can companies actually create culture?
April 8th, 2010 • posts i've written
Below is a short email exchange between myself and Grant McCracken, anthropologist, and author of Chief Culture Officer along with several other books at the intersection of commerce and culture.
Our exchange by no means offers a definitive answer to the question at hand – can companies create culture – but I hope it starts a debate or at least a comment or two.
My inquiry to Grant:
I was burning to ask this question at your bootcamp, I even debated it with my fellow attendees at lunch, but out of fear of monopolizing your time then I didn’t ask but it has stuck beside me like a thorny shadow ever since – can companies create culture?
Marketers like to talk at length about companies creating culture – but it seems suspicious to me. Brands create messages, no doubt, and to that end, I assume it’s safe to say that brands co-create culture along with everyone else; but that isn’t what marketers are talking about. The examples most often cited are clear: Nike created athletic culture in the ’80′s, Apple created their own culture recently, Sex & The City created a culture of women pining for a glamorous urban lifestyle. But in all of these examples, it seems better to say that these brands, flexing their mass media muscle, helped nascent communities gain attention and traction. In the case of Sex and the City, it seemed as though a media property and author perhaps recognized a growing community before members of that community had a pre-standing media property or other cultural signifier to cast their identity with.
So, Grant, could you please set me straight – or at least, set me on a path?
And Grant’s response:
Bud, it’s a great question, I had a run at it in Flock and Flow, isn’t it typical of corporate arrogance to argue that it can create culture, or bend it to its will at will, I think monarchs used to be able to create culture, everyone took their cue from the court and a change would necessarily reverberate through the rest of the world, but no brand has the world’s attention in this way and even if it did, there are so many worlds out there the chances of colonizing or capturing or forming all of them seems improbable.
Certainly, you can have influence, as Coke, Nike and HBO did, and if we shared an academic discipline and a university department it would be fun to find a graduate student to do an anatomy of what and how each of these brands did it. I think one of the dimensions they would share is a willingness to commit big resources over quite a long time, and yes there has to be a responsiveness in place in the first place.
So what do you think?
Are we undervaluing the role of the brand in culture creation?
Anyone up for the challenge of exploring the anatomy of any of the examples cited?
Personally, and to Grant’s response, this conversation reminds me a good deal of my disdain over the term viral – while I certainly take issue with the accuracy of the term, it’s repugnant even more so because of the arrogance it affords companies and marketers: if you make it, people will have no choice but to spread it.
Ultimately, I think it’s time for brands to do away with the dichotomy – there’s no such wall defining where the brand stops and culture begins. It’s like saying that the market is wholly separate from the organization when of course it isn’t – the organization is a reflection of the market and the market is a system influenced in part by the organization. In both examples, by preserving the notion of the dichotomy, the brand ensures that it will never fully understand the environment it occupies or how to navigate it.
FYI – Grant is speaking this Friday in New York at the PSFK conference – read his speaker’s interview.
Related posts:
- tonight: chief culture officer @ cooper union
- chief culture officer
- interview with grant mccracken for chief culture officer
7 Responses (add your comment)
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Yes they can create culture, just think of the red dressed Santa Claus, before Coke he was dressed in blue.
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@Gabriel,
Snopes says the Coke/Santa story is false.
http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/santa/cocacola.asp
@Jen,
Where did the Harley culture come from? Was it partly constructed from the Neal Cassidy/On the Road crew? Or as wikipedia puts the definition of ‘outlaw motorcycle club’ …
“An outlaw motorcycle club (sometimes known as a motorcycle gang) is a type of motorcycle club that is part of a subculture with roots in the post-WWII USA, centered on cruiser motorcycles, particularly Harley-Davidsons and choppers, and a set of ideals celebrating freedom, nonconformity to mainstream culture, and loyalty to the biker group.”
So it seems that the Harley Culture was constructed at least partially from the anti-war movement, the veteran movement, and WWII overall. Harley gave them something to strengthen their unity around, but that subculture was already brewing.
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Doesn’t everything stem from something else, at some point? What culture, branded or otherwise, is ever truly original?
I’m not saying that Harley invented freedom or the idea of riding a motorcycle. What I’m saying is, the invention of the HOG organization, which was a marketing idea, organized a culture for people around these ideals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harley_Owners_Group
“The Harley-Davidson community was the prototype for the ethnographic term subculture of consumption, defined as “a distinctive subgroup of society that self-selects on the basis of a shared commitment to a particular product class, brand, or consumption activity.”[3]“
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Not to get bogged down by semantics, but I think this is a two-pronged discussion: creating “culture” and creating “a culture.” It’s like the difference between a moon and a black hole — do companies aim to create bits of culture that merely orbit bigger, more established bits, or can they create actual cultures (or subcultures or countercultures) that can suck up the little bits and coalesce them?
I don’t think there’s any question that companies can create culture, just by being provocative in some way. Even an American Apparel billboard or the Motrin controversy count as cultural bits, as evidenced by the likelihood that you know what I’m talking about.
As far as creating “a culture,” something that requires developing a very direct means to an identity (i.e. “Nike > performance gear > I’m an athlete,” “Sex and the City > poetic fashion fetish > I’m a fashionista”), it’s extremely difficult in this day and age because of the fragmentation of identity and culture, or what could be called I-listen-to-everything-but-country syndrome. Nevertheless, the Obama brand (not a company, but still…) pulled it off, but it didn’t happen within a Petri dish — it happened because an entire generation was missing a political identity.
If companies are going to create black-hole-massive cultures, they’re going to need a much deeper view of identity than most of their branding reflects.
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I think what counts is the final balance. In my personal experience most of the companies I’ve studied do create culture but they also destroy culture and usually at a faster pace. What I see really difficult (not impossible) is take the commitment to create culture. Again, my experience is that companies, after years of operations, realize they have built an environment where people can create culture. The good companies try to preserve such an environment, the bad ones no. IMHO culture tends to stick to people more than to brands.
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I will argue that companies CAN create culture. Case in point, Harley Davidson. Anyone who’s lived in Milwaukee through HarleyFest knows that HD is a lifestyle and a culture, and is 100% real.