Monthly Archives: June 2011

Quantum Mechanics and Marketing

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Physicist David Bohm concluded that quantum theory and relativity contradicted one another, and that this contradiction implied that there existed a more fundamental level in the physical universe. He claimed that both quantum theory and relativity pointed towards this deeper theory and that this more fundamental level represents an undivided wholeness and an implicate order, from which arose the explicate order of the universe as we experience it.

David Bohm’s implicate order applies both to matter and consciousness, and he proposed that it could explain the relationship between them. Mind and matter are here seen as projections into our explicate order from the underlying reality of the implicate order. Bohm claims that when we look at the matter in space, we can see nothing in these concepts that helps us to understand consciousness.

In trying to describe the nature of consciousness, Bohm discusses the experience of listening to music. He thinks that the feeling of movement and change that make up our experience of music derives from both the immediate past and the present both being held in the brain together, with the notes from the past seen as transformations rather than memories. The notes that were implicate in the immediate past are seen as becoming explicate in the present. Bohm views this as consciousness emerging from the implicate order.

Bohm sees the movement, change or flow and also the coherence of experiences, such as listening to music as a manifestation of the implicate order, pointing to evidence he derives evidence for this from the work of Jean Piaget’s study of infants. Bohm contends that these studies show that young children have to learn about time and space, because they are part of the explicate order, but have a “hard-wired” understanding of movement, because it is part of the implicate order. This idea compares this “hard-wiring” to Chomsky’s theory that grammar is “hard-wired” into young human brains.

Heady stuff  to be sure, but there are some underlying points that we can use in marketing and brand development.  Yes, marketing and brand development. Namely, understanding a brand and the means by which we get people to interact with it in a holistic sense.  Companies are prone to develop operations, mobile strategies, retail signage, etc. as if they are independent elements that do not transmit information (used here in the broadest sense of the word).  We define, categorize and measure individual elements and then stitch them together in an attempt to understand what is working and what is not. The frequent result is that we inevitably run into metrics that “don’t make sense.”  Returning to the music analogy, we rarely listen to the composition, rather we listen to precise sounds without considering context or the complex interactions that result in a whole we can interpret on a range of psychological and emotional levels.

Is shopping a quantum experience? Probably not.  But we can learn a thing or two from examining other modes of thinking than those taught in business school.

Shopping Cathedrals

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The Gothic age produced the great cathedrals of Europe and brought a full flowering of stained glass windows. Churches became taller and lighter, 
walls thinned and stained glass was used to fill the increasingly larger 
openings in them. Stained glass became the sun filled world outside. Abbot 
Suger of the Abbey of St. Denis rebuilt his church in what is one of the 
first examples of the Gothic style. He brought in craftsmen to make the 
glass and kept a journal of what was done. He truly believed that the 
presence of beautiful objects would lift men’s souls closer to God.

With the advent of the cathedral as a regional seat of power in the early 
Middle Ages, the art of forming mosaics of stained glass in windows 
flourished. Though the art had been in use elsewhere, the extravagant and 
symbolic use of the windows would see their peak with The Church. The works served several purposes aside from the architectural:

First, for a population that was almost wholly illiterate, the depictions of 
bible stories would serve as illustrations and lessons for the priests and 
bishops to point to during mass.

Second, they created a holy ambience that would focus the congregation. The 
stained glass would change the color and quality of the light in the knave, 
giving what to the peasant would seem an ethereal glow. This created an 
atmosphere “primed” for worship, convenient since most of those present 
wouldn’t understand the Latin lessons anyway.

Third, symbolically they represented a membrane between the sacred and the 
profane. Through the window was the real world. Sin, hate, pain, suffering. 
The stained glass was a shield from that into the sanctuary of the church 
and instead made the window a symbolic looking glass into the Heavens.

Quite a lot of structural and functional utility in such a simple concept.  So what does any of this have to do with modern consumerism?  Simply this: the world of shopping has radically changed and a warehouse filled with the latest, greatest things is no longer viable.  Stores need to think about the power of their architecture, from the functional elements to the symbolic.

 

Gavin J. and Matt C.

The Power of Stupidity

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As part of a storefront campaign, Diesel blanketed windows to their retail spaces with the caption, “Smart Critiques, Stupid Creates.  Be Stupid.”   Is it cute or an example of playing to our fear of not being part of the elect?  If you’re smart, you are devalued.

Being cool means being stupid, but it also means inclusion.  Interesting paradox when you start to look at the interplay between the idea of creativity as an individual act that has come to represent, symbolically anyway, rejection of the culture at large for membership in a subculture of art.  But that is another issue.  More to the point, Diesel is exploiting the myth that intelligence is a negative.  Science and deep, slow thought represent something potentially more dangerous than the potential dangers brought on by the manifestations of a small mind – the former is paternalistic, the latter is childlike.

We are rapidly becoming a culture of subject over substance and for better or worse, Diesel understands that.  Perhaps they are smarter than they let on.

How Beer Finds Meaning

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Drinking is social, we all know it. Nothing new there until we start to break down what that means. Being a collective drink means that beer choices are shaped by season, the socio-cultural roles we assume in different contexts, identity, the invention of tradition, etc. “Identity” arises when an individual constructs and presents any one of a number of possible social identities, depending on the situation. Drinking is an example of cultural and subcultural practices, in the sense that it is a performance. It is an integral social, political and economic practice. It is a manifestation of the institutions, actions and values of functional culture, the creation of subculture and ethnic culture. We can be sure that beer drinking as display (a code of messages about selves and status, role and religion, race and nation) will persist as long as human beings live by symbolic communication. In other words, beer does more than quench a thirst, it signals important information about who you are to the rest of the group.

Being part of a specified group or subgroup (whether verbalized or not) and categorizing a beer in the same cultural construct shifts depending on the situation and place. This means that shifts to accommodate the contextual norm.

Guinness is a marvelous example of a company doing this. The brand taps into that sense of shared meaning with their customers by living the ideals they represent and displaying the consistency between experience and message through their advertising and company practices. A good brand in an extension of the target audience, it is not a logo, a catch phrase, or a mission statement. The audience and the brand become inseparable. Rather than being a purely transactional engagement, the consumer and the company, the brand, become part of a shared interaction. Or look at the new Sapporo ads in Canada (http://www.sapporobeer.ca/index.php).  Visually stunning, yes, but they also represent a visual and auditory  mythology around production, exoticism and beauty.  They don’t talk about flavor because it’s assumed the drinker is already in the know.

So what does that mean for someone selling beer? It means fundamentally rethinking the way you talk about it. Beer is more than a commodity. It is an extension of a way of life, a symbol that is adapted to the needs of a given group in a given setting. That means going well beyond the 30-second ad and incorporating a brand into the daily or seasonal rituals people have established around various types of social activity. It means understanding the rituals themselves, why they matter and how they manifest themselves.

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When Ethnography Becomes No More Than A $10 Word

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Rarely do I do this, but there are times when one has to call out the absurdity of what people co-opt and redefine to fit their needs.  Ethnography lacks definition to those who see it as a $10 word for lookin’ at folk.  Case in point, I ran across this response today to a LinkedIn query about hiring an ethnographer:

Happy to introduce you to [NAME OF VENDOR WITHHELD]  video online technology for ethnographic research, empowering participants to engage with us on their schedule and without the intrusive nature of in-person methodologies by using mobile cams.

Yes, those pesky, intrusive researchers are such a nuisance.  Yes, sticking a camera in someone’s face and having them log onto a website is significantly less biasing than interacting directly with a human being.

My problem here is this: any idiot with a camera can and does call himself an ethnographer.  The word has been reduced to the lowest common denominator by slack-jawed hacks posing as qualified professionals, all because they took a two-hour seminar at the Hilton last year.  My intention is not to be cruel or mean spirited, but to draw attention to the fact that “ethnography” is increasingly being practiced, so they say, by people who clearly know nothing about what it means to do it well.  It would be like me saying I’m a Mac expert because I own an iPad.  More accurately, it would be like me saying those words as I point to a monitor halfway across the room.  Theory, training and participant observation define good ethnography and anyone who believes their “video online technology” constitutes anything akin to ethnography is the last person you should hire to do this kind of work.

Elements to Remember in Product Naming Strategies

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Using linguistics knowledge to help name products or write slogans is a given, but the discipline has a host of applications that are often overlooked, either because they are deemed too expensive and time consuming or because there is simply no experience on the part of the researcher.  We could easily spend weeks and countless hours going through the various methods used to address the specific elements of language use and how they could be applied to a range of issues in marketing and product development, but we’ll look just briefly at naming strategies.

Product Naming

Why was the Apple iPod so popular while no one has heard of the Nokia E71x? One factor is that “iPod” is much catchier than a jumble of letters and numbers.  E71x may look cool to the team shooting for something that sounds futuristic (look up THX3118 on IMDB), but it’s damn hard to recall.  Why? Because people make associations with symbols and symbols have meaning, they have character.  I won’t go down the path of discussion the relationship between signifier and sign (at least not today), but the point is that a name is more than a series of sounds.

By studying linguistics, you learn about and do research on:

  • What sounds fit well with other sounds (phonology)
  • What words best represent the product (semantics)
  • What kind of words will people most likely to remember, share and build into the cultural fabric (sociolinguistics)
  • What associations do people make with particular sounds and classes of sounds (pragmatics)

This is not the full range of linguistic elements that that go into understanding word construction, but they are essential to the seemingly simple task of developing a name.  The point is that using a model for how language works helps create meaningful names and avoid language missteps.

 

 

 

Personality Seepage

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My friend Bryan Crawford posted a marvelous article by Bethlehem Shoals on “Personality Seepage” yesterday that got me revisiting an issue I’d set aside, namely, the presentation of self in virtual life.  Beautifully written (unlike most of my muses), the article sums up the increasing difficulty we have in separating our various senses or displays of self thanks to the digital age.

Personality seepage is the consequence of the liminality that occurs (that nether-state between one construct of reality and another), when we put too much of ourselves online at once.  With the array of IM windows, boxes, and browsers all crammed together on our laptop, iPad or telephone screens, we see seepage. Personal and professional language become blurred and the lines we draw between one projection and another break down.

Of course, this leads me back to anthropologist Erving Goffman and the theoretical model in anthropology and sociolinguistics rooted in the idea of constructed identity – that we create, or adapt, based on context.  As we communicate with people, we share different parts of ourselves, adopting a slightly different personas, so to speak, to fit the context.  It is a co-creative act and one that has social and cultural rules that define the interaction. The written word, with no face behind it and no real direct interaction to guide our conversation through non-verbal/non-textual cues exacerbates the situation. Unlike most situations, we have no clear way to define our contexts and we juggle too many conversations at once.

More often than not, the blurring leads to expressions that can be taken as insulting or simply out of place.   We inadvertently display a side of our personalities we want to stress with one person but conceal with another.   So much for the praise we heap on the notion of authenticity in what we say and do.  Authenticity isn’t about being “real,” it’s about a different kind of projection, one that is more about establishing a friendly context. The authenticity of a person is, in truth, the last thing we want.

But why does any of this matter?  It matters because of our new love affair with social media monitoring and the ways we build products, services and messages to accommodate the virtual self.  We monitor half truths and make decisions based on spurious exchanges in the virtual universe.  In other words, Personality Seepage is the frequently the communicative norm in virtual space and that means the people to whom we market or for whom we build are not the people we think we know.  It’s not enough to simply watch and “listen” in the social media universe.  We have to understand what happens offline as well.

A Grant McCracken Article We All Should Read

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http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/05/i_gotta_hit_ya_the_coming_revo.html

The Coming Point-of-Sale Revolution

My wife and I recently paid a visit to the new Whole Foods in Stamford, Connecticut. In the time it took us to walk from one end of the store to the other, I made three new friends.

Each was a Whole Foods employee who began our interaction with “Can I help you, sir?” and end up sharing a little story about themselves, the new store, or how much they liked my jacket. I was feeling like Major Grumpy-Pants at the time, yet I was charmed and disarmed.

If it happens once, that’s an accident. If it happens three times in the space of 5 minutes, you know it’s policy. Whole Foods is hiring gregarious people.

How much friendliness the employee gives off is the employee’s choice. Some companies have a minimum standard. They don’t want snooty, obnoxious, or eccentric. (They don’t want that superbly dingy cashier lady played by Kristen Wigg on SNL.) If the employee can deliver pleasant and agreeable, or facsimiles thereof, that’s fine.

Some companies — like, apparently, the Stamford Whole Foods — ask for much more. Zazzle asks employees to deliver shouts of joy at the approach of guests. I walked by Best Buy in New York City where all the staff were doing some sort of affect-building exercise on the sidewalk. Greeters at Wal-Mart are supposed to be forthcoming. Disney is famous for big emotions.

But there are problems. One of them is the American conviction that your emotions are your own personal business. Generally, we believe emotions are a private matter and that it is wrong to ask the employee to use them for public, commercial purposes.

And then there’s the problem of evident insincerity. No one believes the truculent server who promises to be our friend for the duration of a meal. Does it add value to the occasion? Well, perhaps as low comedy, but not otherwise. There is something manifestly unconvincing about the airline staffer who recites, “Buh-bye! Buh-bye! Buh-bye!” as we leave the plane.

Finally, there is a mechanical problem. Greetings are little gifts, and when we force people to be friendly, they are no longer making a gift. No social value is being created. The problem is not insincerity but a paradox. A forced gift isn’t a gift.

The best way around this may be to hire people who are naturally friendly. And surely this wouldn’t be very difficult. It’s not hard to spot a social soul. But are there enough of them? Especially now that Whole Foods, Zappos, and Disney have gone on a hiring spree? What happens when we run out of nice people?

There just has to be a growing accumulation of the socially inept and the downright rude. Think of all those back offices filled with grouchy people. Thank God for back rooms and locked doors.

Clearly, we are going to have to go beyond just selecting for cheerfulness and start training it. We may also have to start paying for it.

Let’s see what we can learn from Dolores. Dolores is the reason a 7-Eleven in Shirley, N.Y., sells more coffee than any other store in the system. She was featured recently in an episode ofUndercover Boss. Have a look at this excerpt to see Dolores in action. (Feel free to skip ahead to the 1:10 minute mark.)

Dolores is no mere greeter. She’s there to make the coffee flow. And after 18 years here, she knows a lot of people by name. And if she doesn’t know your name, she is prepared to go with an endearment. (And who doesn’t want to be called “hon”?) Most astonishingly, she punches people. And she’s not asking for permission either. “I gotta hit ya,” we hear her say, “You know I gotta hit ya.”

Hitting customers. Now there’s a big idea.

I believe Dolores shows us that our conventional instincts are wrong. We offer the customer a glassy, scripted welcome. We craft our greetings as if the staff person were a butler, all frosty detachment and sangfroid. “Good afternoon, sir, may I help you find something?” There are options here. In some cases, it’s actually okay to hit the customer.

The customer is no robot. Standard greetings are just so very boring. To be sure, we don’t want to be intrusive or presumptuous. We are all Major Grumpy-Pants some of the time and when that’s the case we just want to be left alone. It’s also true that respect must be shown, and distance honored.

Human beings, most of them, come into the world with a good ear for things social. We’re wired to be convivial. (Imagine having a chance of contributing to the gene pool if we were not.) Wiring aside, we are rewarded for good interactions and punished for bad ones.

People with a really good ear for social interaction are probably 20% of the population. With the right hiring and training, we can probably double that number. And now in the place of that sullen teenager who avoids eye contact, we have retail staff fantastically good at reading people and responding to them in real time. 7-Eleven sells 1 million cups of coffee a day. Imagine what that number would be if they had a Dolores in every store.

When we turn our service staff into automata, we squander a great opportunity.

Using Color

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With the advent of a sedentary life, reliance on text, ubiquitous signage and a host of other innovations through time, sight has arguably becme our most important means of survival.  Indeed, we are hardwired to consciously heed our sight from countless years of evolution – detecting and categorizing color has is part of our genetic code, literally and figuratively.  Color, as it relates to design and marketing, is fundamental to success and it’s unlikely that most designers would deny this.  But it bears repeating every now and again, particularly as we try to shake out of our day to day practices and innovate.

Color conveys meanings in two primary ways – natural associations and culturally defined symbolism. Successful design requires an awareness of how and why colors communicate meaning. The source of these meanings can be quite conspicuous, such as those found in nature.  For example, red is the color of blazing fire and blood, blue the color of cooling waters and the sky.  Green is the color of most vegetation.  But other meanings may be more complex and anything but universal.

Color is symbolically charged and this is where understanding it is crutial to getting design and marketing right.  This symbolism arises from cultural, historical and contemporary contexts.  For example, green’s associations with nature communicate growth, fruitfulness, freshness and ecology. On the other hand, green may also be symbolic of good luck, seasickness, money and greed Green was adopted as the color of Islam — all of which have nothing to do with green plants. These associations arise from a complex assortment of sources  

Furthermore, color may have both positive and negative symbolism.  For example, although blue is the beautiful color of the sky on a sunny day, it can be symbolic of sadness or stability. Idiomatic American English reflects these traits in phrases such as “singing the blues” and “blue chip stocks.” Red is another example of dual symbolism. On one hand, as the color of fire and blood, it is an energizing, aggressive and bold color. In direct contrast, red is used for “STOP” signs throughout the world today.  Add to this the fact that red takes on yet other meanings in non-Western environments and it becomes evident that understanding color and using it with thoughtful intent is central to how you brand is received, internalized and transmitted.

 

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Using Cultural Capital

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It’s not always about the money.  Yes, the economy has driven people to be more thoughtful about how they spend their money, but it has equally driven people to think about how their purchases reflect on themselves, how they interact with the world and how positive experiences during the shopping act help them preference one location over another.  This isn’t always conscious – indeed, it rarely is.  People seek cultural and social capital when shopping and returning to our old friend Bourdieu can provides an interesting framework for our design decisions.

So what did Bourdieu have to say about these two concepts?  At the risk of being labeled a reductionist, the overarching themes are these: Cultural capital makes up the forms of knowledge, skills, jobs, education, and advantages that a person has, which give them a higher status in society. It can also be argued that the things we possess and the places we buy those things provide a form of material cultural capital.

Social capital are the non-tangible resources we possess based on group membership, relationships, networks of influence and support. Bourdieu described social capital as “the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.”

In a nutshell, then, not all capital stems from economics and systems of direct exchange.  The car we drive, the stores we shop at, etc. provide a means by which we project and exchange social and cultural influence. In one context, Levis are a sign of middle class stability, in another they become a sign of blue collar chic for the wealthy.  So while economics, traditional economics, plays a part in the overall pattern of shopping, it is not as simple as unit price.

Cultural capital has three subtypes: embodied, objectified and institutionalized.

  • Embodied cultural capital consists of both the consciously acquired and the passively “inherited” properties of one’s self (with “inherit[ance]” here used not in the genetic sense but in the sense of receipt over time). Cultural capital is not transmissible instantaneously like a gift or bequest; rather, it is acquired over time as it impresses itself upon one’s character and way of thinking.
  • Objectified cultural capital consists of physical objects that are owned, such as our cars, works of art, or even our groceries. These cultural goods can be transmitted both for economic profit (as by buying and selling them with regard only to others’ willingness to pay) and for the purpose of “symbolically” conveying the cultural capital whose acquisition they facilitate. However, while one can possess objectified cultural capital by owning an object; one can “consume” the car, the painting and the groceries (understand its cultural meaning) only if one has the proper foundation of conceptually and/or historically prior cultural capital, whose transmission does not accompany the sale of the object.
  • Institutionalized cultural capital consists of institutional recognition, most often in the form of academic credentials or qualifications, of the cultural capital held by an individual. The institutional recognition process eases the conversion of cultural capital to economic capital by serving as a experience-based model that sellers can use to describe their capital and buyers can use to describe their needs.

It is typically the objectified cultural capital that is the focus of many retailers, and it is perhaps the easiest for them to identify. However, embodied and institutionalized cultural capital are equally important because they reach the intangible.  They reach those depths of the human experience that are the most enduring.