my first office

At my first job at  S--, I had my own office. This was more an accident of history than a sign of my ability or promise.  The floor plan had been designed in the pre-cubicle days and still arranged along the terms of more traditional hierarchies, with glass enclosed spaces along the perimeter, and a warren of various sized spaces in the interior to which the staff navigated through narrow hallways the color of a damp concrete.   In the early days, orienting to life in a tall office building after so many years working in libraries and studies, I felt at moments like a lost tourist in the most boring Venice imaginable, moving through strange narrow streets that muted both light and sound, and which, despite their beauty, could appear strangely alike, especially when I was disoriented by the endless winding streets.  It seemed that it was only after I’d lost all hope of finding the restaurant or museum I sought, that I would emerge suddenly onto a loud, sun-splashed piazza, tables set for a party, a man speaking into a microphone, young girls in black and red dresses gathering in a line before a seated dignitary; or, in this case, turning before a brightly lit corner office, where Senior Managers were meeting with visiting clients, and they seemed posed as if on stage, their postures of easy camaraderie designed to inspire confidence and envy, while behind them, through a wall made of glass, New York’s buildings rose and fell in uneven levels block after block down to the harbor.

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My office was eight feet wide and a dozen feet long.  And though there was no window, I did have a door inset with an eight-inch pane of glass, letting in light from the hall as well as allowing me views of my colleagues as they walked passed.  My office was around the corner from the receptionist who sat before the locked glass doors leading onto the foyer-space containing the elevators so I saw half of the office staff on their way to meetings and breaks on other floors and out to lunch or accompanied by bags rolling beside them like obedient pets, down to waiting cars which would speed them to the airport.  It seemed to me that this position allowed me a perspective on the behavior of my colleagues that others lacked.   For instance, I learned that it took most people the length of the hallway to readjust to the environment of the office when returning from lunch, sipping their sodas and coffees as they pulled off their coats.  I often heard someone modulate their voice in the midst of some joke or remark probably best left outside, invariably at the request of another member of the party who reminded everyone where they were with a gesture like a flat hand descending through space.  It was, in any case, through this repeated experience of listening to so many different voices, young and old, male and female, boisterous, sly, confessional, catty all adjust in volume and tone to an eerily similar register that I first came to understand the power of the space itself to focus the abundant and defuse energy of the staff toward a shared purpose.

Fieldwork or a some thoughts on the return of ethnography, pt I

At the dawn of the digital age, there seemed to be an emerging promise that every action of every consumer would now be finally be measurable. We could finally retire that century old quip from John Wanamaker about how he knew that 50% of the money he spent on advertising was wasted; he just didn’t know what half. With the help of web analytics, John or at least his great- great grandson could now identify and dispense with the excess marketing dollars. True Marketing ROI had finally arrived.

Well, we are now a couple decades into the digital era and while everything that happens online is technically measurable, it turns out that this data doesn't explain everything as thoroughly as we hoped. It might tell us what people do on a given site, but it's just about weak as every other research method as explaining the complex purchase pathways people go down these days: using multiple sites, apps, media vehicles, kiosks, phones and word of mouth on their way to making or not making a purchase.

I’ve started exploring the limitations of existing research methods to deliver insights in this new multi-platform world. It appears that we have a bunch of way of finding insights around discreet experiences but not much that will help us understand the connections between those experiences.

Most of the research tools we have fall into a few broad categories

1) Concept tests or ways of measuring how people respond to different ideas and statements in a qual or quant way

2) Communication tests: ways measuring the appeal and impact of marketing like objects, from claimed behavior to fancy Clockwork-Orange like biometric tools.

3) Usability tests: ways of measuring how well something works or easy it it is use

4) Behavioral data: which isn’t claimed behavior but retail and site analytics which will measure an action taken, a click, time spent, or a purchase made.

A lot of us involved in helping make marketing stuff for this multi-platform/multi-channel world want to know not just what happens in these discreet moments but what happens in between them so we can strengthen the connections, driving a person from one to another. It’s one of the reasons we spend a lot of time drawing what we now call “consumer pathways” or “Journeys” or “experience maps” that conceptually visualize the path from one stimulus to another.

I think too this is one of the reasons we’ve seen a resurgence in the use ethnography as a market research tool. While market research ethnographies have of course never really gone away, they fell into some degree of disrepute back during the rise of web and social analytics. Why follow people around making notes when we can measure what we they doing every second, crunch the numbers and turn them into big charts and graphs? The flaws in this logic are pretty obvious (sample bias for one), but it's pretty hard to over-estimate the power of statistical analysis to American business, no matter how dubious the methodology. Any number is better than no numbers.

Ethnographies are far from perfect, especially the down-and-dirty variety we generally do in market research environments, but I've generally found them pretty useful for reasons I'll explain in the next post.

Why predictions are almost as boring as nostalgia or conversations I try to avoid

The interminable news coverage of last week's dark anniversary reminded me that back when I lived in NYC, the conversation I most tried to avoid was on the subject of whether New York City was getting better or worse. The point of view most often expressed-- this was pre 9/11--was that NYC was getting worse, in the sense that it was becoming more commercial, more suburban, less, you know, authentic. The person most often expressing this point of view was a usually man who was no longer young. This person would acknowledge that NYC was generally safer and cleaner than it used to be, but these qualities were seen as evidence for his position. The graffiti-covered trains were part of the experience.

I was younger then and it was hard not to think that the most significant difference between then and now had nothing to do with NYC, but had to do with passage of time. What was better about NYC 20 years ago was that the men were 20 years younger. And who can argue with that?

Nowadays, the conversation I most try to avoid is around the question of whether technology is making life/the world better or worse. Life/the world is a pretty big subject so the argument usually doesn't take on the whole enchilada but focuses around relatively smaller subjects: like reading, or social life or education.

In these arguments you undoubtedly hear—on the nostalgic side of the question--a lot about the sensual qualities of books (the smell of paper!) and how all our relationships on-line are more superficial than they used to be while--on the other side of the question--technophiles will talk about how new technology has "changed everything" (really? everything? ) and empowered users to challenge and engage with centers of power from which they were previously excluded (Gopnick did a solid review of books on the various positions which he classified as the “never betters “better-nevers and, of course the "ever wasers" Here)

I find arguments based on both utopian dreams and nostalgic yearnings equally boring for a bunch of reason. One thing, it's almost impossible to extract one’s highly subjective and hugely limited personal investment from the conversation. For another, historical change is very complicated to predict, almost impossible in the midst of it, and totally impossible to do well in the speed with which most of us work in marketing and advertising. As Popper famously remarked--quoted in another recent article Gopnik article on declinism here--What we know next will effect what will happen next and we don't know what we'll know next because if we did, we'd know it now.

But the main reason I avoid these conversations is not that they are sometimes or often wrong, but that they get in the way of much more interesting conversations which are examining the highly surprising ways various ways people embrace, accelerate, resist or refuse to change, regardless of what we tell them is better, faster stronger, shinier, or just plain new.

E-books are an example of accelerated adoption that surprised even the most aggressive promoters, regardless of the fact that many of us love the smell of paper. The same can't be true for those who predicted--a couple decades ago--that "hypertext" stories would replace the traditional novel or that internet would kill traditional retail or even that the internet would make the traditional office obsolete.

To go into why all these predictions were not only wrong, but based on false and unexamined premises is a bigger task than I can handle in this venue, but I can say that I'm much less interested in conversations that begin (and end) with a statement about how some media, technology or form of expression (Print, phone numbers, Hip Hop, irony, ATM's etc) is dead than a conversation about the factors that influencing current rates of adoption or attrition. We live in time. When it come to business (as opposed to science fiction and history) looking ahead with blinders on is only slightly less boring than looking back, but it's always exhilarating to try and feel (and try to measure) the wind on our faces as we move into the passing lane.

Do-gooder brands pt. II or 6 kinds of advocacy and counting

In my last post, I suggested that contemporary consumer advocacy brands are less about consumer protection (like Ralph Nader) and more about positioning. Generally positioning themselves against a category leader who they view as unfair, anti-competitive and/or obfuscating.

Right after I made this claim, I realized I was at least part wrong, as the exploding category of green brands is precisely about consumer and environmental protection. A brand like Method is one of the most successful examples of a brand that was invented (by an ex-planner no less) who saw an opportunity to deliver a benefit without all the toxic chemicals used by traditional package goods companies. Seventh Generation in another that offers a wide range of household products that limit environmental impact. These brands charge a premium, not for maximum efficacy, but for combining adequate efficacy with lower risk to health, home and the environment.

The power of this claim has not gone unnoticed by the mainstream CPG companies who have made copy-cat products with dubious claims, to the point that we now need old-fashioned consumer advocates to protect us from new-fashioned bogus consumer advocate brands.

But the majority of brands claiming consumer advocacy are motivated by taking on some unfair industry or industry practice. Used car dealers probably stand—fairly or not—as the most iconic example of dishonesty in American business, so it’s not surprising that a number of service brands have sprung up to advocate for consumers as they shop for used cares. CarMax has created a retail model which attempts to take all the unpleasant haggling and doubt out of the process, while CarFax claims to provide the hidden history of the used car so the consumer can make a more informed decision.

And there is whole category of brands that became consumer advocates through technology alone, serving the consumer faster, cheaper, better than traditional retail devices. Virtually every industry that’s been impacted by the internet has brands that occupy this space, whether it’s tax preparation, travel, retail or banking. This is how all those aggregation sites work. They streamline the shopping so you have a better chance of buying what you want for the price you want.

In fact, so many brands recognize the consumer in control era that it’s maybe more interesting to note those categories where we still can’t quite get the control or information we want. The financial services industry might be a prime example but when even the pro's don’t seem to know what they are selling, it’s hard to imagine anyone can offer us much help. And then there are industries that we keep thinking will get democratized, like Real Estate, but for reasons from a strong lobby to the complexity to the sale, never quite get there..

All this suggests that consumer advocacy is almost cost of entry these days. The question becomes what kind of advocate are you.

Supplementing my previous list, with a still provisional set of categories, I’ve now get 6 versions, but I’m sure there are more. (And I'm not counting brands or brand confederations that are pure non-profits.)

1) Information/transparency advocate: like Carfax, providing the consumer with important and previously hidden info

2) Competition advocate: like LendingTree, bringing competition to a category that lacked it

3) Green advocate: Like Method, bringing a safer, less toxic version of a product to a category filled with environmentally damaging products

4) Service advocate: Like Zappos, bringing a new level service and conditions to a category that previously offered restricted terms

5) Self-service advocate: Like Etrade or the other online trading services that allow consumers the chance to do what only the pro’s could do before.

6) Social Mission advocates: Brands like Ben & Jerry's which build their social mission right into their product and confederations like RED which enlist a set of brands to raise funds for social causes

Do-gooder brands or what counts as consumer advocacy today

It seems like every brand manager I talk to these days is claiming that their brand is a consumer advocate. Whether they are selling cars or mortgages or checking accounts or shoes or health insurance or ice cream or travel packages or just about anything else, they want to align their product or service proposition with the notion of consumer advocacy. And they seem to mean it. Whenever I push the broader management team on their commitment to this principle they almost all say they are true believers. (There are notable exceptions but pesky contracts preclude me from revealing names) Most managers now claim that consumer advocacy is in their company DNA.

On the one hand, this isn’t so surprising. You only have to type some variation of “good” into The Google these days to see many people—or at least young people—believe that business can and should be an agent of positive social change. You could even say that finding or starting a career that enables them to both do good and get rich is the trick kid’s most want to pull off these days. (An evolution from my own Gen X’s equally tricky ambition to somehow get rich by being creative.)

But the very ubiquity of this claim raises some interesting question. Can every brand justifiably claim they are a consumer advocate? Technically I suppose so. But then what does consumer advocacy really mean? One thing or more than one thing?

Consumer advocacy has been around almost as long as lawyers, but didn’t really start to mainstream traction in America until the 60’s, supported by fiercely uncompromising advocates like Ralph Nader. As represented by his breakthrough book Unsafe at Any Speed--attacking GM's safety recrod--Nader was and is primarily fighting to protect consumers, workers and the environment from unsafe products and practices. Nader and others are still hard at work, but thanks to the democratization of everything, the role of consumer watch dog has been extended to everyone, with blogs like The Consumerist eager to post your complaints and help fight the power.

But most brands claiming to be advocates aren’t in the business of consumer protection. Beyond government agencies and blogs, consumer protection is mostly performed by non-profits.

Consumer advocacy for brands is more about positioning than protection, either against a competitor or category. And in my very cursory overview, it seems to me that these brands generally rest their claim of advocacy on 1 of 3 potential actions:

1) Introduce competition to a category with very limited or no competition

2) Offer—or seem to offer—the consumer more information about a product or service that has traditionally kept the consumer in the dark about important information.

or

3) Offer the consumer new service (often self-service or customization) for a product or service that lacked this offering in the past.

LendingTree, a brand I used to work on, is a good example for the first kind of advocacy. LendingTree isn’t a bank. It’s an aggregator of banks offering mortgages and other loans to consumers. But the brand’s original tagline, “When banks compete you win,” and early advertising both called attention to how anti-competitive the current practice of getting a mortgage was. They claimed—with considerable justification—to be one of the first brands to give the power to say no back to the consumer where it belonged.

Progressive insurance also introduces new competition to a category, but their function as advocates depends more on offering more information, placing their quote within the context of the competitors.

Their site has come under attack for not being quite as fair as they claim (MA investigation report here), but I’ll save my comments on the role of comparison engines for my next post with the hope that others will point out other versions of consumer advocacy they've encountered in the rapidly expanding world of do-gooder brands.

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.

Inspiration remains a hot commodity, even in these tough times

I just heard they are closing the Bank of America branch in the small New England village around the corner from my house. It's convenient having a bank so close but not a big hardship to see it go. Worse by far is the news that the great cheese shop next to the BofA is suffering too. The owner is going to try out some different inventory to try and get sales going but he told me he’s taken a big hit in the past year. Since it’s fair to say that most of the people in my neighborhood aren’t about to go into foreclosure (though one did), it’s another sign that the recession is changing everyone’s habits.

It was with this frame of mind that I noticed that despite the bad news, some stores seemed to be thriving. In one set of stores in a plaza down the road here's what I saw doing well: a yoga studio, a karate school, one of those working kitchen/culinary arts places where they teach people how to cook again. What else, well there’s also a fantastic running shoe store with super knowledgeable staff and a brand new performance bike shop. Oh, and there's also a hairdresser/manicure salon and a (therapeutic) massage place.

Now, you don’t have to be a genuine professional brand planner like me to see the common thread here. People might be buying fewer fancy cheeses and mutual funds but they are still buying experiences, especially ones that make them look and feel better, that expand their horizons and teach them new skills.

Pine and Gilmore first talked about this coming wave in their 1999 hit “The Experience Economy.” The part that’s most relevant to my point here is in the final chapters where they discussed the next wave of business, after experience businesses, what they called “Transformation” businesses, because these businesses help people transform themselves into something they want to be: lighter or prettier or smarter or more relaxed or more effective martial arts killing machines.

I think they’re right. And you don’t have to go to the mall to see it. You can just look at your twitter/social media feed where dozens of people will tell you every day, over and over again, that you should be more focused, more determined, more positive, more entrepreneurial more committed to doing what you love. And that many of these people who call themselves life coaches and/or human potential professionals, can be hired to help you be all these things and more, because that's what it means to reach your limitless potential.

You can tell by my uncharitable tone here that I personally have a limited tolerance for these kind of platitudes, but as a senior consumer insight professional, my job isn’t to let my own snotty tastes interfere with the accuracy of my observations. And I’d be a very bad consumer insight professional indeed if I didn’t see what was staring me in the face everywhere I looked: people want to be inspired, inspired to transform themselves into something they haven't quite become yet, and even in these very challenging economic times, those that can afford it are still very willing to pay for it

Google and the novelist: more on how technology is impacting the creative process

Any of us who work in marketing know that technology is having a dramatic impact on how commercial artists and writers work in all kinds of double-edged-sword ways, both offering amazing new tools to help us get work done and challenging our value props.

But I’ve been interviewing creative people across the creative spectrum—from poets to TV producers--and some of my more surprising findings are coming from writers and artists who aren’t involved with marketing at all. Their stories demonstrate how even fundamental elements of new media are transforming the art they make.

The writer Justin Cronin put it this way, “The easy availability of almost any fact has turned me into a different kind of novelist.”

I don’t normally think about Internet Search as having a transformative impact on the creative process, but for Justin, and I’m sure for other writers., it has.

A little background might help illustrate the dramatic nature of the change I'm talking about. Justin was a classmate of mine at the Iowa Writers Workshop where he wrote beautifully crafted lyrical stories that were in the tradition of contemporary realistic fiction. After graduation, he published two well-received, prize-winning novels which, I think he’d agree, were also in that tradition.

More recently, however, he’s been writing a post-apocalyptic Vampire trilogy which—as widely reported—he’s already sold for a big pile of money. The first volume of the trilogy—The Passage—is being made into a major movie by Ridley Scott.

Now, how does a literary writer suddenly turn himself into an instant master of high-concept futuristic thrillers? Part of the charming story is Justin's native talent. Another part is that the plot was inspired by conversations he had with his daughter while she rode her bike alongside him on his daily run. In order to help pass the time, he told his daughter they were going to plot a novel. What should it be about? She replied, “A story about a little girl that saves the world.” A winning idea if there ever was one.

But the part that interests me here--is the power of the Internet to make available a set of experiences Justin had never tried to imagine before as part of his subject.

Again, in his words, “If I need to know how to hot-wire a diesel engine, well, I can just Google it and it's right there. If I want to know what the dashboard of a military vehicle looks like, it’s there too. ”

He didn’t need to go to the library or interview people or take a trip to a military base. It’s not that Justin stopped doing original research. He told me one story about hiring a guy to take him to a firing range so he could experience what it felt like to shoot assault rifles.

But he acknowledged that the immediacy of search helped him stay in the writing process. The instant availability of facts and images and video helped him quickly fill his imagined world with the stuff that his characters needed to go out and save the world. As he put it, “I might have been able to write this book without the internet but I don’t think I could have written it as fast or as well.”

He also said that the process of imagining more unusual experiences liberated him from an impulse to rely on autobiographical material for his plots. While all artists and writers tend to draw from their own lives to some degree, especially early in their career, the Internet has accelerated or at least help enable that transformation. In this way, the title of his first novel in the trilogy--The Passage--could also double as a metaphor for his own evolution as an writer.

When thinking about technology and creativity, it’s easy to fixate on works that make use of new or sophisticated technology: augmented reality and data visualization. But sometimes it’s the more fundamental elements—like search--that make the biggest difference. It's the question I'm continuing to explore now: asking other writers and artists if Google has helped inspire them to make leaps of imagination into new genres, media and forms.

A call for new tools: starting with observations on successful Facebook applications

One of things that I've noticed about the social media revolution is that it seems to be a lot easier to find big, visionary talk than new tools and practical guidelines for how to do it. In any google search I can find thousands of blog posts about how the world is changing but when I searched for advice or models about how to write a new creative brief that would help creatives develop work for a multi-platform world, I couldn't find anything. My direct queries on the various socmed platforms asking for existing models didn't yield much either.

I think it's pretty established now that the world is changing. What we--all of us, but I'm writing for strategic/brand planners in particular--need now are some new tools to help us navigate and develop work for the changing landscape.

So, in the positive, can-do, crowdsourcing spirit of social media, I decided to try for myself in the hope others will complement/supplement/edit/critique my work as I go. I'm not going to start with the digital/platform brief because that's going to take some work. But there are plenty of smaller tools I need to develop as well.

For instance, one of the things I need right now is a set of high level strategic guidelines for developing successful applications. Chances are, like me, both your creatives and your clients are looking for help guiding the development of branded applications on facebook and iphone. The interest has only heightened as we approach the holiday season in which (as my creative director partner Jason Gaboriou recently pointed out) we are assuredly going to see a hailstorm of holiday-themed gift-finder-ish apps.

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about technical guidelines for developers (e.g. what to do with uninstalls) but rather clues to what makes a good experience based on current consumer behavior (though of course the areas overlap these days). Here's my working list. I'm starting at a very high level of generality, because I'm finding it's what my clients and some more traditionally-trained creatives need.

I'm absolutely positive there are people out there who know more than me on this subject so hope they jump in and correct me either here or on twitter @copia

• Support with marketing, both online and off: the early fantasy of digital media (that people will just find it for themselves) is over. In this very crowded field, you need to help even your loyal consumers find your stuff.
  

• Be social: Doh! Facebook is a social medium. App’s should have a social component which means there is a built-in reason to spread it around. Ideally, it should facilitate an exchange of information rather than just a dissemination.
  

• Fads are real: We always complain about fads in marketing, but the majority of apps tend to move in and of popularity pretty fast. Consider linking to timely events and don’t expect it to last forever.

• Keep it simple: Most successful apps do one or two things well. Facebook is simple. It shouldn’t be more complicated than Facebook itself

• Utility and entertainment is better than utility or entertainment. App’s which actually offer something useful tend to have longer shelf lives. Many app’s have succeeded by just entertaining but they need to be pretty funny.

• Profiles as content: Facebook connect now enables app’s to customize experience based on user data. Think of user profiles as content

• Online behavior is still behavior: extend, enhance, supplemnt the most popular and frequent online behaviors: searching, shopping, playing, flirting, (though of course this changes fast as diagram below from 07 indicates).