Google continues to experience rough air as it seeks altitude.  We might think that they would have looked at Microsoft before them.  Microsoft managed to squander a vast amount of brand equity and brand opportunity by acting like the bully on the block, putting the screws to third-party competitors with all the grace and generosity of a Chicago street gang. 

But no.  Google decided to piss off the entire academic world by appearing to disregard copyright.  For a marketing point of view, this is a howler of the first order.  It is harder to imagine a segment better placed to do you harm than the academic world.  They have much too much time on their hands, possess snit sharpened wits, and have access to the minds of the young for four formative years.  Good one, Google.  (Though I must say, I am sympathetic.  Academics with life time security are well compensated.  The state might well say, "your publications belong to the public domain."  Many scientists already act is precisely this spirit.)

Enter Amazon with a program of its own.  None of the Google/Microsoft bullying here.

Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos wouldn’t comment specfically on the Google library program.  But he said, "It’s really important to do this cooperatively with the copyright holders, with the publishing community, with the authors.  We’re going to keep working in that cooperative vein." 

Hey, presto.  This is largely a matter of respect.  The Internet players needs to be seen to be honoring the old technologies (print), the old institutions (universities) and the old content professors (professors), with a nod in their direction.  And surely it can’t be very hard to create a micro payment system that send small amounts of value to the producers.  (One would have thought that this is the kind of thing Google could have banged off in a Sunday afternoon.)  This is about diplomatic gestures, and these don’t have to be expensive.

But no one, not Google, not Microsoft, not Amazon, not Apple has come to terms with the real issue.  At the moment, everyone is looking for the payment model.  As the head of the Authors Guild puts it, "The book industry has to find its equivalent of iTunes." 

Oh, please.  What the industry has to find is its equivalent of iPod.  Until we have some sleek, perfect, deeply useful, "have to have it," "have to hold it" piece of technology for reading digital format, this issue will remain a minor one.  Here’s what we need, a piece of hardware that makes hard copy, ink of paper books look antique and preposterous.  What we need is a piece of technology that is so perfect to the hand and the eye, so good at capturing our "marginalia," so good at helping us extract, organize, store and repurpose the text in question, that we cannot go home again.  What we need is technology that makes a pulp of fiction.

Yes, we still love the feel, the ease, the tangibility of books, but somewhere out there is a piece of technology that does for reading what the computer did for word processing.  And once it is in place (designed by Apple, softwared by Microsoft, supplied by Amazon, with content discovered by Google?), we will go back to "books" with the same astonishment with which we go back to an IBM selectric II typewriter.  These were the ones that made it sound like World War I is taking place in the living room (when it was merely your girl friend writing her thesis).

Will someone please create a reading machine.

References

Mangalindan, Mylene and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg. 2005. Google This: Amazon Plans to See Portions of Books Online.  Wall Street Journal. November 4, 2005, p. B1. 

Brands have a new way to win the loyalty of the consumer. 

They can serve as a "content supplier."

My argument can be reduced to a number of propositions.

1. That consumers, especially younger ones, are building social networks with new urgency.

Technology makes this easy.  The sheer churn of contemporary life makes it necessary.  Like any complex adaptive system, consumers understand that one of the best ways to respond to dynamism is with more social contacts.  These contacts serve as portals of knowledge and opportunity.

2. That these networks are content hungry. 

Social networks have an hydraulic quality.  They must carry information in order to sustain themselves.  So the only way to maintain them is to feed them. 

In the case of Korean college students I interviewed a couple of years ago, this meant sending a constant stream of messages and photographs through their networks. 

3.  that these consumers are content hungry.

Much of the content that passes through social networks is modest in its character.  It is informational, but the information is pretty slender.  Or it’s phatic, and a declaraction of mood.  In either case, it is almost purely hydraulic.  It is designed to keep the channel open and the network alive. 

4. that consumers need more and new content suppliers.

Traditionally, we have thought of high school was an educational enterprise.  We now know this is wrong.  No, high school exists to create content for teenagers that they might build, expand, sustain and vivify their social networks.  (As in "So then Jeannie slaps him, like, really hard and I was standing there, and then Suzie starts to laugh, so I start to laugh, and he gets really mad and everything.") 

Popular culture, and especially the vast media industry that supports our preoccupation with celebrities, might also be seen as a content supplier.  This is to say, we pay attention to the latest goings on of Jennifer Anston not so much because we are interested but because we believe our friends will be interested.  (How many males read the Sports page because this supplies coin of the conversational realm?)

5. that brands can supply new content

Experimential marketing points in this direction.  It creates events that can then be reported through the network.  Buzz marketing is of course precisely about driving communications between consumers.  (Strangely, it has been incurious or unsophisticated about the mechanics of networks and the motives of network communication.  Why is this?)

6. but will they?

I don’t think any brand is now in the business of building the brand by making itself a content supplier for the consumer.  Certainly, it is true that any great new product (iPod) and lots of new creative (see the new campaign for Playstation) will generate lots of chatter around the water cooler and supply to this extent lots of "network activation. "  But this is happening as an unexpected spin-off of the marketing enterprise. 

This reminds me vaguely of the Dole pineapple operation in Hawaii in the 60s.  Someone asked what they did with the juice after putting the pineapple slices in cans.  "Oh, we throw it in the  ocean."  There is value being created here that is not being captured.

More pressingly, because brand managers are not creating network value in a self conscious way, they are not using the body of knowledge that we know have on this topic. 

This suggests that we need to establish a rapproachement between the branding community and the social software community.  This will take some doing as the two communities have very different ideas of what they do, and want to do.  (The social software community does not think in terms of content creation, for instance.)

Who will take the lead?

References

For more on social software, see these websites:

Many2Many

Social software

Social software II

Seeing an opportunity to expand that expertise into traditional media, Google in recent months has purchased ad pages in two technology magazines and made the space available to some of its advertisers. Google has also indicated that it is thinking about extending its ad-placement services to other areas, possibly including TV. (Brian Steinberg, WSJ)

The WSJ says that Google’s move has Madison Avenue trembling. For God sakes, why? Google doesn’t know anything about advertising.

All Google does is provide a channel for the delivery of what might just as well be classifieds. Everything in this pipeline is information. None of it is meaning. And meaning is what Madison Avenue makes. Meaning is what Madison Avenue does.

Of course, this does not mean that Google won’t stride into the advertising business and make an ass of itself. Most smart people look at marketing and say, with a patronizing smile, "How hard can this be?" They then try to do it themselves, in the process giving the world a most convincing demonstration of how hard it is.

It’s as if smart, numerate people believe that their qualifications are not so much skills, as secret passwords to any part of the business world they care to enter. And indeed, as long as the part of the business world they want to enter is governed by economics assumptions, this is largely correct. But the moment, they want to enter the part of the marketplace governed by culture, new rules apply, and now even very smart, and very numerate people are inclined to screw things up royalty. (This would be where the Google founders founder, I guess.)

What should Google do? I have a deep intuition that the right thing to do is to buy everyone in the corporation a copy of Culture and consumption II. Make that two copies. Mind you, that could just be me. 

What will Google do? Chances are, it will try to enter advertising on it’s own and make a proper hash of it. Then it will buy an advertising agency and try to reverse engineer it to see how it works. (And wouldn’t we all like to be flies on the wall to witness this exercise in the inscrutable.)

What should Madison Avenue do? Tremble? Hah! There is a whapping great difference between computer science and cultural science.

References

Steinberg, Brian. 2005. Google Weighs on Madison Ave.: Ad Firms Watch Closely As Search Engine Ponders Move to Traditional Media. Wall Street Journal. Oct. 31, 2005. here. (subscription required).

For the last couple of days, I have been surrounded by some 180 designers. (I’m at at the Design Management Institute Meetings in Chatham MA.) It’s been interesting. Things are changing fast.

This is a happy time for the profession. Once a stow-away on the S.S. Corporation, design now has its own stateroom. The CEO of P&G, AG Lafley created the first VP position for design. This is a massive endorsement, and we might think of Lafley as a prince awakening design from its slumber.

Of course, this sudden ascent was hard earned. Design can claim iPod, Razr, Chrysler 300, ThinkPad, VW Bug, Virgin, Starbucks, W Hotels, JetBlue, and Target among its successes. To an outsider like me, it looks as if the Razr helped return Motorola from a depressive episode to its accumstomed place of glory. At lunch today, I heard myself say (normally I try not to listen), "This is what stands between corporate greatness and failure? A single piece of design? Good lord." (Motorola announced earnings of $933 million for the second quarter of 2005. This compares to a net loss of over $200 million for the same quarter a year ago.  In Q2 of 05, Motorola shipped 43 million handsets, 10 million more than Samsung.)

I think design truly was an anomalous presence in the corporate world. It was conducted by "creatives" and other people who insist on wearing "interesting" glasses. The corporation was nervous and if it could have figured out some way to dispense with or automate design, it would have done this eagerly.  Or we might put this another way: design was to the corporation what sex was to the English ("only when necessary and as little as possible"). So it’s come a long way.

Where is the profession at this moment of transition? I can’t claim to have conducted anything like a thorough ethnography but a couple of things are clear.

First, design was clever to move into the branding area. The ad agencies had sometimes made a hash of this. And marketing MBAs were systematically deprived of the intellectual and practical concepts they needed to manage it. Designers were right to move in and this will serve them well.  They were also right to move into ethnography.  Anthropology was being it’s usual hamhanded self, and along came IDEO, Sterling, Toniq, and other players and helped themselves.  Very wise. 

But (second), new competences are called for. To deliver against the demands made by Lafley and other CEOS, design will have to become deeply knowledgeable about contemporary culture and increasingly skilled in the ability to read its shifting trends. It is not enough to wear interesting glasses. The designer will have to have a deep and systematic knowledge that takes them outside the aesthetics and design communities they normally inhabit. (This is another way of saying that living in NYC, going to the right clubs, and reading the right magazines, will no longer be enough.)

I know someone is thinking about this issue. I talked to a woman at lunch who wanted to know whether I thought MIT and the Comparative Media department might enable her to add a deeper knowledge of culture to her design practice. So someone is looking at (and for) the big picture. (For the record, I said, "yes." )

But it is not clear that the professional associations are well prepared. As I read them, they are anxious to leverage the dignity, seriousness and standing of the design field by giving it academic associations and credentials. This is an antique and wrong. No one in the corporate world (especially outside the capital markets) cares where or whether someone went to school. Furthermore, academics are badly out of touch with contemporary culture (with the distinquished exception of my colleagues at MIT, of course). Hankering after academic prestige at this moment in the career of the design profession is, I think, a little like putting a suit of armor in a modernist home. Yes, a little status still attachs to this sort of thing but, really, it’s not clear you’re quite grasped the the larger strategic agenda (or design opportunity).

At the moment, the honeymoon continues. Designers are being invited in into the corporate world, and at this stage in the game all successes are praised and all failures forgiven. But capitalism and the corporation have a way of coming to take for granted what once seemed exceptional. And when this moment comes, creating the Razr will take new competences and especially the ability to read contemporary culture as never before.

In this moment, it might make sense for the design community to reach out to an Andrew Zolli or for that matter a Bruce Nussbaum. But, no. DMI just hired a Ph.D. I am sure he’s a brilliant guy. Certainly, he is a charming one. But this was not the time to tap the ivory tower. On balance, I would have thought it would make more sense to engage with movers and conceptual shakers in the real world and stear clear of this and other looney bins.

References

Nussbaum, Bruce. 2005. Target is a great design innovator. here.

Reingold, Jennifer. The Interpreter [on design at P&G]. Fast Company. June. here.

For more data, on the razr and Motorola: here.

Thanks to Katherine Stone at Decent Marketing, we know that Mercury has taken to the streets. Marketers for the Mercury Milan,

"showed up unannounced at Mums & Pops Cafe in Philadelphia on Friday and bought everyone free cups of coffee."

This reminds me of my recommendation to a liquor company looking to secure a position in the Canadian Maritimes. I argued that the most potent marketing tool at their disposal was a spell binding story teller, or as we might call it the theatre of the brand.

Here’s what you need to know about the Maritimes. It is a place where people lived in outports for hundreds of years, where the chief entertainment in these tiny settlements was other people. They descend from Irish, English and Scottish traditions that favor the story teller. (I know of only two other cultural traditions that favor talkers as much as these: one is aboriginal, the other Jamaican. Most of us can hold forth about as long as takes a newscaster to report a story.)

This world built up an extraordinary oral tradition, complete with all the standards items of maritime lore: acts of skill and bravey, inexplicable sightings (ghost ships, etc.), the time the beach filled with deck chairs from the Titanic, and so on. Maritimers love telling stories and they love hearing them. This made them fabulously good respondents in the ethnographic interview. But it was also the chief finding of the research:

these people can talk, and talk must be the medium of the marketer’s message.

Here’s what you need to know about liguor marketing in the Maritimes. It is dominated by the usual strategies of the bar world: free tastings! free coasters! neon logos at point of sale! brand spokeswomen built like bar maids! and that least talkative of marketing strategies, brand slogans kept short and snappy.

So the idea was to participate in the story teller tradition. I recommended that the brand team find a group of out-of-work actors, prep them with some narrative resources, and then send them into the bars of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. Have them tell stories. Have them buy drinks. Have them hold forth. Make them leave. Timing was, by my reckoning, crucial. Spell benders should stay no longer than 90 minutes. They sould show up one evening, at all bars at once, then two weeks later, and then perhaps once a quarter for the duration of the campaign.

This was key: Not a single explicit mention of the brand in question. No stories that have to do with alcohol. When the spell benders buys drinks, they should buy the brand in question. But that’s absolutely it.

My strategy was to allow the oral tradition to "find out and fill in." And you know it will. Maritmers will repeat the stories they hear from the spell binder. Sure as shooting, they will tell the story about "the guy who came in here one night and told these great stories about the days when the Maritimes were…"

There are two reasons for this brand diffidence. First, the more the marketer burdens these stories with brand names, the less likely people are to repeat them. Second, the more obviously a brand makes itself the source of the spell bender, a) the less time and energy people will give to figuring out who did stage the spell bender, and b) the less credit the will give to the brand for the gesture.

Call it brand murmur. When this brand murmurs, everyone is inclined to figure out "who these guys were" and "where they came from." The less we give the consumer, the harder they work. Guesses are hazarded. Choices are made. The brand that approaches so delicately is a brand that may be admired for acting more like "one of us" than "one of them." Now the brand is acting with the delicacy of an invited guest. People like this. They are a little tired of brands that act a great, crashing brand bore, boar, or boor.

There are a couple of take aways for the experiential marketing handbook (at least as I see them, Katherine would have a clearer idea, I’m sure.)

First, discover obey the local culture. Use its favorite media. (Coasters not always the best idea.)

Second, proceed as if less is more. Engage their detective work.

Third, invite completion. In this case, invite them to tell more stories.

Fourth, keep a small footprint (fewer reps better than more).

Fifth, practice brand murmur (aka brand diffidence). Don’t go crashing in there.

Sixth, engage theatrical resources. In a world saturated with mediated communications, there’s nothing quite like the real thing.) (Besides, we’re Elizabethans, too).

What did they do. I didn’t want to ask, and I didn’t have courage enough to check. But I have a terrible feeling they decided to stick with the free coaster and bar maids.

References

Stone, Katherine S. 2005. Meet Them Where They Live. October 17, 2005. here.

An open letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal:

In these pages, today, John Quelch said,

This is well and good, as far as it goes. In a perfect world we would all be utility infielders, equally gifted in all the things a marketer needs to do. But we know perfectly well there’s a trade off. The more skillful we are at some things, the worse we are sometimes at others.

Except at the Harvard Businsess School, where Professor Quelch teaches. In point of fact, there is plenty of training in "left-brain" and quantitative skills at HBS, but virtually none in qualitative skills and what Prof. Quelch calls "creative flair."

This is a problem not just at HBS. Most marketing managers are not formally trained in the performance of their "right brained" activities. This is in some small part because of the influence of HBS. Despite this educational, intellectual deficit, marketing managers continue to be one of the great founts of value for the corporation. While their colleagues are busy squeezing nickels, the marketing managers are the ones who attempt to reap the whirlwind of contemporary consumer taste and preference. And a good thing, too. For as Prof. Quelch points out, "Since customers are the source of all cash flow, marketing and sales excellence are critical."

In sum, Prof. Quelch is whipping the marketing manager for failing to acquire statistical skills when in fact this manager is a) the only reliable supplier of the creative problem solving from which the corporation now extracts much of its value, b) hampered in this exercise by a paucity of formal training in qualitative skills and creativity. (Take a bow, HBS.)

It’s a great idea to give every marketing manager better at running the numbers. While we’re at it, should we make up the bigger deficit in matters of cultural literacy, pattern recognition and creative problem solving.

The corporation is a little ship on the high seas. It must negotiate the perfect storm of the contemporary market place. Reading the instruments is a necessary skill. Looking for land, this, too, could be useful.

My Microsoft migration continues. As readers of this blog know, I dumped Outlook for an online calendar, Explorer for Mozilla, Outlook for gmail and now it looks as if I just dumped Word for a Web 2.0 appliance called Writely. That leaves just Powerpoint and Exel, and I’m done.  (Yes, I know there are alternatives here too.)

The key thing: how risk averse and technologically unsophisticated I am as a consumer. If someone like me is preparing to walk away from my Microsoft suite…well, it may be time to share your shares. I did.

All marketers treat themselves as a window on the consumers’ soul. They know, or ought to know, their tolerances, and this allows them to use themselves as indicators of what is going on in the hearts and minds of millions of other consumers.

Here’s how it breaks down:

I am prepared to walk away from the brand that has been, for several decades now, my friend in need. In the early days, Microsoft seemed liked the safe bet, the necessary companion for a computer novice. Now I am prepared to go to a number of suppliers, some of them brands and companies I have never heard of. Consumers grow up and they leave the brand as surely as kids grow up and leave home.

I am also prepared to allow me software to sit on the internet. This is something I thought I would never permit. I thought I needed to control the means of production. Gmail cured me of that.

There is a small downside here. If I have my hotel info stored in Gmail, and I am checking in, it’s hard to get at. But even this naive consumer can see that internet access will shortly be completely ubiguitous and always on. I can also see that it’s going to be free. (As we all know, Google is going to give away wireless to the city of SF and, as we can guess, the city will embrace them for it. It is a way of giving wireless access to those with low or no incomes.)

You’ll notice that I haven’t said anything about dumping Windows but I noticed that this morning that Dell will release a computer with no operating system installed. Twelve months ago, I would have said, "weird." Now, I think, "yeah, that’s a good idea."

The installed base that Windows and Office give Microsoft an advantage every marketer dreams of. The conventional notion is that the brand is maximally sticky, the consumer substantially captive, the competition simply locked out.

But it may be that we now live in a market so dynamic that even this advantage, apparently as insurmountable as Hadrian’s wall once was, might someday crumble. Branders and other marketers will come across it in old copies of the business press years and years from now. "Microsoft?" someone will ask. "Sure," comes the reply, "they were right up there with Wang. You know, in the early days."

But here’s what’s really strange. With the world now slippery with new challenges, Microsoft continues to manage its branding as if this were not the most urgent order of business at its disposal. With everything else going to hell in a handbasket, surely it makes sense to secure the enterprise by rebranding the company. Surely, it’s time to wrestle the company away from the scrappy, argumentative, contrary spirit of Gates and the great legion of clones he has installed in the corporation.  Start again.

No, not "kinder and gentler." Just someone or something that expresses the best qualities of the world of thinking machines, virtual realities, and streaming signals: curiousity, generosity, playfulness, vitality. Geez, we may not have a "singularity" to look forward to, but grumpy, what’s-in-it-for-us small mindedness is not the stuff out of which great brands ever come. 

Microsoft is losing altitude at speed.  Branding is one of the things they can do right now.  Sure, their problems are wired into the corporate culture.  So what we have now is a certain truth in packaging.  Microsoft the brand is transperantly Microsoft the people. 

Put it this way.  The brand can speak in both directions, inside and out.  If Microsoft create a brand that speaks of curiousity, generosity, playfulness, vitality and if it then license sthese qualities inside the corporation, real transformation is possible. Perhaps it will take courage and imagination from the fact that they are no longer playing an incumbent position.  If the gridiron has taught us anything, it is that playing "safe" is usually a losing proposition.

When Eric was 5, he taught himself the periodic table.  He already knew the alphabet.  Then he started to wonder whether the alphabet and the periodic table might somehow spring from the same thing. 

I heard about Eric at the Association for Consumer Research meetings over the weekend in San Antonio.  His Dad and I went to dinner, thanks to John Deighton’s introduction.  His Dad has looked at the difference between round and sharp numbers in the area of pricing. 

Round prices ($10.00) are the work of, um, rounding.  We don’t suppose that a new product comes out at $10.00.  Someone rounded to make things simpler.  Consumers read and react to round prices in a variety of ways, some predictable, some not. 

Sharp prices ($18.37) are "real(er)" numbers.  We suppose they represent a more faithful reckoning of the accidents of production or profit calculation. 

Forget pricing, all marketing used to round.  Products, brands, communications, were all simplified to make things easier.  This was an important part of marketing’s "value add."  This meant that entire decades were rounded.  I give you the 1950s.  This meant that there could be only one, unique selling proposition.  This meant keeping it simple (stupid) and repeating ourselves endlessly.

Now we’re all, as consumers, a little more like Eric.  We have better pattern detection skills and we find brands and communications that are rounded a little tedious.  We want commercial creations that resist interpretation…at least at first.  When it comes to new products, innovations, and ads, we want manageable difficulty.  We want to find the patterns, not have them imposed upon us.

The early Disneyland was a rounded experience.  Other cultures were survived up in a simplified, easy-to-think, format.  Now we prefer to go some place that is still sharp, unmediated by the tourist industry, not served up for touristic consumption.  Which is to say, we want pattern detection, some of it, to be left to us.  We want a little noise in the system, a little grist for the mill.

Rounded marketing versus sharpened marketing, this is the difference between

Sony versus Apple
McDonald’s versus Burger King
Microsoft versus Google
Kroger versus Whole Foods,
Whole Foods versus Central Market, 
Wal-Mart versus Target,
Chrysler versus General Motors,
Wayne Newton versus Circe du Soleil
a one-hour TV program versus an hour of "surfed TV"

Naturally, we consumers are never going to be entirely like Eric.  (When I was 5, my parents were getting my hearing checked in the hopes that this might the reason I was so out of it.)  We are never going to be so fiercely pattern seeking that we can manage utter and constant noise.  But clearly we’ve got better, and, just as clearly, this means that rounded marketing is dead. 

And this means that we must all be, as marketers, a little more like Eric.  We need to be looking for pattern matchs in new places.  We must be a little more ambitious in the problem solving.  We must be prepared to reinvent the terms of reference.  We can do this like the English, one problem at a time.  Or, we can do like the French, with grand new declarations of the new face of marketing.  (I must tell you that I heard distressing little of either approach at the ACR San Antonio meetings.  We seemed to be acting as if the world of marketing were pretty much business as usual.  But academics, they are typically the last to know.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpts from:

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

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

*Last note:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post script:

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

References

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

Once you start looking, they’re everywhere!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post script

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The surgery went okay, I think.  (Thank you to everyone who offered well wishes.)  The drugs are formidable.  Not a  bad thing under the circumstances. 

This afternoon, I had a moment of clarity, possibly.  I know marketing discourse is not supposed to be drug assisted.  But sometimes you have no choice.  I am taking Oxycodone.  (insert joke of choice here)

I found myself wondering.: Who owns the future of marketing?  There are several contenders:

1. the MBA programs and the academic marketers who staff them

2. the marketing practioners working inside the corporation

3. the marketing practioner working as a consult outside the corporation (jack of all trades variety)

4. the marketing practioner working as a consult outside the corporation (single method seller; e.g., Jerry Zaltman, Claude Rapaille)

5. the design community now poised to take over branding and other aspects of the marketing field

6. various social scientists, including anthropologists and ethnographers

7.  [other contenders, please suggest]

One way to answer this question is to see which of these contenders is best qualified to answer the following question:

What is the best way to think about the

1. extended product

2. as it speaks to/works for/connects with

3. the whole consumer (i.e., the multiple consumer, one or several aspects thereof)

4. in several categories (another multiplicity, this one created by the fragmentation of definitions of class, lifestyle, region, family type, gender, etc.)

5. as a result of  best methods and most illuminating research contact

6. in the creation of greatest value on several registers

7. all of this changing in almost real time to respond to the dynamism of contemporary markets and cultures.

7.  for the extraction of greatest price

Now to answer the question.  I believe that the business schools have pretty much disqualified themselves.  They continue to use an economic man model of the consumer and it is precisely this that is now under challenge.  The designers are making a very interesting challenge to the branding world, and they are strong in the matters that the MBA graduate is weak: what is the visual language that allows the brand to define itself.  Neither one is especially good, in my opinion, in summoning the social scientific theory that should help us understand who and what the consumer is becoming, what and who the brand must be capable of coming, and what theories can help us make real contact with the consumer.  Academic social scientists continue to be hostile to the market place and to marketing.  B-school "importers" of social scientific theory and method continue to borrow and retrofit when they should in my opinion be working much more from the ground up. 

In sum, none of the would-be claimants appear to have a very good claim.  The future of marketing has got away from us.  It has become suddenly and vastly more complicated.  Products and services must deliver many, sometimes subtle utilities to consumers who are now evidencing an internal and an externality complexity they did not have before.  How to talk to the consumer, how to discover what these many values are, how to define them, and most important how to harvest them, these are new questions for which we do not appear to have ready answers. 

I know this is a little too summary to be useful.  I will have another go tomorrow.