This Blog Sits at the

Higher education, finally

We have a problem in higher education.  Students must now choose between cultural studies and professional studies (specifically, business school).

If they choose the former, they swear off real engagement (and full employment) in the world.  If they choose latter, they swear off a deeper knowledge of the culture in which they will compete.

This is a long standing problem.  It plays out that distinction between the "world renouncing" liberal arts and the "world embracng" professional studies.  But it is a problem that has been made more grevious by two things: the continual retreat from the world performed by cultural studies and the continual interpenetration of culture and commerce in the marketplace.  The rapproachment of the two fields is, in other words, both more difficult and more urgent.

Let me put this more concretely.  Most business schools do nothing to advance the cultural literacy of the MBA graduate.  This despite the fact that success in marketing, innovation, management and the capital markets now turns more and more on a mastery here.  I noticed this particularly at the Harvard Business School, where almost without exception knowledge of contemporary culture is excluded from the classroom.  Occasionally, when teaching there, I would make a contemporary culture reference (Righteous Babe Records, the early long tail experiment by Ani DiFranco, say).  Students would look at me in astonishment, either because they had never heard of Ms. DiFranco, or because they knew her music perfectly well but never "in a million years" expected to hear her name spoken at HBS.

I am on record as believing that cultural studies has  systematically removed itself not just from real world usefulness but from any intellectual vantage point that would allow us thoughtfully to examine the interactions of culture and commerce.

The question has long been who would step up and create a program in the excluded middle?  Who would establish a rapprochment between these two worlds? Who would create a program that was fully informed and fully engaged?

I wonder whether blogging might someday serve this role.  How would we turn the materials that issue from the blogging world into the stuff of a higher education?  Interesting question, one that my new colleagues at Corante may well someday answer.

In the meantime, I am happy to report that the Comparative Media Studies at MIT is making extraordinary strides.  I realised this when responding this morning to a request on the part of a Dartmouth undergraduate who asked me to recommend a graduate program.  My reply:

Dear Sarah,

Thanks for your note.  I am happy to make myself useful in the review of some of the options, but I have to say I was yesterday  (belately) getting to know the people at the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, and it's a really impressive program (and probably your best choice).

The graduate students would be a joy to have as colleagues.  [...] 

The core of the enterprise is Henry Jenkins, and he is the odds-on-bet for the most gifted/prolific/seminal/formative guy in the field of contemporary culture.  He is well published which gives you a chance to have a look and decide if his approach works for you. 

Finally, the program appears to be breaking out of that world renouncing reflex of the academic world and is now working with some of the cultural producers in contemporary culture (e.g., MTV) in the creation of a real partnership.  This effectively collapses the distance between cultural studies and the business schools, using one to make up the deficit of the other.

All in all, it's a pretty good choice for graduate study, equally useful as preparation for further academic study or a career in the world.  Hope this helps.  Let's talk if there is anything I've left out or can elaborate on.  Best, Grant

References

McCracken, Grant. 2005. Culture studies and capital markets: parallel or converging?
November 08, 2005. here.  (for more on my unhappiness with Cultural Studies)

McCracken, Grant. 2005. Professor Quelch and the marketing manager
October 11, 2005. here.  (for more on my unhappiness with the b-school world)

Hooray for Hollywood

Good news from Saudi Arabia today.  Oprah is a star there, too. 

According to the WSJ, The Oprah Winfrey Show now airs in Saudi Arabia twice a day, five days a week.  And it turns out she is a smash hit with young women.  Conversation now apparently often begins with a hushed and eager "Did you see Oprah last night?"

Actually, Oprah is being smuggled into Saudi Arabia and the lives of these young women.  Saudi TV is controlled but more than nine out of 10 households have a satellite dish.  This gives the Saudis access to MBC4, a pan-Arab satellite station based in Dubai and the Oprah show.

Naturally, Saudi elites are not happy about it.  The WSJ quotes Maha Akeel, a Saudi journalist.

"Weekly, there are critics who say [Oprah and other Western programs] are a cultural invasion and inappropriate to society, but [because of satellite transmission from Dubai] there's really nothing they nor the government can do."

Some of you will remember that Charlotte Beers was appointed by then Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in the aftermath of the terrorist attack of 9/11 to change the way people in the Middle East thought about the US.

Beers said that she would tackle this problem by treating America as a "brand" and informed Businessweek, that "the whole idea of building a brand is to create a relationship between the product and its user." 

Well, maybe.  A simple reconnaissance  would have told us that there were at least two groups in Saudi Arabia who would respond with special force to the idea of liberty and the meme called choice.  Feminism had created a potent ideology that would speak to one of these.  What was needed was a Trojan horse to get the this message in.  Bless the Oprah Winfrey Show and satellite technology. 

Hana Balaa, director of the TNS Female Research Center in Saudi Arabia says, "Women are increasingly seeking ways to express themselves and their individuality. [...]  Saudi women are also looking at their neighbors, like Dubai, or Kuwait, where women recently got the right to vote."

I guess this is where political philosophy and marketing (strange bed partners!) begin to look a lot alike. 

References

El-Rashidi, Yasmine.  2005.  'Oprah' Is Attracting Young, Female Viewers To TV in Saudi Arabia
The Wall Street Journal.  December 1, 2005; Page B1. (Sorry, WSJ isn't giving me an URL.  Go to www.wsj.com and search for "Oprah."  Subscription required.)

McCracken, Grant. 2004.  America in the Middle East.  This Blog Sits At... March 31, 2004. here.

And stop calling me stupid

Yesterday, in It's the Purpose Brand, Stupid, Clayton Christensen, Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall endeavored to set the field of marketing back a hundred  years.

If they were merely three cranks in a coffee shop, this wouldn't matter.  But Christensen is a vastly and deservedly influential professor at the Harvard Business School, Cook the cofounder of Intuit software, and, most distressingly, Hall is the "chief strategy officer"  for the Advertising Research Foundation.  Worse, what is now merely an article in the Wall Street Journal is soon to be an article in the Harvard Business Review.  Can a book from HBSP be far behind?

The three wise men assert, 

a simple rule has been forgotten. To build a product that people want, you need to help them do a job that they are trying to get done.

the marketer's fundamental task is not so much to understand the customer as it is to understand what jobs customers need to do -- and build products that serve those specific purposes.

I had a philosophy professor who, when confronted by nonsense he regarded as especially egregious, would put down his book, look away and close his eyes.  Think of me so.

The "purpose brand" proposition  is egregious nonsense.  Brands, at their best, and among other things, bundles of meanings, some of them robust, some of them delicate, all of them poised to speak to one or more segments and to deliver unto them an understanding of not just what the product does but what it stands for, how it may be used, for whom it may stand, and where it is located in the larger scheme of things, commercial and cultural.  (These values are not functions.  They are values that create value.)

To reduce the brand to "purpose" is to dumb down the enterprise, diminish the art and science of marketing, beggar the consumer, and so displace the marketer, that our three wise men must be seen to conduct themselves as  proverbial bulls in the china shop of marketing concept, method and action, destroying advances made over the 100 years. 

Shakespeare was clear on this.  When Lear is stripped of the markers of his standing, and told that he doesn't really need them, he replies

Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is cheap as beast's." (2.4.264)

But not just Shakespeare takes umbrage.  The social sciences once embraced and then quite emphatically repudiated the "purpose" approach to things.  They called it "functionalism" and came to regard it as a violent act of reduction.  Functionalism reduced complicated human artifacts to purposes they served.  Thus did theory make us stupid.  Functionalism obliged us to ignore much of what we knew to be true about the object of study. 

Some costs of the Purpose Brand proposition: Puccini becomes entertainment, indistinguishable from Disney.  There is no difference between time keep devices called Patek Philippe and Timex.  Ford makes the same thing as Volkswagen.  All business schools, mark you, Dr. Christensen, are pretty much the same.  Intuit is only a couple of features different from Microsoft Money.  Most of all, Mr. Hall, there is no longer any such thing as advertising strategy.  Now, it's sell the function all day long.  (And to think that marketers and agencies actually fund the Advertising Research Foundation!)

The three wise men are a wrecking crew.  They would have us forget the advances made by Trout, Ries, Levy, Kotler, Levitt, to name a few. They would commit the marketing professional to the cultural illiteracy now installed  in the business school world  They restore to usefulness a theory that is scorned in the rest of the academic world.  But most of all they would will away some of the most interesting, most difficult, and, yes, most useful elements of the marketer's responsibility.

Join with me now.  Let us look away and close our eyes. 

Reference

Christensen, Clayton M., Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall.  2005.  It's the Purpose Brand, Stupid.  Wall Street Journal.  November 29, 2005; Page B2. 

Shakespeare quote is approximate. 

Surfing Your Own Wave: plenty, Netflix, and the creation of managed scarcity

This man's name is Eric Hayes.  He is co-founder and Vice President of research and development at Attensa.

I met him at the Corante/Berkman social software event.  He was standing there at the cocktail hour with a video iPod.  It showed a clip of him surfing behind a motor boat...for a really long time.  Clearly, Eric had found the endless wave.

For those who would like to try this at home, Eric gave me the specs.

2003 MasterCraft X2 (with 2,000 lbs of water ballast on the one side) 20.8’ long 310hp GM Vortec V8, decked out with 17 speakers (10 on the tower) 1700 watts of power (so you can hear it while surfing or wake boarding), and an ipod mini playing the blues.  The surfboard was a 5.5’ Hyperlite “LandLoc” wake surfer. The river was the Upper Willamette  in Portland, Oregon. 

Now you know. 

The other thing that was wrong with this picture was Eric himself.  Really friendly.  Really happy.  Not at all like every other surfer I have met. 

I have long believed that surfers are not by nature surly, ill mannered as*holes.  No, I think it's surfing that makes them so.  Surfing is the original scarcity enterprise.  There are relatively few places where surfing is possible.  Even here, really good waves are scarce.  And even these waves, the really good ones, last a relatively short time.  This is why surfers are so mean spirited.  (Ironically, bad temper spread from them to skaters from whom scarcity is not nearly the same problem.  Evidentally, this was a matter of style, not praxis.)

Eric is a happy human being for many reasons, I'm sure.  But one of the reasons is this:  as long as he's got his 2003 MasterCraft X2 and a body of water, he can surf till he can't stand up.  In fact, he told me this was one of the problems with surfing behind a motor boat.  If you remain upright, the wave will always last longer than your abilities to ride it.   (This puts me in mind of that old English dance hall joke: "Can you play the Maple Leaf Forever?"  "No, sir, eventually my arms get tired.")

Now, it is not revelational to say that the new media and the new technologies, variously enabled by the new economies, have blunted the force of scarcity as an aribiter of value.  Now the problem for some consumers, the lucky ones anyhow, is how to choose when scarcity no longer does most of the work of choice for them.   

I did a project for the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) on file sharing (KaZaa, etc.).  Some of my respondents now had many thousands upon thousands of tracks on their hard drive.  And it was harder and harder for them to savor any one of these songs.  That time honored institution of choosing favorites" (key, in the old world, to group affiliation and self definition) was now under challenge.  Limitless music was a problem.  (Scarcity was apparently playing a role even in identity formation.)

And this brings me to the genius of NetFlix.  I have been trying to figure out what's so charming about the model.  (I have only been signed up for a couple of months.  Thanks to Tom Guarriello   for getting me started.)  Partly, it is the sheer pleasure of getting a "surprise in the mail."  Partly, it is the sheer convenience of filling the " Q" at my leisure and having them fill orders at theirs.  Partly, it's the blessing of assisted choice and those, sometimes cunning, recommendations.  (Was there anything so depressing as going to a video store to stare at the containers of really bad movies in order to find the one you wanted.) 

But mostly the power of Netflix comes from it's creation of "access constrained by interval" and the recreation of a kind of scarcity (a "managed scarcity").  With Netflix, I have access to just about all the movies in the world.  But, given my subscription model,  they come to me only 2 at a time. 

Two movies are not a lot.  In a world of nearly limitless access, this should be irksome.  But it ain't, of course, because these are almost always exactly the movies that interest me.  Two movies has a deeper virtue.  "Two movies" is an elimination of all the movies that might otherwise bid for my attention, damaging my sense of value and, God knows, even my identity formation.  (And there's been quite enough of that, already.)

The fulfillment model is especially clever.  I can speed up the interval at which I receive new movies.  I do so merely by returning the old ones.  This is an interval I do not choose or need to dwell upon.  It is set in train naturally when I finish watching my present movies.  In effect, I am setting my own wave.  I am managing access.  I am mediating plenty in a post-scarcity world.  I am, to this extent, restoring a sense of value.  (The Tarantino picture I own outright on DVD may be diminished by its ubiguity.  The same picture come to me from Netflix is precious because it's engagement, as we used to say, is limited.)

Furthermore, the fulfillment model feels like an act of generosity on Netflix's part.  ("Finished those first two?  Here have some more.  No, you don't have to pay extra!")  This eliminates the cell phone user's anxiety, "how many minutes (movies) do I have left this month?"  And it restores the feeling of living in a universe untroubled by scarcity.

In sum, Netflix has found a sweet spot.  It has found a way to create the generosity of a post scarcity economy while relieving us of the costs and penalties thereof. And to think that they did so by harnessing the intervals established by the US Mail, an off line institution almost as old as the nation!  (Bricks, clicks and letter carriers!)  The mind goggles.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Eric Hayes for consenting to this coverage.  See his interesting enterprise and useful search software here. 

Thanks to Andy Macaulay at ZIG for the CRIA assignment.

Thanks again to Tom Guarriello at True Talk  for the head's up.  (See his recent posts on "both/and" as an example of post-scarcity logics.) 

 

Brands behaving badly: The Sony story

Sony Corporation is having a bad couple of weeks.  Several days ago, this came rattling out of  the teletype machine:

Security experts have found that a hidden antipiracy technology on some Sony BMG music CDs causes dangerous computer vulnerabilities - as does the company's method for removing the original program.

This is of course disasterous from a branding point of view.  It says, "we, the corporation, don't trust you, the consumer."  Worse, there's a follow up.  The antipiracy debacle also says, "You shouldn't trust us and here's why.  We just helped ourselves to your hard drive without disclosure or permission." 

For the last couple of days we have been getting reports from the Wooster Collective about ads for the Sony PlayStation masquerading as graffiti, as pictured.

This too is very bad for branding.  It says "we are happy to help ourselves to someone's else credibility and, no, we didn't think you'd notice."  I believe this is another way of saying, "we, the corporation, don't trust your intelligence and this, and the graffiti campaign, might serve as evidence that you shouldn't trust ours." 

The success of the PlayStation is often attributed to Andrew House, a 15 year Sony executive and Oxford man.  In September, House was made CMO and group executive at Sony to oversee global marketing.  On his appointment, House said he,

foresees no changes in Sony's marketing partnerships, which include Omnicom Group's TBWA\Chiat\Day, Havas-owned McKinney + Silver and Publicis Groupe's Fallon.

I wonder if that will change. 

References

Anonymous. 2005.  Sony Protection Problems at a Glance.  The Associated Press via Yahoo.  November 15, 2005.  here. 

Post from the Wooster Collective here. 

Photo from PSP updates here.

Solman, Gregory. 2005.  Sony Names Global CMO.  Adweek, September 14.  here.