Of course it does. Quaker bought Snapple for $1.7 billion dollars in 1993 and sold it 3 years later for $330 million. Culture changed. Quaker missed it. In this case, culture mattered to the tune of $1.3 billion.
Culture matters to the balance sheet, and so it matters to anyone interested in marketing, branding, ethnography, design, product development, strategy, trend watching, investment strategy, and innovation.
Culture matters, for instance, because it tells us:
1. that and how the new Acura MDX ad campaign is flawed.
[the culture key: Acura tapped the wrong body of cultural meanings for this campaign. For an elaboration, please go here. ]
2. that and how the new campaign for Volvo is near note perfect.
[the culture key: the creative choices were the strategic choices. Elaboration here.]
3. that department stores might have a chance to restore themselves to greatness or at least profit.
[the culture key: department stores are better at managing consumer dynamism than the brand boutique. Elaboration here.]
4. the sudden rise and new celebrity of Rachael Ray
[the culture key: that Ms. Ray defined herself in opposition to Whole Foods, Chez Panisse and Martha Stewart. Elaboration here.]
5. how nearly Disney destroyed Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.
[the culture key: the Disney team nearly meddled Johnny Depp’s performance. Elaboration here.]
6. what drives the artisanal trend.
[the culture key: there are 10 trend drivers. Elaboration here.]
[Forgive me using my own statements of how culture matters for marketing. They are the ones I know best.]
Tomorrow, we’ll look at marketers and marketing theorists who don’t know that culture matters.
References
Harrison, Lawrence and Samuel Huntington. 2000. Culture Matters: How values shape human progress. New York: Basic Books.
When professors Harrison and Huntington wrote a book with this title, my reaction was pure puzzlement. I felt like a NASA engineer who had just been given a book called "Math: more useful than you think!"
Of course, culture matters. It supplies the software for contemporary life. Does this software matter? Consider a hypothetical "Inuit test." We are going to find someone living near the Arctic circle, someone untouched by contact. (This is almost impossible to do, but let’s pretend.) We shall call our hero Annakpok. (This means "free" and in our case it means "free of American culture".) We are giving Annakpok a rudimentary knowledge of English, a destination (Manhattan), a plane ticket, one or two financial instruments…and that’s all.
The plane ride is a wonder, but Annakpok’s challenges have just begun. He wanders around the airport for while, and finally, he sees a line of people climbing into yellow cars. Someone in line tells him that the cars are going to "Manhattan." Perfect. Allan, the "taxi driver" is a chatter box and tells Annakpok all about "hotels." He also helps to clarify the idea of money by helping himself to some of the pieces of paper in Annakpok’s pocket. By the time, Annakpok reaches mid town, he is confident he can find the "front desk," "book" a "room," and hand over the piece of plastic in his pocket. (Allan’s advice still rings in his ears, "don’t let them keep it!") Annapok has heard of coffee but when he arrives at the local Starbucks, he is a overwhelmed by the menu, so many choices, such high prices. (Annakpok is already price sensitive.)
All of this knowledge is merely the "first pass," the mere rudiments of the knowledge that culture supplies and our life demands. As Annakpok wanders the airport, Manhattan and then Starbucks, thousands of culture matters and materials escape him. All the signs, the fact that people when walking tend to bear to the right, those hundreds of "magazines," beautiful things that last a month, Annakpok discovers, only then to be thrown away, and not least the differences in clothing of people around him (and the status, gender, class, professional, ethnic, and religious information this clothing gives off). Poor Annakpok can’t tell the difference between the uniform worn by the man handing out hamburgers and the one who carries a really large metal appliance, that appears always to be pointing, Annakpok does notice, downward. He has a really tough time with security screening. ("Take my shoes off?")
But all of these are themselves mere rudiments compared to the complicated and delicate interactions taking place throughout the airport. At the bar, a pilot tries to pick up a waitress. In the United Lounge, a business deal is being negotiated. Both of these take an exquisite control of detail, timing,and strategy, not to mention a mastery of fundamental ideas of contact and contract that escape even Allan.
It will take some months before Annakpok can engage in the kind of conversation that ordinary travelers have while waiting to board the plane. You know, the one that contemplates that there are one too many airlines, the joys of the spoke and hub model, the trouble with O’Hare, labor troubles at Northwest, and when it was, exactly, that air travel ceased to be glamorous and started to feel like bus travel. Any one of these topics is fantastically presuppositional. You have to know a lot even to make a hash of them.
Oh, I know this sounds like that earnest lecture that kicks off "anthropology 101." It is designed to remind us that culture is invisible and active in the most minor things. But too often it has a "did you know!" ingenuousness that begins to irritate, and eventually the brighter students begin to wonder, "well, if it operates so invisibly, let’s just take it as read and move on." This is essentially the same skepticism that leads people to ask whether they really needed to know anything about Basic to operate their new personal computers. (In the early 1990s, there were Deans who encouraged everyone to take a course in Basic to "get with the program." This is unconcious decanal humor.)
Here’s the thing. Culture does matter. It matters especially to marketers. Tomorrow, in part two, of this post, I will try to show why.
References
Harrison, Lawrence and Samuel P. Huntington. (eds.) 2000. Culture Matters. New York: Basic Books.
With Robert Altman’s death on Monday, the airwaves and internet are filling with recollections. Mine is slender and I offer it as a "bit part" in the larger drama.
I was a chauffeur for Julie Christie during the filming of McCabe and Mrs. Miller in Vancouver in 1970. Julie was entitled by contract to a chauffeur and a limo. She asked instead for an ordinary sedan and a film student. What she got was me and a Volkswagen. The alternative mood of the 60s had found its way to Hollywood and it flourished on this particular film set.
(I know this is the biggest, stupidest Hollywood cliche: using a celebrity’s first name to indicate that you have a personal relationship with them. But I spend several hundred hours with "Ms. Christie" without ever once calling her that. It seems wrong to start now.)
The alternative mood gave me liberties that have vanished from the present Hollywood. I didn’t wear a uniform or a cap. I was allowed "upstairs." I was integrated into the Christie-Beatty household. (Julie lived with Warren Beatty at the time in a Arthur Erickson home not far from Horseshoe Bay. I remembered it as a series of wood and glass rectangles tacked to a stone incline as it ran down to the water.) Shaggy, clueless, good natured, eager, I must have been a little like a Labrador, welcome just so long as everything small and precious was kept well clear.
Occasionally, Robert Altman would come to visit. I was allowed to "stick around." From time to time, my opinion would be solicited. There was some question as to how the movie should end. It was clear that McCabe would die. But at who’s hand? Beatty thought the character should be killed by corporate thugs. (This is indeed how the film ends.) I thought this was a little predictable, a little "Hollywood" at a time when traditional narratives were being challenged, not least by Altman, that Mongolian horseman who had just swept off the plains.
My suggestion, timid but persistent, was that McCabe should die at the hand of Mr. Elliot (Corey Fischer), the spooky Protestant preacher who occupied a wooden church at far edge of the village. Poor, stumbling McCabe feared the power of the corporation that wished to buy his saloon. He had thought not at all of the more ancient, less scrutable menace of the vestigial church at the end of the road. So close to gold, so far from God.
Altman was open to a suggestion of this kind. In truth, he was open to suggestions of any kind. Beatty much less so. I think he looked on Altman’s "open source" approach with alarm. I can’t say I blame him. Some part of Beatty’s career hung in the balance, in a way did not for chauffeurs, kitchen staff and carpenters. We may have been pretending this was an egalitarian universe, but in fact Beatty was risking much more than the rest of us.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller formed in the filming. Occasionally, I would run bits of dialog from Altman’s trailer to Julie’s trailer. She would have to memorize it for the following day. So it wasn’t a few big creative decisions that were still to be decided. In fact lots of little creative decisions were being each day. This was exhilarating for some, but not all.
Beatty and Altman were often at odds. Beatty, enriched and empowered by Bonnie and Clyde (1967), could claim to being "new regime," but it was not entirely clear that he understood the counter culture in any thoroughgoing way. He seemed to think that McCabe and Mrs. Miller was plenty odd enough in narrative. (His character was not very bright, not very heroic, and a bit of dolt.) Surely, he seemed to argue, this was quite enough "departure." Surely, this was enough to be new Hollywood.
Altman wasn’t merely out to satisfy the new agenda. He was keen to see what could be done to and for filmmaking with these new freedoms in place. This is to say he embraced the counter intuitive and the anti-generic not for their own sake, but because something interesting might issue therefore. We could hear in the dailies that he was using sounds in new ways. He was pleased when the lab came back with strange, muted colors on the screen. It was discovered that the film stock in question had been deteriorating in the can, and Hollywood was scoured for more with the same date stamp. Minor characters were set free to explore character and some extraordinary results were forthcoming. Now the question was how to make a place for them. (The actor who does a minor drunk ballet was especially admired. So was the actor who offers the line "My friend wouldn’t pay five dollars to find out something that wasn’t true.") [If someone can identify these actors by name, please let me know.]
The debate between Beatty and Altman grew more intense after a screening of Brewster McLoud (1970). We gathered in a rented auditorium in West Vancouver. The reaction was sheer astonishment. Most of people were thinking (without necessarily thinking about it very hard) that McCabe and Mrs. Miller might be a kind of Mash set in the 19th century of the American Northwest, funny, ascerbic, revealing, and of course new regime. But Brewster McLoud struck most people in the room as being just plain weird, and it was clear from the look on most people’s faces as they left the auditorium that they were now harboring extreme doubts. Who was this guy and what kind of picture did he mean to make in McCabe and Mrs. Miller? As I remember it, people left the auditorium as if no longer certain of their footing.
It was a quiet contest. Until he saw the first complete edit, I think Beatty never raised his voice. He was all gentle persuasion and self confident charm. Clearly, here was a man who never doubted his powers of persuasion, and you could see in the way women treated him, that in his domain he had never had to. He was accustomed to charming the Hollywood media into a stupor of grateful admiration. I remember sitting on a grey sofa, looking out over a grey ocean, his right hand working the touch pad of his telephone, the way only accountants could work an adding machine. He was working the phones, and the calls were mostly to members of the Democratic machine.
There was something confiding about the way he talked to Altman, as if the two of them were not making a film, but planning a particularly cunning piece of politics. Altman, for his part, was not so much confiding as bluff. He too spoke as if it was perfectly obvious both parties had the best of all possible intentions, enjoyed one another company extraordinarily, and shared an unmistakable community of interest. Of course, everything was going to work out splendidly. He and Beatty were merely clearing up the smallest of executional details.
I remember thinking that his eyes glittered with insecurity. (Not that nasty, "don’t cross me" insecurity, but the "what is this universe and what might it do to me next" insecurity.) But when I suggested this in passing, everyone, Julie, her friend, Alfie, and her hairdresser, Barry, exclaimed that this was manifestly the most ridiculous, the most unreliable reading of human character on record. And they could be right.
Finally, it was, I thought, a contest between an actor who was managing his career with all due caution, and an artist who genuinely wanted to see what was possible in the new regime. It is worth remember that these are the recollections of a Labrador. I regarded Beatty then as a man who might someday inflict emotional injury on my employer, and I can tell you he did this more than once. (I was asked to say more for a recent biography on Beatty but Julie would not give me clearance to do so.) My dislike of Beatty has perhaps encouraged me to mistake the man I have compared him to. But, for what it’s worth, this is what I remember about the filmmaker called Robert Altman. May he rest in peace.
References
Honeycutt, Kirk. 2006. Director made chaos flow. The Hollywood Reporter East. November 22, 2006. p. 1.
Kilday, Gregg. 2006. Robert Altman, 81, dies: Helmer challenged conventions. The Hollywood Reporter east. November 22, 2006, p. 1.
The artisanal movement has come to cheese, salt, bread, pickles, quick serve restaurants, chocolate, beer, olive oil, ice cream and stoves. Yes, stoves.
In 2004, several bread makers lost sales, including Private labels (-5.6%), Interstate Brands, George Weston, Sara Lee and General Mills (-14%). Sales for La Brea Bakery, on the other hand, were up 38.7%.
La Brea Bakery calls itself “America’s Great Artisan Bakery.” Here’s the way they tell the story.
Back in 1989, La Brea Bakery changed the way people ate bread in Los Angeles. Those beautiful artisan loaves baked for centuries in Europe had yet to make their way to the states. The only bread available was the flavorless, squishy white rectangle that came pre-sliced in a bag. Little did we know that when we began producing our crusty varieties such as olive, walnut or rosemary that we were about to embark on an American bread revolution.
It’s the anthropologist’s job to see the cultural components of this trend. I think there are 10 of them. The artisanal movement is composed of and driven by:
1. a preference for things that are human scale.
If once we delighted in the sheer scale of a consumer society, now we want things made in tiny batches. In the place of Morton Salt that comes from some vast industrial process, some of us prefer artisanal salt. Pam bought salt recently that came with a talkative, 4 color, brochure. Geez, I wondered, what is there to say about salt?. Plenty, apparently. The first paragraph reads:
The production of premium sea salt takes time and attention to detail. Each small batch of sea salt requires weeks of hand panning and grading to produce the perfect grain. Our quality is a testimonial to the artisan nature of this age-old craft.
I have had a team of ordinary language philosophers working on the last proposition for several days now. No one can make head nor tail of it.
2. a preference for things that are hand made. Sorry, hand panned!
If once we delighted in machine manufacture, now we want things made by humans. The weird thing here is that things that were handmade, especially things that bore the mark of manual manufacture, these were contemptible. One of the nastiest things we could say about a gentleman in the 16th century is that made his wealth by dint of manual labor. Indeed, the first thing a gentleman did was remove his family from all proximity to industry.
In the contemporary version of this notion, it is as if we believe that artisans are “free range,” happier in their work and more likely to deliver quality. (This too is stuffed with dangerous assumption. The philosophers just looked at me when I asked for exposition.)
3. a preference for things that are relatively raw and untransformed.
The nobility of early modern and modern Europe delighted in things that were ornate and highly crafted. Calling something “artificial” was a way to praise it.
This aspect of the movement owes something to the hippie revolution of the 1960s, a moment in which Adele Davis encouraged people to protect their food even from the interference caused by light! (I had a girlfriend in the 1970s who kept everything in the fridge in a brown paper bag. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the light went off when you closed the door.) No transformation was the best transformation. The closer food was to its natural, uncooked state the better.
4. a preference for things that are unbranded.
This is really an odd one for we are still a culture that treats brands as navigational devices in a turbulent culture. But now cheese from a farmer’s market is better for the fact that it is not branded. This too takes as full circle, for in 18th and 19th century America, consumers were buying from barrels. Brands came in as a welcome innovation.
It turns out that Marx was right. (Finally.) The meaning of the object comes from the act of manufacture, not the act of marketing and consumption. And now I have a lovely bridge I’d like to sell you. For the artisinal movement is yet another act of meaning manufacture, driven perhaps by new enthusiasms but shaped at every step by marketing. For starters, this thing we call artisanal production almost certainly relies on mechanics, scale, and artifice. The “artisanal” is yet another cultural meaning that marketers assign to goods.
5. a preference for things that are personalized.
The best example here perhaps is the farmer’s market. We are no longer buying from a vast supermarket that has contracted with agribusiness. Now we want to see the face of the man who grew the food and shake his hand. We prefer to deal with a small retailer, someone who calls us by our first name, and knows our tastes so well, he sets things aside awaiting our arrival on Saturday morning. It is as if we have declared war on anonymity. It is as if we are attempting to “reenchant” the world with personalization. (The term is Weber’s.)
6. a preference for a new transparency
It is as if we want to know, or to know of, all the parties who grow, transport, sell and resell the food on our table. This is not the same as wishing to live in personalized world. This is a matter of disclosure. We know where our food has been. This is one of the things that drives the slow food movement and the Alice Waters Chez Panisse regime.
7. a preference for things that are “authentic”
There is an idea that the food chain has been poisoned by artificial notions of food, and that only a return to “authentic” menu items, foodstuffs, and cooking methods can save us. The James Beard website praises “an artisanal movement that’s bringing back flavors of a world untainted by Wonder-bread and Kraft singles.”
8. a preference for things that have been marked by locality
This is in a sense the new branding. If we prefer cheese that is unbranded, all cheeses threaten to become one. Locality, which may or may not make a difference to taste, is commandeered and pressed into service.
Here is Sally Bany, co-owner and brand manager for the west coast chocolate company, Moonstruck.
“We add chili pepper to it and it becomes a conversation piece for the sales person. ‘Have you tried this particular chocolate. It has these flavors because it’s grown in this region.’ People learn where in the world it came from, the variety and taste characteristics.”
9. a preference for the new connoisseurship
Artisanal products are not without a certain claim to sophistication. Artisanal salt, cheese, bread, these are all better than their non-artisanal equivalents, and any discerning palate can tell this is so.
There is, in other words, a kind of connoisseurship at work. But it is a roomy connoisseurship. Unlike French wine, there are no rules and regs that constrain how something is served, how long it must breathe, or the food with which it may be eaten. There are no real demands for reverence. Artisanal foods can be served and eaten in any way. No special forks required.
Artisanal food allows us be discerning without actually requiring us to learn anything. We get to be special without being specialized. To this extent artisanal food helps play out our expressive individualism.
10. a preference for the simplified
All of the properties that help to make something artisanal are seen to simplify the product, the producer, the act of buying and the act of consumption. Artisanal is the enemy of artifice and complexity. It returns us to a simpler world. There is to this extent a certain nostalgia about the artisanal. It harkens back to another time, another world. Never mind that the happy world of honest artisans engaged in unalienated labor exists only in the mind of the Marxist history. We can harken after it anyhow.
Artisans may or may not have made the new “artisanal” cheese, bread, and salt in our kitchen. But our culture certainly had a hand in their production.
Acknowledgments
Bill O’Connor, CEO, Source/Inc.
Paul Rogers, author of the article noted below.
References
Ness, Carol. 2006. Slow Food Movement has global outreach. Farmers, producers share knowledge at Italy convention. San Francisco Chronicle. October 30, 2006. here.
Rogers, Paul. 2004. Special Report: U.S. State of the [Candy] Industry. Candy Industry. here.
The lawyers now want a shot at YouTube. All that copyright in violation All that intellectual property at risk. All those hours ripe for billing. Brother, can you hook a lawyer up?
There is a simple solution, a way to keep them out: make certain the quality of YouTube remains deplorable. This will indicate that we are not posting the original clip from Borat, but a representation of the first form. It isn’t pretty…and that’s a good thing.
The YouTube version is a copy. It’s purpose is indexical. It exists to point to the Platonic original. It does not pretend to duplicate the original, anymore than a road sign for New York City duplicates New York City. So enough of the lawyerly anxiety that says if copying is allowed, copyright is void. There are copies…and there are originals. The imperfections of YouTube help make this distinction clear. Only an idiot or a lawyer would confuse them.
Or, let’s think about this from an economic and anthropological point of view. This is the difference between stealing and borrowing. When we steal, we make ourselves the beneficiary of value that someone else has created. When we borrow, for these YouTube purposes, we create value for ourselves without diminishing value for the owner.
But of course, on the internet, borrowing actually results in value augmentation for the owner. My use of your material gives you exposure. As long as the quality is bad enough, no one is going to pay me…or not pay you. This point is now "standard issue" wisdom in the internet economy. I don’t know who said it first. Doc Searls? But everyone gets this, including the likes of Mark Cuban. The lawyers should really stay in more.
More social scientifically, when we "borrow" something to show on YouTube, we have effectively nominated ourselves as diffusion agents. Without the first, second and third adopters, many world transforming innovations would languish at the precipice of Geoffrey Moore’s chasm. This too is entirely clear. I can’t believe in a time of very noisy markets and positively Amazonian competition that producers wouldn’t want every diffusion partner that comes their way. I can’t believe they would want to shut themselves out of the wisdom crowds.
The problem here may be one of vested interest. Every profession has found a way to make itself the beneficiary of the new economies and cultures that the internet has opened up. Lawyers, on the other hand, have not been quite so well served. I don’t say we should doubt their motives when they call for the protection of copyright. Um, yes I do.
I have done the ethnography of memory lane. I have sat with people in their living rooms, and asked for a tour of the family photo album.
Two kinds of photo jump out.
There’s the "phantom photo." The respondent may recognize one of the people in the photo ("I think that’s my uncle or something"), but the place, the season, the occasion, are now lost. The meaning of the photo, once so obvious, has evaporated. Interestingly, people rarely destroy these photos.
There’s the "cargo photo." These may not be much to look at. Often, they are smudgy and badly framed. You will be trying to make out what’s in the frame, when you realize the respondent hasn’t said anything for a little while. Then you realize they are trying very hard not to cry. Cargo photos carry bags of information and meaning. Badly lit, badly framed, this photograph of a man sitting at a table at Wendy’s somehow captures the truth of who he was. ("I don’t know what it is. That’s the expression he always had when he was planning something.")
Phantom photos capture less meaning than they appear to. Cargo photos capture more.
Of course, these are the problems of the old technology. The camera, for all its genius, left a great deal out. Indeed, all photos would be phantom photos were it not for the restoration of meaning that happens everytime the family sits down to tell the story of the family. ("That’s your Uncle Bob. At Kalamalka. The trip they shot the bear, I think. Get a load of that shirt. He looks about 20!")
But the new technologies will change memory lane in the greatest urban reconstruction since Haussmann rebuilt Paris. Memory lane is about to get larger, more capacious, easier to navigate, and much more interesting to visit. Or to put this is the language of marketing, these technologies will create value like nobody’s business, they will turn memory into gold.
Four new technologies will make the difference.
One. Cameras liked the Nikon D100 are capable of capturing sound. I was interested to read that Patrick McMullan uses this capacity to capture the names of the people he shoots at social affairs (see Henderson below), but we could use this capacity to identify the shooter and the 5 Ws: where, when, what, who, and why. Every photo will come with its own "voice over." This will capture data from the person best qualified to give data. Thus will relatives speak to one another across generations. (Several generations down the road, the way things are said will be as illuminating as the things that are said. "I really like great, great auntie Elizabeth’s photos. She was so sly!")
Two. Try us we might, the photo taker can never supply enough information. And this is where the geotagging comes in (see Austen below). Cameras will shortly be able to stamp by longtitude and latitude as they now date by time, date, month and year. Superimpose this on a Google map and we will be able to trace the steps of Auntie Elizabeth that Sunday in 2009 when she and the family wandered through up 5th Avenue and into Central Park. Time plus space stamping will allow us to reconstruct quite a lot of this trip: how long Auntie Elizabeth spent that afternoon in Saks, for instance. ("That hat in the attic, is that hers!? Maybe it’s from Saks! Go, look at the label! Maybe this is when she bought it!") Data like these create a web that make other data germane and new inference possible (see Kluver below). Imagine having the historical record and the historical artifact.
Three. Many photos get lost in the storing or the storage. But wireless cameras (or the camera on a wireless phone) can wick photos to safety…or at least to relatives. Now that a photo sits on several hard drives, its chances of survival have gone way up. And eventually someone in the private sector will create time lockers for families, records that can survive the indifference of several generations. (And what would we pay to release the photos taken by Uncle Bob three generations after the fact? It’s a long wait for the service provider, but the longer the wait, the more profitable it becomes) Four. Let’s call "time lockers" a category on its own. With Google now capable of archiving email for millions of people, it shouldn’t be very difficult to capture the photos of several hundred thousand (or at least enough to make the venture profitable.)
It is, of course, possible to capture too much information. And this can destroy the value of a record just as surely as too little information. Gordon Bell at Microsoft has embarked upon an effort to record everything that happens to him (see Thompson below). When I was the head of the Institute of Contemporary Culture, we thought very hard about the possibilities of Pepysian capture. So Bell is my hero. But let’s be clear, for civilians like you and me, we merely want more data, not all data. (What we want is a "Goldilocks" ratio, not too little, not too much.)
And what, precisely, is this value worth? (And now we come to a place that anthropology and economics intersect.) Well, you can see why an anthropologist would like a memory lane transformed by Haussmann. The native is now doing my job for me. The mountains and valleys of ethnographic data (note the Gibsonian metaphor), these will be a great gift. It will mark the return of "arm chair" anthropology that has so fall out of favor in the 20th century.
Other values are pretty clear. Every family, even the ones that are unhappy in their own way, will be glad to have a better record. Think of the amount of time and money that people spend on ancestry.com. The search for roots is one of the things that make the internet the internet. Now, to be sure, some of this is driven by the silliest of human motives: the discovery, for instance, that we descend from a royal family or at least someone famous. But I think the ancestral search gets more sophisticated, the more data is available to it. And as the historical picture becomes more nuanced, the value of all existing data goes up, and new data takes on value enough to warrant entrepreneurial funding. The historically rich get richer. The historical get rich.
But there is a deeper, more pressing value add here that is not much talked about. As change increases and dynamism quickens, individuals will need to have archival data for personal and practical reasons. There was a point in my life when it was possible to say that I had changed jobs, cities, addresses, relationships or perspectives once every six months. (I know this seems preposterous but I think if you sit down and do a "identity chronology" of your own you will see this number or something like it.) This is an awful lot of water under the bridge. The task of reconstruction is now, well, daunting. What would I give for 10 perfectly documented photos for each of those 6 month periods?
All of us will have fragmented selves that will need reconstruction from time to time. But I think reconstructed lives will be especially useful to CEOs, parents, football coaches, criminals, divorce courts and of course marketers. "What was I thinking?" this is the question that hovers over many proceedings. From these data, even this can be extracted. (In a perfect world, there would be little "what was I thinking " booths everywhere, to which we might repair to report when on the verge of a moment momentous.)
Memory lane, before Haussmann, was pleasant, meandering, occasional, and, most of all, optional. Memory lane after Haussmann, this is more useful and obligatory. This memory lane is no longer a by-way. It’s now a Broadway, a street you have to visit or at least cross if you want to spend any time in this town.
References
Austen, Ian. Pictures, With Map and Pushpin Included. New York Times. November 2, 2006. here.
Henderson, Stephen. 2006. Party Masters: Patrick McMullan, Sharp Shooter. Town and Country. November. p. 296.
Kluver, Billy. 1997. A Day with Picasso: Twenty-four Photographs by Jean Cocteau. Cambridge: MIT Press.
McCracken, Grant. 2003. Tag, we’re it. This blog sits at the intersection of Anthropology and Economics. January 5, 2003. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2004. How to blog like an anthropologist. This blog sits at the intersection of Anthropology and Economics. August 17, 2004. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2006. What I did on my summer vacation (or, "may I have your passport, please?") This blog sits at the intersection of Anthropology and Economics. August 22, 2006. here.
Thompson, Clive. 2006. What if you never forgot anything: How Microsoft’s Gordon Bell is Reengineering Human Memory. Fast Company. November. pp. 72-79, 110-112.
For more on Baron Haussmann, the Wiki entry is here.
One of my happiest discoveries in graduate school was an article called "the limits of Elizabethan credulity," from which I learned that Elizabethans believed in ghosts, magic, alchemy and unicorns. (The last were, they believed, merely scarce.)
This article got me wondering about the line between credible and incredible in the present day, and in the last couple of days I have started to wonder whether "American credulity" is not shifting.
Borat pretends to being a documentary. Most of us are hip to the joke. We "get" that this is parodic, that Sasha Baron Cohen, the creator and star, is "just kidding."
But the anthropologist is a bore. He insists on asking:
1) what are the signals that tell us something is parodic?
2) who gets them?
3) do some people not get them?
4) how many people need to fail to get them before we may (or must) cry "hoax"?
Now, I know what you are thinking. You would actually have to be from Kazakhstan not to understand that Borat is a parody.
But what about these other examples? Sega did a campaign that pretended to be the diary of someone trying to "blow the whistle" on the dangerous properties of Sega game.
Mini USA released "actual footage" of a giant robot. The animation is really good, but what sold me on this hoax was the opening interview with a British engineer pottering about in his cardigan and his garden shed. Note perfect.
Alright, so I am from Kazakhstan. I only wish that MIT colleagues, Sam Ford and Ivan Askwith, had not been there to see me fall for it. (Very politely, they pretended not to notice the shocking elasticity of my credulity.)
The world is now filled with what we hope are note perfect confabulations. And the odd thing: we don’t much care. This used to be the job of the chattering classes: to police the difference between appearance and reality, between veritas and verisimilitude. Indeed, the 1990s seemed preoccupied with conspiracy with the Kennedy assassination and Roswell that were all about the possibility that some things were just appearances. If someone were to restage War of the Worlds, would there be the outcry, the indignation that greeted Orson Wells? I don’t think so.
What happened to the cry: Hoax!
References
Mini ads. These have disappeared from the internet without a trace. Anyone who can find them is urged to let me know.
Ok, I think I’m starting to understand the notable Kazakhstani anthropologist, Borat. (See my first go, Friday.)
The stereotyping of Kazakhstan in the movie Borat is shameless and knuckleheaded, but it does help to establish Borat’s bona fides as a child of innocence (COI).
And Borat has to be a creature from another, utterly other culture to make key scenes in the movie work…as when he asks politely (in a deleted scene from Borat) the best way to prepare his newly adopted puppie for eating.
And it is essential that he make this work because it reveals that the pound owner who defends the puppie in question has no scruples about committing herself to the most outrageous anti-semitism.
The Borat character is good at anthropology, and his ethnographic excursion works as a kind of "edge finding" to use the language of trend watchers and futurists.
On the Conan O’Brien show, he investigated the categories and rules that govern what people may say about desire, especially in the highly codified circumstances of the talk show.
The interview is just settling down, when Borat comments on Queen Latifah, and says with great sincerity.
"I would like to make a romance inside of her."
O’Brian shakes his head in astonishment, and it is clear that he is thinking exactly what the rest of us are thinking. This is a patent obscenity, except…well, perhaps, the charming and old fashioned "romance" saves it.
Does it. Or doesn’t it? Where’s the edge? What’s the rule? Everyone is now desparately trying to "run the numbers" to find the reading that would make it OK and more or less COI. Which of course we can’t. Ok.
Finally, O’Brien asks, "you want to make a romance inside of her?"
Borat replies with great feeling and sincerity, and a resignation that says "I know I am asking for the stars, and that I do not deserve such a thing."
"I hope."
This sells the joke and the COI notion to perfection. This guy has no clue how far off acceptable behavior he has put himself.
But the boundary testing is not done. Second laters, with pitch perfect wonder and good natured indignation, Borat asks Conan.
"You tell me, you would not like to make a liquid explosion in Queen Latifah?"
This is over the top. Conan is horrified. The audience recoils. Ok, we can draw the line right here. Not even good natured innocence will forgive this. Not in our culture. Not on a talk show.
We suspect that this is where Borat likes to end up, well outside the boundaries of acceptable culture. But we also suspect that he likes to get there by stages and not before he has confounded our distinctions.
This guy reminds me of Peter Sellers, but the two comedians could not be more different. Sellers liked to get inside his comedic creations (see his perfectly distinct characters in Dr. Strangelove). Cohen likes to set up shop between them.
References
Cohen, Sasha Baron. Pound (Deleted Scene from Borat). YouTube. here.
Cohen, Sasha Baron. Borat on Conan O’Brien. YouTube. here.
Cohen, Sasha Baron. Borat [opening four minutes] YouTube. [featured on sidebar of YouTube homepage]. here.
Borat has broken, and it’s star, Sacha Baron Cohen, is now in the ascendancy. Without much thinking about it, I assumed this guy was another trickster figure in a long line of trickster figures (John Belushi, Jim Carrey, Tom Green, Dave Chappelle…).
But no.
Borat was screened this summer for the likes of Garry Shandling, George Meyer, Judd Apatow, and Larry David.
When the movie ended and the lights came up, everyone realized they had just seen something totally original, perhaps even revolutionary. Capturing the sense of collective astonishment, Meyer turned to Apatow and said, "I feel like something just played me Sgt. Pepper’s for the first time." (EW, as below)
"Totally original"! ""Revolutionary"? What a good way to get our attention. Post modern cultures, as Baudrillard would say, keep things in circulation, creating novelty out of precedent. By this account, originality is impossible.
So what happened? What’s new? Rottenberg speculates that Cohen offers us satire that never acknowledges itself. Borat never once gives the audience an ironic wink, no "get a load of this" respite. This could be true, but I don’t remember Tom Green ever acknowledging his satire, at least in the early years.
It could be that Cohen is more daring than other tricksters. His Ali G character could be read as racist. Borat is unmistakably anti-semitic. Borat holds the nation of Kazakhstan up to ridicule, a character assassination of vast proportions. But this is a difference of degree, not kind. Many comedians are rule breaking. To say that Cohenis more rule breaking does not, cannot, sustain a claim to originality.
Perhaps what matters is a daring of another kind. The filming of Borat took star and crew into peril. Director Larry Charles says,
We walked into extremely hostile situations that we then exacerbated into incredibly hostile situations. (EW, as below)
Well, maybe. This exercise in comedic ambush looks as if targets were chosen with the advice of Michael Moore (i.e., all targets are the favorite liberal ones). Unless you are prepared to subject your own world to satire and ridicule, it’s not really courageous comedy. (When you make fun of your own, there is no place to hide.)
Strickly speaking, the expert here is Leora Kornfeld and if she would grace us with a study of Borat I would be proud to host it. In the meantime, may I offer this suggestion?
Borat is about boundaries. We live in a time of porous boundaries. If you will forgive a moment of self reference, here’s something I posted in 2004.
Selves, groups, institutions, nations, cultures are all now more porous and less bounded than they used to be. Once we were like silos. Now we are now more like bird cages: positively breezy in our willingness to admit influences from outside. (lightly edited, McCracken, as below)
In a culture with diminished boundaries, some are consumed by the spirit of adventure. Is there anything I cannot say or do? Is there anyone I may not be?
Borat is the last moment in a longstanding cultural development, one that takes on new power and definition from the avant garde of the 20th century. Artists and poets (the predecessor of our comedian) looks to see what sensibilities may be scandalized. French painters and their successors the American beat writers lay seige to several of the pieities and clarities of bourgeois culture. And it worked. Eventually the movement was embraced even by the middle class. Once unmistakeable ideas are now marked not by boundaries but quotation marks.
Enter Borat. This character comes to offer a last test, a mopping up exercise. Are there any boundaries left? Well, in certain social circles (both conservative and radical), there will always be boundaries left. (It is interesting to see how often these groups devote themselves almost entirely to what the boundaries are. Much Punk discourse is about Punk boundaries.) Borat is the last enemy of our fixity. He is the new champion of our fluidity. Borat is proof that we can go anywhere and be anyone…or, at least, that there are no cultural categories or prohibitions left to constrain us.
I like the fact that Cohen is never interviewed except in character. I think this says that the Ali G./Borat exercise is not about him. And this makes him profoundly different from another rule breaking exemplar, the now downright tedious Madonna, for whom each successive manifestation and the larger transformational exercise is most distinctly about her.
As proof of Borat, I offer Monk. Borat will go anywhere, beard anyone, say anything, however much it makes us cringe. Monk (someone to whom I think I am a little closer in temperment) is a man squeamish about every kind of boundary and category confusion. While Borat plays the storm trooper, Monk wants nothing so much to stay home and wonder if that place mat is really, truly at right angles with the table on which it sits. Even tiny inconsistencies and imperfections are, for Monk, assaults on the senses, outrages against expectation, a tipping point from which chaos must surely follow. Such a character is inevitable when all placemats are matter out of place.
The structural properties of our culture are changing. We are becoming more fluid, more porous, more dynamic. It is inevitable that we should produce characters like Borat who delight testing the freedom this change brings. And characters like Monk who, like the rest of us, live in quiet horror.
Does this make Borat original? Not really. But he might be the last man in, the character for whom there are no longer any rites of passage, only rights of passage. And when he says and does things that are really impossibly rude, we cringe, but we don’t refuse him. We get what he’s doing. We know where he’s going. He is, after all, one of us.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2004. Culture Porousness. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. May 24, 2004. here.
Rottenberg, Josh. 2006. The Village Idiot Genuis. Entertainment Weekly. October 20, 2006, pp. 31-38. (Quotes are from pages 34 and 38 respectively.)
Today I was at the Advertising Research Foundation meetings in New York City. This was organized by the esteemed Joe Plummer of ARF. Joe asked the panel I was on to address issues that emerged in his recent interviews with Gerry Zaltman.
I have long observed the Zaltman research enterprise. Gerry was once a colleague at HBS and I believe him to be one of the nicest human being God ever created. (I once did a drive around Carmel with Gerry and his wife, and I came away thinking that there was something positively saintly about the guy. Coming as it does from a low church Protestant, this is very high praise indeed.) My regard for Gerry was enough to make me hold my tongue when I came across examples of his work.
But now that I had been asked to comment publicly, I felt obliged to speak candidly. As I said this morning during the panel, I believe that there is something wrong with the Zaltman model. I believe the model is missing something. That something is culture.
This wouldn’t matter if Gerry were just talking about brain structure, function or chemistry. But that is not what Gerry does, not for consulting purposes anyhow. What Gerry does is solicit images from consumers (as pictured, to Gerry’s right) and then presume to tell us what these images mean. I understand that Gerry’s book is called "how customers think" but when he hires out for consulting purposes what he gives us is "what customers think."
I have friends in the marketing world who have used Gerry’s Zmet technique to great effect. And I believe all of methodological infighting and territory claiming must defer to this. If the method works, the method is good. The proof of the pudding has nothing to do with the theory of the pudding or the method of the pudding. The proof of the pudding is a client who says, "this was illuminating. I understand my consumer and my market in ways that I did not, could not before."
I am obliged to say that Gerry is making unsound assumptions. He believes that culture and cultures don’t matter. In How the Customer Thinks, he speaks blithely of "human universals" and the "myth of diversity."
Here’s the thing: If cultural diversity doesn’t matter, marketing doesn’t matter. Is this not precisely what we do: account for the ways in which one group of consumers is different from another group of consumers? Segmentation, I believe we call it. Changes in consumer trends? Isn’t this what we do? Aren’t we always looking for not the state of human universals, but the changes in culture that have changed our consumers? What matters for marketing purposes, is always human specifics, not human universals. My target, this brand, the marketing opportunity, right now. What would have happened at Motorola if Geoffrey Frost had been driven by a pursuit of human universals instead of his exquisitely particular understanding of what the technology could do and what the culture would respond to, right now?
I believe that these cultural differences and developments are the very bread and butter, the very point of marketing. But, if what Dr. Zaltman is correct, marketers may strike their tents and surrender the world of marketing to those who are prepared to posit a few simple human universals. Really? Shouldn’t we take exception to this savage act of intellectual reduction? Shouldn’t we insist that consumers are more complicated than this. A few deep and universal meanings inhabiting and informing all human consciousness? Really? Perhaps human beings are actually a little more various, nuanced, and multiple than this. (And if this is not the case, marketing is just so much sound and fury.)
When Dr. Zaltman sits down with composite images and claims to see what they mean, I get nervous. To suppose, for marketing purposes, that a single individual can use this technique to capture what anyone from any culture must mean, this is not a persuasive claim.
The problem is not just that Gerry doesn’t get culture. The problem is that he doesn’t understand American culture. In fact, Gerry doesn’t understand contemporary American culture. And this is crucial. God help the marketer who loses touch with where and what his or her culture is at any given moment.
Now, granted, Gerry thinks that knowledge of culture, American culture, and contemporary culture, is gratuitous. And maybe for some analytical purposes it is. But you cannot talk about consumer meanings unless you have a very clear idea of the cultures that supply these meanings. It is important to know how consumers think, and Gerry’s work here is interesting and important. But if we are going to talk about what they think, we have to do what marketers have always done, understand the world in which the consumer lives, understand the life the consumer leads, and understand the cultures that make these worlds and lives make sense.
References
Zaltman, Gerald. 2003. How Customers Think. Essential Insights into the mind of the market. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
I am typing this as quietly as I can. For they are everywhere and they are angry.
I write this post from deep inside Yankee territory, a scant few hours after the New York Yankees loss to the Detroit Tigers.
As an outsider, I am missing something. I grew up in that baseball culture that says the World Series goes to the team with the most heart. Talent and skill are so abundant and so well distributed in professional baseball that something more is called for. Big pay checks, and the indignation of the senior manager, how can this matter? (And what do we say about the game, the series, and the winner, when it does?) I thought the game belonged to a bunch of guys who find a moment of greatness, for whom the sum of team proves, sometimes inexplicably, greater than the whole of the team. (The Tigers fit the bill perfectly.)
The local airwaves are now filled with shouts of unhappiness from George Steinbrenner, a CEO so unconvincing, he makes Donald Trump look like presidential. Joe Torre, from whom every manager might learn something about patience and grace, is now for the high jump.
Yankee fans have never tasted misery. They know joy or they know anger. They don’t mourn an unsuccessful season, they fire someone. There is no such thing as fate for a Yankee fan. There is only a third base man hitting .172. Faced with anything less than a World Series, and the Yankees go out and spend more money on salaries…almost $1 billion dollars since the World Series win in 2000.
But the weirdest thing is the Yankee conviction that baseball is well served by Yankee triumph, that what rest of us really want is a Yankee win. I have my own humble thoughts on this notion, but let me defer to an expert on the game.
Admittedly, baseball has been the crucible for many of the most moronic ideas of the last 20 years – that contraction is necessary, that Washington DC doesn’t deserve a major league baseball team, that an unbalanced schedule has no effect on the wild card race, that players who don’t play on winning teams can’t be MVPs… I’ve even had people try to tell me that steroid use has no effect on baseball performance. It’s enough to question the value of a college education. But this contention – that New York deserves a super team because it’s in the best interest of baseball – is by far the most ridiculous and mind-numbingly ignorant I’ve heard. One has to go back to the Scopes trial to hear an argument with less validity.
Ok, I have to go. I think someone heard me.
References
Kepner, Tyler. 2006. For Yankees, October Has an Early End. New York Times. October 7, 2006. here.
Wood, Trace. 2004. Is YRod Good for the Game. The Long Ghandi. April 17, 2004. here.
Does noticing matter? Of course it does. Lawyers notice for a living: the displeasure of the judge, the anxiety of a witness, the significance of a precedent. Doctors do too. House is top doc because he notices first and best. Crime solving depends upon noticing the faintest clues, with or without the use of an electron microscope.
As a culture, we talk a lot about the importance of reading. Literacy is a particularly big deal in Canada (where I am at the moment). I’ve been corresponding with Michael Johnson about an organization devoted to encouraging parents to read with their child.
This is well and good. But reading is really just a way of devoting ourselves to what other people have noticed. And in a culture that is moving at break neck speed from the passive mode to the active mode, surely it is time to "get behind" noticing as much as we have reading. (When you notice, you are driven to read, but the reverse is not also true.)
I have another motive for caring about noticing. My nephew has taken up football. Now this is fine. Personally I believe football saved my life. I was raised in a home with a strict ceremonial regime, and the discovery that I could strap on pads and just run into people came as the happiest revelation of my young life. I loved football. But we all know I think that football can turn a young man to thoughtlessness and so Pam and I resolved to take Andrew shopping for shoes.
Shoes? Yes, the plan is to take Andrew to a mall, to give him 30 bucks and have him join us in the food court with a pair of shoes he has just bought. The plan is to have him describe these shoes, with perfect clarity, using not a word more than he has to, not a detail less than is necessary We are not going to look till he’s done. Then we’ll see.
Now, God kows what he is going to find for 30 bucks and if there is something inherently ludicrous about an 11 year old buying shoes, well, that’s ok. This is the first rule of noticing. It’s ok to look silly. You are going to look silly. Noticing sometimes makes us look conspicuous and if we are not prepared to pay this small price for noticing, well, too bad. The game is over before it starts.
The idea is help Andrew to see details, and to talk about them. The more he does, the better he will get at it. What’s odd is that we are a culture devoted to self improvement of every kind. That airport book store is bursting with books about how to be happier, smarter, thinner, richer, and more successful. But no one has written a book on noticing. Maybe Andrew will.
Yesterday, we saw a nice moment in professional football. On the last play of the game against the Indianapolis Colts, the New York Jets starting chucking the ball around with fair abandon.
“It’s basically a play when everyone acts like they’re still a kid in the schoolyard. You keep lateraling it backward and never let someone tackle you." (Jets guard Pete Kendall)
Here’s how it went:
Chad Pennington, the quarterback, threw to Leon Washington who lateralled to Brad Smith who lateralled to Laveranues Coles who returned the ball to Pennington who threw the ball backwards across the field to Justin McCareins who fumbled backward "to" Smith who fumbled backward "to" Coles who lateralled to Nick Mangold, the Jets’ 300-pound center. Strangest thing, Mangold fumbled. His fumble was not recovered. The game ended.
It was as if the Keystone cops had been smuggled onto the field in Jets’ uniforms. And it looked at first as if this might be a moment of contagion, with the first fumble suddenly striking each successive player as an increasingly good idea, until the idea found its way to Mangold by which point it was orthodoxy. Lateralling, that is to say, that went from something frowned upon to something you had to do, with highly trained, incredibly regimented professional football players looking for all the world like a smart mob. Hope Howard Rheingold was watching.
But, no. Apparently, this moment of pure spontaneity was practiced by the Jets all week. On balance, coach was pleased.
"It was close. I guess we’ll have to practice it some more.” (Eric Mangini)
Now there’s a lovely idea. Practicing chaos. Professional football is now so overformed, so surprised by its moments of creativity, so deeply discouraging of dynamism, that this must be a good thing. The evolutionary path is clear. We must hope the NFL will eventually embrace chaos that isn’t practiced. I mean the military, on which football is so thoroughly modeled, has embraced complexity theory. How long before football follows suit?
It sits now in a modest apartment in Guangzhou. But it’s last address was the home of a landowner. During the cultural revolution, the landowner decided that something so splendid might be held against him by the rampaging Red Guard.
So the landowner sold it to a local peasant for a tiny sum. And the peasant said, "Yes" and the object changed hands.
Now it is not known whether this was enough to spare the landowner the fury of the Red Guard. Probably not, one guesses. Great furniture can be laundered in a way that great houses and reputations cannot. Perhaps the idea was to get rid of anything smashable, because once the kids started smashing, things would spin quickly out of control. The other possibility is that the jettisoned this chair because he wanted to find a place of safety for it.
None of this is clear. I asked the present owner whether it wasn’t a dangerous object to own and he said, "no," he came from a very long line of peasants and no one would begrudge him it.
Qin Xiaoying says so. He argues that China’s culture industry has been shut out of the spectacular growth demonstrated by other industries in China. This means it is falling behind the US and the UK, for whom "cultural products" are a major piece of the economy. Mr. Xiaoing asks, "how can we turn China’s culture industry from a weakling into a major power?"
The struggle to create a cultural industry will be titanic because the barriers are formidable. Mr. Xiaoying says, China’s thousands of years of "feudalistic authoritarianism [which] have stifled the promotion of individual personality." And there are the lingering effects of the "Soviet-style, highly-centralized planned economy" that put "Chinese culture in a developmental straight jacket."
Mr. Xiaoying argues that three things are called for from the state: capital injection, policy support and protection. To be this in the parochial terms of our own debate on the subject, the thing comes down to Virginia Postrel vs. Richard Florida
Richard Florida believes that "creatives" are a professional class who can be nurtured and enabled by interventions from the state. This is one of the reasons he is so beloved of urban planners. He promises them a role in the "innovation economy."
Now, I have never consulted Virginia Postrel on this question but I am pretty sure she would be unenthusastic about the Floridian vision. I think she might say (and if she won’t, I will) that cultivating creativity through state support is a contradiction in terms. Real creativity, creativity that is fully responsive to and engaging of, the cultural moment at hand, this comes from creatives flying by the seat of their pants, speaking to popular taste, and not from people funded by government committee.
Creativity that is not tied to commerce doesn’t usually come to very much in the way of culture. It speaks to a small constituency in orbit around a small elite. That’s the way it looks to this Canadian.
References
Xiaoying, Qin. 2006. Nuture creativity to propel culture industry. China Daily. September 16-17, p. 4.
