I’ve recently finished, OBD Obessive Branding Disorder - The Business of Illusion and The Illusion of Business, by Lucas Conley, who write for Fast Company. I’m way behind on blogging, so I’ll keep the book review short, and will reference the book in some other posts that have been brewing in my brain.
Conley discusses branding and marketing along similar lines as Rob Walker’s Buying In. However, he takes a much more explicitly critical view of the current practices of today’s marketers, where as Walker writes from a more description perspective. One of Conley’s most interesting passages is on “buzz agents” that are paid to push products to friends and acquaintances. His concern is that when any stranger or worse any trusted friend or family is a potential marketer, the value of our entire social network are at risk. This risk is exacerbated by coupled with findings from the American Sociological Review from 2006 cited by Conley. The General Social Survey (GSS) which measure people feelings and social perceptions, found three times the number of people who stated that they didn’t have anyone to discuss important matters, than 20 years ago. The study also reported only half of the participants claimed to have two or fewer close friends and a quarter claiming having no confidants at all. Therefore, not only are we getting more isolated, the trust of the people we do interact with is decreasing as well.
Telecommunications encourages people to seek out relationships over space, and makes it easier to avoid those in their immediate surrounding. Further, as mobility increase and people move across states and countries to attend school or to find work, traditional face to face social networks are weakened. Just as Walker states that we use brands to create our own identities, Conley states that we form communities based on brands.
One side distraction of the books is its, at times, loose use of statistics to bolster arguments. In one early section, describing how US companies are replacing innovating with marketing. This is a troubling observation, reveals in the way company reshape, repackage, reposition, and retire their products rather actually innovate. Conley cites that the number of hours worked in the US is decreasing while they are increasing in the countries, many of which are in Asia. This idea would only be relevant if more hours worked translated to more innovation, which is may or may not be true. While I agree that sacrificing research and development for more marketing and brand positioning is bad for long term business practice, confusing links to data is distracting.
Overall, OBD is a good read. He notes the ironic end point, that anti-branding voices such as Ad Buster and Naomi Klein, author No Logo, are established brands themselves. I appreciate that Conley attempts to tackle the idea of how to rethinking the brand which surrounds us. Although he doesn’t provide an actual roadmap to encourage social and corportate change, which may not even exist. If brand are inescapable, then what are people who agree with Conley to do?
A couple of weeks ago, I finally finished, “The Design of Future Things,” by Donald Norman. I loved his popular book, “The Design of Everyday Things.” Norman is clearly an important thinker in the subject of design and usability. He tackles the intelligent systems that are being designed for our homes, offices, cars and personal devices. Instead of writing a full blown book review, I want to highlight on idea raises towards the end of his latest book, which is the entitled “The Science of Design.”
In this section, he cites that design is an interdisciplinary field, which often combines, art, social science, engineering, and business. Of the fields which comprise design, each field falls within a spectrum of formal methods of evaluating design. Engineering has quite formal approaches, and aesthetics tends to resisting them. Norman calls for a “science of design” because he feels that more rigor is needed in the intelligent systems he describes the book. The argument is easy to accept after reading about the many failures in the initial attempts at intelligent systems, which he documents in the book.
Norma does not offer the specifics of what this methodology would look like. While there are benefits to a formal approach to evaluating design, I would argue that we need to proceed with extreme care in creating an approach. My fear is that the easy route will be taken, which would blindly try to build evaluation tools based on medical experimental methods, which is where “quantifying research” usually ends up. This would be clearly wrong. Understanding if a cancer drug treatment worked is much more straight forward than if and more importantly why a design worked. (I won’t go into the problems of medical experimental methods, of which there are many.) Tom Reeves from the University of Georgia has some interesting thinking in this area when looking at methods of evaluating interactive educational tools.
Obviously, someone could create an experimental measure if a person used, learned, and understood the design properly. However, a simplistic efficacy rate (99% of testers used the design “properly”) may miss the big picture of, for example, a disenfranchised population who are not being designed for, which raises questions about the ethical and political responsibility of the designer. (Products such electronic voting booths, public transport, and educational tools are examples which readily come to mind.) Further, the leaps in innovation often require a lag time for people to understand and integrate the new design features into their lives. The temptation to overuse design evaluation tools will be great for companies who risk millions of dollars to roll out products. If the evaluation tools are poorly implemented, innovation may decrease as companies and innovators choose safer designers over ground breaking products such as GUI desktops, because they don’t initially “test” well. In the end, Norman’s call for a science of design is an important one, and it ties into the ethics of design that I’ve been thinking about lately. So, I suspect that there will be more posts in the future on the subject.
Last Friday morning, I stopped by Likemind to see Piers, Noah and others, as well as to pick up an advanced copy of the book “Buying In” by Rob Walker. His publisher, Random House, offered Likemind attendees in North America free copies and kindly paid our coffee bill too. Walker is a journalist who covers marketing and consumerism for the New York Times. The book attempts to explain why we prefer certain brands, for seemingly irrational reasons. His theory is that we have a deep relationship and dialogue with the products we consume. More importantly, we use these products to create our own self-perceived identity and they give meaning back to us. Changes in marketing strategies have made the relationship even more complex, as the traditional modes of advertising such as mass television and print ads give way to the untraditional methods of “viral” or “guerrilla” marketing. The shift blurs the differentiation between marketers and consumers. Many of the cases he covers will be familiar– Pabst Blue Ribbon, Red Bull, Timberland, American Apparel, and of course Apple’s iPod– especially if you read Walker’s column “Consumed” in the New York Times Magazine.
The idea works like this: we buy into brands and their products mainly in order to a tell a story about ourselves to ourselves, not just to other people. Many successful brands are a blank slate, onto which people can project various stories. These multiple meanings allow certain brands to grow beyond their initial niche. Messages from marketers as well as peers shape our perception of what a brand means. Things get interesting when Walker explains how, although we believe that we can see through marketing and branding, exposure to external messages (that is, marketing) can affect not only our perception of quality but the *actual* quality of a product. He cites an extremely interesting study by Dan Ariely, Baba Shiv, and Ziv Carmon, which gave a group of students an energy drink, its true full price, and told them a scientific study showed that the drink helped mental performance. These students did better than students who were given only the test. Surprisingly, other students who given various combinations of getting the drink, being told it was cheaper (and therefore less valuable,) and that the drink “might” improve performance all did measurably *worse* than the control group.
The relationship between our identity and our brands become apparent when we look at two human drivers that Walker mentions, wanting to be an individual and wanting to belong to a community. The two seemingly opposing internal motivations work out in fascinating ways. We buy products that conform to what we perceive to be our individual taste. However, our unconscious minds process and react to much more than our conscious minds detects. My point is not to argue that we are victims of subliminal “buy popcorn” images in movies. Rather, people are complex beings, full of, emotions, gut instincts, competitiveness and irrational thoughts. If we were truly rational beings economists could more easily explain our behavior, and everybody would be saving more, eating healthy, and exercising a few times a week. Further, the “truth” that we bestow onto our brands is relative. The actual “truth” about the brand is secondary to our perceived brand identity. As Walker notes, anti-marketing hipsters can drink a “working class” beer like FBR, when in fact, it is increasingly drunk by hipsters and less by mid-Western working class beer drinkers.
Walker also describes how the lines between marketer and consumer are blurring, as I previously mentioned. As with most business books these days, he coins a new term for this observed phenomenon, in this case “murketing.” He goes on to describe how new marketing companies hire “agents” to push products onto friends, family, local store owners, and strangers. The key insight here, is that the agents often do this for free, because they like the feeling of empowerment from sharing their ahead of the curve knowledge about upcoming products to people. What is also interesting is that many of the agents aren’t the hipster influencers in the Lower East Side that Malcolm Gladwell describes in “The Tipping Point” or as Walker names as “Magic People.” Instead, they are regular people with regular jobs, living pretty much anywhere. This idea of weak links and how influence spread through them deserves a post of its own.
Often, people make the claim that people are in control over their decisions, and are further aided today by having overwhelming access to consumer product and service information. This is true, but the issue is more complicated than that. In the past, my general reaction was that this idea, while true, is only part of the equation. We need to insure that our society supports media literacy for people to have the tools to properly deconstruct all the marketing we increasingly exposed to seeing and hearing. Now, Walker’s research suggests that media literacy is not enough.
“Buying In” is mostly descriptive, rather than normative. Walker doesn’t go out and definitely argue that murketing is itself bad, and acknowledges that he too is influenced by these forces at play. He cites his personal questioning of his allegiance to Converse sneakers as an authentic anti-establishment choice after it was purchased by Nike. He does starts this exploration some of the ethics behind our brand-based identities in his coverage of Etsy and craft culture. The founder of Etsy, Robert Kalin, states that his mission is to create authentic “connections” with the things we own. I saw him speak at the recent PFSK conference and was interested to hear him talk about wanting to move towards away from big box shopping and towards a more authentic bazaar-like experience. Walker reports that Kalin has the goal of having his entire wardrobe be hand made products from his site. While this is a noble goal, it does not attempt to unbundle our identities from our brands, be it an artisan on Etsy or the Gap. I would have liked to see Walker take his ideas further in a more normative direction, and explore the possibilities of walking away from our brand attachments. What would happen if we unplugged from our brands? How would we and those around us react to separating ourselves from our possessions? Is that even possible? Even better, what stories would we construct about ourselves? Who would we be?
I finally got around to reading Elizabeth Currid’s book, The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City, which argues that these creative industry are an important economic force in the city and social networks that allow it to function. The book is a breezy read, with an academic context but written for lay people. Thankfully, Currid references in an academic style. Many of her citations which left out of books aimed at the general public have been added to my to read list. Books in this style are very important because they counter the increasing obscure that academic research often takes has it plummets in sub-sub genre navel gazing. Although I have some issues with the book, I’ve been thinking about it for a week, which is a sign that it was worth reading. Aside from a few factual errors that slipped though the editorial process, (the Roxy was located in Chelsea, not the East Village) the book ends up leaving me wanting a lot more exploration on the merit of the social networks which promote the creative production and why that is good for New York.
She sets out and shows how the creative industries of New York, provide real economic value to the city’s economy and represents a growing percentage of the labor force, which quickly and adequately does in Chapter 3 of the book. She then spends the rest of the book describing how the social networks of these creatives (the people working the industries Currid explores) help produce output that drives these industries, by interviewing people who have successively used this networks to advance their careers. Also she shows the creative industry has value, she doesn’t explain why it is valuable over other uses of resources. That is, the creative industry and its use of social networks is assumed to be worth continuing because of its past existence. However, this assumption doesn’t question the dependence on the social network itself. Is this dependence on being able to capitalize on social networks efficient, fair or democratic?
By only interviewing the success stories, she risks overly celebrating her subjects like Quincy Jones, Jeffry Dietch, and John Varvatos. A more complete study needs to include examples of failure. The barriers to entry of these networks are only slightly mentioned. She quotes of a successful graffiti artist, Colt45, who mentioned that other talented colleagues did not achieve success or fame, while other less talented ones did. Interviewing those who lost out, I suspect reveal a new narrative. Last year, the painter, James Rosenquist gave a telling interview (around 30:30-31:45) in which he discusses being selected by Henry Geldzahler to be the now legendary show “New York Painting and Scuplture: 1940-1970″ at the Met.
He goes on to explain that the his success has a lot to do with luck, and recounted that he knew many talented artists who never were able to achieved fame. These experiences only get brief mention the Warhol Economy but deserve examination, because they shed insight on why we should ultimately care about these social networks and ask if they are better systems to encourage cultural production.The middle chapters of the book describe the interaction with creative workers and the gatekeepers of culture, be it fashion, music or art. Here, the analysis misses an opportunity to show how digital technology is influencing production of culture and the tradition powers of the gate keepers. These are relevant changes, because the fall of the cost of digital media production and the rise of digital social networks are having effects which simultaneously work for and against the gate keepers. This simultaneity of opposing forces caused by digital networks has been discussed here in previous posts, as well, and I will admit is a personal interest of mind. In this case, decreases in the cost of audio recording equipment, the rise of peer to peer networking and increases in the access to high bandwidth, are creating opportunities for musicians to circumvent traditional music labels. Further, promotion of music has similarly seen a massive increase in the ways a musician can self-promote her music as well. When anyone with a personal computer can record and distribute music, the creators are seemingly no longer as dependent on gate keepers found at big music labels and mainstream publications.On the other hand, with an abundance of choice, we often look towards these taste makers as trusted brands to do the filtering for us, which in turn increases their power. Disruptive forces in the music industry, such as MySpace and P2P file sharing, radically change the importance of the nodes of that a band’s social network. Currid interviews the independent band, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and describers their rise of success from in part, being in New York and playing shows in the Lower East Side clubs. While this is undoubtedly true, here is a slightly different narrative from metafilter:
“Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are a band that, less than a year ago, were making music without the help of a record label, pressing CDs themselves and selling them at concerts and on the Internet. Then the following happened: June 9: Dan Bierne writes about the band on his MP3 blog, June 14: Pitchfork Media posts a review of the song “In This Home On Ice”, June 15: Blogger Gothamist posts an interview with the band, June 20: Blogger Stereogum announces the band’s show at the Knitting Factory, June 21: Gothamist reports that David Bowie was in the audience at the Knitting Factory show, and June 22: Pitchfork posts one of a slew of reviews of Clap’s first album. Now, they’ve been named to dozens of critics ‘best of’ lists, they’re playing Conan and Letterman, and are about to embark on a new tour.”
Pitchfork, which Currid mentions, is not just a well-regarded online music review site. It was started in 1996 by a recent high school grad in Minnesota, and then relocated to Chicago. The digital social networking component was both decentralized and an important component to their eventual success. It also suggests that changes in social networks can have effects on the culture economy and therefore, according to Currid’s research, New York City’s overall economy which depends on cultural production. The reason acknowledging the influence of digital production and communication is of value, is that it is changing the status quo, which Currid’s proposals seek to maintain. Policy makers have a tradition of regulating for the past, certainly not the future, and rarely for the present. While is it impossible to predict, closely studying the present is useful, of which William Gibson is often attributed for stating something to the effect of, “the future is here, it’s not just widely distributed yet.”
As the book is mainly a descriptive text, rather than normative (or proscriptive) I’m wondering what Currid feels about the current social network, gatekeeper system that is in place. The title of the book is telling, as Warhol redefined not only the art of his time, but also idea of fame, wealth and celebrity of living and working artists. In his aftermath, the idea of the starving artist is passe. Not only the rapidly rising cost of living in New York that is changing, but the expectation of what an artist’s standard of living should be. It’s hard for me to tell if $300 bottle service is good or bad for New York’s cultural economy, because she makes it sound so alluring.
Currid concludes by suggestion a few ways that local government can support artists and designers through subsidized housing and studio space, as well as, more open policies toward nightlife. However, with this suggestion, it’s not clear to me that they would work, or if we want them to work. I wish she included more than a paragraph reviewing of what other countries (Canada, Australia and New Zealand) are doing in supporting the culture economy. I’m curious to know how can we learn from cities with better funded social-welfare programs, such as Tokyo, Paris, Amsterdam, and London strengthen or weaken her ideas. While what Currid documents in important, there seems to be a lot more work to be done.
