A Tourist At Home

the shape and color of our aspirations (cymbolism.com)

In my research, gaining access to the values and meaning of the relationships that consumers have with the brands that they interact and engage with is the primary task. the associative and metaphorical nature of the mind is at the heart of this methodology and it is always powerful to simply talk to consumers about the role and significance that certain colors have.

The very name of this blog (abluecircle - i had intended to be my first consulting business) was the product of just these kinds of exercises.

it was the late 1990s and when consumers were asked to associate colors and shapes with brands or products that they had positive associations with - it was invariably a blue circle. So i bought abluecircle.com and have been using it ever since.

the color and shape of our aspirations, i like to say.

Cymbolism is a web tool doing the rounds of the trendwatching sites - and suffering from bandwidth issues, it appears. It is well worth a visit, primarily for the color association tool that it has. check it out.

Exploration of Assumptions

From an interview of Grant McCracken by Scott Berkin:

Anthropologists specialize in the study of culture, and culture matters in marketing because it supplies the infrastructure for thought and feeling in America. How consumers see the product, the service, or the pitch, these are largely shaped by the culture in their heads. The marketer who understands this culture has an advantage. The marketer who understands culture very well has an extraordinary advantage.

As usual, we are asking the corporation to be X and not-X, but the magic of the corporation (and the thing that makes the corporation the best problem-solving machine we have at our disposal) is that it can be all things to all people. Anthropology can help here because it understands that the intelligence of this complicated creature exists not just in the formal procedures and divisions of labor of the organization, but in also in the less official ideas and practices that make up the corporation. Once again, anthropology is about culture, but in this case the culture is the particular ideas and practices of a particular organization. Anthropology can help senior managers re-engineer their organizations.

This is one way anthropology can serve the corporation. Hire someone to go in and document all the assumptions at work in the corporations, the official ones and the unofficial "this is just the way we do things" assumptions. And then see which of these needs to change now that there is a new idea in town like "innovation." The point is not to dismantle ideas unless they stand in the way of what the new idea is. We don't want to forget what it is we know, the knowledge we have build up of our markets and our industries over many years of expensive trial and error.

How well do we know our own culture?

I am in the middle of reading this article by David Graeber and came across a question that i thought was interesting. I'm always lurking around the corner from legitimate anthropologists, trying to pick up scraps of insight and perspective that will make me smarter and help me make the world seem a bit more acceptable.

anyway, this next bit reminds me that the two anthropologists i'm into are the two that are as disappointed as anyone else in our lack of understanding of ourselves. Grant McCracken is constantly chiding academia for snubbing their noses at popular culture. and here, graeber does the same for the bureaucratic existence of daily life in untold Americans, as he finds himself in the middle of it managing the passing of his mother:

As an anthropologist, probably the most curious thing for me was how little trace any of this tends to leave in the ethnographic literature. After all, we anthropologists have made something of a specialty out of dealing with the ritual surrounding birth, marriage, death, and similar rites of passage. We are particularly concerned with ritual gestures that are socially efficacious: where the mere act of saying or doing something makes it socially true. Yet in most existing societies at this point, it is precisely paperwork, not other forms of ritual, that is socially efficacious. My mother, for example, wished to be cremated without ceremony; my main memory of the funeral home though was of the plump, good-natured clerk who walked me through a 14-page document he had to file in order to obtain a death certificate, written in ballpoint on carbon paper so it came out in triplicate. “How many hours a day do you spend filling out forms like that?” I asked. He sighed. “It’s all I do,” holding up a hand bandaged from some kind of incipient carpal tunnel syndrome.

Volcano Erupts in Chile

i just had to share. take a moment and look at this image. really look at what is going on there. it is amazing. apparently there remains no common explanation for the concurrence of lightning and the eruption of a volcano. it's happened, according to the site linked below, more than 150 times in the past two centuries. (I'm not sure how helpful that is.)

regardless, volcanoes may be electric. enjoy the awe.

Do you know the meaning yet? Youtube Ethnography

I just got finished watching this video – “An Anthropological Introduction to Youtube.” It’s long at 55 minutes but well worth the viewing. I stole the title of this post from a banner that hangs on top of the Youtube channel of MadV, an artist who collaborates via Youtube to do some profoundly interesting stuff.

Like many I’ve found myself a bit astounded by the opportunities and fluidity of organizing that new technology has wrought. And it is heartening to see the sincerity and earnestness with which Mike Wesch and his students are exploring this behavior. Questions of authenticity, self-reflection identity and community are all here. Below are a few of my favorite moments:

In the video he tells a story that Youtube had asked it’s viewers and producers to answer a question for them. What does Youtube mean to you? The answer that came back the most often was, Free Hugs.

From the early years of the internet, an eeringly recent example of a fundamental lack of respect for the consumer:

You are not going to turn passive consumers into active trollers on the internet. Steven Weiswasser from ABC

Mike Wesch, the professor whose program this is, commenting on the cultural inversion and collapse of context (his language) that occurs in the production of these unbelievably revealing and challenging video blogs.

"People have the freedom to experience humanity without anxiety. You get this aesthetic arrest – if you think of the idea of James Joyce. You get this sense that people are actually experiencing this sense of being totally overwhelmed by the beauty of the human in front of them. People have this profound deep connection with people through Youtube, that maybe they couldn’t experience in everyday life because they’re not allowed to stare and to experience them as a human being."

There are plenty of characters on display here, charting the birth of a new kind of star. The Youtube star. Juan Mann, who walked through the streets of Sydney with a sign that read, Free Hugs.

There is MadV, who challenged the world to write one message on the palm of their hands and raise it. To Bnessel73 who lost his son to SIDS and populated Youtube in a wide array of characters. They are what you’d expect; just him in a chair acting out voices and costumes. he describes it as a form of therapy and left a vlog thanking the community.

“Some people have said that the videos we’re creating on Youtube should be made with the hopes to change the world. . . . I’ve made mine to help me live in it. Whether I make a hundred or a thousand more I will know forever that this website this community helped bring me life again. And there’s something really special in that.”

(this image is not of bnessel73)

Listeners & Talkers

a comletely unedited rant-slash-screed that plummeted from my fingertips in response to a question a dear and smart friend posed to me. it was about altruism and research. it was about being conscientious in business and in work. it was about finding a better way for things to work better for more people:

I think what’s amazing is that the kinds of conversations and listening skills that are required to adapt and engage as a business in the simple pursuit of profit are often those that are most lacking in daily life. We are a terribly complicated culture, to say the least, but our sublimation of therapy, consciousness, self, and even earnest emotion is astounding.

Corporations have zero competence in communication. I’m going off on a tangent, but if I were to congratulate myself and call myself a listener (which is, I think, a legitimate skill that needs to be announced in some way) then the corporation is a culture of talkers. And nothing rewards talkers better than a corporate hierarchy.

I also feel like the rapidity of corporate culture and the nature of change is diminishing the value of language itself. Brands don’t inhabit Powerpoints. People don't inhabit bullet points.

I think it's a myth that clarity or insight comes neatly packaged or in a simplistic form. And as meetings and presentations, especially in the Design Economy, value the visual and the simple, I wonder what gets lost. I don’t think there is necessarily a sacrifice when communicating visually and for expediency, but I do worry that it is congratulatory and superficial – and does not deliver the kind of body knowledge that constitutes real awareness. And I’m just talking about being in the same room with someone and listening to a story!

I think research is dead and strategy will shrink up the foodchain and brand managers will be empathy managers and anthropologists whose task it is to maintain a dynamic relationship with their segments’ culture. This is old hat, but what it illuminates is the need for real conversation for conversations sake.

I think research is tourism. I have a slide in my thingy that states that it has been proven that one can no longer remain an authority on their own lives. When I wrote it I was thinking of hillary clinton and the bosnian snipers. Never mind the political significance of this moment or the indications of her character that it may or may not reveal.

It was her memory and her experience of that moment that was on trial. The stories that she had told herself to survive and accomplish the challenges of a first lady in a hostile environment (vast right wing conspiracy). Of course this is the dangerous side-effect of a hyper-mediated environment and living life on film, as it were, but this is a monumental shift. The simple fact is that she got caught being a Talker - on the subject of her own experience!

I think research is branding. I’m not entirely sure I know what I mean by this, but there is very little research i think that actually asks the corporation to listen. even when they do research they are the Talkers - do you like this? would you buy this? (The myth here is that simply by asking questions do you become a Listener. this is bullshit.)

It seems to me that the focus of any corporate effort only gets more meaningful when it arises out of the empathy that happens in conversation, when you actively become a Listener.

And if that conversation becomes constant and earnest and business objectives begin to help (as opposed to validate) then maybe things get better. Our job, as researchers, ultimately, should be to put ourselves out of business. to train listeners. to building listening into strategy.

I’m curious about how often corporations and brands actually Listen. It'd be like a bureaucratic moment of silence, a pause, a stolen moment of quiet, into which all that should have been heard and incorporated would rush the gates, seizing the machinery of assistance.

I would love to have access to a list of “excuses to get into the field.” how does ethnography come up as a good idea? When does it feel appropriate for a client to be present vs. not present?

I think everyone is waiting to be asked to tell their story. I have faces and stories swimming around in my head from all the work I’ve done. I think we forget how wonderfully kind and giving and generous we are as a culture – to a person.

Where are the "people" people?

Seth Godin has a post about the bitter taste of nickels and dimes and it reminded me of an experience I ad recently.

I was in DC attending an innovation session, staying with the friend who’d been kind enough to invite me. After a long second day, we relaxed in his back yard with a catalog of collectible watches. Watches, in case you hadn’t noticed, have a powerful hold over the imagination of men.

This catalog was 200-plus pages of beautiful collectible watches. Each possessed the layer of attraction that comes with age, time, history and mechanical seduction.

Somewhere in the middle, my friend told me a story of a man who had bought numerous watches from the catalog and called to complain about the delivery charge on his most recent $5000 watch acquisition.

The arrival of this watch is the fulfillment of a beautiful and sincere desire for a thing of beauty, perhaps long awaited and long adored. This collectible watch auction house ships their watches via FedEx and makes the buyer pay. Dramatic pause for import of detail to settle in.

There is a humming FedEx truck at the end of the drive. The deliver man brusquely hands him the box. He signs illegibly and awkwardly on the digital pad. The watch, and the entire relationship, has become soiled by indignity.

For a business whose sole clientele are the affluent and discriminating, and for whom attention to detail and authority seem to be the essential competencies, how is this possible?

I can imagine that, according to the auction house, it just isn’t their responsibility to take care of delivery. It is beneath them to handle or even discuss such frivolous matters as packaging, boxing and delivery. Their focus is elsewhere.

This is a mistake and it speaks to a way of framing purchases as transactions as nothing more than that. It is a vestige of the old marketplace that was designed to be cold and calculating to protect us from ourselves, to purge emotion and pleasure from the exchange.

To be put on even footing, we were taught, we would need to accept that everyone is in it for themselves. And, by this logic, the auction house is right. Their job ended when they got the money for the watch. Anything else is gratuitous and has nothing to do with watches.

Perhaps this is simply an anachronistic monopoly bashing its head against change, following its instincts into irrelevance. I’ve seen many of them lately and it’s not pretty. But we all must learn to avoid the arrogance.

On a somewhat related note, I’m reminded of Clay Shirky’s post on Cognitive Surplus and the individual who works in TV wondering where people find the time to play World of Warcraft?

Why is that those whose responsibility it is to attend to these issues are most often the ones who lack the awareness to address them? Is it simply because people that love TV more than people go into the TV business so they can talk about TV and not people?

Is it because people who love antique watches go into the antiques business so that they can spend their days with antique watches and not people?

Where are the people people?

Zidane: The movie

on one of my weekly overnights in NYC, my friend put this movie into the computer and the evening was lost. it has been haunting my mind ever since.

the premise is simple. Train 18 or so quality cameras on Zidane for the entirety of one match. Lay over some conversation with him describing his experience on the field. edit together. it's gorgeous. i cannot honestly remember the last time i had an experience that was as intimate, engaging and surprising.

the video embed is no longer working so check out the wired piece on it here.

Hudson, New York according to Wordle.net

One World, One Dream. Free Tibet. at Bird's Nest

From Free Tibet 2008.

Four Tibet activists from Britain and the United States were detained in Beijing today after unfurling Tibetan flags and two 140-square-foot banners outside the Olympic stadium. The first read, “One World, One Dream: Free Tibet” in English, and the second read, “Tibet Will Be Free” in English and “Free Tibet” in Chinese. The dramatic action took place hours before the Olympic Torch arrives in Tiananmen Square, and two days before the Olympics opening ceremony takes place at the stadium. The activists were detained by Chinese authorities after displaying their message for nearly an hour; their current whereabouts are unknown.

Tibetans and their supporters worldwide condemn the Chinese government’s attempt to use the 2008 Games to cover up its occupation of Tibet and its violent and ongoing crackdown on Tibetans struggling for their basic rights and freedoms.

For years, the Chinese government has tried to use the Olympics to legitimize its illegal occupation of Tibet,” said Lhadon Tethong, Executive Director of Students for a Free Tibet. “At this very moment, Tibetans are facing the most severe and violent repression they have seen in decades at the hands of the Chinese government, and we have taken nonviolent action at this critical time to draw the world’s attention to the crisis gripping Tibet.”

Arty Becko at ESPN.com has a recounts his experience of coming upon the protestors. Here is a nugget:

Some of the policemen walked toward me and grabbed me by the arm. They were angry and aggressive while holding on to me, yelling in my face. But I still kept yelling, "TV! Media! Press! TV! Media! Press!" The policemen were speaking into their walkie-talkies, but I didn't understand what they were saying.