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Marketing reimagined: revolutionary implications of the Watts-Thompson reply to Gladwell

Last night I went to the Fast Company office in New York City to hear Clive Thompson interview Duncan Watts.

Duncan Watts (a research scientist at Columbia and, for the moment, Yahoo) argues that "influencers" are less influential than Gladwell's Tipping Point model would have us believe.  He argues that news travels as readily through ordinary people as influential ones.  This means that our world is not "hub and spoke," with some individuals acting like O'Hare and the rest of us like Cleveland or, pause, Dayton.  No, as Thompson put it, networks are  democratic.  We are just as likely to "get the news" from a friend as we are from an networking paragon.

The argument seems to me compelling.  And these two, Watts and Thompson, make superlative pitchmen on its behalf, the first as a cautious but quietly charismatic academic,  and the second acting on the evening as a kind of "key light," stepping in occasionally to make certain points "pop."  But it also seems to me that the Watts criticism should not be given rights of free passage anymore than Gladwell's argument.  (The latter is now used so freely that it threatens to become the marketer's all purpose conceptual tool.)  We must resist the temptation to generalize.  (Occasionally.)

Watts' arguments seems to me to apply to the network as "transmission device," i.e., when it serve as a way of moving something from one place to place in the network.  In this case, one link is pretty much as good as another.  But clearly networks sometimes serve as a "thinking machine"...as when ideas ricochet from blog to blog, and the wisdom of crowds assembles itself to identify the problems we care about and the answers we think plausible.  In this case, surely, links are not all created equal.  In this case, Clay Shirky's opinion matters much more than mine.  (The bastard).  And so it should.  (The bastard.)

Never mind.  Even in this narrow form, the Watts-Thompson argument has revolutionary implications for the world of marketing.  If their argument is true, it feels like we are looking at a turning point, not a tipping one.  Many marketers thought that Gladwell's model gave them a way to "game" the diffusion effect.  All we had to do was influence the influencers and entire markets will fall before our approach.

There is always a substantial part of the marketing community looking for that open sesame, the magic formula, the hidden panel, the hot button, the wand and incantation that will allow them to trick the consumer.  These marketers are in effect looking for a cheat.  In the place of an intimate knowledge of the consumer and the market, in the place of a superlative productive or service, they look for a shortcut.  Let's call these people "mechanistic" marketers.  They want to "operate" the consumer automaton by divining the secret levers within. 

How grim.  If marketing learned anything in the 20th century, it is that consumers are smarter than this, that there are no tricks in any case, that the world is not about process, it is stubbornly about content. If the marketer wants influence, the solution remains what it has always been.  The answer is to build great products, brands and messages.  It is these, and not "memes" or "viruses," that capture attention and prompt choice. 

It turns out, hey presto, that consumers like things because they like them, not because someone told them to like them.  Consumers like things because these things are a lot like consumers themselves: smart, creative, interesting, lively, topical, winning or otherwise engaging.  And if the consumer doesn't like a product or a service, it doesn't matter how hip, authoritative, or viral we make them or our agents.  They don't like them.  End of story.

Mechanistic marketing threatens to be cheap trick marketing.  Worse than that, it threats to be lazy and insulting marketing.  It's diminishing, not just to the consumer but also to the marketer. There is no substitute for getting to know the consumer, building products and brands they care about, making and managing meanings well.

Well, forgive my bad temper and the eagerness with which I embrace this point.  Clearly it is self serving of me.  If Watts is right, it's good news for anthropology.  Now the first objective of the marketing game must be to get to know consumers and the culture from which they come. Why is this a lesson we have to keep learning?  When do we learn to resist the siren call of the cheap trick and simply apply ourselves to thoughtful, passionate, engaged discovery?

References

Thompson, Clive.  2008.  Is the Tipping Point Toast. Fast Company.  Issue 122.  February. here. 

Product placement and the FCC

Kevin Martin, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission says he wants to examine product placement on TV.

"I believe it is important for consumers to know when someone is trying to sell them something and that is it is appropriate for the commission to examine these issues."

Hmm.  The thing about product placement is that it's not clear there is any selling going on.  Marketers are so unhappy about being TIVOed out of existence that they are happy merely to get things on TV.  They don't get to control how products appear there.  They don't get to build a brand proposition.  They don't actually make a pitch of any kind.  They merely to get the product on TV.  Marketing, it's come to this. 

As I say, there's no selling going on. 

References

Teinowitz, Ira.  2007.  FCC May Examine Product-Placement Rules: Chairman Kevin Martin Proposes Inquiry as Networks, Marketers Increase Integration.  Ad Age.  November 29, 2007.  here. 

Celebrity sighting

I think someone said of Gerald Ford that he had the ability to make people around him less interesting. 

I had the chance to watch Faith Popcorn at work today, and I was impressed with her ability to do the opposite.

Everyone seemed to get a little smarter, a little more imaginative.  Clients, participants, the BrainReserve team, all boats rose on the  charismatic tide.

Ms. Popcorn managed somehow to oxygenate the room.  You felt you had permission to think ambitiously, to cast the net wide, even as something in her clarity made you understand that sloppy thinking or intellectual self indulgence were not to be indulged.

Acknowledgments

To Riccardo Vecchio and the Stanford Medicine Magazine for Vecchio's remarkable rendering of Popcorn.   You may see the image in its original context here.

Marketing's Great Chain of Being?

Pam and I stayed in a NYC hotel this week.  She was recovering from surgery in Manhattan and we didn't want to move her.  (The surgery went well and she is recovering nicely, thank you.) 

Sitting on a shelf in the hotel bathroom, I found something the size of a business card. There it is to the right.  The card reads:

TRANQUILITY TIP

Create rituals for yourself

Rituals help ground us, especially when we feel out of control.  A ritual can be as simple as going for a morning jog or enjoying an evening bath. 

This reflects a couple of things at work in marketing and capitalism:

1) the movement from utility to meaning

Capitalism used to be about making and selling things, useful things.  Marketing helped sell these things.  The sale was about trumpeting the usefulness of the thing.  Marketing was about information.  In the 1980s, some of us, following the lead of Syd Levy and Irving White, proposed a broader view.  Goods were about meanings, meanings the individual could use to help construct the self, the home, the personal world. 

2) the movement from the sale of objects and services to the sale of experiences.

Capitalism used to be about making and selling things.  Marketing helped sell these things.  Now marketing imagines grander things for itself.  We can thank Pine and Gilmore and their book, The Experience Economy, for this development.  Things are mere props, part of the theater the brand supplies.

3) the movement from engagement to the restorative.

The real deliverable, this approach says, is relaxation so deep it amounts to restoration.  To dive so deeply into an experience that the world falls still.  To detach from the furious pace of contemporary life and reset all our activity clocks to zero.  In the words of hotel wisdom, to become "grounded" again. 

4) the movement from the mundane to the enchanted. 

Several companies with whom I have worked can hear the siren call of the new age movement.  They now to seek to offer the consumer something like enchantment.  They see the consumer climbing to spiritual heights, establishing contact with planetary harmonics, and/or their inner child.  (This is enough to make my inner child throw a tantrum, but never mind.)

Thus does marketing accommodate the changes taking place in our culture.  Thus does our commerce stay in touch with our culture.

And while these lofty missions are pursued, many marketers wrestle with the problem of commodification: the ability of competitors to duplicate a product and shave its price.  Brands turn back into products.  Margins begin to shrink.   A newly powerful channel (Amazon.com on line and Wal-Mart at the mall) demand discounts and more price cutting.  Margins grow slimmer still.  Before long, competitors are locked in a "race to the commodity basement."

Many brands are caught between hell below and heaven above, between the nether world of commodification and the intellectual challenges and profit opportunities that come from selling meanings, experiences, restoration or enchantment. 

We might even go so far as to say that the marketer is caught in a great chain of being.  In the Renaissance case, here's how the "chain of being" worked. At the apex of the hierarchy stands God.  God is pure intelligence.  Next in the hierarchy are Angels, creatures who have pure intelligence.  Then came earthly creatures: Saints, the hierarchy of the church, blessed with elevated intelligence.  Man, stood in the middle of the hierarchy, a kind of linch pin, capable of intelligence, but always distracted by the passions and inclined to error.  As we continue down the hierarchy, we move ever further away from intelligence.  Animals have no reason.  Inanimate objects are insensate.  (This is imperfectly remembered, sorry.)

In this hierarchy, man was mobile.  As he exercised his reason, as he devoted himself to spirituality, he moved upwards in the great scheme of things.  As he refused his gift of reason, he moved downwards, becoming finally like unto a beast.   

Marketers are mobile too.  As our brand succeeds, we move upwards into the realm of ideas, concepts, experiences.  If we hold parity, we play a game of optimization, tinkering with our positioning, but without resources to contemplate experiment or much in the way of risk taking.  As our brand fails, we descend into a commodity hell, we are destined to slug it out with promotions and channel play. 

We are caught between heaven and hell.  The higher we climb, the closer we get to the realm of pure idea.  The more we are called upon to exercise a our intelligence, creativity and strategic sense.  The lower we fall, the closer we get to something brute.  We are now in a reactive mode.  (This is of course unfair.  Plenty of brain power and strategic sense is called for here. I am letting the metaphor do the talking here.)

Could there be a great chain of being in the marketing world?    

References

Lovejoy, Arthur O.  1950.  The Great Chain of Being: the study of the history of an idea.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.  (acknowledged here with all due apologies for my imperfect recollection and liberal use)

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  Culture and Consumption II: markets, meanings and brand management.  Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 

Pine, Joseph and James Gilmore.  1999.  The Experience Economy.   New York: Harvard Business School Press.

Marketing and convergence

A Canadian journalist asked me to comment on advertising in social media.  My reply got more elaborate than I had planned, and I share it with you here.  (Happy to name the journalist in question, if she'll let me.)

 

My reply:

Thanks for your note.  Here are a couple of thoughts scratched out in haste while I get ready to go to the airport. 

I think we are beginning to understand that people in their 20s and their teens now live as much on line as they do off, that their lives are shot through with virtual media and digital messages, that their sense of self and group are taking on new structural properties.  As "content creators," and "content consumers," they participate in a new culture and a new economy.  (In the language of my blog work, our world is getting cloudier.)

Marketers and designers are trying to figure out how to find these people and how to speak to them.  Many of the old rules, especially the K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, stupid) logic of marketing no longer applies. 

The old days

In the old days of network television, there were the people who made TV, there were the people who watched TV and there were the people who made commercials for TV. 

Three, quite different groups engaged in three quite different activities. Then something remarkable started to happen.  These activities are beginning to look more and more like one another.  This is what Henry Jenkins would call convergence.

Stage 1

In Stage 1 of this convergence, consumers started to become more like producers of popular culture.  They mastered the grammars and technologies of pop culture and they began to produce like crazy.  (All Your Base Are Belong To Us was an early indicator.  The flood of video that pours through YouTube every day is the latest one.)   Now the consumer and the producers of TV were engaged in something like the same activity.  Both parties are participating in the same culture, as consumers and especially as producers.

Stage 2

Stage 2 is now upon us.  Marketers now understand that they are having to become more like the producers and the consumers of TV.  They too must become producers.  To participate in the new media, they have to begin creating this culture (as opposed to commercial messages, narrowly defined). 

What they can't do any long is practice is the old model of marketing.  This is one that has the marketers firing big simple messages into the life of the consumers with cannons called big advertising campaigns. Well, there is still a place for big campaigns, but these work not as vehicles of persuasion, but a cultural convictions so interesting that everyone is pleased to watch them, work with them, and send them speeding on their viral way.

Marketers understand that if they want a place in the world that matters to consumers, they have to act like these consumers, manufacturing interesting, clever, quirky content that will help increase and speed the mass of messages that pour through the internet each day.  No more firing big fat messages at a stationary target.  Now the idea is to take part. The idea is to converge.

Now, this is not as easy as it looks.  Burger King's subservient kitchen is to me the limiting case.  It is wonderfully viral.  People were pleased to look at it, and pleased to pass it along.  But it did not have very much to do with the brand.  And the other extreme is to force people to see the brand theme song, as Oreos does.  This has too much to do with the brand.  The secret is a Aristotelian (or Goldie Locks) mid point and this is something we are searching for still. 

Don't try this at home (on advertising & amateurs)

Last post, I noted a problem with cocreation: that it makes marketing about the corporation, not about the consumer.

There is a second problem: advertising made by the consumer is often bad advertising. 

Exhibit A: The Doritos ads that debuted at the Superbowl

Exhibit B: the new Pepto Bismal ads.

These latter are really horrible, like the worst, most embarrassing outtakes from American Idol.  (And this is no doubt the point.  Advertising wants to occupy any new niche created by contemporary culture, especially when it can be played comically.) The PB ads direct us to a website where we may operate the Pepto-Bismal Dance machine...and this is so bad as to invite the suspicion of deep cynicism or new media incompetence.

Not all ads made by consumers are awful.  The Converse spots were interesting.  The Tahoe ads were, I thought, wonderful, because they found a way to let new voices and messages into the ad world. 

It looks like we are forgetting 2 things:

1) marketing is about the consumer, not the corporation

2) advertising is exceedingly hard to do well.  There's a reason why we have professionals.

Bad advertising is never OK.  Even when it comes from "the people."  The only thing that consumers dislike more than being excluded from the production of popular culture is bad popular culture.  (They will forgive you the first.  They will NEVER forgive you the second.)  Even very gifted creatives and planners have a hard time making great advertising.  What makes us think that rank amateurs have anything to offer? 

Andrew Keen was wrong on every particular, except perhaps this one: Amateurs are sometimes pretty hopeless.  Don't get me wrong.  I accept what Keen does not:

    Consumer-created content is out there.

    It will change our culture.

    It will change our advertising. 

    Culture and commerce will cohabit here too.

But it's not clear to me we want to make a direct, unmediated connection.  I don't think we want consumers making ads directly.  Not when we have trained professionals standing by.

References

Keen, Andrew.  2007.  The Cult of the Amateur.  New York: Doubleday. 

McCracken, Grant. 2006.  Chevy Cocreation.  This blogs sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics.  April 25, 2006.  here.

McCracken, Grant.  2007.  Cocreation and the real objectives of marketing.  This blog sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics.  September 21, 2007. here.

Post script:

Clearly these are early days and we are still working on the model(s) that will bring cultural producers and consumers together in more egalitarian, participative, cooperative relationships.  Rob Walker proposes one such models, suggesting that we call this process not cocreation, but copromotion. 

Walker, Rob.  2007. Amateur Hour, Web Style.  FastCompany.com. Issue 119.  October.  p. 87.  here.

Death of marketing?

Yesterday Piers Fawkes made history.  Or what might be the beginning of history.  He dropped the word "marketing" from his description of the PSFK Conference to be held iin LA in September. 

It's possible historians will look back on this gesture and say:

"We believe it started here.  This is when marketing ceased to be "marketing."  This is when they began changing the term and the field."   

Certainly the conditions are right.  I mean, if "marketing" were a brand, we would have redesigned and relaunched it a long time ago.  As it is, the idea stands for an extraordinary bundle of things.  It is a very messy concept indeed, and the practice...well, the practice is even messier.  Getting rid of this idea is a good idea. 

Piers believes marketing has 3 particular problems.

1) ‘marketing’ doesn’t really encompass the solutions that people are generating in business today;

2) ‘marketing’ comes with all the bad baggage that advertising and promotions has generated (e.g. urban spam);

3) ‘marketing’ isn’t accessible to a new generation of creative minds. 
(numbering, and point form, added)

All of this is right.  And new language is called for.  A couple of months ago, following the suggestion of Jerry Michalski, I proposed that we give up the term "consumers" and begin using the term "multipliers." Some people thought this was a good idea for about 3 seconds and went right back to calling them consumers.  It is hard to shift linguistic furniture as substantial as "marketing," and perhaps we shouldn't try. 

And I am sure there are people who will say it's "only" language, that it doesn't matter what we call it.  But changing the term is a potentially a revolutionary thing to do.  Change the term and we begin to change the things it defines and enables, the concept, process and hiring of the corporation and the business school.  Once the term catches up to the reality, the reality is obliged to catch up to the term. 

There are a couple of risks here.  "Marketing" reminds us that we are are not just talking about branding, and the likes of you, me, and Piers sometimes forget to include things like pricing. And when we do this, we marginalize ourselves and create a market for McKinsey.  While we are chasing after big ideas, someone else is collecting the data, crunching the numbers and offering a more deeply informed approach to the problem.

It's also true that removing a "reigning" term is like removing the head of state.  Good ideas can now flourish but bad ideas can flourish too. When we change this language, we encourage a tower of babel and the rise of still more gurus to lead us to the land of clarity.  Sticking with the old language protects us from the ambitions of our betters and the anarchic tendencies of the mob below.  What is it that Van Morrison said about "no method, no gurus"? 

I mean, let's be honest, "marketing" is a brand with an incredible installed based, a lot like Windows.  No one likes it very much, but it makes the world of computers (read business) make sense.  By this reading, we should just stick with orthodoxy.  It might not be very good, but it's better than its alternatives.

No, let's not "go along to get along."  This is a revolutionary moment because so much in the traditional purview of marketing has changed.  The old regime has to topple.  It has been hollowed out by the new realities.  We bloggers in the marketing world document it's insufficiencies everyday.  At the very least, it is, as Piers says, hostile to the new powers of creativity and innovation that are now at large in the marketplace.  We have no choice.  We have to move.   

Did marketing die yesterday?  No, of course, it's didn't.  It's not even feeling poorly.  But you have to start somewhere.  I wonder if Piers just did. 

References

Fawkes, Piers.  2007.  PFSK Conference Los Angeles: Dropping The worl 'Marketing'  PSFK.
July 31, 2007.    here. 

Homer Simpson and the 7-Eleven endorsement debacle

In ten days, on July 27, a dozen 7-Eleven stores will turn into Kwik-E Marts.  The remaining 6400 stores will carry Homer dolls, Krustyo's cereal, Buzz Cola, Squishees, and pink-frosted Sprinklicious donuts. The Simpsons are coming to visit. 

For me, the joke stops here.  I used a 7-Eleven when living in Boston. It was a shrine to processed food, bad service, aesthetics without mercy, design without shame.  The overlit vacancy of the place gave everything a vaguely radioactive quality. 

Some "light at night" is wonderful.  (Remember how you used to feel about when you were coming home with your parents as lights came on.  Safety.  Comfort.  Joy.) But light at night can also be terrible in its vacuity.  Surely, one couldn't help wondering late at night in Boston, 7-Eleven is the place that souls come to die.  (One of the interesting thing about Hopper's famous painting of an all-night diner [above] is that we can't tell which light applies.) 

7-Eleven was the only game in town, so we put up with it.  But it felt like a place that had managed to capture all that was wrong with the American approach to food, brands and retail.  And when you think about it, this can't have been easy.  I mean, how do you get something this wrong this often? Somebody had to work at it.  Practice the art.  Perfect the formula.  There, it's ruined.  Hi-5, everyone, hi-5!   

Yes, it's very Homer, when you think about it.  Only he could have screwed a corner store up this completely.  But what happens when he comes to visit on July 27th? 

Maybe Homer will fit right in at 7-Eleven.  But if there is a place that can take the joyful stupidity out of Mr. Simpson, it's this. Because, you see, bone-headed stupidity trumps joyful stupidity every time. 

Maybe Marge and the kids and the spirit of The Simpsons will flourish here.  But if there's a place that can puncture irreverence and irony, it's a 7-Eleven.  You see, places that are aggressively irony-free have a way of prevailing over every other form of human wit and creativity.

That's the 7-Eleven promise to you. 

What I mean is this.  7-Eleven is such a disastrous brand and retail proposition that there's no way it can save itself with a Simpsons endorsement.  Now, if meanings are going to move here, they can only go the other way: from 7-Eleven to The Simpsons. 

And how sad is that?  One of the most effective enemies of numb skull capitalism will have been damaged by one of the great accomplishments of numb skull capitalism.  D'oh!

References

Schiller, Gail.  2007.  Discrmininating?  D'oh!  Only 4 'Simpsons' tie-in partners.  The Hollywood Reporter East.  July 6, 2007, pp. 1-2, p. 2.

Prius, not pious (or, hostage rescue in the world of marketing)

This post is about the adoption of the fuel efficient car, specifically the Prius.  I will argue that sales of the Prius (the hostage) are sometimes discouraged by the likes of Arianna Huffington and her supporters (the hostage takers).  I will also argue that this problem can be addressed by the marketer (the hostage rescuer).  To address the problem and the solution we must contemplate diffusion theory, one of the places that anthropology and economics particularly meet. 

Our culture streams with innovation.  But how does "streaming" work? 

Diffusion theories (Simmel in the early days, Rogers in the late) say that innovations "stream" by passing from early adopters to late adopters. Each group has its own motives and its own tolerances for change. Between them, they help draw innovations into the mainstream. 

But how does "passing" work?

Simmel says innovations pass into the mainstream when people imitate  early adopters.  This is the classic operation of the diffusion effect, but there are times when late adopters will not imitate.  This happens when the early adopter flaunts his difference, and rewards himself with self congratulation.  This self-congratulation is read as other-scorn, as if the adopter is saying, "I get it, you don't."  In this case, the early adopter provokes not admiration but antagonism.  The innovation has been taken hostage.

There is a second case when imitation is not forthcoming, and the innovation is left, in effect, marooned and unassimilable at the far end of the diffusion stream.  In this case, people regard the innovation as puzzling and strange.  Certainly, novelty always has a small current of oddity running through it.  (It would not be novel otherwise.)  But in this case we are talking about innovations that remain opaque, a hostage of another kind.

Simmel's "imitation" effect does not work in either case.  In fact, the would-be "late adopter" wants nothing to do with the innovation, which remains antagonizing or unsettling.  Or to put this in the language of another marketing model, the innovation is blank of meaning, or inhabited with someone else's meaning.  Adoption is unlikely.  Captivity is assured.

Marketing to the rescue.  Our job is to find meanings for the innovation that are intelligible, palatable and interesting.  To do this, we could assemble a room full of ad agency creatives.  The other possibility is to see if the early adopters have created meanings other than that of self congratulation.

And this is precisely what was done by Heffner, Kurani, and Turrentine in a recent article on Hybrid Electric Vehicles, specifically the Prius.  H, K and T interviewed 25 Prius owning family, almost all of them in California.  (See the link below for the article and a PDF of the article.  I am still in Warsaw and a little under the gun, timewise. Otherwise, I would break it out for you.) 

Some of the results were predictable.  Some owners drove their cars as a badge of environmental virtue.  And predictably some of them intended their cars as a repudiation of the SUVs with which they shared the highway, a kind of "I'm environmentally sensitive and you're not" kind of message.  (Actually, sometimes the Huffington driver can send a more strident message, something closer to, "I'm environmentally sensitive, and you are an enemy of the planet.") This is of course precisely the problem, and the thing that antagonizes the late adopter and maroons the innovation. 

But Heffner, Kurani, and Turrentine found respondents cultivating other, less divisive meanings.  For one respondent, the Prius was a compelling choice because it meant that America would sent less money overseas, and gain independence from foreign governments hostile to the US.  This same respondent believed that his choice of a Prius "sent a message" to the American manufacturers of cars, chiding them for having been too slow in developing hybrid technology.  It was also a way to punish the American gas lobby. 

This consumer created meaning moves briskly away from environmental issues into political ones, and there is, I believe, a much larger, constituency for this meaning than there is for the environment.  The marketer could take this up and run with it.  Certainly there is something a little Alice-in-wonderland about promoting Japanese cars on the grounds that it's good for American interests.  But, hey, it's for the planet, man. 

A couple was enamored of how quiet the Prius was at low speeds.   They called their "stealth mode."  This is really lovely.  This is a couple out for a little drive, noticing something about their car, reaching for metaphor, and coming back with a little bit of drama that makes driving more fun.  It is for them moment the kind of play that couples share.  (Pam and I have constructed a life out of these little moments, as every couple does.)  But in the right agency hands, this is the stuff on interesting creative, which creatives could "air lift" the Prius out of Huffington self righteousness with a single 30 second spot. 

A third consumer saw his Prius as the perfect car for someone in the technology field, in his phrase, a "geek-a-rific" car.  This consumer was concerned that the Prius would identify him as a "tree hugger" and took pains to emphasize the technological advantage of his car by driving it with his foot to the floor.  Splendid.  In this case, the consumer is actively engaged in the very problem that concerns the marketer.  This may not be the best way of addressing the issue, but it reassures us that our strategy is not altogether mistaken. 

There are several points to make here.

1) That the diffusion effect sometimes comes undone.  Imitation is not forthcoming.  The early adopter has hijacked the the innovation, so to make it cosa nostra (our thing), a party to which others are not invited.  Would-be late adopters are antagonized.   Adoption is slowed. 

2)  When this happens, it is up to the marketer to intervene.  Good ethnographic research will reveal other meanings that "work" for the innovation, but do not have the effect of antagonizing the consumer. We are looking for the acts of symbolic "re-production" with which the consumer has reimagined the innovation.  Now, the communications task is to transship these meanings to the would-be late adopter, running an end-run around the cosa nostra, Huffington gang. 

3) I believe this hunt for palatable meanings is the unofficial practice in marketing.  Certainly, it is a part of  my professional practice as a consulting anthropologist.  I spend a lot of time listening to active consumers talk about the ways they have engaged with the product or brand, that these meanings might be build back into the product or the brand. 

4) So there is a way in which marketers honor this strategy in a de facto way.  But it's not clear to me that theory has caught up here. Mind you, diffusion theory has been shocking neglected, both in the b-schools and the social sciences.

5) We might think of this as an act of hostage rescue.  What we are doing is saving the innovation from the meanings lavished upon them by the early adopters.  In a way this is fully consistent with the consumer centric mission of marketing, and the conviction that our products and services can't be "about us" but must instead be about the consumer.  Except in this case, when we say it's "not about us," we are also struggling to make sure the product or service is "not about them," i.e., the Huffingtons of the world.

6) Come to that, I wonder if this sort of thinking might not prove useful for the Democratic party and it's presidential hopefuls.

References

Heffner, Reid, Kenneth S. Kurani, Thomas S. Turrentine.  2007.  Symbolism in Early Markets for Hybrid Electric Vehicles.  Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Dais, Research Report UCD-ITS-RR-07-01. here.

Last note:

For those following my travels in Europe, I leave Warsaw today for Kracow, I think it is.  On the other hand, it could be Lodz.  I will let you know when I get there. 

"Mr. Isdell, I have Mr. Buffett on Line 1."

First, it was Mary Minnick, who resigned as The Coca-Cola Company's VP of Marketing, Strategy and Innovation.  This week it was Esther Lee, TCCC's senior VP and chief creative officer.  Minnick went into retirement.  Lee is CEO of EURO RSCG Worldwide.

Two fabulously talented marketers, gone. 

And what happens now? According to AdAge,

Chairman-CEO Neville Isdell assumed oversight for Coke's strategy and innovation group, and marketing moved under President-Chief Operating Officer Muhtar Kent. ... Coke's North American unit was restructured in March, decentralizing marketing and shifting brand stewardship to newly named president-general managers for three business units.

Now Isdell isn't remarkable for his mastery of marketing.  Kent, well, Kent is an Operating Officer.  This means the Coca-Cola Company appears once more on the verge of compromising its marketing.  Isdell's predecessor, Daft did this in 2000, casting to the winds a deeply talented Atlanta team on the grounds that there were local marketing teams around the world TCCC could fall back upon.

Without marketing, Coke, the product, the portfolio of products, is sweetened water.  Without marketing to create new meanings and to renew old meanings, the brand begins to wither and die.  And I thought TCCC had a go at this recently.  The category, challenged by water, juice, sports drinks, is shrinking.  Competitors multiply.  Pepsi gets stronger.  The little brands grow more numerous and more nimble.  Is this the time for another disaspora of talent?

The field of marketing is undergoing a revolution that takes it out of the stupidities of the old world into strategies that are new, difficult, and ever changing.  (See the post for yesterday, please.)

This is to say that marketing has always mattered to the Coca-Cola Company, and it especially matters now.  Perhaps this is not the time to replace good marketers with non marketers.  I mean, if I were a shareholder and I discovered that the marketing team was being once more diminished, I would not be happy. 

Come to think of it, Warren Buffett, one of the great champions of TCCC investment, is now famous for having encouraged the Gecko ads for Geico.  What happens if he starts to ask questions? What if he phones to ask what happened to the marketers? 

"Mr. Isdell, I have Mr. Buffett on line 1."

Oh, oh. 

References

Sanders, Lisa and Kate MacArthur.  2007.  Euro RSCG Taps Coke's Lee as North American CEO.  Adage.  May 2, 2007.  here.

What I think I'm doing in Mexico

What I'm doing here in Mexico City is trying to save marketing.  No, really.

There was a golden age in the agency world when research, strategy and creativity worked together, and brands were build by smart people working in a happy, reckless free-for-all of creativity.  (Like all mythic creations, this golden age is heavy on the happy.)

Take Chicago just before and after World War II.  Lloyd Warner had taken his position at the University of Chicago in the 30s.  (He'd been a graduate student at Harvard in the period 1929-1935 where he was connected both to the Department of Anthropology and the Business School!  Like that's ever going to happen again.) Even as Warner was writing books like American Life: Dream and Reality (1953), he was doing commercial work.

With Burleigh Gardner and William Henry, he created a firm in Hyde Park on 53rd street called Social Research, Incorporated (SRI).  This group helped create the focus group, brand image, and other staples of the world of advertising.

Over the next two decades SRI helped to revolutionize the field of  market research, transforming its assumptions, methods, goals, and consequences in ways that quickly redirected the world of advertising...according  to Andrew Abbott, chair of sociology at [the University of] Chicago.

By the time I started doing commercial work in the middle 1980s, things had change, the world had shrunk, joy was largely extinguished. An age of iron now prevailed.  Clearly, dark forces had prevailed.  The free-wheeling days of smart people from different fields working together in the creation of novel approaches, this was pretty much over.  Now people would open marketing meetings with "what's the hot button here?"

What happened?  Certainly, the b-school continued to treat creativity as an off planet activity.  Most brands were controlled by managers who didn't know or care about the full value that agencies and research could create.  Wall Street was tightening the screws.  And this discouraged longer term thinking and risk taking.  The agencies themselves often demanded that they be left alone to commune with their gods.  The rich connections and accomplishments of the Chicago world were vanishing.   

"Hot buttons!"  What a grim metaphor.  It casts the consumer has a mechanical device for which the operating manual has gone missing.  How to operate this creature?  Say, let get someone to see if there's a lever or a button?  Look for something blinking.  Send in the researchers and see.  (There is a Ph.D. thesis waiting to happen here.  Where did the hot button theory come from? Who invented it?  What made the world vulnerable to it?  Surely Warner and SRI would have laughed it out of court.)

In the post-Chicago, post-Warner regime, a cycle of diminishment prevailed. Clients asked less of research, research asked less of the consumer, the corporation asked less of the agency, and of course the consumer was diminished most of all.  Everyone was holding out.  Certain kinds of creativity and innovation were dying out.  Sometimes, I lay the fault with the nuclear winter of positivism that prevailed after World War II.  Everyone was trying to be as much like a scientist as possible.  If marketing professionals could have got a way with lab coats, believe me, they would have.  Science has status.  Marketing was imprecise and pandering.  It is worth pointing out here that it was Chicagoans, academic and industrial, who sustained qualitative methods during the nuclear winter.

At some point, things started to get better.  The corporation came to think of the consumer as a more complicating, interesting, intelligent creature.  Sometimes this was a humanizing gesture.  Sometimes, it was merely a  response to competitive pressure.

Funny advertising happened.  This didn't mean that the agency or the client cared about sophisticated meaning manufacture, but at least both were now prepared to credit the consumer with a sense of humor (instead of button).  This is the era of Cliff Freeman, among others.  The field of design, thanks to the revolutionary efforts of Jay Doblin made a difference.  Now the consumer was to be consulted (not examined).  Stephen King and account planning happened and eventually found its way to North America.  Some of us began to offer ethnography as a new way to talk to the consumer, and eventually P&G happened, as A.G. Lafley blessed the  method.  And under the stewardship of Russ Belk, Rich Lutz, Philip Kotler, Syd Levy, Michael Solomon, Susan Fournier, John Deighton and Al Silk, to name a few, there emerged better models of the consumer. 

Which brings us to what I think I'm doing in Mexico.  I am in those homes to capture the consumer in some (but not all) of her complexity, to cast the net wide with a series of questions that would horrify the hot button mechanic.  I am asking lots of diverse questions.  I am following the consumer any where she is prepared to take me (by direction or implication).    I am here to advance my clients interests not by finding a hot button, but looking for a match between all of the cultural complexities of the consumers' life and all the things the brand and the product are or can become. 

Ethnography is pretty good at drawing out the complexity of the consumer.  Not of course in the hands of the bargain basement players or the high-charging methodological pretenders, but when someone knows what they are doing, the method is fecund.  We are going to sit in someone's home for a couple of hours and listen to them answer a couple of hundred questions.  And every question is potentially a Mississippi.  By asking a simple question, we stumble onto a far tributary and by asking successive questions, we begin to see that we are now moving from detail to "something good."  If we're lucky, and this only happens once or twice an interview, we end up all the way downstream, connected now to the very delta of this culture.  Now we see what matters.  More important, we know why.  This is the place for the brand to position itself.  This is the place of advantage. 

Will I save the world of marketing?  Well, not single handedly.  But the more we look, the more we find.  And the more we make available to the agency and the client, the better and smarter marketing can get.  Thus does a virtuous cycle replaces the downward spiral.  Everyone gets smarter.  Everyone supplies more value to the next party.  At least, we hope they do. Clients asked more of research, research asked more of the consumer, the corporation asked more of the agency, and all of us, in concert, supply more to the consumer. 

This may seem like an exercise in preaching to the choir.  Surely everyone cares about and has committed to a more sophisticated, value adding marketing!   Um, I'm not so sure about that.  Not if things afoot at the Coca-Cola Company are what they appear to be. Tomorrow, I'll have a go at this. 

References

Easton, John.  2001.  Consuming Interests.  University of Chicago Magazine.  here.

The Wikipedia entry for Lloyd Warner is here.

Post script:

For those of you who are following my travels, you will note from today's photo that I am now in Guadalajara.  It has that splashing light of southern California (whereas Monterrey, especially when overcast, had pewter-ish light, which is of course exactly what the heath calls for).   I am received by matrons of the house with the grace and good humor that I received in Monterrey and Mexico City, but I think here, perhaps, people are a little more relaxed.  Still the numbers are too small to risk a generalization of this kind.  One of the joys of interviewing here is that the rooms are usually breezy and bright, the opposite of the Khrushchev kitchens in which the project began, so little, so hot, so little, so hot.   The question is who will win the foot race, the powerpoint deck or the exhaustion that always descends in the second week?   I have my money on the powerpoint deck.      

Op-ed marketing

Nike ran an ad this weekend in the Sunday New York Times.  It read:

Thank you, ignorance.

Thank you for starting the conversation.

Thank you for making an entire nation listen to the Rutger's (sic) team story.

And for making us wonder what other great stories we've missed.

Thank you for reminding us to think before we speak.

Thank you for showing us how strong and poised 18 and 20-year-old women can be.

Thank you for reminding us that another basketball tournament goes on in March.

Thank you for showing us that sport includes more than the time spent on the court.

Thank you for unintentionally moving women's sport forward.

And thank you for making all of us realize that we still have a long way to go.

Next season starts 11.16.07.

Well done, Nike.

Contemporary brands must be made to stream with meanings.  Only thus can they remain responsive in contemporary cultures. 

Usually, these meanings come from the three levels of culture:

1. deep foundations

These are meanings that have been in place, defining our culture, for sometimes hundreds of years.  Some of our notions of gender and status have this status.

2. long term trends

These are meanings that are more recently arrived and still forming. With its "curatorial" approach to the soccer world, Nike has taken a strong position here.

3. short term trends

Nike has been active here too, associating itself with the athletes of the moment. 

But by taking on the Imus affair, Nike is actually reaching into a stream of meanings that is brand new.  Naturally, this is strategically challenging.  It is not yet clear exactly where this development will "net out."  So there is an element of risk.  (Though, pretty clearly, most people are quite happy to see the last of this guy.  I know I am.)  And the risk is not just that there might be some residual loyalty for Imus, but also that some will accuse Nike for "piling on."

The trade-off is pretty clear.  The more current the event, the more powerful the meanings and the less stable the proposition.   But as brands come to understand the value of constant renewal, and source more and more vivid meanings to accomplish this renewal, tapping contemporary events may be the coming thing. 

I for one hope so.  Branding was once a "keep it simple, stupid" undertaking.  Dumbing down, and repetition were the order of the day. Happily, brands that persevere with this backward approach are made to pay for it.  I think it's a good thing that currency is joining complexity as an important instrument for those interested meaning manufacture. Thank you, Nike.

References

McCracken, Grant. 2004.  Brands as Shadows.  This blog sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics.  November 18, 2004.  [for the "sailing ship" concept of three levels of meanings for the brand.] here.

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  Nike, new branding approaches.  This blog sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics.  March 11, 2005.  [for the curatorial approach by Nike] here.

McCracken, Grant. 2006. The Artisanal Movement, and 10 things that define it.  November 9, 2007.  [as an example of a recent meaning] here.

Thomaselli, Rich.  2007.  Nike builds ad campaign out of Imus Controversy.  Ad Age.  April 17, 2007.  here. subscription required.   

Mea Culpa, buzz word watch II

Friday, Leora Kornfeld gave us a guest post.  She complained about the use of the word "strategic" by consultants who often aren't very.

Leora has an anthropological ear for language and especially for its abuses. I believe she's been playing "buzz word bingo" in her head for many years, well before the invention of the game in the 1990s. 

I was rooting her on, until it occurred to me that her criticism applied to me.  The first time I met Virginia Postrel, I used the term to describe what I did.  Virginia asked me to explain.  This surprised me.  For my purposes, the term was self sufficient.  Her question implied, politely, that there had to be more to say, and if there was not, I had used it too liberally.  Oh.

In his comment on Leora's post, Steve Postrel, reveals what Virginia might have done to complete my embarrassment. 

Just for laughs, when someone claims to be a strategist, you could ask them which tradition of strategy they represent. Economic? Then ask them to define a Nash equilibrium and see how they feel about Cournot vs. Bertrand models. Military? Then ask them about Clausewitz or John Boyd or Edward Luttwak. You can do the same thing with sports, chess, marketing, or any other domain they claim that has a tradition of strategic analysis.

Thank you, Virginia, for your constraint.

The question is what did I think I was doing?  (Apart from being a bumptious prat, that is. I am always a bumptious prat, so the designation is not acutely useful here.)  What I think I was doing was telling Virginia that I was not merely working as a marketer or a marketing researcher.  I was trying to say that I was not just collecting data but actually thinking about what I did.

And then the question is, why should this rhetorical misbehavior be necessary?  I am quite sure that other professionals do not suffer the temptation.  Lawyers, doctors, civil servants...they don't use the term.  ("What kind of medicine do I practice?  Oh, I do strategic medicine, you see.  I don't just identify symptoms.  I think about them.") 

No, the buzz word abuse that Leora spotted is a symptom.  The field of marketing and the fact that it is not in fact a profession at all.  I guess we could say that the MBA is a professional credential, but some of us agree that when it comes to cultural aspects of markets and consumers, an MBA is not much good at all.  Having an MBA says only that the player could manage to complete a program and not much more.

Without sorting, we are reduced to making boosterish, self aggrandizing claims, dressing ourselves up in the dignity of someone else's language. 

It's not clear how we solve this problem.  I agree with Steve that certification (or credentialism, as he calls it) is probably impractical.  Reputation helps of course.  It would help even more if those of us in branding circles had the depths of knowledge that distinguish the McKinsey consultant. 

I wonder when clients will begin to ask whether a would-be supplier is an active member of the blogging community (as a poster or a commentator).  This is I think a pretty good way of separating sheep from goats.  After all, it's very difficult to sustain a presence in the blogosphere if you don't have intellectual and creative resources at your disposal.  (Or it pretty easy to tell when you are just faking it.)

Out of naturally emergent communities, I think we have the foundations of a college, groups of people who have enough in common to sustain debate and enough divergence to engender it.  And this eventually becomes a kind of certification.  I had the good fortune to have a conversation with Sebastian Wendland in Berlin, and I believe we figured that a college on line could be largely self organizing and that it would, as a by-product, serve several sorting functions.

References

Kornfeld, Leora.  2007.  Buzz word watch.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  April 6, 2007.  here.

Postrel, Steve.  2007.  Comment on Buzz word watch.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  April 6, 2007. here.

[We need some way to create permalinks for comments.  Or am I missing something?]

Post script:

Those who are following my travels, I have finished my week in Brussels, (which proved to be unexpectedly beautiful).  And before leaving Brussels, I had the distinct pleasure of watch Cambridge beat Oxford and the Hanshin Tigers beat the Tokyo Giants.  (This could be the year for the Tigers!)  Paris is stunning, and I was left to wonder why you can't remember how stunning it is from trip to trip.  Some things, sublime things, can't be kept in memory.  (It's a technical information processing issue, I think.)  On the other hand, it is also looking a little over-the-top, everything cleaned and regilded.  As if Paris really gives at all what tourists think.  (The moment France cares what a tourist thinks that will be the end of civilisation as they know it here.)  But the big news is that I have befriended a house plant that came in on my room service tray last night, and while I understand that this is the sort of thing prisoners do (well, without the crystal pot and the French carpentry, of course), it is nice to have a friend  on the road.  She is now taking the sun on the table, as pictured.  (If anyone knows how often I should water her, and what language she speaks, I would be grateful for these details.)  I am calling her Melanie, that is, until she tells me her real name.  (I know this is where Tom gets out the DSM handbook, but really, I'm fine.) 

buzz word watch: thank you Leora

I am distinctly the worse for ethnographic wear.  Leora Kornfeld to the rescue.  She send me an email today.  I think it captures an interesting and important abuse now evident in marketing circles.  I present it without editing and with abject thanks.

what is up w/ everyone calling themselves a ‘strategist’ these days?

Marketing strategist, communications strategist, internet strategist, etc

Does this somehow distinguish them from colleagues in the same field who pursue things non-strategically?

I was in a mtg w/ some web development guys a # of months back...and at the initial meeting they pitched their expertise as follows:

“we like to think we’re high level thinkers”.

To which I responded with a wry smile “so you like to think...hmmm”... the message being that just because you like to think of yourself as possessing these qualities does not necessarily endow you with these qualities.

And at the same time I don’t want to put forward a plenitude-quashing point of view, it’s just that things are swinging to a ridiculous end of the spectrum and people make wild claims about almost everything. One of these days I may actually be in a meeting with people whose web site doesn’t promote their work as “award-winning”.

Hopefully this isn’t too cynical, but...

LK


Thank you, Leora.

Post script:

The photo was taken this morning in the countryside outside Brussels.  Sunday, I am off to Paris for the week.   I have a couple of posts brewing on ethnographic practice.  I mean, I just feel it should be more strategic, right?
 

The RED campaign, is this what happened?

The early results are in.  On a "massive" investment, the RED campaign recently returned a mere $11 million. 

You could argue that these are early days, that it's too soon to judge the Red campaign.  On the other hand, you could say that this much firepower, publicity and currency should have produced a bigger effect. 

It would be a lovely case study.  There are lots of bits and pieces here for scrutinizing.  Does the fault lay with any or all of the following factors:

1. Bono fatigue

2. the association with big brands

3. the association these big brands (the Gap, American Express, Motorola, iPod)

4. using a color as the thread

5. using this particular color

6. something about the marketing execution

I think none of these is the culprit.  I think the RED campaign was killed by the skeptics, the ones who insisted that RED was too little, a distraction from real problems and real solutions, and/or a way of disguising or obscuring personal and corporate responsibility.  These arguments established a shadow of doubt and this did the rest. 

After the skeptics, the RED project carried a secret message, one that suggested that the bearer of a Motorola was perhaps a poor, clueness dope who didn't get a) how serious are the problems of this world, b) how little corporations care, c) now little this particular campaign could hope to do.  Now the consumer has to worry that the RED campaign positions him or her as someone who "just doesn't get it."  And let's face it, in certain circles, on these issues particularly, no one wants to look like someone who just doesn't get it.  In a flash, all one's credibility as a social actor disappears. 

Now, when someone wears a Gap t-shirt in hostile circumstances (a particularly hip coffee house, say), there is always the outside chance that he is doing so ironically, that it was a gift from a girlfriend, or that he got it as a give-away.  When the product is a simple t-shirt, the consumer is not obliged to "own" the brand.  And even if he IS obliged to own the brand ("but we have pictures of you buying it!)", it's finally just a t-shirt , no real harm, no real foul. 

But if the consumer is seen packing an American Express credit card, after the skeptics have spoken, he really has to own the card, and its new shadow, the imputation that the bearer really has no idea of the larger, most pressing issues of the day.  Not so good. 

Now, I am betting that most of the skeptics lodged their skepticism reflexively.  On the grounds that you just can't let the corporations get away with this act of white wash, green wash, red wash.  I mean you have to say something, if only because you don't get a chance to state the position often enough.  We know the drill here.

But if the effect is the killing of the RED initiative and if funding is denied AIDS prevention in Africa, yikes, the skeptics have a lot to answer for.  There is suffering in the world that can be put at their doorstep. 

The larger marketing issue is also clear.  People build personal identities out of the meanings accessed from the branded world.  In this case, the intended meanings of the RED brand were subverted so that now RED adoption must necessarily  diminish the consumer's claim to intelligence, sensitivity, worldliness.  People will pay any number prices to aid in the amelioration of social problems.  Participating in the ritual destruction of the social self is probably not one of them.  And we would be naive to expect otherwise. 

The take-away for RED, take it down and start again.  This campaign is truly cooked. 

References

Join the Red campaign here.

Fawkes, Piers.  2007.  After Huge Marketing Effort, RED only Delivers $11.3 M.
PSFK.  February 19, 2007.  here. 

MBA meet MI5

Something remarkable is happening in the world of marketing.  According to Brandweek,

The tenure for chief marketing officers at the 100 top consumer branded companies has continued to decline.... Over the past three years CMOs at these companies have seen their time on the job drop from 23.6 months to 23.2 months, said Greg Welch [Spencer Stuart, Chicago]

So what does this mean?  Many things.  But one of them is that every CMO must now arrive at the corporation with a team in place. Specifically, the CMO wants to arrive with a "pre-existing" connection with an agency.  There's no time to play "getting to know you" paddy cake.  No time to audition the agency world.  You want to come with an agency in place. 

And what does this mean?  Many things.  But one of them is that the agency needs to start early.   It won't do to get to know the CMO as a CMO.  It won't even do to know the CMO as a brand director or brand manager.  No, it would be nice to spot CMO talent the moment he or she clears the MBA.

And this means, among other things, that the agency wants to reach out to b-school profs the way MI5 did.  MI5 (Thames House headquarters as pictured) is the security service responsible for protecting the UK against threats to national security.  In the old days, the British secret service relied upon a network of professors who kept an eye out for espionage talent.  It was all very discrete.  In the course of a conversation over lunch at the club, names would come up and references would ever so casually change hands. Approaches would be made.  Connections would be fashioned  The British secret service didn't need executive search.  It had a deeply intelligent, observant, thoughtful corps looking out for recruits who were in their turn deeply intelligent, observant and thoughtful. 

It could work in the world of marketing.  If the tenure of a CMO is less than 2 years, perhaps it's going to have to.

Go.

References

Babej, Marc E. and Tim Pollack.  2005.  Who Needs a CMO Anyway?  Forbes.com.  October 5, 2006. here.

von Hoffman, Constantine.  2006.  Length of CMO Tenure  Continues Decline.  Brandweek.  August 22, 2006.  here.

the website for MI5 here.

What did we learn from the Doritos Super Bowl experiment?

The Super Bowl on Sunday may represent a historic moment.  It is perhaps the first time that the corporation has reached out to consumers and offered them something like full enfranchisement in the world of marketing. 

Certainly, we've seen moments of consumer inclusion before. Converse solicited consumer created ads, as has Chevy Tahoe.  But on Sunday, consumers were not just participating on the margin, they had a seat at the table.  Or, to use the metaphor at hand, consumers have, so far, not got much further than the marketing's utility squad.  With the Dorito spots on Sunday, they made varsity. 

I wasn't crazy about the results, but that's not important.  What matters is that consumer participation is truly upon us.  It's time to ask where this experiment might go from here.  The true zealots will argue that we can look forward to a world in which all marketing content is consumer content, that marketing teams and agencies will effectively be reduced to clearing houses.   The near-zealots will argue that the better part of marketing content will be consumer created.  I believe both parties go too far. 

I think we can steal a page from political science and ask whether marketing enfranchisement might not look like political enfranchisement.  By this reckoning,  consumer participation will:

a) always be heralded as the arrival of complete inclusion

b) but it will not, in fact, enfranchise everyone

c) indeed, some consumers will never be included in any meaningful way

d) and some consumers will be effectively excluded from participation

e) consumer participation will bring consumers in according to their digital sophistication, their creative ability, and their connection to and mastery of contemporary culture.

This is another way of saying that consumers won't be welcome to create content unless they have most, if not all of the properties of existing marketers.  Rank amateurs need not apply.  Even those consumers who are "pretty gifted" will not be included.  The Doritos Super bowl experiment told us, I think, that pretty good is not nearly good enough.

This is not to refuse the power of this idea.  In the long term, some consumers will participate more, and power at the center of marketing will become still more consumer-centric as a result.  But if we think that someday all marketing will be created by consumers, we are wrong.  If we think that someday all consumers will create some marketing, we are wrong.  If we think that any thing more than a tiny percentage of consumers are qualified to participate, we are wrong. 

Tops, a tiny percentage of consumers will participate.  Anything more than 10% is unrealistic, unless professional marketers are reworking the material in a very substantial way.  In sum, consumer created marketing has come of age...only to discover that there may be dramatically less to the the proposition than we thought.    

The new Pepsi can and old marketing orthodoxy

We learned today that the Pepsi can is changing.  Cie Nicholson, Pepsi's chief marketing officer, says the Pepsi can will now change every 3 to 4 weeks.  There will be 35 new designs this year, with more to come next.

The Wall Street Journal speculates that the new designs will help Pepsi "connect with the sort attention span of teens and young adults."  And this is partly right.  Attention spans are now brief.  Familiarity comes faster.  Boredom descends ever more quickly. 

But the more pressing issue is sustaining Pepsi's brand visibility in a turbulent culture.  Stillness and consistency were once a virtue. The old style marketers insisted on keeping things simple and repeating themselves endlessly.  Sameness was the name of the game.

New school marketing says the brand must meet change with change.  It must stream with dynamism to stay in touch with dynamism.  Thirty-five designs in a year.  This is precisely what the new school of marketing has in mind. 

The new can will help.  But by itself it is not enough.  Pepsi is going to have to build in dynamic tastes.  Now this really contradicts marketing orthodoxy, but I am prepared to wager that Pepsi will be varying its formula by the end of the decade. 

The old marketing is built into the big brands so deeply that it is almost impossible to see.  This is the challenge for the brand stewards inside the corporation, inside the agency, inside the consulting world.  How quickly can we change?   And how many of the now great brands will end up pulled down to the ocean floor by the weight of orthodoxy.

You think I'm kidding.  Pepsi lives in a declining category and it is still possible for the WSJ to offer this risk analysis:

By changing designs so frequently, Pepsi runs the risk of confusing or alienating consumers who rely on familiar visual cues to find their favorite brands among a change sea of products, some marketing experts say. 

Ah, if only doing nothing were still an option

References

McKay, Betsy.  2007. Pepsi's New Marketing Dance: Can Can.  The Wall Street Journal.  January 12, 2007.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Gary Beene for the image.  For his excellent website on Pepsi history go here. 

The wounded Zune

Pricing is an obscure piece of the marketer's tool kit, the least considered of the 4 Ps (others being product, promotion, and place). Some people are good at it and those who are really good at it practice a fine art. 

For the rest of us, pricing is mostly a matter of calculating costs, estimating what the market will bear, looking at the competition, and reaching for a dart board.

But Microsoft has come up with a new approach.  The consumer who wishes to purchase tunes for a Zune must buy points.  A Zune point is worth $1.25 cents and a track costs 98.75 cents.  To buy a single song, the consumer must surrender $5.00.  If this consumer never buys another song, this is what the single song will cost them, $5.00.

We can guess that Microsoft thinks it's doing: incenting the consumer to buy more tunes.  Kingsley-Hughes believes this pricing scheme will allow also Microsoft to increase prices much more easily than iTunes can. 

But could we consult Marketing 101 for a moment?  The first question of every marketing exercise is this: what problem are you trying to solve?

The problem for Zune is clear.  Microsoft is trying to break into a market that is occupied by an incumbent who precedes Microsoft by several years, enjoys deep brand loyalty, still has better technology, offers a more attractive product, and gives the consumer entry into a magic circle called "cool."  This is what we call an "advantage."

And the advantage is daunting.  Chances are Zune will not make it.  So the problem is adoption.  It is not repeat use.  I am quite certain most MBA students would see this.  Yes, I can hear someone calling out from the skydeck now. 

"Professor McCracken, tune purchase is not the issue.  The issue is getting the consumer to buy a Zune in the first place."

The Zune pricing scheme will not merely muddy the waters.  It will create confusion and coercion.  Let's consult the Marketing 101 textbook for a moment.  Yes, it's right here.  Confusion and coercion, bad.  Clarity and engagement, good. 

What is it about this corporation?  They get into the hardware business.  They decide to go toe to toe with a great competitor.  They produce (ok, buy) a piece of hardware that just might have a shot. (Hey, I'm giving them the  benefit of the doubt).  And then they allow someone on the marketing team to screw things up. 

Is there something self destructive about Microsoft.  Have they reached deep and come up with a will to lose, a wish for failure?  Are they now the Bobby Knight of marketing? 

References

Kingsley-Hughes, Adrian.  Crazy Zune Marketplace pricing scheme. Hardware 2.0. November 13, 2006.  here.

Public relations post Gulliver

Public Relations sets itself apart.  There is something "high church" about the profession,   as if it were much too fine to mix with the rest of marketing, vulgar, beer swilling, louts that we surely are.

This is about to change.  Thanks to a good article in the Financial Times today, we can see that the corporation faces two new structural realities.

1) the corporation is losing its communications advantage.

The contest that Public Relations must modulate is no longer being conducted between press releases from on high and disorganized grumbling en bas.  Thanks to the internet and the blogosphere, every grumble is, potentially, available to every grumbler.  Grumble aggregation is now possible and for some brands, now certain.  Several "grumble Tsunami" have already come running off the internet to devastate several corporations.   

2) there is no place to hide. 

According to Chris Deri, head of Edelman's head of corporate responsibility practice,  "The expose by some 19-year old blogger of a factory in Thailand is only months off."  This means that no constraints of time and space will protect the corporation from scrutiny.  Bangkok might as well be in Cleveland.  It's a "see through" world.

Two reactions

The first reaction from Public Relations is raw panic.  Surely, the corporation is now poor Gulliver (as above), confined and attacked on all sides by little people who have no sense of responsibility or accountability. 

Once the panic passes, a second reaction sets in.  The profession reaches for a new metaphor.  "Right, then," the argument goes, "let us think of this as a conversation."  (Bob Langert, McDonald's head of corporate responsibility calls it a "dialogue."  Alan Marks, Nike's head of media relations, refers to "real time conversations."  See Murray for both, below.)

I think this is wrong.   The metaphor gives us a communications event in which the corporation and the non-corporation engage in a rapid, spontaneous exchange of views.  If there is a rule in marketing after "know your audience," it is "craft your message." The corporation must continue to engage in set piece communication, crafting each method with strategy and care.   

Parts of the old model must hold

This is another way of saying that Public Relations will continue to manage public relations, and not an open, daily conversation with many hundreds, or thousands, or millions of consumers.  The principles here will be what they are in the rest of marketing.  What are the ideas, the meanings, the concepts, the promises for which the corporation stands?  How do we make these meanings most effectively using the instruments at the professional disposition.

Parts of the old model must change

Here's what I think must change: tone.  As it stands, Public Relations speaks with a grand and formal voice.   (And this gets us back to that "high church" positioning again.)  One can't help feeling that this press release is authoritative, possibly definitive, perhaps from the CEO herself.

This is a strait jacket.  Communications from the corporation would do well adopt a tone that is lighter.  No more thundering from on high.  No more tablets from the mount.  What we want is that engaging tone that comes naturally to the football coach, especially the ones with an Arkansas accent.  This is a tone of voice that says, "I'm just saying," instead of "hear ye, hear ye."  It is confiding, sometimes almost conspiratorial.  It is candid when it can be, and tentative when that is, in point of fact, the only real option.  The new public relations will not be a conversation, but the tone will surely be conversational.

What about those party animals? 

Yes, there is a precedent: advertising.  The rhetorical rules here are entirely difference.  These messages may be funny, casual, beguiling, ironic, playful, counter-intuitive.  These are, willy nilly, messages from the corporation.  And no one says, "hold, this will not do."  If we are prepared to let brands speak in a various, variously engaging voice, why not the corporation?  (Certainly, I do not mean to say that Public Relations has the same of degrees of freedom, merely more degrees of freedom.) 

Yes, the corporation lives in a world that is newly symmetrical in terms of power and newly  see-through in terms of disclosure.  Yes, the Public Relations profession must change.  But I wonder if conversation is the model to pursue here.  Perhaps there is something to be learning from those drunken louts after all. Let's all drink to that.

References

Murray, Sarah.  2006.  When blogs put brands at risk.  Financial Times.  November 8, 2006, p. 10. 

Parsing the symbolic logic of the Smith Barney campaign

Smith Barney launched their "working wealth" campaign yesterday.  (To the right, a clipping from the homepage.)

I've written about marketing in the world of investment and wealth management before.  It is a wonderful thing to see an industry that previously would not "stoop to conquer" now actually addressing the consumer in a language he can understand. 

The industry is new to the game, so the results are uneven.  American Century Investments was, I think, wrong to use Lance Armstrong as a celebrity spokesperson.  The Citi ad that spoke of the "heart of new york" was not so much wrong as muddled.  On the other hand, recent Charles Schwab work has been exemplary.  I particularly like the ad that reads, "owning a house worth a million bucks is not a retirement plan." 

It is a pleasure to report that the SmithBarney campaign is a superb piece of consumer centricity.  It addresses the barrier in place: the fact that most consumers fail to fail to how money makes money.  Now, I know this complete confounds the financial industry. "What's not to get?" they want to know.  But that is the point of consumer-centricity.  It doesn't matter what we think.  It matters what the consumer thinks, and the further they are from our standard, the harder we have to work, the more due ethnographic diligence we must exercise. 

Consumers believe that money comes from a pay check.  They work hard. Someone pays them.  Now they have money.  Yes, they grasp the idea of "interest."  Yes, they understand, roughly, how the stock market works.  But the idea that this industry is all about and only about, money, this is as counter intuitive as a "virgin birth."  Money has to come from somewhere.  How can it  come, as if immaculate conceived, from other money. 

For the average consumer there is something impenetrable about financial planning.  It's a mystery of the old fashioned kind, not something you can clear up with a flashlight and a basset hound.  No, this is one of those imponderables of the human condition, one of those things we will just never understand. 

And what a barrier this becomes for the financial industry when it finally decides to market to these consumers.  How does the consumer calculate risk in a decision making situation such as this?   Well, he just doesn't, that's all.  He practices avoidance.  This feels like the rational thing to do.  Marketing comes late to the game, and it must move mountains.

Oh, there is one thing that the consumer understands perfectly well: the moment he sits down with a financial adviser, he's going to look like a rube and a dope.  Here's another reason to practice avoidance.

What to do?  How to speak to a consumer in this frame of mind?  The Working Wealth is a great place to start.  If the Charles Schwab campaign demonstrated a knowledge of what the consumer thinks, this one shows us how the consumer thinks. 

The notion of "working wealth" complete with gears has an appealing literalism.  The first few lines of the body copy:

"Earn your first dollar by your labors.  Get up early, work late.  Get up the next day and do it again.  Keep doing it, even after the dollars start adding up."

Exactly on target.  Start with the what the consumer is thinking.

The campaign then proposes an equation, that at Smith Barney, capital works the way you do.  Hence the headline: "I am working wealth."  This is classic metaphor.  It allows the consumer to understand the unknown part of the metaphor equation (capital) with what they know about the known part of the equation (their working lives.)

Then Smith Barney invites the consumer think of himself as someone who has control of this process.  ("I am working wealth.")  Some part of their work-a-day world is a place of special control and competence for them.  Now the equation says, hey, what you know about your domain of competence, apply that to the way Smith Barney will allow you to manage your wealth.

In the symbolic logic of this ad, we step the consumer from where he is (capital comes from a paycheck) into a moment of identification (capital works the way the consumer works) into a proposition and a promise of control (I am working wealth.)  From the old world of capital to the new world of capital with a couple of phrases and around 100 words.   This is exemplary meaning management.   

The agency responsible for this exemplary work is Hill Holliday New York.  The planner was Lesley Bielby (now of Hill Holliday Boston).  The Executive Creative Director was Alon Shoval, who, with Charles Veprek, served as copywriter and, with Victor Anselmi, as Art Director.    

 

References

Anon.  2006.  I am working wealth.  Full page ad for Smith Barney. Wall Street Journal. October 31, 2006, p. A7.

For the Smith Barney "I am working wealth" website, here.

McCracken, Grant.  2006.  Marketing the Capital Markets.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  February 10, 2006. here. 

McCracken, Grant. 2006.  Marketing the Capital Markets II.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  February 14, 2006.  here. 

McCracken, Grant.  2006.  Marketing Financial markets: Schwab Triumph. The Blog sits at the intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  March 1, 2006.  here.

Acknowledgments

Pip Coburn, Coburn Ventures

Nick Hahn, Vivaldi Partners

Olivier Blanchard, Corante

Wharton giveth and Wharton taketh away (or, why 57 million consumers must be wrong)

Wharton reveals that consumer centricity is coming even to the health care industry.  In a Knowledge@Wharton interview, Mike McCallister, Humana CEO, says:

When we decided to set the strategy for this company after I became CEO
in 2000, one of the most important decisions we ever made was to organize and drive this company around the simple premise that the consumer had to be at the heart of health care. Now there's a lot of talk around that idea today. Six years ago there wasn't anybody talking about it and there weren't many people going down that path. If you think about health care and the way it operates and has for a hundred years -- very paternalistic, no information -- it's a mother and father "may I" kind of environment. To have the consumer at the core of how it's organized seems so simple and seems so right -- except when you talk to health care people, who think it's crazy. That decision was a big one and has really guided everything we've done for the last six years with varying levels of success.... What's particularly gratifying is that the rest of the industry has now decided they're going to go down this path, too. We get the benefit of having been at it for a while, and we also take pride in the fact that we may have helped nudge the industry toward consumers. (emphasis added)

Wharton also reports the Pew Internet and American Life Project finding that 57 million American adults now read individual blogs.  But this does not impress one member of the marketing faculty, Xavier Dreze. 

Blogs are the latest forum for people who have nothing to say that others actually care about. [...] I don't see the point. It's a bunch of people writing their opinions, and  those people have no credibility. The information content is very low.

Thank you, Professor Dreze.  Consumer centricity, I guess this has to work it's way through the health care industry before it reaches the marketing faculty of a major business school.

References

Hunter, Dan et al., 2006.  To Blog or not to blog: Report from the front.  Knowledge@Wharton: Managing Technology.  October 18, 2006.  here. 

Useem, Michael and Stephen Wilson.  2006.  An interview with Humana CEO Mike McCallister: Letting the Consumer Drive Innovation. Knowledge@Wharton, October 25, 2006.  here.