Author Archives: Grant

Flo motion: That Progressive ad starring Stephanie Courtney

Ad campaigns are like corporations. Nothing happens without a big bold idea. But there is no hope of success without an unblinking eye to execution.  

The devil is in the details.

Which brings me to the campaign created by John Park and Steve Reepmeyer at Arnold Worldwide for Progressive.  It stars Stephanie Courtney as Flo.  

Spot 1: no more holding her purse!

Flo greets a husband and wife.  Flo shows them their car insurance options and then says to the husband,

"And no more holding her purse!"

The wife replies,

"It’s a European shoulder bag."

The husband adds,

"It was a gift."  

Fair enough.  Funny enough.  Job well done.

But what sells the spot, and the insurance is the details and the acting.

The wife delivers "It’s a European shoulder bag" just about perfectly.  Flo has just put her foot in it. The wife is salvaging the situation by returning this reality to her concept of it.  This is what we call "putting a good face on it."  All better.  Her husband is no longer a girl.  Flo needn’t be embarrassed by her mistake.  What sells this moment especially is the beauty of the wife’s voice and how flutingly she uses it.  No other voice or tone would have managed social repair.

The husband does a nice social repair of his own.  He lets us know that he is obliged to carry the purse.  (It was a gift.)  Even as he tells us, by rolling his eyes, what he thinks of having to  carry it.  (His wife is a kook.)  Hey presto, he’s saved face for both Flo and his wife.  Good girl.  Boy!  I mean, boy.  

And now Flo (aka Stephanie Courtney) does that little "bobble head" thing people do when they have just stepped into someone else’s madness and now wish to withdraw from it without of course in any way repudiating the madness (and they really mean that).  They smile stupidly to show that of course they accept the terms of these deranged people and wish merely to be allowed to leave quietly.  (I think anthropologically we could go a step further.  Flo’s bobble head performance has a social logic.  It says, "You may have lost face, but look, I’m too dim to have noticed!  You’re fine!")

Here is the bobble head gesture (eyes right).  How long does it take to get these details right?  How long to train the actors in the first place, to give them the ability to play social situations…as if they were unfolding spontaneously.  How long to find the actors?  How much direction and take after take is then called for?  This is an aspect of the creative process of meaning making that will probably never makes its way into social media.  This is part of the art of advertising that could now be in peril.  

Spot 2: Calculator humor

Courtney has special dramatic powers.  I was impressed with a second spot, the one that features the line "calculator humor" and has Flo saying "I’ll be here all week" and then "I will. Those are my hours."  (I can’t find a version of this anywhere on line.  Please let me know if you find it somewhere)

With the blessing of a VCR, I played this spot a couple of times, first at full speed, then in slow motion. Flo motion?  It’s astounding to see how fast and how cleanly Courtney gets into and out of each of the bits in the bit. (Andy Grove has a piece in his Only the Paranoid Survive about watching an image in transition and not being able to spot the exact moment of transition. Courtney’s acting here has that quality.)

A case in point:

In the "calculator humor" spot, Flo moves from stage 1 ("I’m here all week") to stage 2 (sly glance at customer) to stage 3 ("No, really those are my hours.") in the blink of an eye but with perfect clarity. These are quite different dramatic moments but she executes each of them cleanly.  There’s no blur or "trail."  

Bad actors make one of two mistakes.  In the first, they can’t accelerate into and out of moment with Courtney’s deftness.  It takes them awhile to lumber into stage 2 and then awhile to lumber out again.  We show this here (eyes right) with long tails. This error means that the creatives cannot "pack" the signal and the spot is rendered thin and less engaging.  Worst case, the ad becomes an exercise in tedium.  The worst offender on air at the moment is for 5 hour energy drink.  You actually need the drink to survive the ad.  (I’ll be here all week.)

The second mistake comes when an actor has the ability to accelerate but cannot get far enough into the bit.  We, the audience, is left to wonder where he or she might have gone.  What we get is a rough indication of the social moment the actor and the creative meant to deliver.  And no more. The spot, the campaign, the brand are shortchanged.  

This is meaning manufacture and meaning manufacture as the ad biz has always done it.  It takes a fantastic attention to detail.  It means that the creatives and the actors must have a deep knowledge of how social interaction works.  And they must use this knowledge to craft 30 seconds that engages us. It’s easy, I think, to look at an actress like Courtney in a spot like this, and see it as broad and goofy comedy.  

But as usual our culture has wheels with wheels and the people who would contribute to it must have gifts within gifts.  Hats off to Courtney, Park, Reepmeyer, Arnold and Progressive for this splendid work.

References

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor.  

The "and no more holding her purse!" Progressive ad on YouTube here. 

The Wikipedia entry for Stephanie Courtney is here.  

The Wikipedia entry for the Progressive campaign starring Flo is here.

Kanye West, anthropologically

Kanye West is interviewed by Vanity Fair.

The interview demonstrates that Mr. West is maturing into a fine young man with new powers of self understanding and self control.

None of which interest me at all.  

What I like about this interview is what happens when Lisa Robinson asks Mr. West:

What do you think Jay-Z has done for you?

West replies:

Man, everything–served as a big brother, the blueprint, our reality.  Someone to look up to.

And you were wondering how smart Kanye West is?  He gives three answers, leaping assumptions as he goes.  

"Jay-Z is a big brother."  Good opener.  Family metaphor evoked.  Status difference acknowledged. Deference given.  

West could have stopped there.  But he’s just getting started.

"Jay-Z is a blueprint."  I got whip lash and a nose bleed from this one.  (The doctors say I’ll be fine.  No cards or flowers, please.)  

Normally, when we pile up the comparisons, we build a small universe as we go. Each term is inclined to furnish (and sound) the same semiotic space.  New terms overlap a little.  We build an ensemble.

But, no.  West is done with the family metaphor.  Now he’s on to "blue print" and an entirely new metaphor.  He is telling us that Jay-Z is a world containing worlds, that he supplies that directions, the dimensions, for making music.

Holding a hankie to our bleeding noses, we understand the chances of Kanye West elaborating on this second metaphor are next to zero.  

Sure enough, he calls Jay-Z "our reality."  

Now Jay-Z defines the ontology of popular music.  He supplies the most fundamental assumptions of music and the creativity from which it springs.  

And now West goes full circle.

Jay-Z, he tells us, is "someone to look up to."

The big brother theme returns.  And we’re done.  Thanks for coming everyone.  Please drive safely.  

Now, I know what some people are thinking.  Surely, this is a mixed metaphor.  Surely, this is messy thinking.  And this would have been exactly right 20 years ago.  

But things have changed.  Now we want our creatives to leap cultural frames in a single bound, to find new metaphors while still in flight, to send us careening between cultural references.  Anything else seems a little thin, a little bit too much like culture before Kanye.  

References

Robinson, Lisa. 2010. “Hot Tracks: Kanye West.” Vanity Fair http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/11/kanye-201011 (Accessed October 11, 2010).

Cincinatti

I spent yesterday in Cincinnati.  I  was there for the TED x Cincinnati.  (Thank you co-chairs  Michael Bergman, David Volker, Emily Venter and Mary Riffe for inviting me. Thanks also to Trey Smith, Carla Inman and Joe Rigotti).  

I got to see the city from two points of view. 

The transformational (aka Jerry’s) view

Jerry Kathman is the CEO of LPK and a prince of a man.  We were driving through the city and he started to tell Pam and me the story of the city he loves. I have tried to capture it in the drawing below.  (You may have to click on it to read it. Apologies to Jerry for all mistakes and liberties.)

Cincinatti was the first inland American city.  In the 19th century, it was a long way from other big centers of population.  It needed a product valuable enough to still be valuable when it got to market.  Here is the Cincinnati solution.

The city had lots of corn.  It turned this into spirits (boubon), cows and pigs.  The spirts could be put right on a boat and sent to New Orleans (say).  But the cows and pigs needed another transformational cycle.  They needed to be turned into tallow and wax, and these needed to be turned into soap and candles.  (This is where P&G came in.)  These products went to off to market and into the lives of consumers who completed the cycle by turning the spirits into illumination, pleasure, abandon, debate, and commotion of several kinds, the soap into cleanliness (and this, as we know, into godliness) and the candles into illumination of a lesser kind.

The Snap Shot view

One of the TED presenters was Patricia Van Shaik who, as the head of the Local History Collection of the Public Library of Cincinnati, is the keeper of one of the most extraordinary images of American life in the 19th century.  Her presentation was a tour of the Cincinnati Riverfront Panorama (top image shows a partial view).

While the Jerry’s vast transformational process was turning corn into products and products into profits, here was Cincinnati at the beginning and the end of the transformational cycle.  

Patricia took us through the fine detective work that determined the exact moment the Daguerreotype was made in 1848.  We don’t know much about Charles Fontayne and William Porter, the men who made it.  And we can’t be certain what their motive was. (It doesn’t look like it was commercial.)  It is a miracle that this image was taken and a bigger miracle still that it survived to the present day.  

You don’t so much look at the Panorama as enter it.  It’s a kind of time machine. There are people sitting looking out on the river.  There is a chance, Patricia says, that they are African Americans, and that would make this the earliest extant image of free African Americans.  (Cincinnati was part of the underground railroad that brought slaves north to freedom.)  

The Panorama shows us the riverboats that took products to market and profits home again.  It shows us the ads on shore that shouted out to river traffic, encouraging people to stop in Cincinnati and shop there.  (The 19th century equivalent of the cruise ship phenomenon?)  A lot of city life was seared into these plates.  

Most poignantly, we can see a stream carrying human waste into a river. Downstream we can see kids drawing water from the river.  Patricia showed us the local newspaper reports that covered the outbreak of cholera a week later, and the names of the people carried off by it.  

Patricia and her team are committing this treasure to a website and someday we will be able to wander it.  There is coverage in Wired (see reference below) and it’s hard to imagine that Ken Burns has not heard of this image and considered it as a center piece for one of his magnificent documentaries.  

So there it was.  Cincinnati as a transformation and a snap shot, a process and a moment, a creator and an outcome, an engine and an artifact.  Thank you, Jerry.  Thank you, Patricia. Thank you, WebxCincy.  

References

Rehmeyer, Julie. 2010. “1848 Daguerreotypes Bring Middle America’s Past to Life.” Wired Magazine, July 9 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/07/ff_daguerrotype_panorama/ (Accessed October 8, 2010.

LeBron James, sacrificial hero?

Poor LeBron James.  Fans curse his name and burn his jersey. His departure from the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat is called a monstrous act of bad faith.  Some 80 days after the fact, Mr. James’ ignominy is unrelieved.  Indeed, it seems to grow (Doyle, 2010). 

Let’s be clear.  Mr. James has committed no crime.  He’s done nothing morally culpable.  There are athletes accused of using steroids, assaulting women in restaurant washrooms, of staging dog fights, but Mr. James is the one fans choose to hate.  As we learned last week, his Q rating is plummeting (Rovell, 2010).

Naturally, everyone expected some unhappiness when Mr. James left Cleveland.  No town wants to lose an athlete of his standing, especially a town that’s down on its luck.  But who expected this degree of rancor?  America is prepared to forgive celebrities just about anything, as the Charlie Sheen story perhaps attests.  And what doesn’t fall under “celebrity license,” normally gets washed away by our fast acting amnesia.

Not for Mr. James.  He’s on the verge of becoming the man fans love to hate.

Why?  Let’s try the transposition test and see.  Let’s suppose the CEO of Cleveland’s biggest employer suddenly up and took another job in Florida.  Not a murmur of unhappiness.  How about the Cleveland’s most beloved doctor?  Some unhappiness, no doubt, but nothing lasting.  I bet Cleveland’s favorite pastor could leave with only minor hue and cry.  Certainly, nothing like hatred.

Many athletes have left Cleveland, abandoning the Cavaliers, the Indians, or the Browns for a higher bidder.  This city is a revolving door when it comes to high-price talent.  This surprises no one.  We expect athletes to sell their talents on an open market.  It is precisely what we would do if we were 22 years old and mind-bogglingly good at one of the pursuits of our childhood. 

And then there’s the paradox of Fantasy League basketball, football and baseball.  I reckon many thousands of people living in Cleveland have joined these leagues and now sometimes root for Cleveland’s enemy (and perhaps even against Cleveland itself) to advance their standing. 

The question intensifies: Why so much animus for LeBron James?  Mr. James and others have wondered whether the answer might be racism.  And it might.  But I think there is a simpler reason.  The answer must have something to do with the fact that Mr. James a deeply local athlete.  He was born in Akron, 30 miles from Cleveland.  He played his high school basketball locally.  And because he went straight to the pros, he didn’t obscure his loyalties with a career at Duke, Kentucky or Ohio State.  Mr. James is that exceptionally rare athlete: the one who plays for the place he grew up in.  They call him “King James,” but this guy was manifestly a man of the people

This makes LeBron James truly old school.   He is precisely what a sports hero looked like before the rise of free agency and a competitive labor market.  From the fan’s point of view, he was “one of ours.”  In the old school model, the local hero doesn’t just win for Cleveland, he wins as Cleveland.  In the era of the high priced mercenary, it’s hard to remember this model, but there was a time when fans used to say “that’s us out there.”

To be sure, the commonalities were often more imagined than real.  (How many Cleveland fans grew up fatherless in the inner city?)  To his credit, Mr. James never made a thing of his differences.  He was gracious and inclusive as a local hero.  (We have seen sports heroes who are less generous, who seem to want to keep their glory for themselves.)

It’s this local connection that’s the problem.  Mr. James gave us the old school connection, and then like every other professional athlete in America, he betrayed it.  We had long ago forgotten and forgiven the general trend.  But here it was restaged, as if deliberately to taunt and wound us.  Fans who hate Mr. James are expressing a larger unhappiness.  They are protesting the hero as hired gun. 

Mr. James was old school and, until he bolted for Miami, we had forgotten how much we loved that school.  We had persuaded ourselves that it was okay we were represented by mercenaries.  And now that even this has been taken from us, now that Cleveland’s son has decamped, well, we’re going to have to blame someone and we think we’ve found our man. 

To be sure, Mr. James is the victim of an empty nostalgia.  We don’t really want local heroes if they can’t play.  Given the choice between local heroes and winning teams, the fan is clear.  (The great thing about Mr. James is that you didn’t have to choose.) 

Mr. James is also the victim of a marked hypocrisy.   Fans who play Fantasy League sports have pretty remarkable disloyalties of their own.  Cleveland haters may wish to examine their souls for moral defect.  Let he who is without sin burn the next jersey. 

References

Doyle, Ricky. 2010. “LeBron James Hatred Reaching New Levels as He Settles In With Heat.” NESN.com. http://www.nesn.com/2010/07/lebron-james-hatred-reaching-new-levels-as-he-settles-in-with-heat.html (Accessed September 27, 2010).

Rovell, Darren. 2010. “LeBron’s Q Score Takes Huge Hit.” CNBC. http://www.cnbc.com/id/39170785/LeBron_s_Q_Score_Takes_Huge_Hit (Accessed September 27, 2010).

Post script

I am in Cincinnatti for the TED conference there tomorrow.  I hope you will drop by and say hi if you are at the event.  

Meaning through multiplicity (aka fluid selves in fluid cultures)

digital natives like Molly
have power over their self expression
they are constantly recreating themselves on line
but simultaneously leaving behind traces of their past selves behind
(from Re:Born Digital, ref. below)

This is Berkman School Interns describing what it is to be a digital native.

Is multiplicity possible only through new media?  No, it is, of course, an ancient engine of creativity and (as we now prefer to call it) innovation.  This summer saw the publication of a Secret Historian by Justin Spring.  

Drawn from the private archives of Samuel M. Steward, Secret Historian is a sensational reconstruction of one of the more extraordinary hidden lives of the twentieth century. An intimate friend of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder, Steward transformed himself into Phil Sparrow, tattoo artist, and then into Phil Andros, erotica novelist. Secret Historian is a moving portrait of homosexual life in the years before gay liberation.

Is multiplicity for "secret" identities only?  No, increasingly it’s the logic of life lived "en plein air."  Last week I was corresponding with Shira Nayman about a research project.  I mentioned my interest in multiplicity as a theme and she replied

And wow, about the multiplicity of the modern self—my background is an almost embarrassing pot pourri, as I hinted at (my studies alone–B.Sc. in physiology, a year of medical school, a one-year diploma in religion, a doctorate in Clinical Psych, a MA in Comparative Literature, a 2 year post doc in psychiatry), and now being a consultant, a fiction writer, and a professor (I teach in the Program of Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, both to Medical Students and to doctors and other professionals).  And geographical–in the past eight years, I’ve lived with my husband and kids in Mexico, Spain, France, US, and I’m Australian (I just realize that in my lifetime, I’ve held three citizenships….).  Help, it’s sounding scary…  (And I also just realized that we have close family members in four continents, and visit them not infrequently).  Guess I’m kind of a poster child for all this….  (Don’t mean to catalog ‘myself’ in a narcissistic way…just kind of wowing on your point, and realizing that I’m a living instance of it….)

A couple of years ago while living in Toronto and Cambridge, and figuring out how to be an anthropologist in business and a businessman in anthropology, I wrote a book called Transformations.  It opened to no notice.  Had it been a Broadway play, it would have closed the next day. 

It turns out our culture didn’t need an "instruction manual."  The multiplicity continues anyhow.

References

Anonmyous. 2010. “Re:Born Digital, in Video: 2010 summer interns take up "Born Digital".”  Berkman School for Internet & Creativity. October 1. here.  (Accessed October 5, 2010).

Linn, Denise, Paul Kominers, Molly Sauter, and Sunanda Vaidheesh. 2010. YouTube – Re:Born Digital, in Video: Identities.  On YouTube here. (Accessed October 5, 2010).

McCracken, Grant. 2008. Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture. Indiana University Press. on Amazon here.  

Nayman, Shira.  2010.  Personal correspondence.  September 24.  

Nayman, Shira. 2009. The Listener: A Novel. Scribner.  on Amazon here.  

Spring, Justin. 2010. Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. on Amazon here.

Notice

Mr. Spring will discuss his book today at 4:00 at the Beinecke Rare Book Manuscript Library, Yale University, 21 Wall Street, New Haven, CT. This event is free and open to the public

Mikal Built a Magical Box

Mikal Hart built a magical box.  

This box.

It’s a box that knows where it is.

It remains closed and locked until it is transported to exactly the right place on the planet.  Then it springs open

If we push that button anywhere else on the planet, the book stays locked.  And a figure appears in the window.  It’s up to us to surmise that this is a measure in miles and that the box wants to go home.  We are allowed to push the button 50 times.  After that the box locks forever.  

Mikal can’t quite figure out why the box is so interesting.  (See the Youtube video below.) He built the first one as a wedding gift for friends.

When word leaked out about Mikal’s box, the world went a little crazy.  He got calls from journalists all over the place.  The journalists can’t quite figure out why the box is so interesting either.  

In short, Mikal isn’t quite sure why he made the box.  And those journalists aren’t quite sure why they called him about it.  And, yes, sure, ok, I’m not sure why I’m writing about it. 

We’re all in the thrall of the box.

The magic of the box is not so much in the "what" and the "how" of the box.  it works on a principle that Mikal calls "reverse geocache."   Geocaching gives us coordinates so that we can find a box.  Mikal’s geocache gives us a box so we can find coordinates.  Lovely and clever, but not quite magical.

The magic of the box is in the "why" of the box.  Specifically why it is we all find it so very arresting.  

We know some of the the explanatory bits and pieces here.  Mikal’s box is a good demonstration of how we now use technology to reverse what Weber called the "disenchantment of the world." There is also something mythic and medieval about the box. It’s as if this box can detect hidden correspondences and a secret order to the world.  We like the "new age" sound of this completely.  That the box conceals a secret, check.  That the box will only reveal the secret according to its agenda, double check.  And much more besides.

What I like particularly is the sensation we get when we first hear about the box.  It’s as if something has operated on the tumblers of consciousness.  Something seems to click.  We hear about the box and snap to.  We awaken.  We smile.  We are charmed.  

This box has remote control.  We don’t have to have the box to feel its effect.  It makes journalists pick up the phone.  It makes bloggers fire up WordPress.  It makes the rest of us snap to.  This is the magic of the box.  

References

Listen to this YouTube treatment of Mikal here bit.ly/akdZRX

Johnson, Steven. 2010. Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Riverhead Hardcover.  

Hart, Mikal. n.d. “The Reverse Geocache™ Puzzle Box.” Arduiniana. http://arduiniana.org/projects/the-reverse-geo-cache-puzzle/ (Accessed October 4, 2010).

Andy Grove and the mysteries of the inflection point

It begins like a classic HBS case study. Andy Grove and Gordon Moore are sitting in Grove’s office at Intel. They are deeply unhappy.  Intel is caught in a price war with the Japanese. 

Here’s how Mr. Grove describes what happened next:

I looked out the window at the Ferris wheel of the Great America amusement park revolving in the distance, then I turned back to Gordon and I asked, “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?” Gordon answered without hesitation, “He would get us out of memories.” I stared at him, numb, then said, “Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves?

It’s an amazing moment.  Intel’s most senior managers bring themselves to make the right decision, but only by contriving to step outside of themselves.  Grove is saying "what would we do if we weren’t us?"  He and Moore Grove and Moore have been in the memory chip business for so long, it is difficult for them now to see that it is, for Intel, over, and that the time has come to move on.  

This is the problem with a corporate culture.  It contains much of the cunning and intelligence of the corporation.  But it also contains deep seated assumptions that blind the senior decision maker.  "What we do" has become "who we are" and only be pretending to be someone else can Grove and Moore set themselves free.  As Grove puts it, "Intel equaled memories in all of our minds. How could we give up our identity?"

Grove has a pragmatic grasp of culture.  He sees it here in the corporation culture that constrains the senior manager.  And he has a feeling for how to manage cultural moments, as he demonstrated with his "what if" scenario with Moore.  

He is acutely sensitive to the way his "strategic inflection points" can work silently and invasively.

"New rules prevailed now—and they were powerful enough to force us into actions that cost us nearly half a billion dollars. The trouble was, not only didn’t we realize that the rules had changed—what was worse, we didn’t know what rules we now had to abide by."

And when he talks about this sort of thing, he is talking about culture.  More exactly, he is talking about a set of understandings and practices that have embedded themselves in employees and the corporation.  Grove talks about them as "rules" but if they were precisely this, they would be visible to employees, more obvious when changing, and easier to acquire when changed.  

Give the guy a break.  He’s an engineer.  A deeply gifted engineer who had quite a lot to do with the fact that I can now communicate with you in this manner and the machine on which I am now typing furiously.  So lighten up a little.

Still, a guy this astronomically smart would be smarter still if he had a formal idea of what culture is.  He would understand its formal properties.  He would be still more skillful in detecting cultural factors as causes and consequences of the inflections he describes so well.  

References

Grove, Andrew S. 1999. Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company. Crown Business.  (first passage is around location 1176 in the Kindle edition of this book; second passage is c. location 1184; third passage, 359)

Acknowledgements

Thanks to several people on Twitter who recently encouraged me to read this book.  I would mention you by name, but I can’t seem to retrieve our conversation.  If you read this, please identify yourselves.  Also, does Twitter have an archive?  

How do we make culture?

It’s like a tune I can’t get out of my head.  It keeps circling.

 
“From its opening sentence, every novel is an argument for its own reality.”
 
This is the sentence with which Mark Kamine opens his review of the new Joshua Ferris novel, The Unnamed.
 
But of course it’s going to appeal to an anthropologist.  We’re in the business of observing how cultural artifacts serve as arguments for their own reality.  
 
But there’s still something breathtaking about the “reality argument” process. Doesn’t Marx have a line about how we build worlds, and they then build us? Worlds issue from artifice and end up as perfectly actual, so actual you can bounce a nickle of them.  The arbitrary becomes the indubitable.  Miraculous. And then not.  And therefore miraculous.
 
We have a pretty good idea how this works in natural systems.  The complexity theory shows us how things emerge.  The Fibonacci series is a nice illustration of how the application of the same logic over and over again produces a robust, complex system.
 
We have a somewhat less clear idea of how this works in economic systems.  How enterprise starts from tiny acts and scales up into enterprises.  We can start with simple acts of exchange and, whoa nelly, before you know it, we have a market and a world. Economists are more inclined to posit this miracle than study it.
 
We are not at all clear on how this works culturally.  How do cultures create “mattering maps.”  (And who was the novelist who coined this term? Elizabethan Spencer, I think. Can’t find her with Google, but the search tells me that Lawrence Grossberg has also used the term.)  
 
How does a world makes itself?  Collecting gives us a glimpse.  No coins matter till you have a 18th century penny.  Then more and more 18th pennies do and, then, eventually, 19th pennies start to exercise their fascination.  The mattering builds its own scaffold, piece by piece.  We posit one thing, and another becomes necessary, still another becomes plausible, and a third hoves into view.  
 
It’s all very vector-ish and critical path-ish, isn’t it?  With these creations, we want to choose our starting point carefully.  It will impose certain limits.  It becomes a substructure, potentially an imprisoning assumption.
 
I think this is what Kamine says finally about the Ferris novel. Eventually the conceit is exhausted.  The “what  if” ceases to be generative.  The novel starts with a man possessed of the urge to keep walking and, er, follows him as he walks.  This builds a world and a novel of some interest.  But eventually the conceit empties out.  The novel does not become a complex system, a world of meaning.  It isn’t a plausible argument for its own reality.   
 
And that is of course the big problem with our culture at the moment.  Now that we are so various, multiple,  contradictory, and dynamic, we have plenty of arguments against our own reality.  Making culture in our culture is difficult.
 
And the makers of culture are tempted by two options.  
 
The first is, perhaps, the one exhibited by Ferris, to build a world from a single conceit, to play out the “what if” until a world results.  
 
The second is to embrace the noise and in that once radical act of abandon to construct a post-modern world that is filled with empty signifiers in chaotic flight.  This novel is exciting to write (and read) the first few times, and then it’s “Dude, the novelist’s job is to make meaning, not distribute it.”  
 
The “man who must walk” conceit is a courageous one.  It says, “what if I posit this guy with this condition, what if I am true to this, what I write where this (sorry) takes us.  What if I “vector” this and see what happens.” In effect Ferris’s peripatic hero is Mosiac.  He promises to walk us out of our post-modern condition to something that can be lasting and substantial.  
 
But Ferris fails (nobly) because fictional terraforming of this kind can only work when some of the noise is let back in.  It works only if the critical path is not allowed to cul de sac. At least, I think that’s it. The problem, I think, in a nutshell: How can cultural artifacts serve as arguments for their own reality, how can they build worlds?  It’s clear they do.  It’s up to us to figure out how.
 
References
 
Ferris, Joshua.  2010.  The Unnamed.  Viking.  Available at Amazon here.
 
Kamine, Mark.  2010.  Going in Circles.  Times Literary Supplement.  March 5, p. 20.  

Nike vs. Skechers: How to battle a brand titan

What does the Marketing 101 tell us about fighting titantic brands?

We have several options.

One is to to play the "size" card.  We use our smallness to be more nimble.  As trends in consumer taste and preference change, we change too…faster than the titan can. If we’re really lucky, we will catch one big trend, early, and ride it to market shared.  (Think Snapple.) 

Another option is to play the "intensive" card.  The titan is trying to be all things to all people.  We try to be one very particular thing for one particular niche.  

The last is to create a competitor so unprepossessing, unattractive, and dubious that no us takes you seriously…until it’s too late.

This appears to be the Skechers strategy.  I haven’t done a thorough search, but it looks like Skechers took the low road.  Product design, the advertising, naming, the product proposition, they all scream awkward and untutored.

Now, of course, this could be an expression of the limits of the Skecher team.  But it could be something craftier.  I mean, it’s almost as if Skechers is being deliberately gauche. 

What a good strategy.  This is the only way to take Nike on.  Talk about a formidable marketing team.  Yikes.  The chances of competing face to face, well, you’d have to get up pretty early in the morning.  Actually, you wouldn’t be allowed ever to go to bed.  No sleep ever.  And you’d still lose.

Not to get too "little grasshopper" about it, but the only way to take on Nike is to use their strength against them.  They expect the competition to look like them, to hold to the same standards, to exhibit the same formidable professionalism.  So when Skechers comes shambling into the arena in sweat pants and throwing around dubious fitness claims, the Nike people must have said, "Please."  It was like a Double A baseball team wandering into Wrigley Field.  Clueless was the perfect Trojan horse, the way to sneak into the market without setting off alarms.  

This is always the weakness of a formidable enemy.  Their self love prevents them from taking certain enemies seriously.  It’s said that one of the reasons the German mercenaries fighting the American revolutionaries lost the first few engagements was that they had a hard time taking seriously farmers wielding ancient weapons and pitch forks.  By the time they summoned their professionalism, the Americans had won just enough engagements to create the impression that they could take the whole thing.  (Which I believe they did. Check your own particulars.  I’m a Canadian.)

Again, I haven’t done the research.  I am just judging things from the externals only.  I mean Skechers stealing a market from Nike.  It’s like learning the Bridgeport Bluefish just gave the Yankees a whipping.  It seems not just unlikely.  I would have said it was statistically impossible.  But it is precisely when things are impossible that hidden assumptions give the cunning competitor a way in.

References

Townsend, Mike. 2010. “’Toning’ shoes gain traction.” MSNBC. September 6. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37510162/ (Accessed September 30, 2010).

Glee escapes the American Idol Airlock

I’m watching Glee, along 13.7 million other people, give or take.  

I was pleased by the rehabilitation of Britney Spears.  I mean, why not give her a chance?

Mr. Schuester doesn’t want to.  He wants to feature Christopher Cross.  The kids think this is a deliriously stupid idea. They grew up with Britney.  

If we didn’t know any better, we might suppose this is show making sly fun of American Idol. Christopher Cross is just the kind of person American Idol would like to feature.  We could be forgiven guessing that most of the musical programming is being done by Elizabeth Taylor.

Britney on American Idol.  Never!

Things get even better when Rachel (Lea Michele) comes out of her dentist-induced anesthesia and says, "is this real life?"

This is a reference to the YouTube video of the little boy coming home from the dentist.  he was filmed by his Dad as he "manfully" trying to sort out reality from the effects of sodium pentothal in the back seat of the family sedan.

This is Glee referencing not only the full scope of popular music, but the fuller scope of popular culture.  Indeed, this is popular culture aiming for complete self sufficiency.  

The New Normal Is The Old Normal

If you are interested in the New Normal (the supposition that consumers are changing how and what they consume), please have a look at my post today on the Harvard Business Review’s The Conversation.  

You will find it here.

References 

McCracken, Grant.  2010.  The New Normal is the Old Normal.  Harvard Business Review, The Conversation, September 27, 2010.  

Jeff Zucker leaves NBC

Jeff Zucker has been fired by NBC.  I don’t want to add to the vitriol being hurled in his direction but I can’t help feeling that Mr. Zucker might have had a better chance of pulling NBC Entertainment out of its tailspin had he hired a Chief Culture Officer.  

It looked for a little while that he had brought Ben Silverman on board to serve in that capacity.  It didn’t very long to see however that while Ben Silverman was only good at cultural import (it was he who brought The Office from Britain) and that there wasn’t much else to his game. Kath and Kim (imported from Australia) was proof, I thought, that Silverman had no ear for substantial parts of American culture.

It’s odd that a senior manager would believe himself possessed of the instincts necessary to read and seed the shifting winds of a turbulent world, especially one who had been locked in the NBC castle for the whole of his career.  I am assuming he didn’t reserve to himself the right to call the shots in operations or finance.  I mean, who would expect his competence to extend this far.

But when it comes to creative decisions, guys like Zucker do insist on their right to inflict their limits on the corporation.   I wonder if the mandate for this sort of thing goes back to the days of the studio head, the brilliant tyrants who ran the early Hollywood studios.  They presumed to make decisions, and pity the employee who crossed them.  

Let us take for granted that the world is more complicated these days, and creative and strategic decisions more difficult.  Let us hope that Zucker’s replacement will hire a CCO as a matter of course.  (I know just the person for the job.)

How to read a book now

Sometime in the late 1970s, I was sitting in the Rare Books Room of the Cambridge University library.  I had just come back from lunch.  

I was reading a leather bound book published in 1588, and all of a sudden and for the very briefest moment, I imagined myself immensely fat, covered in grease, and sitting on a groaning wooden chair that seemed ready to burst.

And then the sensation was gone.  If you are inclined to this sort of thing, and I am not, you would say that I made psychic contact with the person who owned this book, that I was for a split second an Elizabethan.

I don’t think this.  At all.  I recall the moment, because for all our differences, this book owner and I had a lot in common.  At least when it came to the activity called reading.  We held something made out of paper in our hands and gazed upon the page.  We may have been separated by half a millennium and differences of every imaginable kind, but when it came to books, we were one.

And now even that has passed.  Sometime last week I started to read books in a new way.  I buy them from Amazon.  I have them installed on my iPad.  i underline and makes notes as I go.  These notes are then transferred to the Amazon site, where I can visit them anytime and add comments.  (It is a little bit as if the book falls away.  The focus of my attention is now the highlights and notes.)

It’s truly mind boggling.  We can go to http://kindle.amazon.com and they are all there.  Best of all, all this content is clippable so it can be ported it to Zotero (highly recommended) or a research document or a blog post.   

My Elizabethan pal, the very fat one, would be thunderstruck at this development.  I am hoping for another moment of transportation so I can tell him all about it.  

Some Trends I’m Following



Thanks to Jonathan Feinberg and his word-cloud app called Wordle here.

Culture Contest

The Minerva judges have consulted and we decided to leave the culture contest open for another week.  

This is the one that asks you to compare the cultural strategies of USA Networks and Showtime.

We had some very good entries but too few of them, hence the extension.

You can find the Culture Contest here.