I spend the day at Northwestern, giving a paper to the Marketing department. I was talking about reading trends. I have worked up a new model for doing this, borrowing heavily from Complexity theory and the work of Stuart Kauffman at the Santa Fe Institute.   

I blew by one opening slide called “trends trending upward.” The point of this slide is to note in passing, and much too summarily, that the dynamism of consumer taste and preference appears to be growing.  

Here’s the slide as I presented it.  

1. trend sensitivity is up: Russian glasses

2. more trends at work: end of big slow breakers

3. producing stations more numerous (NY, LA, London, Paris to Atlanta & Iceland)

4. end of mass society: fragmentation of taste

5. trends penetrating new sectors: paint at the hardware store

6. trends peak faster

7. so far the corporation plays catch up

8. what happens when corporations become fully engaged?

Most of these are pretty transparent. The “Russian glasses” notion come from the experience of a friend of mine who examined the possibility of selling prescription glasses in the 2^nd and 3^rd world, only to discover that Russian visitors are really quite well informed about that fashions in glasses. We used to be able to take advantage of a “back water” effect.  That’s gone.

Point two was about the old days when we had plenty of time to spot new trends and to watch them roll through the marketplace. Now it is closer to a perfect storm, with several trends colliding with sometimes unpredictable results.

Point three noted the problem of how many centers can now participate in cultural innovation. At one time it was enough to keep an eye on NY, LA, London and Paris because innovators else would find themselves shut out by the gatekeepers. Now we know that innovators can happen even in Iceland.  This means we must monitor more widely and the changes that we will miss something (and suffer the blind side hit) have gone up.  

Point four is clear enough, as is point five.   A good way to make point five, I find, is to note that trends have penetrating even that bastion of function and pragmatism, the hardware store.  Our great grandfathers would be astonished to find that paint colors in hardware stores now change routinely.

Point six says simply that trends move more quickly. And this is just about the only reason I think to feel good about the amount of money we pay our cultural icons.  Their moment upon the stage of celebrity can be very brief indeed.

Points seven and eight suggests that as it stands the corporate world is usually playing a game of catch up, often hanging onto trends by their fingernails.  This won’t last long. In the next decade we will see corporations solve the trend watch as they have solved every other problem.  And once this happens, our dynamism will be redoubled. Once corporations are full participants in the trend game, we will set off in a cultural adventure that will be pretty darn astonishing.

This is another way of saying that as people like me create models to track and predict change, the corporation will get better at creating this change.  And then the model building will have to begin again. 

References

McCracken, Grant.  In Press: 2006.  Flock and Flow: tracking consumer taste and preference in a dynamic marketplace.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

I was in Santa Monica last week doing ethnographic work for a client. In the course of an interview, one of my respondents said, “it’s all about attitude.”

He was commenting on suits. I was wearing one. He was not. He was telling me Californians don’t need suits to make an impression. They wear attitude.

CA has a symbolic economy very different from CT. (Break out the Pulitzers! Anthropologist reports breakthrough finding: CT and CA not the same!)

One of the important differences is that there is a very well marked elite in this system. At the top of the hierarchy sits anyone who is “recognizable.” This category sorts very finely, from the extraordinarily famous (Brad Pitt) to a face you remember from TV (“wasn’t he on that X-Files episode, the one where…”). In this world, merely having a face that has been seen before puts you in a special club and the first category…even if it leaves you a long, long way from Brad Pitt.

The second category is made up of people who might well be a very big sneeze in the larger scheme of things. They could be producers, power brokers, star makers, even. This group needs to let you know that they may not be recognizable, but that doesn’t mean they are obscure. Yes, sometimes membership is declared by an “S” class Mercedes but the rest of the time it is attitude that sends the message that this is someone to be reckoned with.

The third category is made up of people who are not players in the game. They are ordinary people with no status card to play. The good news? We, the witless bystander, don’t know that. The trick here is to summon enough attitude to create a shadow of a doubt.  We should look upon them and say, “wow, this guy must really be something.  He carries himself like Napoleon.”

The fourth category is people who cannot sell the lie. These are people working in restaurants or Starbucks.  There is no shadow of a doubt. This person is not famous and they are not powerful. Some of these people cultivate the anti-attitude. They cultivate pure self possession. They carry themselves with that air that says, “I don’t need your admiration, I have my own.”  Now, some part of us knows that these people would trade this self possession for even a little stardom without a second thought.  But we are nevertheless impressed. To be this close to the Hollywood game and to summon a counterweight celebrity, a self constructed stardom, this is not easy.  Some part of us is impressed by the sheer acting talent on display and we are likely to mutter, “this kid should be in pictures.”

The fifth category is people who want you to know that they despise the star system and the hierarchy it creates.  How do they do this?  You guessed it.  Attitude!  They use attitude to say that they don’t care about Hollywood or stardom, that they are glad that they are not famous, glad, get it, glad! Now attitude sends a new message altogether: f*ck you, buddy.  I’m a Goth and in that world, I’m a God.” 

Hmm, let’s review. It is all about attitude. 

I’m in southern California, talking to people in their homes about their homes.  It’s an interesting world and an underdocumented one. 

Some respondents tell me they have "followed their bliss."  As I understand it, this phrase stands for the notion that we are best served when we devote our lives to the cultivation of an enthusiasm.  Prosperity, happiness, satisfaction, all of these will follow if we put first things first. 

I like this idea. I may even have, in a low key way, lived this idea.  But I’m not sure I get this idea. 

This isn’t the way markets are supposed to work, is it?  Don’t we think that the market satisfy our wants and needs because people have responded not to bliss but to opportunity.  The market are responsive precisely because they are driven by self interest, not self expression.  Market, our best form of dynamism, is created by people trying to figure out what we want, not what they want. 

Now, there is a pretty simple answer here.  People will use a decision tree that look like Mazlow’s hierarchy.  If they have no choice, they will take any job on offer, bliss be damned.  The more prosperous their circumstances (private and or public), the more plausible is a self expressive career, instead of a self interested one.  In a wealthy society, filled with wealthy families, it is possible for lots of people to follow their bliss (in proportion to their privilege).

But this still leaves us with a problem.  We are living in society that changes shape, not according to what the consumer wants to buy but what the producer wants to sell.  This is the "long tail" development that Chris Anderson has documented so well.  It is also the "plenitude effect" that some anthropologists have labored to discover.  But these new markets are clearly dispersive in ways that old, opportunity, markets are not.  It’s not clear that they will work the same way to canvas, shape and express public taste and preference.  In fact, the very idea of "emergence," so beloved of economists and complexity theorists, is thrown into question.  Will things emerge…and how? 

Now, it is right to say that I am jumping the gun.  Most people live in opportunity economies, not expressive ones.  (I am put in mind of that old Leno joke: that Jerry Brown did have supporters for his run for California office, but unfortunately most of them were trapped in Biosphere II.)  On the other hand, expressive opportunities are expanding, and it’s not a bad idea to get a leg up on this topic.  I believe that Burning Man is probably a great place to study this topic, and I believe Robert Kozinets at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Business has done important work of this topic.  (References will have to wait till I get home.)

A last point: bliss economies, we might say, were invented by tiny artistic communities.  Follow your own creativity, the world will just have to catch up.  And this is a simple, not very threatening exception to the rule when it is confined to communities as small as this.  But the bliss economy, perhaps especially here in California, has gone wide.  And now it is a larger problem with larger implications.   (On the other hand, this could all be crap.  I am in California and I am having the dickens of a time thinking clearly.)

Thanks to Jason Kottke, the mystery of the McDonald’s drive-through has been well aired, much debated, and, no, not yet solved. 

Today, another mystery. It’s not so concrete, but it is, for anthropological purposes, a worthy puzzle because it may well be proof that fundamental cultural change is taking place.  

Here’s the mystery: fiction, specifically the novel and the short story, is losing its authority in our culture.  It may also be true that non fiction is rising in its authority.  The mystery, most compactly, most mysteriously: why is non fiction eclipsing fiction?

A contrarian would say that this is old news, that the “decline of fiction” is merely a belated recognition the facts of the matter.  Literary fiction has been in eclipse for some time now.  But it was so preferred to television and films as a cultural form that the elites conspired to give it a “free pass.” Writers were lionized. Best sellers were touted.  Reviews were featured.  It didn’t much matter that every literary novel was outsold by lots of romance novels.  Literary fiction demanded special treatment. It was given an elevated status. (And this is why Jonathan Franzen objected to being included on the Oprah list. It was treatment not special or elevated enough.)

But let’s say that is a contemporary development.  What are the factors that encourage the decline of literary fiction?  There are many factors and I am looking forward to any and all explanations.  

Here’s mine. Literary fiction succeeded too well. It helped to create a world that turned on it.  

In the avant garde view, the author is a little like that Jack Nicholson character in A Few Good Men. He (or she) is a creature who answers to higher loyalties, contends with forces that ordinary people would prefer not to think about, serves as a heroic figure protecting a middle class Guanatamo from the Cuba beyond. Oh, ok so the comparison is odd but I like it because the actual contrast is as telling as the formal similarity: the novelist wishes to escape the very middle class standards Jack Nicholson struggles to defend. (Hey, I am in California as I write this, and it’s having an effect, apparently.)

The novelist had a simple charge. He was to take up what Trilling called the “adversary intention” and this meant  

detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture the produced him.

And halleluiah, it worked. The novelist so loosened “the habits of thought and feeling that the large culture imposes” that we became as a culture newly productive of every kind of social difference. Many creatures, not just adversarial ones, emerged in the world. A veritable plenitude was unleashed. Every imaginable creature of social life sprang forth.  

Bad luck for the novelist, at least the one animated by an adversarial intention.  Fiction may be suffering eclipse because it needs a tidy bourgeois society, something to push off against. Without this “larger culture,” the novelist cannot play the heroic figure who identifies its dishonesties and excavates the deeper authenticities to which lives should be devoted instead. No, when the alternative world is lots and lots of diversities and the middle class world continues to dwindle, the heroic novelist’s own favorite way of seeing the world is put in peril.  

It’s just not fair. In fact, it’s a little like patricide.  The culture created by the novelist has turned on him (or her).  The adversarial novelist claimed to hate the smug, self righteous, self satisfied creatures of the middle.  But now it turns out you can’t have a margin unless you have a centre. You cant be an iconoclast unless you have a tradition.  Bad luck, old chums. There are, of course, Middle Eastern societies that could surely use your heroic contemplations.  But I am certain you are not nearly so heroic as that.  

References

Donadio, Rachel. 2005. Truth is Stronger Than Fiction.  New York Times, August 7, 2005. 

Trilling, Lionel. 1965. Preface. Beyond Culture: Essays on literature and learning. New York: Penguin Books, p. 12

Sanneh offers a paean to summer in the Times today. It’s about “the song of the summer” which this year happens to be by Mariah Carey.

Sanneh does his characteristically elegant job describing the song “We belong together,” the artist’s  return to grace, the state of the music industry, and one or two trends shaping contemporary taste (e.g., the “thug love duet”). The song of summer is expertly contextualized, and the Times manages, for once, to get this right: to take contemporary culture seriously and help us see what it is and why it is…while it still is (active and extant).

The song of summer is a telling cultural institution. I am pretty sure no such thing existed in 12^th century France or even 19^th century America. And I believe I can say with some confidence that nothing of this kind exists in contemporary North Korea. (Though I understand there is a large and active Kelly Clarkson contingent there.)

Any song of summer is a little miracle of consensus. Somehow we choose, in our mysterious way, that this is the song of summer. And this is no mere popularity contest, a simple designation of “the song we like best.”

No, the song of summer will have many responsibilities heaped upon it. It must be the sound that, on early hearing, manages to communicate the impossible riches of the summer to come, and, by August, it must be the song that is already giving off a “world we have lost” nostalgia. And twenty years hence this song must be capable of allowing today’s 14 year old to recall with archival perfection her favorite blouse, what her sun tan lotion smelled like, and a general “sense impression” of the world that was the summer of 2005.

This is a lot to ask of a tune. But “We Belong Together” is that cultural operator that will make this summer a “culture of the moment” within a larger cultural system that so streams with change and discontinuity that the very idea of consensus and compartment is implausible. (And we think divas are paid too well!)

So I started wondering if there was somewhere in blog land, a post that would capture the power of the song of the moment for someone who was 14. I didn’t quite find anything, but I did find this. It was written yesterday by a teenager in Lubbock, Texas.

Ok so ONCE again…SO many people are demanding another blog…well A person but it still counts. And so i figured i would do a little sumation of the summer. Let’s see i arrived in Lubbock the day after graduation so basically ive been here for eternity and at first i seriously thought i would die from being so bored. Like i havent seen my parents all year or whatever, but really after the first week being here i felt pretty caught up!! I love em and all and im glad i get to see them now..but seriously its been ALL summer.

[…]

but THANKfully ashley came and stayed with me a week! I was so happy!!!! WE had so much fun…so many things happened like everyday. For example, getting trapped in a dimly lit, sketchy (love that word!) hastings parking lot at 12;30 am by this hispanic stalker guy. he completely blocked the exit with his car and I was so close to hitting him. I braked really hard and Ashley and i both look at each other and scram(past of scream). And being the stalker that he is…stares us down like pieces of meat. And finally when I realize i need to reverse (after being so traumatized) he follows us out the other way…tailgaitng us for a mile down the road. My house was only like 2 blocks away but i knew i couldnt go home b/c then he would know where i live!! (those lifetime movies taught me well ;-]) I dont know how but we lost him…WOW what a relief that was the scariest thing ever.

Yes, this girl can write. It is prose straight out of speech, but this is harder than it looks. Let us close this glass-bottom glimpse of someone’s summer and the kind of thing that is going to return from memory with Proust like perfection, when in 2025, our blogger hears “We Belong Together.”

And so just as we are leaving at like 10pm we walk to the car and i see this guy with his hood up..so you know you HAVE to ask if he needs help. And he was like "i could use some plyers" SO i was like plyers…plyers.. I had this roadside kit my grandpa gave me that i never opened. But I proceed to look for the plyers he needs and I reach for what appears to be plyers. I said "OH here they are! But why does these have a rope connected to them???" He said "those are jumper cables."

References

Merey Moo. 2005.  untitled post. BloggyBlogBlog.  Aug. 3 entry.   (tiny editorial changes made)
 
Sanneh, Kelefa. 2005. The Summer Buzz: Cicadas and Mariah Carey. The New York Times. Aug. 4, 2005, here.

I had drinks with Ed Cotton last week.  He’s at Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners, the firm that asked  consumers to make ads for a Converse campaign. It’s one thing to talk co-creation, another actually to do it, and yet another to make it work.  Converse web traffic went up 40% to 400,000 unique visitors a month.   Converse sales went up 12% for the quarter.  (400,000 unique visitors a week, now that’s language a blogger can understand…and scarce imagine.)

By this reckoning, marketing  works as  culture to work as commerce.   Erick Soderstrom, Converse’s global marketing chief:

Our customers tend to be creative and we’ve given them the biggest canvas we have to express themselves–our advertising.

Converse becomes the medium for someone else’s message.   Bully!

But here’s what caught my eye.  When Ed was doing research in Santa Monica, he talked to a kid who was wearing mismatched shoes.  Both were, I think, Chuck Taylors, different models thereof. 

Here is customization and co-creation that doesn’t actually require that Punk stand-by, the felt tip pen, or the scissoring so beloved of the Japanese teenager.  Combining pre-fab elements from the world of goods is both the simplest act of creativity and the biggest.  It creates new meanings, and appropriates old ones, without executional compromise.  The empowered consumer does not end up looking like a rank amateur ("Look, I drew on my t-shirt!").

Mismatched shoes are also nicely subversive.  There is somewhere in the clothing code a notion that holds over from the Elizabethan era that says a person’s shoes must show that they are in the Elizabethan lingo, unconcussable.  Shoes, especially the shoes of the male and the young, are meant to show that the wearer is, all apologies, grounded.  (High heel shoes take their semotic precisely from the way they break this rule.  The wearer, a female, demonstrates her vulnerability, her fragility, her elegeance, her powers of evocation by showing herself not at all grounded.) 

Plus, let’s face it: symmetry is to clothing as exhausted a genre as addled exposition is to a movie.  It’s like enough already.  You don’t really have to repeat yourself.  We got it the first time, carry on. 

We know that the world of goods is governed by rules of combination.  There are some things that always appear in a hipster’s apartment in Park Slope and other things that never do.  (Connecticut has rules of its own, believe me, and they are stupifying.)  These rules open up a great modularity for the cunning, the creative consumer.  (We got a not very interesting glimpse of this from the Ashley twins this summer, as they combined a variety of clothing inspirations.)

One of the  questions here is whether brands will set their products free.  Will they encourage consumers to mix and match the product with unexpected choice mates and a new combinatorial freedom.  This is a path out of the ordinary and the predictable.  It is one of the ways to keep the brand from overforming and losing its dynamism.  (It is of course, also  the very strategy with which Hollywood stars seek to keep their career alive: casting themselves against type.)  Perhaps once we have got over the present preoccupation, and somewhat embarrassing preoccupation with buzz management, we will take modularity as a new way to manage the meanings of the brand. 

References

Kiley, David.  2005.  Advertising of, by, and for the people.  BusinessWeek.  July 25, 2005, pp. 63-64.

I had the honor to have lunch with Joan Kron today.  Ms. Kron is interesting for many reasons, but she won my particular admiration for having run  a smuggling ring for most of her career.

Joan works the coast line between the academic archipelago and the Agean sea of journalism.  Clearly, these two domains find one another in miles of contact,  but they have been policed so well and so viciously that scholarly discourse and popular communication were, until recently, very close to mutually exclusive categories. 

In High-Tech, Ms. Kron identified the fact and the origins of a trend that is only now washing into the suburb.  (Think Metro shelving, open, metal shelves designed to withstand cold temperature in industrial kitchens.  No, you don’t have this but believe your neighbors do.)  Ms. Kron saw this in the late 1970s.

Home-Psych is, in my opinion, the single best translation of academic ideas for popular consumption.  Ms. Kron interviewed academics on the topic of how and why Americans construct this thing called "home."  I was one of them.  I began the interview with trepidation.  Not to worry.  Joan has, if I may mix my metaphors, great "return of service."  She gets it and returns it effortlessly.  (I have said ungallant things about Yale on the blog, but if Joan is the proper measure of the school, I take them all back.)

Lift was a careful study of the plastic surgery business.  Joan interviews doctors and patients.  She submitted to plastic surgery of her own. She is now regarded as the single most expert "civilian" (non MD) in the world. 

Has she been well treated?  Academics, designers, and other journalists have taken turns heaping scorn upon her work.  Clare Cooper Marcus took special pleasure in her assault on Home-Psych.  Many of this thought this was sad, because Marcus isn’t very bright and her competing book isn’t very good.  But she got a reading that Kron did not, because she has credentials that Kron does not. 

Of course, these days we waltz back and forth across these boundaries without a second thought.  This is the license of our new post-modernist mobility.  But sometimes I see a youngster engage in academic trespass, and I think to myself, "You know, it was always so.  It used to take a small boat, a shuttered lantern, and all the guts you could muster."

References

Cooper Marcus, Clare.  1997.  House as a mirror of the self, exploring the deeper meaning of home.  Berkeley: Conari Press.

Kron, Joan and Suzanne Slesin. 1978. High-Tech: The Industrial Style and Source Book for the Home.  New York: Clarkson Potter. 

Kron, Joan.  1983.  Home-Psych: the social psychology of home and decoration.  New York: Clarkson N. Potter.

Kron, Joan. 1998.  Lift: wanting and having a face lift.  New York: Viking.

At a cocktail party, the topic would come up. Inevitably. And when it did, all the academics would make condemnatory, exasperated noises. TV was bad, soulless, empty, moronic. Everyone knew that. One by one, they would take the pledge, one of the pledges, anyhow:

“We have no television.”

“We have a television but it’s black and white.”

“We have a color TV but it only gets a couple of channels.”

“We have a TV with cable but we never watch it.”

“We watch cable TV but only PBS and ‘serious’ programming.”

“We watch several channels on TV but we make fun of everything we see.”

You only had to wait, oh, about 17 minutes before these same academics would be demonstrating an astonishingly thorough knowledge of Law and Order and the specific accomplishments of Michael Moriarty and Sam Waterston as the Executive Assistant District Attorney.

This was not just the sherry talking. The academics had to give one another permission to take the topic seriously, to settle into it by degrees. Because of course they did. It was only for official purposes that TV was “not done.”

Some of the more desperate neo-Cons continue to insist on this position. But the rest of the world managed to come to its senses.  Most academics no longer regard TV watching as a “shameful secret” and a “guilty pleasure.”

This is a very big cultural difference, one of those differences that makes a difference. I am not sure who gets the credit. Some of it must go to people born in the late 60s and 70s.  It’s also true that TV got better (HBO and all that). But this weekend I came across something that might some day be seen as a watershed: in 1993, there was a changing of the guard at the Times crossword puzzle.

No, really. Before 1993, the author of the crossword was Eugene T. Maleska, former Latin teacher and, according to the Times, a curmudgeon of some standing. “If you were of a certain age or a cultural snob or raised in or around New York City (or, ideally, all three), he was your hero.” On Maleska’s death, the job fell to Will Shortz whereupon, “the puzzle began to demand much more extensive knowledge of contemporary culture.” It was now necessary to read something other than the Times to dispatch its crossword.

But this is just the surface thing, really, the obvious one. For Shortz’s puzzles also demand “the ability on the would-be solver’s part to come to terms with a number of other puzzle dimensions: themes that bear on how one interprets clues correctly, rebuses, squares containing more than one letter or figure, graded levels of difficulty, and so on.” In sum, the puzzle began to demand a dynamic engagement. You have to listen to the game as you play it. The game instructs you as you go.

Ah, cultures, by their puzzles we may know them.  Ah, puzzles…

References

All quotes from: Romano, Marc. 2005. First chapter: Crossworld. As excerpted in the New York Times. July 10, 2005. here. 

Acknowledgments

Hargurchet Bhabra (for the title of this post)

Light blogging today thanks to those scoundrels at Optimum Online. This morning, in the new house, I had internet service. Then it stopped. So Optonline could come out “and turn it on.” When are they going to cease and desist this little scam?

To the business at hand. In New brands, new consumers, a couple of days ago, I reflected on the success of a perfume that had deliberately embraced an unexpected rubbery scent. I noted that a move away from the agreeable and bland opens up a vast terrain of new meanings for products and for brands.

Today, as I was shifting boxes, I began thinking about Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise. Here are two celebrities who do not appear to be following the traditional playbook.

In the old model, really big stars were scrupulously careful to remain noncontroversial. They sought flattering roles on screen, and an agreeable persona off screen. (Indeed this distinguished them from actors, people prepared to play even odious characters.)

The old model changed a little when big stars began to embrace unattractive roles on screen. Mel Gibson was all about being charismatic on his way up. But in the last couple of years he has played roles that were not especially flattering. I believe Payback and Conspiracy Theory serve as cases in point. In the same way, Tom Cruise played an assassin recently. (Sorry, I can’t think of the picture. It’s the one with Jamie Foxx. Thank you Optonline for blocking my access to IMDB.)

And now both Gibson and Cruise have gone a step further still and devoted their private lives to projects that are controversial for many and loathsome to a few. (I am thinking of Gibson’s The Passion and Cruise’s recent “exuberance” on Oprah. There isn’t enough data here, and clearly it will be a cold day in hell before we see anything like this from Julia Roberts or Michael Caine.  But if this is early indication of a new trend, perhaps we will see celebrities express themselves more frankly. 

This difference would make a difference. As it is, celebrities remain great guarantors of the uncontroversial, unmarked, unexceptional. They have suppressed their real individuality to broaden the base of their fandom. Their roles on screen may help encourage (and in a cultural sense fund) our heterogeneity as a society, but their private lies do the opposite. They suggest (and perhaps help fund) a private blandness.

Let us see whether celebrities become more forthcoming, and what difference this difference makes to the rest of us.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my sister-in-law Michelle Goodman for helping me to identify several movie titles. Thanks to Starbucks for a remedy for Optonline’s thuggish behavior.  Thanks for the several great comments on recent posts. I promise to respond the moment I am not having to do so from the Starbuck’s parking lot. 

In today’s New York Times, there are a couple of stories on perfume. Both contain surprises that attract the trend watcher’s eye and the marketer’s scrutiny.  

Surprise 1

One of the hits of the perfume season smells like rubber.  Horyn of the NYT describes it is “a manly, tasty blend of black pepper and bergamot with just a hint of Scotch pine, whiskey and – could it be? – rubber.”

"People are always shocked when they smell it. They’re like, ‘Oh, this is really good.’ Well, that speaks a lot about perfume today.  People are all too often prepared for something powerful and not immediately pleasant.” (Christopher Brosius in Horyn, 2005)

The perfume industry has always been able to reach beyond the merely pleasant and agreeable for scents that were more nuanced, interesting and mysterious. But this is the first time, I believe, they have willingly embraced something that was “not immediately pleasant.” It made me wonder whether the industry was breaking with what, a couple of days ago, we called minstrel marketing: the inclination to offer products and services that were agreeable, even when this meant they were also a little bland or entirely idiotic. 

In a fiercely segmented marketplace, some marketers are prepared to embrace a trade-off: in order to get real engagement with the consumer, they embrace something that is stranger and less agreeable. In this case, the perfumer achieves a smash hit with (and by) something that smells like rubber.  

This has an interesting implication for the world of marketing: we can now reach for brand meanings that were once out of bounds. Now the brand can have meanings that are dark and/or difficult, and/or a little odd, and/or really (not merely) mysterious. Once we give up being agreeable, an entire range of meanings and creative strategies opens up to us. (Several days ago, we noted this development in the case of Honest Tea.)

Surprise 2

The perfume in question is endorsed by and named for the Hollywood star, Alan Cumming. And this is really counter-expectational. For Cumming is not comely. He is not handsome, especially likeable, or even charismatic, except in that spooky way villains sometimes are. Here too I think we appear to see a willingness to “buy” engagement at the price of a marketing device that is unattractive or at least unconventional. 

If Cumming is now a useful celebrity endorser, the universe of acceptable endorser has just expanded dramatically.  Can a perfume contract for Steve Buschmi (sp?) be far behind.  Come to think of it, virtually everyone in Reservoir Dogs should be expecting a call.  Just kidding.  But you see what I mean.  If Cumming’s useful as a source of meanings for a brand, we are looking at a substantially expanded set of possibilities, one that takes the marketing world well beyond its usual band of happy, beautiful people.

Surprise 3

Gina Pell is the CEO of Splendora, a fashion web site. She is a sophisticated consumer of perfumes. She has a large collection of scents which includes Stella McCartney, Must de Cartier and Cuir de Russie by Chanel. So Ruth La Ferla of the Times was surprised that Pell also uses Curious. This is the Britney Spears perfume, something La Ferla describes as “a vanilla-and-peach-scented elixir that is distinctly mass market.” 

This is a mixing of the high and the low, the disciplined and, um, peachy.  When Silverstein and Fisk (authors of Trading up and members of Boston Consulting Group) observed this sort of mixing and matching behavior, they put it down to a wish to attain high status goods.   And La Ferla is clearly tempted by this interpretation, calling Curious a “guilty pleasure.”  And this may well be it. But when Pell is asked to explain herself she says she mixes Curious with Eau d’Orange Verte by Hermès, “to set her[self] apart from those ‘blind trend followers’ who would never dream of tainting their Fracas or Prada with a drugstore scent.

This mixing and matching behavior may be driven by a status motive, but we may also see it as an indication that where we do not create new variety, the consumer step in and create it for themselves. In Pell’s case, we are looking at customization that makes her scent absolutely distinct.  And down this road we may see a branded, commercial world in which there are, perhaps someday,  as many meanings as there are consumers.  And strewn along this road lay the ruins of the arguments of those who insisted the commercial society must always encourage a regression to the mean, a uniformity of offering, and a strict conformity of purchase behavior.  
Surprises 1 and 2 suggest that the meanings of the brand are becoming more various…and not a moment too soon.  Suprise 3 says consumers are becoming more various too. 

References

La Ferla, Ruth. 2005. The Guilty Pleasure of Smelling Like Vanilla and Peach. The New York Times. June 30, 2005. here.   

Horyn, Cathy. 2005. The sweet smell of celebrity. The New York Times. June 30, 2005. here.

McCracken, Grant. 2005. Minstrel marketing and the Hegarty trade-off. This Blog Sits At… here.

McCracken, Grant. 2005. Brand meaning management: new opportunities. This Blog Sits At… here.

McCracken, Grant. 2005. Who is the Celebrity Endorser? In Culture and Consumption II: Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (releasing any day now, I promise.)

Silverstein, Michael and Neil Fiske.  2003. Trading up: The New American Luxury. New York: Portfolio.

I saw Lisa Kudrow in The Comeback last night, giving a performance wonderfully more skillful than anything she ever attempted in Friends. 

Pam, my wife, spotted something I didn’t. Kudrow hits the woody vocal notes of a Katharine Hepburn as if to place a “do not cross” barrier before her.  This made more poignant what I could see: the desperate good humor Kudrow beams from within the compound so to signal, apparently, the willingness to capitulate before any attack is broached.  Passive aggression in a new key.

It is a cringingly good performance. Where Kudrow on Friends was ditzy and loveable, here she is almost too painful to watch.  There is in fact only one way to watch this program:  horrified fascination. Her “comeback” must end badly.  I haven’t felt this uncomfortable since I was watching The Office. 

Friends was a joke manufactory.  Characterization, plots, sets, actors, all were subordinated to the need to deliver funny every 4.5 seconds or so.  (The program was a program, as it were.) But The Comeback is closer to drama than comedy.  When Kudrow must choose between ha-ha funny and the cringingly accurate, she is knows what to do. She has engaged in hours of meticulous observation. She has done her anthropology. And now she delivers it without remorse, and sometimes without the funny.  (This is why the show will fail to produce more than HBO numbers, despite its star. It is more interested in the comedian’s comedy, than mainstream comedy. See my post below for more on this argument.)

Television that makes you cringe? Who would have guessed that the great “wasteland” of television would ever have this effect?  And it got me thinking about all those CSI moments when we are obliged to look at the most ghoulish of scenes: bodies that are damaged or decomposed to the point that someone in the room is moved to shout “hey, they can’t show that on TV, can they?”

Law and Order used take the standard approach. Each show would begin with someone lying prostrate, body and clothes askew, blood modestly in evidence, as if the camera were saying (assume voice of Denis Leary), “listen, this person has met with an act of violence and now they’re dead.  Ok? Let’s move on.”  Not any more. Now the camera pours over cadavers like a ghoul. And everyone at my house puts their hands over their eyes, and waits for Molly, the cat, to give the all clear signal. 

So what’s happening here? Is this a trend?  Is culture shifting? Johnson argues convincingly that TV has become more intellectual demanding, with more themes and a new complexity.  Could it be that TV is becoming more emotionally difficult, too?  Now that the simple plot lines are disappearing, so are the easy laughs and the cheap sympathies.  Now we have to pay for our humor and our drama and engage with something more like life. 

References

Johnson, Steven. 2005. Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.  New York: Riverhead.

McCracken, Grant. 2005.  Anthropologist saves Hollywood.   May 11, 2005.  here.

The Opensource interview with Jason Scott and Christopher Lydon got me thinking about who will capture an ethnographic record of contemporary society and how. 

Good news from Time Magazine.

It has become fashionable to take a menial job–nanny, say, or assistant to Anna Wintour–and then snitch about it in a thinly veiled novel. 

The latest case in point, apparently, is a novel by Rachel Pine, The Twins of Tribeca.  This is said to be an insider account of Miramax, here called Glorious Picures.  This won’t be as good as a true ethnographic study, but then it’s hard to imagine that the Weinstein brothers would have let an anthropologist in.  (For God sake, Harv, let me know if this is wrong.)

What we need know, for someone with lots of time and a very deep knowledge on contemporary non-fiction, is a map of contemporary culture (and its groups, activities, institutions, economies, and so on) that shows where all the existing "first person ethnographies" now stand and where the blanks exist. 

I expect Hollywood is pretty well covered.  The world of capital somewhat less well.  And the world of Little League coaching, for instance, not at all.  Too bad.  But then the publishing industry is "funding" only those ethnographies that promise scandal, titillation, celebrity worship or schadenfreude. 

Wouldn’t it be a good idea for an "Institute of Contemporary Culture" to recruit and fund people to do the rest? This was an issue that did not emerge in the Open Source show.  Thank god for people like Jason Scott who now captures podcasts.  But until the documentation of contemporary culture is given over to the safe keeping of the marketplace, it will remain a minority enthusiasm and a spotty one at that.

We need two things:

1. Someone needs to set up a documentation service.  This will drop in on us every x months and record as much or as little as we want them to.  At a minimum this should be a detailed record of our material surroundings, a 40 minute interview in which we say who we think we are and what we think we are doing in/with our lives, and, less often, a quick race around the neighborhoods and cities in which we live and work.  We need a snappy name.  (Paging Leora Kornfeld.)  And we need storage facilities.  And then we need a business model.  I don’t think we’d have to charge much for capture and storage.  And there is a failsafe factor here.  Even if someone decides that they no longer wish to continue with the service, we can store their data indefinitely and sure as shooting someone in the next generation is going to want it.  (What would you pay for this kind of record of your parents in their 20s?  I personally would pay a small fortune.) 

2.  We need a Paul Allen or some other patron to create the Institute that would capture the things that private, for-profit initiatives do not.  It might not quite as much fun as owning a major league sports franchise, but hey, you get to be remembered forever. 

References

Anonymous.  2005.  Five fantastic first novels.  Time Magazine, June 20, 2005. p. ~70. 

If they were Martians, we’d resent them by this time  It’s not enough that celebrities  commandeer our admiration on the silver screen.  Now they publish books, release clothing lines, start rock bands, found restaurants, launch political careers,  and otherwise colonize as much of the non-movie world as possible. 

Why, just a couple of days ago, I was buying a shirt in Greenwich.  There was no staff anywhere, and when I went to investigate, I discovered Angie Everhart surrounded by sales staff.  Not her fault of course.  I could entirely see the point of witless admiration and it was all I could do not to stand there staring too.  When Ms. Everhart was not glowing, she was shining.  When not shining, she was gleaming. We had gathered round her like so many flowers to the sun. 

But celebrities compete  in our lives even when they are not actually front and center.  Here’s how Chuck Klosterman puts it:

I once loved a girl who almost loved me, but not as much as she loved John Cusack.  …  If Cusack and I were competing for the same woman, I could easily accept losing.  However, I don’t really feel like John and I were "competing" for the girl I’m referring to, inasmuch as her relationship to Cusack was confined to watching him as a two-dimensional projection, pretending to be characters who don’t actually exist.  [This should have] given me a huge advantage over Johnny C., insasmuch as my relationship with this woman including things like "talking on the phone" and "nuzzling under umbrellas" and "eating pancakes."  However, I have come to realize that I perceived this competition completely backward; it was definitely an unfair battle, but not in my favor.  It was unfair in Cusack’s favor.  I never had a chance.

Actually Klosterman has no idea how bad it is.  Reading this passage, I suddenly heard it being spoken in the voice of the character that Cusack plays in Hi-Fidelity.  Klosterman  complains about a celebrity stealing his girlfriend?  The celebrity steals his voice.

It’s when they insist they can play the little guy, this is the only place we draw the line.  As when Tom Hanks plays that poor bastard living in an airport.  Or Russel Crowe plays a working class hero in Cinderella Man.  This is where we say, you can have stardom, your books, clothing lines, rock bands,  restaurants, and political careers,  but you can’t play the little guy.  You can’t insist that your celebrity is a "get into anywhere free" card and then make it go away in the movie house.  We’re not buying it.

Maybe.  The other more terrifying possibility is that we are so enamored of celebrities, we have ceased to care about the little guy.  Little guy, schmittle guy.  We’re all celebrities now.  Give us movies about movies, not movies about life. 

References

Agins, Teri.  2005.  With Her Own Line, Pop Star Rides Rise In Celebrity Fashion Upstaging Upscale Designers, Jessica Simpson Prepares For Big Launch in Stores Nixing a ‘Cheesy’ Touch.  Wall Street Journal. June 9, 2005.  A1.

Klosterman, Chuck.  2004.  Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs.  New York: Scribner, p. 2.

In transit today to do the Open Source show on WGBH and to see old pals in Cambridge.

The show tonight is called "Attention, calling all future historians."  Show time is 7:00. 

The Open Source  link is down.   Here is the way they describe what they do. 

Open Source from PRI is a LIVE on-air conversation designed to capture the sound of the Web, embracing the Internet transformation of media as host Christopher Lydon engages callers, e-mailers, and bloggers from around the world on a range of topics.

"My ambition, with producer Mary McGrath, is to thread the seeming chaos of the Web into a coherent skein of ideas and argument," says Lydon. "We want to launch the smartest, most wide-open, democratic conversation anyone’s ever been invited to join, in any format. The Internet transition we’re living through is a boundless opportunity. It extends the rim of the roundtable and the range of the give-and-take to the whole planet."

And, yes, that  penultimate sentence does make you wonder what they think they are doing inviting me. 

Tomorrow, I take part in a WGBH-Open Source show called “Attention Historians of the Future.” My “Pepys Project” argued that blogs will someday be used to reconstruct our life and times.

Jason Scott, the internet archivist, is all over this. He is capturing podcasts by the many thousands. Open Source producer, Robin Amer, asked me to have a look at a few of these. How, she wanted to know, might future historians use them.

First things first. Future historians will know and revere the name Jason Scott. They will build little shrines to him. They will name their children after him. Unlike the rest of us, Jason gets to be immortal.

Mark Johnson

1) Mark Johnson gives an autobiographical glimpse of his participation in the world of gaming that takes us from his childhood to the present day. Some of things that will jump out in 100 years.

1.1. what life was like before the internet. Most everything Mark knew about gaming came, in the early days, from other, very local, gamers. This vision of networks before the internet will be one of the most exotic things about us and one of the toughest things for future historians to imagine and reconstruct. Mark can help.

1.2 historians will pounce on Mark’s use of the term “geek.” In 100 years, they are going to be extremely keen to see how this term emerged, changed in meaning and valence, and how it helped form the self concept and community of some of the people who helped create the internet. Mark uses the term with pride and apology.

1.3 the challenge of this documentary work is for the “assume nothing” rule. This means listening to what one says and supplying an explanation for taken-for-granted terms. The further historians are from our time, the more extensive and intensive “archeology” they will need. Mark has a splendid style. It is crisp, clear, almost completely without ego, rich in detail, and architecturally well designed. He excavates well.

Still, there are moments when even the present day ethnographer wants to shout out, “For God sake’s Mark, give us more.” This happened especially when Mark talks about the advent of role playing games. We guess that this changed gaming extraordinarily. But Mark does not illuminate here.

2) Ron Brugler puts his sermons on line.  These are interesting for a couple of reasons:

2.1 Ron is just about the most patronizing speaker you have ever heard. That people were prepared to put up with this when it was virtually banished from all other forms of discourse will interest. Was this the voice of sincerity? Did patronizing speech say that this was a man who “felt your pain?” What was going on here?

2.2 Ron appears to be engaged in a “how slow can I go” bicycle race, telling stories that just take forever. (Really, it’s like using a 56k modem again.) This is the exception that helps prove a rule: we are a culture that prizes pace. Why this sermon (and the church of Swedenborgian) is allowed to break the pace rule will be a nice little puzzle for future historians. (The answer may be simple. It may not.)

3)  Free traffic tips from Tinu Abayomi-Paul

Our culture is extraordinary because many of us have seen the “man behind the curtain.” We have glimpsed the grammars of filmmaking, television, music making, etc. Almost all of us are hip to the codes of production.

But there will be places and people that do not evidence this cultural competence, and parsing who understood what and why, will be one of the ways historians will preoccupy themselves. Enter Traffictip.com. Whoa, baby. Here’s a woman who has a charmingly imperfect understanding of what makes this sort of thing hum…or not. (Again, why Tinu is indifferent to, or exempt from, prevailing rules might be illuminating or it might be banal.)

4.  Radman talking about Ascii art and early computer music (chip tunes)

This is where Jason’s work really shines. The cultural production being talked about here is way, way off the mainstream and this is just the kind of thing vulnerable to the forces of neglect and entropy. This is the sort of thing that must be preserved. And there are some interesting moments that illuminate the state of our aesthetic categories as when Radman talks about a chip tune version of oye com ova as being really funny and really good (or words to that effect). I am pretty sure this is a aesthetic judgment (and its mixing of admiration and contempt) that did not exist even 20 years ago. Discovering it will be a future historian’s notion of a compelling thesis opportunity.

References

More from Jason Scott here

More from Mark Johnson here

More on the WGBH show here

Last note:

Please forgive if there is a little choppiness in the next couple of days. I am moving from Movable Type to TypePad (Thanks to Dave Ely.)