something. Apparently, we believe that our appropriation of Hollywood phrases is exactly that, not merely a robotic repetition, but a cunning redeployment. Once we take it on, it belongs to us, and expresses the authentic self, not some borrowed one. (As T.S. Eliot used to say, "bad fans imitate, good fans steal.")
What the president of the Academy, Sid Ganis, says is true. The lines on the poster are everywhere around us in “in everyday conversations, in meetings, at parties, or walking down the street. They … give us great shorthand ways to express how we feel about […] things.” And with this poster I wonder if Hollywood contemplates declaring and perhaps recapturing the highest order value it creates in our culture…as it creates our culture.
There is no danger that Hollywood will find us in copyright violation when we enter a bar shouting, "Yeah, baby!" But it does make sense that Hollywood should take credit where credit is due, for the fact that it is perhaps the most important supplier of the cultural materials with which we direct, write, and perform the details of our everyday lives.
Much is changing in Hollywood at the moment, but this "value add" grows, I believe, ever more important.
References
Melidonian, Teni. 2006 Oscar@ Gets Quoted. Press release for the Oscar poster for 2007. here.
McCracken, Grant. Prefab culture. This Blog Sits At The Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. December 8, 2002. here. (for the role of TV in the creation of cultural materials.)
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the Academy for permission to reproduce this poster.
Hats off to TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles for their work here. (If anyone knows the names of the people on the creative and account team, please let me know, and I will add them here.)
The "culture matters" theme continues to rattle around in my head. Take this theme seriously and I believe we would serve not just the corporation but the body politic. We could actually help end the culture wars.
The trouble is simple. Our culture has become profusely inventive. Trends have become more numerous. The sheer scale and variety of our cultural space has expanded.
This trouble makes trouble: people panic.
The term "moral panic" was invented by Stanley Cohen in 1972. It means
a reaction by a group of people based on the false or exaggerated perception that some cultural behavior or group, frequently a minority group or a subculture, is dangerously deviant and poses a menace to society."
But these days the moral panic is provoked not by a false or exaggerated perception of one group or behavior. Moral panic now exists as a generalized response to all those groups and all that behavior out there. And this means that we are looking at an order of moral panic from which most people never recover. They find menace coming at them for every quarter. Deviance blossoms before their very eyes. Poor bastards, panic is upon them all the time.
Let’s be fair. It is true that our culture is a profusion of novelty and discontinuity. All of us who are writers and readers here at the intersection of anthropology and economics are aware that the rules of marketing, among other things, are changing as we write. There are new media, new motives, new measures, new mysteries. It’s enough to make your eyes bleed, or at least water.
But everyone is surrounded by mysteries. Is Facebook or YouTube something to be reckoned with, or really nothing at all. (I guessed wrong on reality TV and game shows. Thank God, I’m not running a network.)
We keep pushing the boundary. Seinfeld was interesting. Then came Curb Your Enthusiasm. Same sensibility, but the hero is not handsome, likable or heroic. News Radio was funny in a way. The Office is funny in new ways. First there was Merv, now there is Ellen. First Peter Sellers, now Sasha Baron Cohen.
The world of possibility is expanding. There may be some people who are who understand all of this, but for most of us there are now big chucks of our culture that are terra incognito. The world is impenetrable. Parts of popular culture, once witlessly transparent, are now "grayed out" and removed from comprehension.
And we know what happens when this happens. People start posting "wild beasties" notices and raising the voice of alarm. Panic gives way to politics and religion. Before you know it, alarm starts passing laws, banning things, vilifying things like gay marriage, all in a desperate effort to legislate order. Panic turns into gated suburbs of the actual and figurative kind.
Oh, you thought I was talking about the Right. No, not at all. Well, not only. I am also talking about the Left. There is panic here too. The Left was persuaded that capitalism, like the TV that was its crudest cultural expression, was a waste land. Nothing could come of this, they assured us. And along came Silicon Valley, an improved independent film industry, and risk taking television, to name a few. Another favorite notion of the Left is that innovation and cultural commotion must come from the avant-garde, the margin of society. It cannot come from the mainstream. But now of course it comes routinely from the mainstream, which proves ever more inventive. (Scrap booking is a case in point. Women in the mainstream reinvented the photo album.)
This is not the way the world is supposed to look! And the Left has embraced a moral panic of their own, which now expresses itself in an intellectual rigidity, accusation and name calling, and extra laps on the high horse of indignation. Lewis Black is a deeply frightened man. Ranting, that’s what moral panic has induced in the Left.
Oh, but I see I have climbed up on a high horse of my own. Here’s the point I want to make: that if we were to map contemporary culture and make it less mystifying, we wouldn’t just make the corporation smarter, we would diminish the moral panic that intensifies the ideological battles of our time. A little more knowledge would make for a lot less panic. I don’t mean that we could create consensus. But if we were to create new cultural literacy for both the Right and Left, we could create common terms of reference and newly mutual understanding. We would have managed to restore some part of this culture to itself. Now if you will excuse me I will return to my riding.
Last week, I was in San Francisco. I picked up a copy of the Guardian, and came upon my first "year end review." To my horror, I recognized only a couple of songs in the top ten. (This is a chronic problem for those of us trying to stay in touch with contemporary culture…or me, anyhow.)
Time to catch up. In the old days, I would have had to buy 10 albums. But now, of course, I can buy 10 tracks (or albums) on line. Or so I thought.
I am not an iPod user. Something about the "closed Apple universe" put me off. I wanted music from many sources that I could play on several devices, not a "sole source" supplier that limited my options.
My iPod alternative was the music service from Microsoft’s MSN. This is where I turned last week. Bad luck.
Beginning November 14th, 2006, MSN will no longer offer music downloads through the MSN Music store. The "Buy" buttons that you are used to seeing on the MSN Music album and artist pages will change to links that connect you to Zune and Real Rhapsody. See below for information regarding how this change will impact your MSN Music account.
There are several things to say here, but here’s the one that strikes me most forcibly. Microsoft has abandoned PlaysForSure. PFS was designed to make it easy for consumers to buy digital music from several sources and play them on several devices. In the place of Apple’s "closed universe," Microsoft was creating something breezier. It was admitting third party players.
Well, with Zune, that’s over. Now music from Microsoft is a closed shop too. Music from Microsoft now plays only on Microsoft devices. And Microsoft devices will play only Zune tunes. Now the Microsoft music universe is as closed as Apple’s.
If I want to continue to buy music from Microsoft, I must:
1) rebuy all the songs I have bought from them already.
2) buy a Zune player
3) buy all future music from Zune
I think that we can divide the world of digital music into two camps. There are those who embrace the Apple iPod as a sole source supplier, but there is so much to like about it, and those who, like me, accept a little imperfect for the protection of an "open universe" approach. Most of the people who used the MSN music service did so, I am guessing, out of this motive. (I mean, is there another plausible reason?)
And what does Microsoft do? It breaks this connection, creates a closed universe, and forces me to join this closed universe. Golly, if I were prepared to join a closed universe (and repurchase everything), why would I not just go over to Apple? Microsoft just managed to remove my one motive for connecting to Microsoft. Nice work, fellas.
This is a brand behaving very badly indeed. Normally, we don’t treat consumers this way. And God save us if we do.
When I was doing research for the Canadian Recording Industry Association on the problem of illegal downloading, my respondents told em that they had several motives. One was revenge. Consumers understood that the transition from vinyl to digital, when prices did not drop, was a piece of pure profit taking on the part of the generation. Also, and this surprised me, they were still pissed off with the "jewel case," that crappy piece of plastic that breaks virtually upon first contact. I wonder if Zune doesn’t supply a new motive for illegality.
In the fall, BusinessWeek indicated that the the illegal download problem is still with this. By the estimate of the International Federation of the Photographic Industry, 20 billion songs were illegally downloaded or swapped in 2005. I think it’s fair to say, that when Microsoft pulls a stunt of the kind (and order) Zune represents, they damage not just their own brand, but the prospects of an industry that is struggling with a gigantic competitor.
Let’s review. With the Zune universe, Microsoft has dispensed with their difference, broken their contract with consumer, forced him/her to repurchase the music, and with this they have supplied a new motive for the flight from legality that now torments the music industry. Really nice work, fellas.
A.G. Lafley, CEO of P&G, said recently that marketers
"must stop thinking of brands from [a] manufacturing point of view. Consumers own brand equities [and] brand messages. [Marketers] need to learn to let go."
Let go of the brand. What good advice. Oh, and Microsoft, while you’re at it, let go of my music.
References
Bahn, Christopher, Andy Battaglia, Aaron Burgess, Scott Gordon, Liam Gowing, Marc Hawthorne, Jason Heller, Steven Hyden, Josh Modell, Noel Murray, Sean O’Neal, Keith Phipps, Nathan Rabin, Kyle Ryan. 2006. Best music of 2006. December 13, 2006. AVclub.com. here.
Bernoff, Josh. 2006. iTunes are NOT plummeting! Forrester blogs. December 13, 2006. here.
Lehman, Paula. 2006. Free Downloads — After this message. BusinessWeek. October 9, 2006, p. 95.
Melillo, Wendy and Joan Voight. 2006. World on a string. Adweek. December 11, 2006, p. 10. (source for the quote from A.G. Lafley)
Slater, Derek. Speculation – Why Did Microsoft Design. A Copyfighter’s Musings. here.
I have a couple of books that need finishing and a trip to India in the works.
I will be back on line December 18, 2006.
May I take this opportunity to thank people who have left comments? These comments are, many of them, wonderfully good, much better than the posts they adorn.
But not everyone thinks so. There are marketers who neglect, diminish, or exclude culture.
Excluding culture
Christensen, Cook and Hall say the marketer’s task is "not so much to understand the customer as it is to understand what jobs customers need to do." They urge the construction of "purpose brands," brands, that is to say, devoted to declaring the function of the product. In this model, function is all. Culture is excluded.
I do not mean to be discourteous or to indulge in ad hominem attack, but I believe these two things to be true: 1) that it is wrong to give advice on branding unless the speaker is knowledgeable about culture, 2) Professor Christensen knows very little about contemporary culture and nothing at all about that part of contemporary culture we call popular culture. (I am less sure of point 2, and I would be pleased to hear that I am wrong.)
There may have been a time when knowledge of culture was optional. This time has passed. Brands are made up of cultural materials. They are fashioned by the application of cultural instruments. They are constantly transformed by cultural forces.
There is now an additional reason why people interested in branding must know about culture. Indeed, we may treat this new factor in terms Christensen brought to the field. Culture is a new "disruptive technology." (I speak metaphorically. What I mean is that culture is now as disruptive as technology.) Culture contains a surface churn, a boiling innovation that helps refashion consumer taste and preference. It also contains deeper, structural changes, that are transforming the very grammars of innovation.
I believe Professor Christensen has no knowledge of the churn and no knowledge of the structure. I further believe he does not see this as an intellectual deficit, still less as an intellectual deficit that disqualifies him as a branding scholar. But it is. This is a new rule: those who suffer this deficit may not offer branding advice, instruction or models. I expect someone will rush to the Professor defense, saying "well, the guy only claims expertise in the effects of technology." But this ended when, with Cook and Hall, he offered a new model of branding.
For a more detailed version of my argument, please go here.
Another marketing scholar who excludes culture is Gerry Zaltman. Professor Zaltman believes that he may perform his "Zmet" analysis unaided by a knowledge of culture. He solicits visual metaphors from consumers and then presumes to tell us what they mean. Here it is: every single semantic and structural elements in the visual array created by a consumer comes from or has been transformed by contemporary culture. A business school professor removed from contemporary and popular culture is not just unqualified to perform the Zmet analysis, he is disqualified from performing it.
For a more extended version of this argument, please go here.
Diminishing culture
Clotaire Rapaille is famous for "cracking the code" of culture by his study of cultural archetypes. The trouble with this Jungian approach is that there are too few archetypes to decode a culture as far flung, various and changeable as our own. And in any case, Rapaille inevitable offers up a key word or phrase that is meant to stand as his moment of illumination. This is so simplifying and reductive that one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I have seen MBA students more intellectual depth and acuity in cracking a single case study than Rapaille’s demonstrates in "cracking" the code of India. I mean, really.
For an extended version of this argument, please go here.
Kevin Roberts has offered a "lovemarks" model in which culture is becomes a matter of emotion, and the brand a mark of love. This is all and well, I suppose, but culture is vastly more and more complicated than anything dreamed of in Roberts philosophy. Culture helps shape and specify the emotions. It also creates the very categories of perception and conception with which the consumer perceives and conceives of the world of goods.
For an extended version of this argument, please go here.
Cool hunters are diminishing in another way. The only part of culture that interested them are the things that a trendy and brand new. Its all the froth of the churn, with nary a thought for the deep structures. I have seen the cool hunters at work, shaming big corporations for not being hip enough. But big corporations cannot set their cycles of innovation only to the trend of the moment. They must spot deeper cycles of change. Knowing about culture can’t be a pursuit of cool.
For an extended version of this argument, please go here.
Neglecting culture
Surely, the most recent act of neglected culture (and marketing theory and practice is of course filled with these acts) is the Blue Oceans book. This is of course a book about discovering new opportunities, blue oceans, where the enterprise may flourish without the usual rock ’em sock ’em competition that characterizes mature categories. What is odd about this book si that it does not having any systematic idea of culture, and if culture is not a domain for blue oceans, well, tell it to Steve Jobs and the creators of iPod. Yes, this is a new technology, but what gives it a blue ocean character is the extent to which it helped occupy and then transform a cultural domain. But there is another issue here. It is culture that supplies the high winds and high waters that periodically turn even the bluest waters into a treacherous place to do business.
For an extended version of this argument, please go here.
Summing up
Culture matters to marketing. But there are many, well placed and influential parties who would exclude it from the equation. I don’t believe you can do branding, unless you get culture. I don’t believe you can do marketing, but there are corners when perhaps the culturally illiterate can get away with it. For the rest of us, it is time to put this right.
It is no longer an option. Now it’s an obligation. It is time for business schools to snap out of it. It is time for senior managers, and especially CMOs, to add an investigation of culture to their due diligence. It is time for the cool hunters to cease and desist their dreadful partiality. It is time for scholars who talk about marketing without the benefit of a knowledge of culture to come to their senses. There was a time when every serious player in the world of marketing was obliged to add a knowledge of statistics to their skill set. That is we are talking about here. Culture is now standard issue marketing knowledge, and the professional world of the marketer will have to change. Some players will have to retire from the field. This rest of us will have to add a cultural competence to our skill set. Because culture matters to marketing.
A note of explanation:
Yes, that’s me in the picture. It was taken a couple of years when I was talking at PopTech (that’s the inimitable Bob Metcalfe in the background). I like it because it makes my hand look like it’s one of the weeding claws. That’s the way I think of this, the third piece, in the Culture Matters series. I’m weeding.
