Service economy anxiety pt III, or good help is hard to understand

Over the past couple posts, I’ve been writing about America's collective uneasiness with our long shift to a service-based economy, citing a range of examples that seem to express what I'm calling our Service Economy Anxiety. I've written about our collective desire to nostalgically celebrate the skilled trades (through the artisanal movement and elsewhere) as well as the frequency and volume of complaints about customer service on social media platforms. But the richest and most dynamic cultural expressions are often produced by artists and writers who intuitively tap into this underlying anxiety as a source for their work.

I think I first noticed the popular expression of this anxiety in Louis CK's now famous "Everything's amazing and nobody's happy..." riff on Conan (here). His monologue focuses on how the amazing advances in technology have made us impatient with just about all kinds of service, including the technological replacements for personal service.

But once I got sensitized to the importance of customer-service content in popular culture I started to see these scenes everywhere.

Just last night, watching a TIVO’d episode (Season 3, Epi 4: Mitten, cited here) of Nurse Jackie, I saw the indomitable Edie Falco pretend to be a restaurant manager in order to confront an arrogant customer berating a waitress for failing to get his order right. The waitress/customer confrontation is pretty standard fare, almost an iconic representation of social relations of any era. (Think Five Easy Pieces to Seinfeld)

But you don't have to very work hard to see how this scene is particular to our current cultural moment: 1) Edie F isn't an irate customer but a service vigilante, stepping to address an injustice, like the Consumerist come to life. 2) Eddie's nurse’s uniform positions her as an iconic leader of the service professions 3) most most revealing of all are the dynamic of the scene. In order to make her case, she turns to the arrogant customer’s dining companion and asks him if he’s a client. When the dining companions replies that he is, Edie then asks him if he wants to do business with an asshole like this. He replies, “No...Actually, my daughter is a waitress.”

Past versions of this would have likely called out the differences between between the two rich white guys dressed like lawyers or bankers and the women serving them. But in Nurse Jackie the distinction is collapsed to make a point about shared social responsibility. Don't be assholes to service pro's; after all, they are all somebody's daughter. (And yes I'd argue the gender politics are no accident either, but that would require another post).

Nor it need hardly be mentioned—though I’ve mentioned it before—that the show Nurse Jackie is itself all about privileging the nurse’s work of attentive personal care over the work of the self-interested and generally flawed doctors--the higher-status experts, who are the professional equivalents of the assholes Nurse Jackie castigates in the restaurant.

But the freshest and funniest take on our service economy anxiety has to be this year's 6-part IFC special Portlandia. The source of most of its comedy—as my clever wife first pointed out—is the social confusion and blurred roles caused by our service economy.

Virtually every one of the first six episodes has at least one scene that represents a character perplexed by how they are supposed to behave as a provider or receiver of service. Portland's notoriously lefty social politics create the raw material for this confusion, but the confusion extends beyond political correctness to the nature of the work itself. In scene after scene, service providers and recipients stumble awkwardly back and forth across line of uncertain authority, trying to figure out who is actually in charge. Often, the service provider tries to redefine the role to something other than service: they want to be friends or educators or therapists, almost anything but old-fashioned servants.

In the opening episode, a waitress at a progressive, lefty café doesn’t just tell the diners that their chicken is local, free range and “all across the board organic” but actually produces its “papers,” which documents its pedigree. (Clip here under "Is it local?") "His name was Colin," she tells the diners, the series' creators and co-stars, Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen, but of course even the papers don’t satisfy Fred and Carrie who leave to “check out” the farm on which Colin was raised.

In another episode (clip here), a spot-on parody of the Ace Hotel (renamed The Deuce), the show mocks the boutique hotel chain’s notoriously crappy service with Carrie playing a hostess, trying to bond with customers angry over the lack of attention even though she’s the one who has failed to serve them.

And then there is episode 3 in which Fred and Carrie discover that their maid is in fact their favorite artist and cultural hero—indie songwriter Aimee Mann. The most slapstick representation yet of our current confusion about our roles as service purchasers and providers, Fred and Carrie fall over themselves trying to ingratiate themselves with the hired help. They might be paying but they aren't in charge. In Portlandia, capital is no match for cultural capital.

In the final episode, W+K (which seems to have some involvement in the series) pokes fun at itself by documenting Carrie’s first day on the job at the famed agency (clip Wieden and Kennedy). While there are a handful of obvious jokes about hipsters trying to signify how cool their job is--birthday parties for dogs and dodge-ball brainstorming sessions--the deeper social comedy is about our newly uneasy relationship to our co-workers.

In her first moments on the job, Carrie is invited to sign a birthday card for a woman she has never met. The show plays up the artificially intense emotion for comic effect (this is advertising’s job after all: instant affect!) but the creepiness lingers, and should be familiar to any of us who have worked in environments which strive to erase boundaries between professional and personal life. Throughout the scene as Carrie is bombarded by increasingly personal questions and requests, her puzzled expression seems to ask: Who are these people anyway? Are they my colleagues? My bosses? My friends? My family? Is this a job, a lifestyle, a cult, or what?

Versions of these anxious questions are ones the show poses over and over again.

It's easy to forget that it wasn't always like this, but you want to be reminded just how uncomfortable we are our new roles, just read a novel from the first half of the century to remember how comfortable we—or our English friends—once were feel telling servants how to behave.

The distinction between providers and receivers of service was once clearly divided along class and then professional lines. Those distinctions are now long gone. We're all serving somebody now. We have adjudicate our roles in each and every interaction as we simultaneously try to pretend that something more meaningful (an education, a relationship, a bond, enlightenment) than just plain service is happening.

It's exhausting of course but no one said customer service was easy.

Service Economy Anxiety, pt II or how we complain now

Our uneasiness about our nation’s long shift to service economy has spun off a number of cultural expressions.

A few examples I cited in the last post were related to our attempt to hold onto the myths and values of the skilled trades even as they become marginalized in the nation's economic life. It seems to me that this anxiety might also be seen in the widespread use of social media to complain about customer service.

Almost every major brand on earth now has a Facebook page dedicated to failures in customer service, or in the parlance of soc-med: how much they suck. Sears sucks as does Home Depot as does as does JC Penney. JP Morgan sucks. Fidelity sucks. Bank of America suuuuucks. McDonalds sucks. Burger King sucks. All the airlines suck of course. As do all the telecoms. And all the cable companies.

And branded twitter hashtags can sound almost biblical in their Job-like litanies devoted to the miseries inflicted by bad service. Above is a Cablevision thread but just about any brand + sucks will tell the same story.

When any form of expression becomes pervasive it's hard to hear what’s new and strange about it anymore. So if you want to refresh your experience of all this complaining, try getting a member of the boomer generation (a parent will do for many of us) to read one of the “X brand sucks” threads and watch their faces wrinkle into one of those “why do people waste time on this unpleasant nonsense” expressions.

In the most annoying and yet apt expression of the era, these old people just don’t get it. We may like to think that what they don’t get is how empowered we are now that we can complain on social media to brands who better listen or WATCH OUT because we can spread our complaints to the four corners of the earth. But the generation gap doesn’t work that way. Older generations aren’t necessarily blind to contemporary experiences. They just don’t need what we need. They got and get their satisfactions elsewhere.

What the non-net-complaining-generation don't get is that our new social rules have been defined by our new social-economic roles. We are a nation of service providers providing service to a nation of service providers. No wonder we are so judgmental, so impatient, so demanding, so intolerant of minuscule FAIL-ures. Every time our service economy fails us, we feel implicated in the exchange. How do we expect to make it, unless we all give %110 all the time, people. Pro-class members of a previous generation would have never dreamed of asking to change places with a cashier or barista; we contemporary service pros will happily do it: just to show them show how it's done.

Consumer advocates argue that we complain so often now because we can. And that’s probably true. (It's certainly and obviously true social media has become an important tool of political activism.) But it seems to me it's also true that we complain so often because we need to. It's a point of pride, a reminder of the expectations we all have to meet. It's service we were born for. It’s Bergdorf's we mourn for.

Of course not all of us are blind to the cultural contradictions of the service economy. I've recently become sensitized to the prevalence of scenes in TV shows and movies that represent customer service failures, including an entire series that seems devoted to the social tensions created by our service-to-service culture, Portlandia. But more on that next time...

Service Economy Anxiety, pt I

While economists differ on the practical implications of America’s long shift to a service economy, almost every discussion of the change carries with it the suggestion, however faint, that something essential to our national character is being lost—some native spark of boldness, ingenuity and determination. While we still want to align the American character with the pioneers, inventors and farmers who founded and built our country, the stat's show that we've become a nation of cashiers, marketers and money managers, careers that require more decorum than boldness, more social intelligence than ingenuity, more emotional endurance than determination.

Our cultural anxiety over this perceived loss has found many expressions. Our butchers, bakers and candlestick makers might be increasingly marginalized in our nation's economic life, but we're far from ready to give up on the values and myths we associate with the skilled trades. It's visible in the long rise of the artisanal movement which has transformed previously low-status jobs like butchers and bakers into forms of performance art (at least in Brooklyn) as well as inspired manifestos like Crawford's recent Shop class as Soulwork that argues for the fundamental, philosophical value of working with one's hands. Only by making, Crawford claims, can we liberate ourselves from the soul-killing labor of managing and serving.

My own research with Creative Class folks supports Crawford's claim that a life devoted to customer service can make a man feel, well, less manly. The vast majority of pro-class men I've interviewed over the years actively seek out hands on work in their off hours--from farming to carpentry--because, as they put it, it just seems more "real." Their remarks repeatedly turn to the uneasiness that their two hands aren't being put to much use. "I want to see that I've actually made something...accomplished something.." "At work there are a lot days when I'm not sure what I've done. I know I've done something, but it's hard to describe."

Another manifestation of what am I calling service economy anxiety is the way social media platforms are rapidly transforming into giant forums for complaints about service. Just about every brand on Facebook now has a page devoted to how much it sucks, but more on that next time.

Two Minds Branding

If some consumer research company happened to call me today to ask me the standard series of brand sentiment questions about say Toyota or Bank of America, I’d likely say that my feelings are more negative than they used to be. My reasons for these negative feeling are probably similar to everyone else.

I know Toyota’s legendary quality has slipped in recent years (even if a lot of those careening Prius's were caused by driver error) and of course I am well aware that B of A has had more PR disasters than Robert Downey Jr. since the financial meltdown.

But if this researcher happened to ask me what kind of car I owned, I’d say I just got a new lease on a 2010 Toyota Prius because I’ve had a good experience with my last one and there wasn’t a better option at the price. And if they asked me where I banked, I’d say Bank of America for the same reason. No bad experiences, a few actually positive ones and I don’t really care if John Thain--or any other big bank president--likes to have a fancy office. I'm kind of working under the assumption that they all do.

My point is that these issue--which are undoubtedly impacting how most people answer these brand sentiment questions--have had zero impact on my personal choices. This isn’t to say my feelings about the “master brand” don’t matter at all. If, for instance, some car brand offered a potentially better alternative to the Prius, I’d probably be slightly less loyal to Toyota than I would have been in the past. But not much. Certainly not as much as a declining brand sentiment score might traditionally indicate.

It seems that most of us have two minds when it comes to big brands. On the concrete, day-to-day level, brands exist as the symbolic authors of products and services that we actually use and our experience of those products pretty much defines whether we buy them again. And then there is the BRAND, the big abstraction, existing in culture, which sometimes motivates our choices, but not nearly as much as we often hope or fear, particularly with brands that deliver some functional benefit.

Our relationship to this latter abstract BRAND entity has about as much influence on our purchase decisions as our feelings about a country like France have on our desire to go to Paris in the spring. I’m no fan of the reemergence of the National Front, but that doesn’t have much to do with my desire to see the Rembrandt show at the Louvre followed by dinner at Aux Lyonnais

Not dead yet: towards the reinvention of the focus group

I’ve been hearing about the death of focus groups for about as long as I’ve been in this business, which is now over a decade, and yet they keep happening, which makes you wonder: can they really be as stupid and pointless as all their detractors claim?

Well, sure. Sometimes they are just that stupid and pointless but as more measured observers have pointed out, they have their place, so long as you understand that place and their limits as research tools. I’ve written about them before myself here, comparing them to the usefulness of using water to put out fires. There might be better ways to put out fires, but water works pretty well and there are quite a few handy fireplugs around so we might as use them.

But this is a pretty weak defense when the truth is I often get quite a bit out of qual research. Though I should add that I've generally had a different take on focus groups than most people I’ve met in the industry. In general, I’m not that interested in whether consumers “like” something or not. It’s always seemed to me that the only reactions that mattered were strong reactions, and that a strong negative was probably more useful and informative than a weak positive. This a fact that Sacha Baron Cohen understands intuitively and uses to great comic effect in Bruno. Few reactions are as powerful or revealing as disgust.

I certainly don’t think of qual as evaluative in the marketing research sense of the term. In fact, I generally don’t care what consumers think coming into the groups. My standard line in the past has been I don’t care what consumers think so much as what I can make them believe. Am I leading the consumers? Yes, I am. The question is: are they following? If I can’t get them to follow me in the room they certainly aren’t going to follow any marcom object they encounter in their daily lives.

But this was always an exaggerated claim of the kind I’m prone to. I do care what consumers say or at least how they say it. I don’t care if they “like” a particular idea or expression but I do care a lot about the particular language they use to describe their reaction. The form and content of these reactions is far more revealing than any of their claims about whether they like something or whether they will buy it. Unlike these claims--which are of dubious accuracy--the way consumers express themselves reveal how they think through consumer decisions and the cultural touchpoints they use to support their own opinions. These are almost impossible to fake, even if consumers had any motivation to make them up. Plus the lanaguage often makes for great creative source material.

It wasn’t until I started working at Amalgamated that I joined up with a group of strategists and creatives that really embraced this point of view and had developed a methodology that made use of these seemingly irrelevant details that most researchers edit out of reports or consider merely directional, when in fact they are the most meaningful and useful content in the research.

And yet, I still didn't fully understand or could really explain everything I was trying to do in focus groups until recently, when, with the help of some of my former colleagues in academia, I was led to the work of a neo-Freudian analyst named Christopher Bollas who has detailed a revolutionary way of thinking about the old idea of free association, which I’ll post about next.

Why strat/plan is more like nursing than doctoring these days or a different defense of listening

Saw a great show on the growing Nursing Crisis on NOW the other night. Now comes at the end of a series of newsweekly shows (Greater Boston, McLaughlin Group, Washington Week) that generally occupies the attention of my media junky family on Friday evening so I'm usually pretty burned out on current events by then, but this show caught my attention.

The segment began by describing how important nurses were--the proportion of well-trained nurses to patients has huge impact on survival rates--and then went on to detail the causes behind the nurse shortage.

While the majority of the show was about the nurse shortage, I'm writing about the first half of the show here because it reminded me once again that the exhausting, repetitive, caring, tedious work of just paying attention--or what we can call listening now that "listening" is a technical term--is often more important than the single, grand deductive insight in achieving a successful and satisfying outcome.

Maybe it’s because I had spent several hours of that day monitoring radian6 feeds and optimizing keywords for a paid search. Or maybe it was because the earlier half of my week was spent listening to franchisees talk about trying to drive traffic to their stores in our challenging times, but the combination of events made me think that the work I do--strategy and brand planning--seems to be shifting from more high-level diagnostic type work (voila, the strategy is X) that we associate with doctoring to the more continuous listening, monitoring, supporting, comforting and adjusting that we associate with nursing.

I don’t think this shift from big top-down thinking to continual ongoing vigilance is unique to our planning/strategy profession. On the contrary, as others have noted, this shift seems to have impacted just about every field in which an expert has to make an important decision with imperfect information. There are many reasons for this new appreciation for careful, ongoing attention, but the most significant ones seem to be:

• New technologies of measurement have created an overabundance of data: access to an increasing complexity of data in almost all fields makes it harder to make a simple overarching decision with confidence.
• We suck at making decisions: Those who study the way we make decisions (from cognitive scientists to behavioral economists) have uncovered innumerable “heuristics” or cognitive biases we all use when we make decisions, often without being aware of them.
• Skepticism about expertise in general: And related to the above, an empowered non-pro population with new access to pro-grade info is growing increasingly dubious about expertise in general. Just this morning the NYT cited a study in the Journal of Consumer research here that showed we find confident amateur reviews more convincing than expert evaluations. (So it's no accident, I think, that our popular culture is suddenly more interested in nurses than doctors.)
  

And then, reinforcing my developing thoughts on subject was an article/review I read in the NYRB making exactly the same points about the medical profession.

The review- “Diagnosis: What Doctors are Missing” by Jerome Groopman--isn’t an attack on the profession so much as a description of how so many interpretive professions have evolved: from an early optimism that new technology would help produce infallible expertise to a growing recognition that the complexity of these tools and the limits of our brains only increase the need for good old-fashioned human attention and listening (along with a healthy skepticism about our over-confidence) in order to solve complex problems.

Groopman’s biggest gripe is that the economic structure of the profession make it difficult for doctors to spend time doing what doctors most need to do: that is, listen because the system doesn't allow them to charge for it. Or to put it another way: they can't make money when they behave more like nurses.

There’s obviously been a lot of talk about the importance of listening in the marketing profession as well. And I think listening is important too, but not necessarily for reasons most often cited. Among proponents of listening in marketing, the argument generally goes that now that consumers are in control of our brands we have to listen to them in order to serve their needs. They don't want to be told what to think anymore. (TV is dead: the monologue is out, the dialogue is in, etc., etc.) They want to tell us what to think.

I actually don’t think consumers are in control of brands except in a highly relative way, at least so far. (They can choose among options; just as the patient can choose among doctors; if they could they cure themselves they wouldn't be at the doctor in the first place) Nor does evidence suggest that consumers are very good at knowing what they want. So we shouldn’t convince ourselves that giving consumers what they think they want will make them happy for very long.

No, I think listening is so important less because the consumer is always right than because we (like doctors) are so often wrong, especially when we are making lots of complex decisions. In our newly complex media/culture-scape, it's almost impossible to get everything right the first time, or at least get it so right you that you can't make it better in the near future by paying attention to what happens and making adjustments. It's only by listening that we fix our first mistakes fast enough so that we don't kill our own patients and our brands.

Why we (or at least I) still need creative departments: a tribute

A combination of both long-term trends and recent events impacting our business have led to some interesting conversations about eliminating creative departments altogether. Like the talk on this panel here. One can see the logic. Creatives are, or at least were, pretty expensive. And, the logic goes, they only did one or two things. And it's certainly true that these days we need lots of people to do lots of different things. We can't possibly afford to keep all this multifarious talent under one roof. Wouldn’t it be great to just outsource all the creative?

This should be good news for strategists like me. It could potentially elevate roles like mine even higher, making creative strategists and strategic creatives brand orchestrators or, in the latest buzz word, "curators" of creative elements that we arrange to form brand experiences and communications. And in many ways I do think this is a golden age for planners, but I’m not so sure I want to do away with creative departments altogether, if it means I don't get to have daily meetings with people who actually make stuff.

Why? Well, I could explain my hesitation with a bunch of big unsupported generalizations, but since this a blog, I'll just speak for myself. I’ve worked at a bunch of different agencies and brand consultancies and the simple truth is that my thinking is exponentially better when it is developed through an ongoing dialogue with a creative partner. And not "creative" in the general sense of someone who has ideas, but someone who spends the majority of their time thinking about and making creative objects. (I still think there is a difference, but that would take a post by itself)

I’ve been doing this for awhile now and I have some evidence that I'm pretty good at asking useful questions that yield intriguing data points. And a fair amount of people have told me I'm also not bad at synthesizing these data points with various perspectives into platforms and provocative formulations that help inspire creatives across a number of disciplines from advertising to design to application development. (And if only to prevent this post from being relegated to the POV of a wonky analyst, I’m a published fiction writer too)

But again, much to my annoyance, whatever ideas I'm able to generate using my right or left brain (and, on very special occasions, both halves of my brain!) those ideas get infinitely better whenever I share them with creative partners as they develop. Simply put, the good creatives I work with see things I don’t see. Over and over again. And I'm not just talking about the creative development stage. I'm talking about the research stage too. Even the pre-research, wtf are we going to do, stage.

Good creatives see tangents and weird possibilities and just bizarre inversions that would never come to me and frankly I could never get to through the data (quant or qual or cultural) in any conventional analytical way. And these sometime wacky, sometimes insightful thoughts in turn help me ask better questions that yield even more interesting answers which in turn yields better work.

So when I propose a thought and a creative says to me, what if we asked the same question but from a bunny's perspective, or, I think it's just the opposite of what you just said, I couldn't be happier, because that's exactly what I need.

The point I'm making should be obvious, but I haven't seen it in the dialogue around these points. Creatives don't just execute ideas; they are especially good at generating ideas of a certain kind, the kind that are, well, creative, intuitive, weird, surprising etc, And I'd argue that the kind of ideas that agency's develop are great and valuable in part because of the dialogue between analytical and conceptual thinking types like me and the many creative thinkers I've worked with.

It's this dialogue that makes agency ideas different from the business ideas that are generated by big consulting firms like Mckinsey and Accenture. They aren't just insightful and rooted in lots of data and analysis. They may be rooted in data and analysis, but at their best, they do more than that, they engage with the broader culture in a surprising unique powerful way that only art can and thereby transform consumer behavior and culture. .

Can you do what I'm talking about with outsourced creatives? One great company I worked at called Mechanica is built on just this principle. And they are particularly good at thinking broadly about addressing business problems beyond communications, and using a range of network partners to address those issues, whether they require employee training or new product development. On the creative communications front, my experience suggests it's not as easy to outsource great creative as it might appear.

Why? Again, I'll speak personally. If you've ever worked in a really creative agency, one which really valued creative excellence, you know how many conversations and iterations it takes to get the idea where it needs to go. And it isn't one or two or five. It was more like 20 or 30 or a 100. If you’re using freelance talent that can get pretty expensive pretty fast. And we all know how hard it is to work creatively when you don't have existing relationships.

I'm all for the new models emerging out there and I'm curious to see how they develop. But to do my job well, I, for one, want and need daily interaction with people who spend most of their time making strange, new, beautiful, compelling things.

So Jason and Tommy and John and Bruce. And Trish and Laura and Ted and Ed and Greg and Karen and Jim and Libby and many many other art directors and writers and designers and developers who've collaborated with me every step of the way: I couldn't have, still can't and don't want to do it without you so I hope we all get to stick together.