Grant McCracken's Blog, page 3

Color is culture (disruption watch)

Watching for the future feels optional.

Watching for disruption, that’s more urgent.

One way to look for disruption is to watch our color palette.

Cause color is culture. And that means it can tell us that culture is changing.

I was reminded of this when I went to an artisanal fair in Hudson, New York. Everyone around me was dressed in autumnal hues. I had turned out in a bright yellow that can only be called nautical. (I wear this coat not because I sail, but because I am very much hoping I will not get run over when walking at night.)

Autumnal colors, good. Nautical yellow, bad. Color matters because color is culture. (Thank you, Peter Spear, for your patience with a tone-deaf visitor.)

So last night, watching TV, I couldn’t help notice this new ad for Cadillac.  Notice the riotous use of color.

This struck me especially because Cadillac recently used a very different palette, showing new models drifting through the moody, monochromatic, streets of Soho. Very quiet, very hip, very dialed down.

So what gives with all the colors? No, I’m asking. What gives?  Is this an indication of a change in culture? Is this the future whispering in our ear?

But of course, this could well be an eccentric choice on the part of the brand or the agency. That’s always possible. But let’s assume that the people at the brand and the agency is listening to culture as hard as we are…and possibly, just possibly, they think they’ve heard something, they’ve spotted a future, they have seen a disruption in the works.

As I was suggesting in the last post (How to read a t-shirt) we cannot follow everything happening “out there” in culture. We have to rely on other listeners. We have to divide the labor of our disruption watch.

The question now: Are big, extravagant colors coming? And does this suggest something in culture that might be big and extravagant too? Is the new prosperity going to change our palette, our messaging, and the messages that matter in brand building? Is the economy going to drive culture in new directions?

No, I’m asking. Is it?

Postscript.

You know who might have an answer to these questions is Ingrid Fetell Lee who, as it happens, has just published a book called The Aesthetics of Joy. For more details, see  Ingrid’s website here.

Peter Spear has a great newsletter called That Business of Meaning. I think you can subscribe here. Otherwise visit Peter’s website here.

 

How to read a t-shirt (and the future)

[image error]Listening for the future is a tricky thing.

If we listen far enough out into the future, we are dealing with very weak signals. Or, better, we are dealing with noise that may or may not be signal.

One way to solve this problem is to enlist the aid of others. To let them listen for us. We need listening stations. Where ever they present themselves. (And they are likely to present themselves in the most unlikely places.)

One example caught my attention recently.

The first came from an essay by Lauren Sherman. Sherman is an impressive journalist. She examines the fashion world broadly defined and has a gift for seeing the pattern in the whirlwind of data that comes spinning up out of this world almost daily. (She writes for Fashion of Business.)

Recently, Sherman wrote about t-shirts.

Traditionally, the t-shirt is a perfect example of a commodity market. It may begin with robust margins but it’s not very long before people are slugging it out for tiny increments barely above cost.

But Sherman noticed a company called Everybody.World was doing very nicely indeed. Everybody.World had discovered that it can sell wholesale in the very teeth of the commodity market.

There was margin here. And lots of customers. The Trash Tee was a hit with streetwear brands including Noah NYC and No Vacancy Inn. It sold to to Shake Shack, Standard Hotel, Google, Airbnb and Dropbox. It was a feature of music festivals like Coachella.

This is a god send for someone who cares about the future. The t-shirt is a message from the future, a glimpse of the world in the works.

Case study learnings (from the ground up)

1. We can’t monitor everything.

2. We enlist the help of others, listening to the listeners, so to speak.

3. In this case, the journalist Lauren Sherman surveys the fashion business and spots something.

4. Everybody.world is making a success of t-shirts (of all things).

5. This is a big and unlikely change: The lowly t-shirt, once the unloved and unlovely child of the clothing biz, and almost the classic case of a commodity market, is undergoing its own little apotheosis. It has escaped the status of an undergarment, night shirt, softball team uniform and college wear. It is now punching above it’s weight and is now the medium for some very interesting messages. There is something to learn here.

This is where the culture watching really begins.

For starters we are looking at the expression of a couple of new sensitivities. These are, or should be, familiar territory, specifically:

6. People prefer things that are recycled.

7. And they prefer things that are manufactured in America.

Let’s treat these as “so noted.”

But the rest is new to me. How about you?

8. These t-shirts reveal something astounding about music festivals. They work there because they help festival organizers speak to 20 different segments. 20! (And the t-shirts work here because these groups are not going to signify their difference with a cheap and flimsy piece of polyester.) We are put on notice that festivals, once monolithic and a little repetitive, are now various. Very various. Certainly we have absorbed the “diversity” lesson from other sources…but this kind of cultural diversity tells us something about consumer taste and preference that our economic models were never designed to content with. Are we ready?

9. These t-shirts sell as street ware. The world of fashion is changing. Design and branding comes not just from on high from the great fashion houses and god-like designers. It comes also from the fearless, endlessly provocative efforts of people who routinely break the rules of the fashion moment. (In the current world of fashion, the insurgent designer, as Scott Miller would call him, is powerful and rising.) Let’s contemplate what this means for branding and PR. If we think we can speak to the world in the big booming voice of corporate self assurance…well maybe it’s time to think again. Everyone in the marketing and innovation biz is taking a risk on new voices. (Consider Nike as a recent case in point.)

10. These t-shirts work for companies like AirBnb and Google precisely because these companies are working hard to get away from that big booming voice of corporate assurance. Nothing says playful and propositional like a t-shirt. Especially when compared to the official bumpf issued by PR at HQ.

11. The t-shirt are also a calculated effort, as expert Sophie Wade tells us, to send a message to the Millennial employee for whom all companies must now compete. A t-shirt says, “look how much fun it must be to work here! We’re, like, super casual! And also totally awesome.”

12. Perhaps the biggest take-away is the evidence these observations give us of a world in which the basic rules and regs are changing. Three worlds, to be specific. That of the Music Festival. That of the street. And that of the organization. All of them have embraced the t-shirt for their own, revealing, reasons. All of them are primed for change. Are we monitoring these changes? Have we read the t-shirt? Have we grasped its message?

The Bill Belichick disruption (and what we can learn from it)

[image error](This post was originally published on Medium two days ago. It is reproduced here with light editing only.)

How do they do it? How do the New England Patriots win so much?

Yes, Belichick is a genius. Yes, this system is the beneficiary of continuities at owner, coach, quarterback and players other teams can only dream of.

There are lots of answers. Every football fan has pondered them.

But here’s one I hadn’t heard of.

On Get Up (ESPN), Dan Orlovsky said this about the Pats offense.

“I don’t really believe that they have wide receivers or running backs.

They just take a bunch of guys [who are] football players and they move them all over the place to get match ups. Their running backs, sometimes they look like wide receivers. Their wide receivers, sometimes they look like running backs. Edelman, Wes Welker, James White, they all kind of look the same, playing different positions.”

This Belichick innovation is something more than a clever adaptation. It’s exactly the kind of thinking we prize these days. It rises above the architecture of thought and solves a problem in a new way. This is a classic disruption, a veritable black swan. The opposition can’t see it coming until there it is on the field.

Other coaches are prisoners of convention. They start with the positions specified by the age-old architecture of football. They find the players that fit these slots. And only then do they begin the work of strategy and execution.

Belichick’s innovation says, in effect,

“We don’t have positions to fill. We have problems to solve. We have plays to run. We will ask our players to conform to the play…instead of asking the play to conform to conventional thinking. Luckily, we have players so talented they can change their stripes from play to play.”

Has Belichick been reading Complexity theory? It’s possible.

What does the Belichick disruption mean to the rest of us?

Most organizations are slaves to convention. There’s the hierarchy that distributes power. There’s the division of labor that tells people what to do. We ask our personnel to conform to these conventions. Instead of turning them loose to solve the problem at hand.

Why can’t we be more like the Pats?

Attributions

The photo is public domain.

Are podcasts a wasteland? (with a post script about Kurt Wagner)

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This image of Rebecca Walker is from the Wikipedia entry for Third Wave Feminism (I can’t find an attribution for the image on this page or the one for Ms. Walker.)

(This post was originally published a couple of days ago on Medium. I’ve added a post script which does not appear there.)

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts the other day, and was shocked to hear the guests talk about their clothing brand as if it were very special and blindingly original.

They insisted that their brand spoke to young women with a feminist message of empowerment. I kept waiting for the host to gently point out that there were a couple of precedents here.

For starters: One hundred years of suffragette feminism, Gloria Steinem, and Rebecca Walker (pictured), to say nothing of the work of Dove and the brilliant “Throw Like a Girl” videos by Lauren Greenfield for Always.

But no. He sat by while his guests sang their own praises. The best he could muster were obliging prompts on the order of “so tell me, would you say you were totally awesome or merely utterly fantastic?”

The host is from the creative world, so he’s not trained as a journalist. And podcasts are, as we know, a planet still forming.

More’s the pity.

Edison Research found that 48 million people listened to podcasts last year. The number grows steadily. This universe expands steadily. But it’s not clear that it is maturing as a form of discourse. My fear: that it is expanding but a little witless, that it’s agreeable but a little toothless.

The world of journalism has taken this question on, and the podcast has something to learn from this precedent.

The Society of Professional Journalism has code of ethics. The code asks that members adhere to four principals:

1. Seek Truth and Report It.

2. Minimize Harm.

3. Act Independently.

4. Be Accountable and Transparent.

In the podcast world, this might be boiled down to a simple imperative:

cut out the shameless glad handing and ask real questions in the pursuit of real answers. Do not suffer fools.

Post Script

No sooner had I published to this post to Medium than I found myself listening to a Recode Media interview by Kurt Wagner of Nick Bell, Snap VP of Content. I was impressed by Wagner’s willingness to ask the difficult question. Several of them. How well was Bell’s company doing and what did he (really) think about the share price? Why does Bell use “sexy selfies” when we might expect “serious journalism?” Most devastatingly, Wagner asked Bell if he regrets having failed to engage the creator community. (This is a difficult question because it suggests a fundamental failure to grasp perhaps the biggest change ((and opportunity)) in the digital world.)  Bell took these questions in stride, but the interview was now richer and more illuminating. No glad handing here. (It occurred to me that one behavioral marker of the difficult question is the awkward silence. There were a couple. You could almost hear Bell thinking, “He did not just ask me that!”)

I looked Wagner up and was interested to see that he puts the “ethics question” at the center of of how he describes himself.

Kurt Wagner

Senior Editor, Social Media

Kurt Wagner has been a business and tech journalist since 2012 and was previously reporting for Mashable. He also covered general tech and Silicon Valley news in his first job as a tech reporter with Fortune magazine, based in San Francisco. Originally from the Seattle area, Kurt graduated from Santa Clara University with a B.S. in communication and political science. He served as Editor-in-Chief of The Santa Clara, the university newspaper, for two years.

Ethics Statement

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

In June 2016, my then-girlfriend, now-wife took a job as an administrative assistant with Instagram’s marketing and community team. She is now a member of Instagram’s brand marketing team. She does not share material information with me about specific company projects or plans. She has been awarded a small stock grant as part of her compensation package, in which I do not have any ownership or control.

I have various 401K and IRA accounts, as well as non-retirement mutual fund stock accounts that invest in a wide-ranging basket of stocks, over which I have no control. I do not own stock in any individual tech companies.

I do not consult for any companies, nor do I accept gifts or products of value from companies I cover. I do not accept travel or accommodations from companies I cover.

Recode is owned wholly by Vox Media, a company with an audience of 170 million worldwide. It has eight distinct media brands: The Verge (Technology and Culture), Vox.com (News), SB Nation (Sports), Polygon (Gaming), Eater (Food and Nightlife), Racked (Shopping, Beauty and Fashion), Curbed (Real Estate and Home), as well as Recode (Tech Business).

Vox Media has a number of investors, including, but not limited to, Comcast Ventures and NBCUniversal, both of which are owned by Comcast Corporation.

My posts have total editorial independence from these investors, even when they touch on products and services these companies produce, compete with, or invest in. The same goes for all content on Recode and at our conferences. No one in this group has influence on or access to the posts we publish. We will also add a direct link to this disclosure when we write directly about the companies.

Blogger, heal thyself

It’s all very well to play the “J’accuse” card. In point of fact, I do not have a Wagnerian statement of ethics that lets the reader know what standards they can expect of this blog. And I should. (And it says something about the haze of self congratulation that surrounded blogging in the early days that it never occurred to me to criticize blogging in the way I am now criticizing podcasting. Bitter? Ok, a little.)

I will leave the full statement for another day. But I can say this much.

1) I have never expected, solicited, or extracted any sort of payment for a blog post.

2) I have never written in a laudatory manner about anyone for whom I have served as a consultant.

I have written a lot of laudatory pieces. My “beat” at this blog is contemporary American culture and I am especially interested when I see people (by which I mean creatives, writers, agencies, brands, journalists, bloggers) making interesting (witty, rich, powerful) contributions to that culture. My guiding assumption is that much of American culture comes from commerce and we have done a poor job looking at the intersection between culture and commerce. Inevitably this means I look at the work of branders and agencies in an approving way. How does they express culture, how does they improve culture? But in 1.5 million words, I have not got any sort of payment for these posts. Before or after the fact. I’ve never even got so much as a bottle of scotch or a note of acknowledgement. (Agencies like to think they exist sui generis. And this says a lot about why the creative and commercial world struggles so much these days. But it’s also a good thing. It keeps temptation at bay.)

3) It’s one thing never to write in a laudatory manner. If we are to follow the example of journalism in general and a journalist like Wagner in particular, we are obliged also to write negatively. This blog has lots of criticism. I have criticized Gillette, P&G, and Coca-Cola, to name just three. Bad work (i.e., lazy, stupid, craven work) deserves to be called out and scorned. I am sure this has cost me clients who supply the income that keeps my “self-funded anthropology” enterprise afloat. So this has been something more than a cosmetic gesture. It’s cost me.

There may be an official anthropology code here. (And it is almost certainly an exercise in the field’s solipsism, effectively discouraging all interactions with all parties. God forbid, the field should let in data that might disturb its orthodoxies.)  But certainly there is an unofficial “University of Chicago” ethics code. This says, “you are in this inquiry for the inquiry, and the moment you start to shill, you cease to inquire.”

American culture* and problem solving (case study #7)

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At the Culture Camp in June, we will be applying our knowledge of American culture to the following topics.

1: Futures of work (the physical, hierarchical and emotional changes in how we work)

2: Futures of social (meme making, identity construction and pinging the hive)

3: Futures of storytelling (TV, marketing, movies, advertising)

4: Futures of branding (artisanal, consumer packaged goods and brand you)

5: Futures of retail (the mall, Main Street, fighting the Amazon dragon)

6: Futures of consumer engagement (brand activation and other Culturematics)

7: Futures of financial services (speaking to different segments, in new languages with new logics)

8: Futures of Health & Wellness (new cultural ideas of body, mind and spirit)

9: Futures of the American Home & American Family (critical contexts for CPG)

10: Futures of Tourism & Hospitality (engaged travel, share economies)

11) Futures of Social Good (the economy of social change)

I can hear someone saying, “But you can’t possibly cover all this territory in a day.”

But that is the beauty of a cultural approach. It gives us knowledge that is deep and broad. It gives us a single set of principles that apply across the board.

Culture operates everywhere to shape the American experience (and experiment). So it can be used to solve a great breadth of problems.

Or to use the visual metaphor that features in my opening deck on culture.

Any and every culture looks like London from the air. A great mass of detail and complexity. Like this:

[image error]

But once we do our study of culture, this world looks a lot more like this:

[image error]

We can see the parts, the wholes and the relationships. More than that, we can see the logics that make this world make sense. This has always been anthropology’s promise. It casts the net wide. It struggles to see things whole. We will show how we can use anthropology to solve a range of problems. Come join us.

✻ Why do I call it “American culture?”

To distinguish it from “corporate culture.” There are two kinds of culture an organization must understand and a manager must manage.

Culture Inside: this is the culture of an organization, the “corporate culture.”

Culture Outside: this is American culture.

We sometimes confuse these. But that’s a little like confusing American football and European football. My Culture Camp is dedicated to understanding American culture, the culture outside the organization. This is where we find blue oceans of opportunity. This is where black swans of disruption find us. It’s time we made the distinction.

American culture* and big data (case study #6)

[image error]American culture is a dynamic thing. It is busting out all over. There are several ways to contend with this blooming confusion, and we will look at several of them at culture.camp on June 7. (Please come join us.)

One of our best opportunities is big data. Here are some very big data indeed, courtesy of ESRI. This is a screen-grab of their real time rendering of Boston.

[image error]

 

[image error]

[image error]

This is Boston. From a God-like point of view. (Though I think we know God abandoned Boston a long time ago.)

I have a dream. We listen to Boston by listening to its data streams. This data can be SKU (stock keeping unit) data, vehicular traffic, pedestrian traffic…well the possibilities are now many and diverse.

What are we listening for? Departures. It’s a little like SETI. We are listening for something, almost anything, that breaks from the baseline we have established. We are listening for a signal…instead of all that noise.

For instance, we are listening for a spike in SKU data. Or a shift in traffic. And we are really listening for two streams of data both departing from baseline at once.

Hey, presto. There’s a place downtown that is selling a selling new kind of drink and we can see by traffic patterns that this bar is attracting a new volume of attention.

The map is showing us American culture in action. It may be an artifact. It may be a mirage. It may be a figment of our over-eager imagination.

But what if it’s something? What if we just got a message from the future? What if we are looking at something that will someday transform consumer taste and preference in the spirits category?

What is this worth to us? What would it be worth to Pernod Ricard or Diageo to have 6 months of advance notice of this shift. Peter Schwartz says the American corporation lives in a state of perpetual surprise. This “big board” system would return to an “advance warning” model. With all the strategy and planning advantages that that confers.

I had a chance to talk to ESRI people at an IIR conference in Florida in the spring. (Thank you, Romina Kunstadter. Thank you, Dominik Tarolli.)

ESRI sees their geographical data in layers, as below.

[image error]

And this is a pretty good metaphor for the way we want to bring American culture together with kinds of other data.

Really, there are two objectives. How do we make the cultural layer make other layers significant? How do we use these other layers alert us to cultural developments and help us understand them?

We can imagine the scenario.

“There’s this bar in the North End! Something is happening there!”

This is where we send in the anthropologists, the ethnographers, the design thinkers, the likes of IDEO, the Canvas8, Trend watching, perhaps a creative class from SVA or the dSchool at Stanford. We are there at the beginning.

Culture is the cause and the consequence of much of what happens in American markets. But like everything else in those markets, it is also diverse, complex and dynamic. Big data to the rescue. And I think we can argue that the “rescue” works the other way around: culture can make data meaningful that is now merely big.

✻ Why do I call it “American culture?”

To distinguish it from “corporate culture.” There are two kinds of culture an organization must understand and a manager must manage.

Culture Inside: this is the culture of an organization, the “corporate culture.”

Culture Outside: this is American culture.

We sometimes confuse these. But that’s a little like confusing American football and European football. My Culture Camp is dedicated to understanding American culture, the culture outside the organization. This is where we find blue oceans of opportunity. This is where black swans of disruption find us. It’s time we made the distinction.

American culture* and big data (case study 6)

[image error]American culture is a dynamic thing. It is busting out all over. There are several ways to content with this blooming confusion, and we will look at several of them at culture.camp on June 7. (Please come join us.)

One of our best opportunities is big data. Here are some very big data indeed, courtesy of ESRI. This is a screen-grab of their real time rendering of Boston.

[image error]

 

[image error]

[image error]

This is Boston. From a God-like point of view. (Though I think we know that God abandoned Boston a long time ago.)

I have a dream. We listen to Boston by listening to its data streams. This data can be SKU (stock keeping unit) data, vehicular traffic, pedestrian traffic…well the possibilities are now many and diverse.

What are we listening for? Departures. It’s a little like SETI. We are listening for something, almost anything, that breaks from the baseline we have established. We are listening for a signal…instead of all that noise.

For instance, we are listening for a spike in SKU data. Or a shift in traffic. And we are really listening for two streams of data both departing from baseline at once.

Hey, presto. There’s a place downtown that is selling a selling new kind of drink and we can see by traffic patterns that this bar is attracting a new volume of attention.

The map is showing us American culture in action. It may be an artifact. It was be a mirage. It may be a figment of our over-eager imagination.

But what if it’s something? What if we just got a message from the future? What if we are looking at something that will someday transform consumer taste and preference in the spirits category?

What is this worth to us? What would it be worth to Pernod Ricard or Diageo to have 6 months of advance notice of this shift. Peter Schwartz says the American corporation lives in a state of perpetual surprise. This “big board” system would return to an “advance warning” model. With all the strategy and planning advantages that that confers.

I had a chance to talk to ESRI people at an IIR conference in Florida in the spring. (Thank you, Romina Kunstadter. Thank you, Dominik Tarolli.)

ESRI sees their geographical data in layers, as below.

[image error]

And this is a pretty good metaphor for the way we want to bring American culture together with kinds of other data.

Really, there are two objectives. How do we make the cultural layer make other layers significant? How do we use these other layers alert us to cultural developments and help us understand them?

We can imagine the scenario.

“There’s this bar in the North End! Something is happening there!”

This is where we send in the anthropologists, the ethnographers, the design thinkers, the likes of IDEO, the Canvas8, Trend watching, perhaps a creative class from SVA or the dSchool at Stanford. We are there at the beginning.

Culture is the cause and the consequence of much of what happens in American markets. But like everything else in those markets, culture is diverse, complex and dynamic. Big data to the rescue. And I think we can argue that the “rescue” works the other way around: culture can make data meaningful that is now merely big.

✻ Why do I call it “American culture?”

To distinguish it from “corporate culture.” There are two kinds of culture an organization must understand and a manager must manage.

Culture Inside: this is the culture of an organization, the “corporate culture.”

Culture Outside: this is American culture.

We sometimes confuse these. But that’s a little like confusing American football and European football. My Culture Camp is dedicated to understanding American culture, the culture outside the organization. This is where we find blue oceans of opportunity. This is where black swans of disruption find us. It’s time we made the distinction.

American culture* and platforms for producer creativity (case study 5)

[image error]Yesterday we talked about platforms for consumer creativity.

Today we will talk about platforms for the producer creativity.

The corporation was meant to serve as this platform. It brought together the people and processes needed to create innovation and extract value.

But sometime after World War II, the world began to see that the corporation was actually not very good at creativity. (May it please the court, I enter the photo above as evidence.)

Part of the problem was that the corporation was better at keeping things out than letting things in.

It had thick boundaries. It contained silos. It demanded a certain manner of dress and speech and sometimes thinking and thought. This excluded many things and it especially excluded American culture.

It was a tragic trade-off that created an efficient corporate culture at the cost of essential knowledge.

Tragic and kind of dim. When we removed cultural intelligence in this way, we rendered the organization incapable of understanding the consumer it claimed to care about. From the deep well of the corporation, the consumer was virtually inaudible when not completely invisible.

Various expedients were created to make the corporate culture more sensitive to and inclusive of American culture. There were agencies and consultants who plotted an orbital course around the corporation, far enough away to know something about this American culture, but close enough to the corporation they could “airlock” this intelligence in.

Those days are behind us largely. Every corporation cares about innovation, and at least sometimes this is a de facto acknowledgement of caring about the world “out there.” The corporation is making itself less siloed, less boundaried and more porous. American culture now pours in. Well, flows. Ok, trickles.

People are still a little nervous about Karl in the mailroom. (The chief question: Are ALL the tattoos really necessary?) But now that so many people have tattoos even this anxiety has subsided. Diversity hiring has also helped break down the Us and Them distinctions that so diminished the conversation. Popular culture is steadily less idiotic so conversations at lunch are often a useful, if unofficial, review of things happening in American culture.

But it remains the case that every organization has staffed with people who know much more about American culture than they are ever allowed to say. My friend Tom Guarriello is good on this theme. He says that most organizations “leave money on the table.” They hire people and then fail to consult them on what they know. For some organizations, amnesia remains the order of the day. Too often the “go to” expert on American culture is the intern.

This really is a question of how American culture is made to articulate with corporate culture, and this will be a lively question for the culture.camp on June 7. We have deeply knowledgeable people in place. I hope you will join us.

✻ Why do I call it “American culture?”

To distinguish it from “corporate culture.” There are two kinds of culture an organization must understand and a manager must manage.

Culture Inside: this is the culture of an organization, the “corporate culture.”

Culture Outside: this is American culture.

We sometimes confuse these. But that’s a little like confusing American football and European football. My Culture Camp is dedicated to understanding American culture, the culture outside the organization. This is where we find blue oceans of opportunity. This is where black swans of disruption find us. It’s time we made the distinction.

American culture* and platforms for consumer creativity (case study 4)

[image error]What happened to mass culture, mass marketing, and mass media?

Well, several things.

One is the inclination of consumers to make their own culture. Once passive recipients of someone else’s mass creative efforts (TV shows, ads, magazine stories, journalism), the world has got very Do-It-Yourself. We make our own culture in the form of blog posts (like this one), fan fic, YouTube videos, Twitch performances, and spoken word.)

My favorite example is fan fic. According to UC Berkeley professor, Abigail De Kosnik, there are 1 million words in the Harry Potter novels written by J.K. Rowling. Fans have written 6 billion words with Harry Potter novels as the jumping off point.

The Rowling novels create a platform that supplies characters and story lines, and a variety of other fictional materials. And these supplies the bits and piece that readers variously reimagine and augment to tell their own stories. And tell them and tell them and tell them.

What should we make of this great profusion of creativity?

Many people just seem to shrug and move on, as if to say

“Kids, what are you gonna do?”

The Chris Anderson answer was “build a pipeline.” Capture value by being the conduit through which the new diversity of contemporary culture flows.

A second answer is “build a platform.”

And this means doing deliberately what J.K. Rowling did by accident. What we want to do is to “fund” the creative efforts of “fans” as deeply and as generously as possible. Create the starter kit that spares them having to start from zero. (These people have absorbed so much contemporary culture they could, and often do, start from zero. But some of us would like someone to play the “early investor” from a creative point of view, to supply the “upfront” investment needed to get things started.)

Having created a platform, we want to build an economy.

We need to find a way to reward the best fan fic writers. I think the best way to make this happen is to ask a big brand to fill everyone’s “tip drawer.” Now when we are traveling through the Harry Potter fan fic universe, we are able to tip the best writers for their efforts. This doesn’t have to be big money to make a big difference. As it is, very talented fan fic writers will spend this summer working at McDonald’s. Instead of telling stories and extending their talent. Picture Shakespeare in a paper hat. Too stupid. Too cruel.

A big brand can change that. And the rewards would be immense. Building and funding a fan fic platform takes a big telecom, or unicorn, or CPG brand from self satisfaction and a too vivid sense of their own grandeur to an enterprise that actually grasps what is happening around them. Does this build consumer interest and loyalty? You have to ask?

But it’s not only an opportunity for brands. Want to be the new Jack Dorsey? Build a platform that enables and rewards fan fic creativity and you will be worshipped as a god. You will be the Medici of the postmodern age.

I know that people like to praise fan fic as a flourishing of the gift economy. But, ladies and gentleman, let’s forgo the tearful declarations and put away our hankies. We’re not the ones who have to work at McDonald’s this summer. Let’s make ourselves useful, by enabling and funding American culture. The marketing rewards are simply astronomical.

✻ Why do I call it “American culture?”

To distinguish it from “corporate culture.” There are two kinds of culture an organization must understand and a manager must manage.

Culture Inside: this is the culture of an organization, the “corporate culture.”

Culture Outside: this is American culture.

We sometimes confuse these. But that’s a little like confusing American football and European football. My Culture Camp is dedicated to understanding American culture, the culture outside the organization. This is where we find blue oceans of opportunity. This is where black swans of disruption find us. It’s time we made the distinction.

The image: I am meaning to do a post on this Spring ad for ages now. It captures something about the new, newly creative, consumer. Those who know the ad will know where I’m headed. (And if you could please tell me, that would be very much appreciated.)

American culture* in the digital space (case study # 3)

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This is a series of posts that examines how and why American culture matters to American business. The opening post was “American Culture* and the Harvard Business School discovery,” and you can find it here.

I promised I’d look at several case studies in support of my thesis which is:

American culture matters and business is bad at it.

The opening case studies were about a commodity called orange juice and a Consumer Packaged Good called Coca-Cola.

This raises the question: does culture matter to other kinds of enterprise?

I have a friend who gives advice to startups in Silicon Valley. (I will give you his name if he gives me permission.)

A couple of years ago he was talking to a couple of guys who were persuaded that they had created an app that must take the world by storm.

It wasn’t quite clear to my friend what the app was for or how it created value.

To help the guys clarify, he asked,

“So who’s your user?”

The guys looked at him with surprise.

Then one said,

“Well, the user!”

This is what things sometimes happens in Silicon Valley. It’s a little like a return to the 19th century. American capitalism made stuff that was manifestly useful. A hammer, for instance. You didn’t have to know anything about the “user” here.

Except that apps, networks, and digital instruments are not manifestly useful. They are less like a hammer and more like a possibility. Often they are a solution in search of a problem. Not very clear at all.

We know this because it often takes us several false starts to discover how to use an innovation.

Take the case of photographs. The digital space courses with photographs. There are 95 million photos and videos shared on Instagram each day.

This is a mystery.

I mean, if the number was much smaller, a couple of million, say, I would be inclined to say, “Sure. People like to share their photos.” But 95 million? This is not a casual interest.

In fact, a third of the 800 million users on Instagram say they look at the platform several times per day. Wha?

This passionate interest took everyone by surprise. The digital world was slow to see that photographs would matter so much. They absolutely did not see that photos would become the “secret ingredient” of the internet economy. (One exception here might be Chris Hughes, the guy who persuaded Facebook to take photos seriously.)

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post called “the mysterious properties of the photograph.” If I may, I will quote a couple of paragraphs.

“We tend to think that photos matter because they are a record of the world. But this is only the necessary condition of their significance. The reason they really matter is that they are the single, smallest, richest, cheapest, easiest token of value and meaning online. We mint them. We trade them. We accumulate them. We treasure them.

Individually, photos are content coursing through our personal “economies.” They are the single most efficient way to build and sustain our social networks. We gift people with photos. They reciprocate. Hey, presto, a social world is confirmed and enlarged.

Collectively, photos create a currency exchange. They are a secret machine for seeing, sharing, stapling, opening, sustaining and making relationships. Want to know where networks are going? See who is giving what to whom, in the photo department.

Photos are in constant flight. They are a kind of complex adaptive system out of which some of our social order comes.

Why did Zuckerberg pay $19 billion for Whatsapp? He was following the photos, that secret ingredient of the internet economy.”

I missed something when I wrote this post. What I didn’t see is that these photos matter because people use them to craft public images and personal identities (aka “personal brands) in a culture that makes everyone their own press agent. This is one of the things it means to live in a celebrity culture.

Studying American culture helps us see that,

photos have a larger, cultural, significance
people take and share them for specific, non-utilitarian, purposes
advantage goes to the digital players who best aid and abet these purposes

Sometimes the consumer / user / person is looking for a hammer. They’re looking for the most practical solution for the most obvious of problems.

But sometimes they are engaged in social and cultural work. They are building social networks and personal reputations.

And in this second case, a deep understanding of American culture is the difference between buying WhatsApp for a couple of million and several billion. This thing called culture, it can save you a fortune.

✻ Why do I call it “American culture?”

To distinguish it from “corporate culture.” There are two kinds of culture an organization must understand and a manager must manage.

Culture Inside: this is the culture of an organization, the “corporate culture.”

Culture Outside: this is American culture.

We sometimes confuse these. But that’s a little like confusing American football and European football. My Culture Camp is dedicated to understanding American culture, the culture outside the organization. This is where we find blue oceans of opportunity. This is where black swans of disruption find us. It’s time we made the distinction.