I have been on the road for the last week and a half, and something remarkable happened while I was away. Google went from being the darling of the internet to something poised on the verge of branding ignominy. WTF?

Many things are happening at once here. John Battelle’s book about Google is being talked about.  Google is on the verge of a second stock offering.  There are two new products, Talk and Desktop 2, that reveal more comprehensive ambitions in the marketplace. The article by Elinor Mills, a CNET staff writer, has been released and Google has blacklisted CNET.

The most striking public event in the last 10 days: the press is now prepared to speak ill of Google. Criticism has become a thinkable posture.

I guess this was inevitable The anti-Microsoft could not hope to remain so forever.  As it grew, Google would eventually lose it’s "little guy" status and risk reclassification as the new bully on the scene. 

But what is interesting for a marketer is to watch this event play out in one’s own head.  Over the last few years, Google had wormed its way into my affections. I had made it my search engine, my email supplier, and my desktop search engine. I was impressed by the product development strategies and other aspects of the corporate culture. I was pleased to see Google anoint itself as an enemy of the philistine Microsoft.

And then in the last ten days, things shifted. Call me capricious. Call me inconstant. Call me superficial. But suddenly I could feel the brand slips its moorings. For a marketer, this is a revelational moment. We are there at the moment of creation, in this case, recreation.  We are there to feel the brand sliding out of one meaning and sit poised on the verge of others. 

Most of cultural meanings come draped in their own inevitability…even when they are that particularly subset of meaning, the brand. We don’t choose to think them. They’re just there. We don’t give them their authority. They bring that with them when they enter our world.  We don’t give brands their power or their meanings. We merely honor what is extant.

Until things change. Google is now exploring that moment when the brand is suddenly separated from the meanings and the glory thrust upon it. (No doubt, some of these meanings were crafted through good marketing.  But only some.) Now, the thing, the brand, is negotiable. Now its labile.  Now we know what Google does next, and how we respond will make this thing in our heads called “Google.” 

Now the hard work of marketing begins in earnest.  I wish them well. I think.

The slump in Hollywood pictures continues. Ticket sales are off 11.5 percent from last year. 

There are many thoughts on what the trouble is. Waxman of the Times reviews them:

… a failure of studio marketing, the rising price of gas, the lure of alternate entertainment, even the prevalence of commercials and pesky cellphones inside once-sacrosanct theaters. But many movie executives and industry experts are beginning to conclude that something more fundamental is at work: Too many Hollywood movies these days, they say, just are not good enough.

There is another factor that does not seem to be getting much play: the fragmentation in consumer taste and preference. 

Hollywood continues to rely on the blockbuster to make its numbers…and occasionally, this miracle of consensus is forthcoming (e.g., The Wedding Crashers). But any marketer can tell you that markets are fragmenting. This must mean that blockbusters are harder and harder to manufacture. To be sure, Hollywood has always promoted “chick flicks” that could talk to men, and mature pictures that could bring in the young. But the differences of gender and age map only a relatively small part of the difference “out there.”

To make matters more difficult, TV has got better at responding to difference. Hundreds of channels, and the opportunity to leap between them instanteously, this is what responsiveness looks like in the "channel" channel. (Skipping between films in the multi-plex is just wrong somehow.) Furthermore, the relative health of the indie film industry means that there are more and more films that can be precisely targeted (Bend it like Beckham) and one or two “sleepers” that come from narrow origins to go wide. 

Packaged good marketing has had the great luxury of offering multiple offerings in fragmenting channels. Hollywood is obliged to make a one size that fits all. This is not impossible, but it will take a reinvention of the filmmaker’s art and science. As I understand it, marketers in Hollywood now stand mostly for artistic compromise. They encourage market accommodation with scant regard for artistic costs. 

And this is interesting to contemplate: marketers as fully committed to the success of narrative as they are to the demographic reach of the product. What business school is prepared to take this on? Where is the MBA program capable of this breadth? Let’s be honest. Existing MBA program are currently doing a terrible job preparing their students to ride the Tsunami of a dynamic contemporary culture. What makes us think they could add to this new knowledge, the ability to engage in “product innovation” (aka script development) that spoke to many audiences with both artistic engagement and marketing acuity.   Because, and this is the marketer’s new lesson,  it can’t work as a marketing enterprise unless it works as an artistic one. 

In sum, as Hollywood struggles to respond to the challenges of contemporary culture, marketing partners must struggle, too. 

References

Waxman, Sharon. 2005. Summer Fading, Hollywood Sees Fizzle. New York Times. August 24, 2005. here.

A nice observation in the NYT today:

[E] xpanding [student] expertise beyond computer programming is crucial to future job security as advances in the Internet and low-cost computers make it easier to shift some technology jobs to nations with well-educated engineers and lower wages, like India and China.

"If you have only technical knowledge, you are vulnerable," said Thomas W. Malone, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of "The Future of Work" (Harvard Business School Press, 2004). "But if you can combine business or scientific knowledge with technical savvy, there are a lot of opportunities. And it’s a lot harder to move that kind of work offshore."

This suggests that the first world advantage will not come from being a knowledge worker and the isolated creation of intellectual capital.  It will come from the ability to see how technical knowledge integrates with a fuller  range of marketing intelligence. 

Western cultures have done very well by constructing knowledge silos and making management the cat walk that sees to their integration.  The development of which Malone speaks suggests that the wealth of nations may also come building into the individual a fuller appreciation of the ultimate uses and markets for which any particular act of innovation is destined. 

This is another way of saying that marketing, with a little application, might still be the hero of the piece, the wheel house on which the wealth of Western nations, er, turns. 

References

Lohr, Steve.  2005.  A Techie, Absolutely, and More.  New York Times.  August 23, 2005. here.

(filed from Philadelphia)

Gucci, the fashion house, is embracing some of the basics of marketing research and a new consumer-centricity.  This innovation is the work of Robert Polet, formally of Unilever PLC.

This is a sensible way to manage risk in a volatile marketplace…and a good idea.  Most fashion houses continue to adhere to the "muse model."  Great talents  like Tom Ford are hired for their ability to call on their muse (or perhaps more exactly to serve as one), and anticipate where the market is going to go.  In this model, marketing intelligence does not come from the focus group and other kinds of marketing research.   It descends from on high, as the fashion genius divines what lies ahead.

Clearly, fashion has lots to learn from non-muse marketing, but I wonder if learning shouldn’t run both ways.  While fashion houses are learning from marketers, shouldn’t marketers ask what they can learn from fashion?

Here is the problem.  As the rate of change increases, lots of markets are taking on the long standing characteristic of fashion ones, specifically, that consumers often cannot tell you how they are going to react to an innovation.  This is especially true in tech markets where people tell you that they have no interest in a "personal computer" or a "modem" and 6 months later can’t live without them.  In these cases, it really doesn’t matter how good the research is.  The consumer just doesn’t know. 

Fashion has struggled with this order of dynamism, and the designer has proved an extraordinary asset.  Designer listen carefully to the market, to one another, to contemporary culture.  Mostly, they listen to themselves.  Their intelligence is an extraordinary winnowing system.  They comb the heavens for  possibility and more often than note, they can see five years ahead of the rest of us.   

Joan Kron is the best postioned purpose to investigate the intellectual system at work here.  But she tells me that the research is almost impossible to do.  When asked how they do it, designers are inclined to say they "just know"  what they know.  And they can’t say how they got there. 

This is a pity, because the world of marketing would be well served by seers of this kind.  And I guess we have them.  Faith Popcorn is clearly one.  I am not sure who else qualifies.  And of course the whole idea makes us uncomfortable because it has the effect of black boxing the very thing, forecasting, we want so much to make manifest.  But this is a real resource and, as I say, an increasingly valuable one in dynamic markets. 

Muse marketing is too important to be ignored. 

References

Galloni, Alessandra.  2005.  At Gucci, Mr. Polet’s New Design Upends Rules for High Fashion.  Wall Street Journal. August 9, 2005. 

The Times recently quizzed a marketing expert on what it takes to build a brand.

The answer, from Kenneth Roberts, was, well, disturbing.

Q. Aside from basic advertising and marketing, what does building a brand entail?

A. What it’s all about is reaching your customer through touch points, or all the points where people interact with a product. You know about Mercedes because you’ve seen the ads. Or you’ve visited the showroom. Or your best friend has one and told you about it. Or maybe you’ve test-driven one. Or maybe you’ve owned one or two or three. There are whole different levels of knowledge. Then there is a range of different experiences – the buying or leasing experience, the ownership experience and the "trying to find a hard-to-find part" experience. All of those shape your perception of Mercedes as a brand.

Q. Who’s doing a really good job of branding these days?

A. Have you flown on Virgin? They do a spectacular job. They’ve constructed an experience for their customers that’s very different from the other airlines. They’ve identified the touch points. The safety video, for example, is a cartoon. When they give you the instructions to take your shoes off going down the slides, everyone in the video looks at this guy wearing cowboy boots. It’s a little hipper, a little funnier than others.

Starbucks is about selling a cup of coffee, but they’re doing a lot more than that. They recognize that. Apple, through the design and online buying experience, also has done a very good job of addressing a whole series of interactions.

By this reckoning, the brand is created out of experiences that occur everywhere the consumer interacts with touch points. The marketer’s job is to figure out and design every touch point so that it creates new and more compelling experiences.  

Hang on. I do not doubt that finely crafted every aspect of the brand is a good and strategic thing to do. I don’t doubt that thinking through every opportunity for interaction is a good and strategic thing to do.

In the name of Philip Kotler, Sydney Levy and all that’s holy in the world of marketing, have we forgotten our fundamentals?  Brands are first and foremost a bundle of meanings. Were it not for these meanings, it would be impossible to talk about brand images, brand personalities, or brand positions.  When we craft brand experiences, we are doing so to communicate brand meanings.  

If branding were really about experiences, we should find all brands driven down a single rodeo chute and confined together in a single pen, with precious little space to show their difference.  All brands, to move the metaphor a little, would aspire to be perky, solicitous, charming and chatty.  The best they could hope for would be, my metametaphor, high school’s consolation prize: great personality!  

In a world dominated by a preoccupation by touchpoints and experience, all brands would be, in Huelsenbeck’s phrase, like cats in the half light of the cathedral, which is to say, virtually indistinguishable.   

Let’s take the example that Roberts addresses: Mercedes.  No amount of touch point management is going to fix this particular branding problem.  As Roberts notes and everyone knows, Mercedes has (or had) a quality problem.  

Meaning managers know how devastating this is. The problem is not just that Mercedes is supposed to be a quality car.  The problem is that quality plays are very particularly role in the Mercedes portfolio of meanings.  

In our culture, there are two reasons that status meanings are treated with some discomfort even by the segments who prize them the most. 

1) Most men see status meanings as dangerous to the claims to “guyness.”  Call this the “Little Lord Fauntleroy” problem. Any male who displays too much concern for status compromises his claim to gender meanings he prizes. The “quality” meaning allows guys to say that they buy the Mercedes because “frankly, I think it’s the best made car on the market.”  The moment Mercedes loses its quality meaning, it’s status meaning becomes an embarrassment.

2) Most people wish to embrace and display their status meanings, but there are certain moments (high school reunions, dinner with inlaws, company pic-nics) when they wish to be seen as “just folks.”  Everyone wants versatile personhood, and the trouble with status, in our culture, is that it forces a trade off: it gives you a social identity with impact but it forces an estrangement with other identities and solidarities.  When the quality message is intact and conspicuous, the consumer may resort to “I buy it for the quality” positioning.  The moment quality is compromised, the trade off is enforced.

The Mercedes brand is a collection of meanings that must be constantly renewed, burnished, balanced, and when necessary rotated.  No amount of touch point management is going to get the job done.  

As everyone knows, this is a perilous time in marketing.  (A friend of mine was recently recalling somewhat wistfully the time not so long ago when you could reach 85% of Americans in a single week by means of the big three TV networks.)  Now that the marketing rule books and the marketing tool kit have changed, this is the time for us to change only what we must. And remember what we know.    

References

Holstein, William J. 2005. Sometimes the Sizzle Can Drown Out the Pitch.  New York Times. July 31, 2005. here.

Levy, Sidney J, and Dennis W. Rook. 1999. Brands, consumers, symbols, & research: Sidney J. Levy on marketing. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publications.

Kotler, Philip, and Sidney J. Levy. 1969. Broadening the Concept of Marketing. Journal of Marketing: 10-15.

Kotler, Philip and Kevin Lane Keller. 2005.  Principles of Marketing.  12^th edition.  New York: Prentice Hall.  

Everyone with a Flickr account got this email yesterday. It’s an innocent little communication, not to be given a second thought.  Click the “delete” icon and it’s gone.

 

The Flickr team has up and moved this week to Californ-i-a and has
been singing Beach Boys songs non-stop since arrival. And you’re
moving too!

We’re moving each and every pixel, bit, and byte, all your data, lock,
stock, and barrel, from our humble server shack in Canada to our new
server palace in the U.S. of A!

This process will begin during the week of June 28 and will result in
speediness, stableness, and happiness. For more information, please
visit the FAQ about the data center move.

Thank you, Flickreebies, for making Flickr such a wonderful place to
share, connect, and befriend. We love you! (In an entirely non-creepy
way.)

– The Flickroobies

But we’re laborious here at This Blog Sits At.  We sweat the details, interrogating them until they “spill.”

Here’s what we got when we tortured the Flickr email. Why the interrogation? If brand building is a process of relationship building, this could be interesting. 

1) The email tells us something we don’t need to know. Indeed it tells us something that would otherwise have been invisible. (We don’t care whether Flickr is resident in Canada or the US, just so long as our accounts are available on line.) It seizes a pretext for communication. The motives here can’t be informational (or referential, as the linguists call it).  They must be otherwise. Interesting.

2) Flickr doesn’t just announce a move, it uses a voice that is revealing and chatty.  (They are singing Beach Boy songs at Flickr.) The tone is exuberant and a little corny (“Californ-i-a,” “U.S. of A.”) 

This kind of communication is characteristic of contact between friends.  We tell friends about the small, nonessential details of our personal lives.  (The closer we are, the more likely we are to do this.)  The function of this kind of communication is that it keeps us in sync.  We might call this “phatic information.” It is designed to give us the sense that we are “in touch.”.  (When do relationships end?  It is precisely when this kind of information dries up and blows away.)  Interestinger.

3) I wonder if we could say this is a performative (“wishing makes it so”) strategy.  If Flickr talks to us as if there is a familiar relationship, then they create a familiar relationship.  The full intention of the email are revealed: Flickr use a familiar tone to create a familiar relationship, and so to create an intimacy and bond. Interestingest.

4) Actually, the tone is not merely intimate, it is sentimental. “Thank you for making Flickr such a wonderful place to share, connect, and befriend. We love you!” To my flinty, Protestant soul, this feels like it goes right over the top.  I am grateful that Flickr provides a service. Their love, I can take or leave.  On second thought, I will leave it.  Hmm.  Less interesting.

5) But here’s the thing that really struck me, the people at Flickr call themselves Flickroobies and they call us Flickreebies.  Suddenly, I feel like I am back at a United Church summer camp where they were used to put us into groups of 4 or 5 and give us "jazzy" names designed to whip up a little tribal enthusiasm without actually encouraging us to stage an amateur production of Lord of the Flies.  (Naturally, we did anyhow.)

Strickly speaking, I don’t care what the people at Flickr call themselves.  But I am pretty sure I do not wish to be called a Flickroobie or even to know that I am so called at Flickr. 

Call it an arc. The first three stages move upward, using simple linguistic strategies to help build the Flickr brand, and then, Icarus like, things go too far, and the entire enterprise  comes crashing down.  Hey, it’s still early days and we are learning. 

Here’s the cover of my new book.  Lively and engaging, it is still missing something. 

Exactly.  No kind words, no endorsements, no puffery, no (b)logging rolling.

Consider this a solicitation.  I would be grateful for any and all suggestions.

Examples:

This book stands like a colossus in its field. Winston Churchill

Great to dance to.  Cher

Keeps doors open real good.  A  friend from high school.

You get the idea.

p.s., book  design by David Drummond.

p.p.s.,  C&C II due out in a couple of weeks. 

This weekend I had lunch with Stewart Owens. Stewart was the Vice Chairman and Chief Strategic Officer of Young and Rubicam. He is now a principal at mcgarrybowen.

We agreed that marketing has become more demanding at the very moment that research practitioners are, some of them, working to an ever lower standard. This means that data coming into the corporation is, some of it, compromised from the very beginning. It doesn’t matter how smart the analysis post hoc. Garbage “in” must mean garbage “up.” (GIGU is the corporate version of GIGO.)

Stewart and I remarked that a lot of the qualitative work is accomplished by people who appear to be suffering a terrible case of amnesia. People can have spent 20 years doing focus groups but they appear to have learned almost nothing in the process. They have developed no depths of knowledge. They have listen to people talk about themselves and their culture twice an evening for thousands of evenings, and nothing stuck. It’s was in one ear and out the other.

Following Ani DiFranco, we might call this the “gold fish” effect. In a song called “Little Plastic Castles,” DiFranco lays it out

They say goldfish have no memory
I guess their lives are much like mine
And the little plastic castle
Is a surprise every time.

References

DiFranco, Ani. 1998. Little Plastic Castles on the album of the same name. Copyright Righteous Babe Records. The Amazon.com link for this CD here

The mcgarrybowen website here

In the old days, corporations knew where to go for new marketing ideas. They would pick up the phone and order a new meme from the ad agency.

In due course, this was delivered by groovy people dressed in Manhattan mufti, so marked by their beauty, stylishness and a security badge that there was no danger that they would wander the halls and wreck havoc. Once the meme was delivered, the agency people would be sent away, and everyone would sigh with relief. “Thank God, I honestly thought they’d never leave.”

The advertising agency served as a kind of virus containment laboratory. It was a place where new ideas were allowed to bloom. But it was also nicely sealed away from the corporation. In this way, the corporation could have its cake and eat it too: there was creativity on tap, but no danger that this creativity would infect the proceedings or prowl the hallways.

Creativity in the corporation has always been a kind of necessary evil. Necessary because is often the source of competitive advantage, category leadership, brand profile, growth, profit and share price. Evil because it’s just so hard to manage.

Corporations thrive on system, process, top-down control, stasis and discipline. Creativity prefers fresh thinking, rule breaking and getting outside the box of conventional practice. On balance, it seems better just to keep creativity “over there” at the advertising agency.

These days are over. Now that new ideas are the very fount of value, the corporation tis getting serious about its own idea creation. And there are lots of things going on: skunk works, off site brainstorming sessions, hiring more mavericks, loosening the place up a little, and creating corporations that act more like “complex adaptive systems.” In sum, system is looking for ways to let creativity in.

But what if we had the right idea in the first place? It may just be that a rapprochement of corporation and creativity is never going to work very well.

Three reasons:

First, there is the problem of system. Management is about command and control, how generously we seek to re-imagine it. To this extent, the corporation may well remain a place that is essentially inimical to creativity.

Second, there is the problem of office politics. Every corporation is filled with people who compete for budgets, for CEO attention, for pride of place, and most of all for advancement. This means the corporation systematically creates people who will interfere with the realization of other people’s ideas, however good these ideas are.

Third, a lot of corporations make people miserable. The sheer press of business, the multiplicity of projects, the conflicting agenda and objectives, the grinding need to “make one’s numbers” every quarter, all these conspire to make life overwhelming, exhausting and grim. One effect: talented people turn into nay sayers. The corporation has found another way to staff itself with people who block innovation.

So what are the alternatives? How about a “Hollywood” model? Most of the marketing functions of the corporation would be stripped out of the corporation. Idea innovation (especially new products, brands, positioning, and campaigns) would be handed to outside partners.

We don’t want to return to the advertising agency approach. Not now that Hollywood has gone it one better. In the Hollywood case, each project demands a new talent team, purpose build and evanescent. It draws together the best people from a pool of good people, and it lasts only as long as the project. This supplies a more perfect fit of people to people and people to project.

I can hear the objections. First, what about all the things the corporation has learned about its products and brands? We don’t want to give this to strangers. And we can’t expect strangers to pick up our deep stocks on knowledge on the fly.

Nonsense. In fact, very little about what we know about our markets is proprietary. Second, the corporation is porous. Consultants see to that. More important, consultants demonstrate that people can pick things up on the fly.

Second, what about continuity? Who will help preserve the long term strategies of the corporation and its brands? The fact of the matter is that we are no longer a continuity culture. Every “brand team” is a rotating door of personnel. If the corporation really cares about continuity, why does it endure this? But more to the point, brands are themselves whirl-winds of discontinuity. They are constantly being redesigned. So too are the consumers for whom they are intended. The nut here: when continuity management gets in the way of dynamism management, it is costing us more value than it is creating.

Hollywood long ago learned now various and changeable the world has become. There was no point in making the next picture just like the old one. Consumer taste and preference changed so fast, it might sense to treat the new product as a new project. (The sequel franchise is the exception that proves the rule. The use of genres is another matter. Let’s talk.)

In the words of Bob Wright, GE’s entertainment boss, and CEO of NBC Universal Inc.:

One big difference in television or movies is that every project is very different. It’s a very project-oriented kind of work. So it’s hard to get repetitive process. It’s also hard to streamline production of a show, because by the time you get everything running just how you like, the show is over. You don’t get savings with volume.

Now that all consumer taste and preference acts a lot like fan taste and preference, perhaps its time for marketers to steal a page from the Hollywood handbook.

In a culture of discontinuity, all innovation is start-again innovation. Perhaps all marketing teams should start again as well.

References

Barnes, Brooks. 2004. Wright’s Hollywood Script. Wall Street Journal. December 23, 2004, p. B1.

McCracken, Grant. 2004. On naysayers in the corporation here.

Last note:

Apologies for having been slow to respond to comments. I have been overwhelmed with comment spam and I am spending most of my spare time weeding. MT has hired that wizard of the black list, Jay Allen, and promises a fix soon.

Last night I ended with a rather sour note that compared the consultant’s life with that of a gray hound. A good metaphor but a bad rendering of life here at the heart of world of marketing.

Something’s going on here.

It feels as if the commercial world is beginning to take up residence of the excluded middle in the strategic world—that big stretch between the academics at one end of the continuum and the marketing practitioners at the other.

The academics keep their distance. Creatures of privilege, protected by tenure, safe in the parochial world of their “discipline,” academics like to imagine themselves the occupants of the world of pure idea. But this proves to be a world so divorced from the real world, so well insulated by privilege, that they have not had to grapple with the real intellectual challenges of the day. They are persuaded the categories are unstable, but they take this to be a license for their repudiation of the world.

The rest of us must use these categories anyhow—under pressure, with a world of reference whirling around us, with moments of clarity that come and mostly go.

On the other side, the practitioners who are deeply and properly occupied by meeting their numbers and managing growth. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to look up and out.

What’s out? It is a newly imponderable world. Consumer taste and preference continues to fragment, and change runs swift and fast. Advance warning becomes more important because the future gets here sooner than it used to. What used to be an option is now a necessity. Without advance warning, we must play a game of perpetual catch, to endure a condition of perpetual surprise. As Andrew Zolli puts it, advance warning is becoming “just in time” notice.

With academics confined to their corner, the commercial world is working its way up the continuum. This week I have worked with Sterling Rice, UBS and the Global Business Network as they explore the excluded middle (though both of them, to be fair, have made a good living looking in this direction for some time).

There are rules to living in this middle ground. The first one is that no one is an expert. In the old days, these forecasting sessions would have brought oracles together with those prepaed to defer to them. But here in the middle distance, no one can know for sure. The trick is to talk about what you know, and to suggest intelligent ways to think about it. This does two things. It gives advance notice, to diminish the “surprise” effect. It gives a first form, with which to think about what the novelty might be.

This doesn’t sound like much. But without it, we are flatfooted. Everyone who has played sports knows the difference between engagement and flatfootedness. The latter happens from time to time. A moment of distraction and we are removed from the flow. The game seems suddenly to be happening around us in hyper time. The most ordinary athlete passes us around effortlessly. If this is the difference between getting the news early and having it visit it as a surprise, then value is being created here.

New York City continues to be an interesting place in which to pursue this sort of thing. You still get the sense that the future happens here first. Even when, seconds after room service arrives, you are visited in your hotel room by a cockroach the size of a Buick. He’s looking for the future too.

Men are dogs, aren’’t they?

Adrants notes a trend in the ad world: portraying men as "clueless idiots.”"

His case in point is a Domino’s Pizza ad that shows guys salivating at the sound of a door bell in a hardware store.  If you haven’’t seen it, you can find it here, courtesy of Ad Age.

Adrants thinks this might be a "reaction" to all those years of portraying women as belittled housewives.” 

I beg to differ (no pun intended).  The Domino’s ad shows guys in their new persona: as big, happy lugs with simple appetites and not a brain between them.  For several years now, we have seen men portrayed as Labradors, or, in this case, as German shepherds.

Men communicate through actions, as a German shepherd does.  [N]on-verbal communication is all you can rely on to understand your dog.  It is all you should rely on to understand a man.  […]  Your chances of turning your romantic vision of a relationship into a reality improve dramatically once you come to recognize and accept that, in a relationship, men are as different from you as they can possibly be.  (Sterling, A. Justin. 1992. What Really Works With Men. New York: Warner Books, pp. 86, 88.  Thanks to Denise McLeod for this reference.)

Men don’’t have to be dogs.  The novel Animal Husbandry by Laura Zigman and the film Someone Like You (2001, Tony Goldwyn) suggests that it makes more sense if we think of them as cows.  In The Animal (2001, Luke Greenfield), the protagonist (Rob Scheider) plays a dog, monkey, dolphin and goat.  The point is, men are now seen an animals, elemental, appetitive, and, as Adrants says, clueless.

Where in the dickens is going on here?  I think this new trend is a follow on from the feminism of the 1970s.  When "second wave” feminism fall apart, we were looking at a gender stand off.  A key statement here was the Madonna "boy toy” video of some years ago, which argued that women might as well present themselves as sexual objects.  Men were never not going to treat them as sexual objects, so it was time for women to "get real"” and act accordingly.  As long as they controlled and profited from the outcome of this treatment, a new sexual "parity" was possible.

This is the "gender separatism”" I have addressed before in this blog (2002.12.24) and it is as Adrants say, a little sad.  But what’’s especially sad is that men never seem to object to this notion that they are when all is said and done, big, happy Labradors.  For many people, those who embraced a socio-biology point of view, this seems to be a final reckoning with the facts of the matter.  But it serves us to remember that is a trend like any other, and that this too shall pass. 

The anthropology of contemporary culture is a study of cultural categories that are constantly in a state of transformation.  The categories that define gender are especially changeable, as we variously call for and accept new definitions of what "maleness" and "femaleness" should be.  We know, for instance, that hip hop has made an important contribution to the "man as dog" definition of maleness.  And we know that there is a generation of women coming up who are, they tell me, thoroughly sick and tired of the present terms of reference. 

This will be an interesting trend to keep an eye on.  Our culture is a little like the weather in Ireland, "if you don’t like what you see at the moment, wait awhile and it will change."  It won’t be long before Dominoes is selling pizza with a different notion of what men are.  In the meantime, I feel like Godfrey Cambridge, who, when asked what he thought about Jimmy J.J. Walker, the TV star who entered every room shouting, "Dy-no-mite,"” said quietly, "That doesn’’t happen at my house.”"

In sum:

Today saw the publication of another treatment of advertising, the agency world, and marketing as undertakings of dubious moral character. The treatment in question is riddled with contradictions which I labor to detail.

In total:

A recent study of the advertising industry was reported today in the pages of the Baptist Standard. (With thanks to marketingvox for the link).

The study, to appear in The Journal of Advertising, was done by Meme Drumwright, an associate professor of advertising at University of Texas, and Patrick Murphy, a marketing professor at the University of Notre Dame. Drumwright and Murphy interviewed more than 50 advertising practitioners at 29 agencies in eight cities.

It is perhaps not reasonable to judge an academic study from journalistic coverage and fully, fairer treatment will have to wait for JA publication. But there is something so odd about the Baptist Standard coverage that even premature comment is perhaps warranted.

The Baptist Standard says that Drumwright and Murphy

“found most of the people they interviewed suffered from “moral myopia”—a distorted moral vision that keeps ethical issues from coming into focus—and “moral muteness”—an unwillingness to talk about moral concerns.”

It looks as if Drumwright and Murphy broke the first rule of qualitative research. Ethnographers may not supply the terms with which respondents describe their experience and, still more fundamentally, they may not fault respondents for using terms other than our own. Apparently, Drumwright and Murphy are accusing the agency world of failing to care about the things Drumwright and Murphy care about.

I can hear the objection: but surely morality matters to everyone. This is certainly true. And so does motherhood. What would happen if we were to rush into most contemporary organizations and demand a cogent position of this topic? I’d be surprised if one were were forthcoming. Plainly, this would not entitle us to say that the organization in question doesn’t not care about motherhood or that it suffered “maternal myopia.”

What’s really scary is that Drumwright and Murphy’s methodological error actually creates their finding. When Drumwright and Murphy interview executives and find them unable to supply a detailed moral account of their actions and their industry, they take this as evidence of a moral myopia and muteness. But what they call an important, telling, damning absence is only absent because they insist it should be present!

If we dig down (this is after all anthropology), we find a presumption that there is something so dubious about advertising that in fact the executives should have a well developed moral understanding of what they do. That this is a peculiar assumption is, I think, demonstrated by the fact that we would be surprised if a pair of researchers descended on the world of dentistry and returned with the indignant declaration that this world has no active moral vision of itself. (I believe we would have the right to reply, with all due solemnity and eloquence, “hey, it’s dentistry.”)

There are lots of understandings that would be acceptable alternatives to the moral vision that Drumwright and Murphy insist upon. Some advertisers might plausibly say that they are meaning makers, that meanings create value for the product and the brand, that meanings create value for which the consumer surrenders value and so on. This is a robust, well formed understanding of what advertising is (if you will forgive me schilling for my own view) and there is no obvious or necessary ethical subtext here. By this account, advertising is an unobjectionable practice, indeed it is a vital part of the economy (and one of the most interesting places that anthropology and economics begin to mix). But it is no more moral than dentistry.

Let’s conclude with a final irony. The term “myopia” that Drumwright and Murphy press into accusatory service here is attached in the marketing world most clearly to the important work of Theodore Levitt. Levitt wrote a paradigm-shifting essay entitled “Marketing Myopia” that appeared in 1960. (Levitt taught for many years at the Harvard Business School. He was one of the people who encouraged the corporation to shift from a producer to a consumer orientation. As he put it, “…what [a firm] offers for sale is determined not by the seller but by the buyer.”)

Drumwright and Murphy went looking for their own vision of advertising and were unhappy when the world disappointed them. But surely this is the very shortsightedness that marketing was designed to help us overcome. Levitt and a generation of scholars said plainly, “it doesn’t matter what we want. It doesn’t matter what we think the consumer should want.” What matters is what consumers want, everything else is shortsightedness.

So Drumwright and Murphy break not only the first rule of qualitative research, but the first rule of their scholarly discipline. Somehow you’d think that scholars who indulge themselves in short-sightedness might be more careful about how they use the term.

The reference for Levitt:

Levitt, Theodore. 1960. Marketing Myopia. Harvard Business Review 38, no. 4 (July August): 45-56. reprinted in Levitt, Theodore. 1986. The Marketing Imagination. Expanded Ed. New York: The Free Press.

There is a popular notion in our culture that says marketing is a demon in our midst, run by a brain trust to hold all other brains in trust. (Sorry).

If the last post (on Mach 3) doesn’t reassure you, consider this witty observation by Jay Jurisich and Steve Manning at Snark Hunting. Steve says,

Nothing communicates an idea better than a dead language that no one speaks.

Here is how the CEO of Redactive Media Group Chief explains the company name.

The Latin word ‘redact’ means ‘to prepare for publication’, and combined with a sense of dynamic activity, this name captures the essence of who we are and what we do.

Captures. Then conceals. The brain trust in operation. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

On April 22 I noted how little marketing savvy we see these days from Gillette (Mach 3, I mock thee).

Certainly, this is a technological game and the person with the best blade(s) wins.

But branding is about more than technological competition. This has always been so but it is especially true when laboratories can “reverse engineer” an innovation and take it away.

The other half of branding is the cultural meanings that we invest in the product. And here Gillette has been almost clueless. They have gone after “maleness” but they have done it in the most obvious and unsubtle way imaginable.

Mach 3 is itself a pretty stupid conceit. Razors as military technology? And the advertising has not been inspired, with one recent spot featuring a picture of a red sports car interspersed with shots of a red Mach 3.

(I have met the Gillette marketing team. They came to Harvard to sing their own praises. I do not mean to be cruel, but I did not come away with a sense that this was a group superbly connected to contemporary culture.)

The marketing press is beginning to rumble in protest. In this week’s Strategy Magazine, Rob Tarry of Rethink says,

Come on, this category embarrasses me as a gender. How do our wives/girlfriends/sisters keep a straight face when these ads air? Give it up my stubbly brother, we’re not going to be astronauts or jet fight pilots or race car drivers. What are we, nine?

April 22, I was pointing out that all cultural meanings and market segments have fragmented. This means, among other things, if a brand wants to claim maleness as a meaning, it has to cover off a little more than the fighter pilot male. If I may quote myself,

“Maleness” has undergone some pretty astonishing changes and Gillette continues to pitch men with a single message and a message that has rather too much in common with the brand strategies of the 1950s.”

It is a favorite argument of the anti-marketing bashers (Ewen, Frank, Klein, etc) that brands and marketing lead contemporary culture around by the nose. But this is not what the anthropologist (or any intelligent observer) sees. In many cases, and the Gillette is a striking one, the marketer is left banging out old fashioned messages while the rest of the world moves on.

Let us give the last word to Duncan Hood, editor of Strategy Magazine:

Big marketers are intensely competitive, and when the testosterone is flowing, they can do the dumbest things. A wiser approach might be to take a break from the following your competitor’s every move, and look to your consumers to see what they want.

Hood, Duncan. Editorial. Strategy: The Canadian Marketing Report. May 3, 2004, p. 2. p. 14.

Tarry, Rob. 2004. Comment. It’s a $270-million cutthroat battle: Can anyone catch category leader Gillette? Susan Bourette. Strategy: The Canadian Marketing Report. May 3, 2004, p. 2.

Strategy Magazine

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