can companies actually create culture?

08 Apr, 2010 • posts i've written • 7 comments

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?

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.

words to think by

25 Jan, 2010 • posts i've written • No comments

I’ve added a new page to my site: quotes on marketing, culture, and digital

The quotes are from some of my favorite thinkers on the intersection of those subjects, and people I quote all too-often without some kind of public shrine to smart thinking like this. Regardless of what you do, or where you do it, these folks tend to offer the kind of point of view that forces you to spin an argument around and take it in from all sides.

Of course, it’s just a start. And I’d love to hear your favorite quotes from your favorite thinkers, so please, drop a name, a link, and some love in the comments.

Jump to quotes by: Mike Arauz, danah boyd, William Gibson, Henry Jenkins, Grant McCracken, Clay Shirky, Faris Yakob

And if you dig the idea, and want to help advocate a bit more thinking in everyone’s day, please consider linking to the page. Thanks so much!

chief culture officer

21 Dec, 2009 • posts i've written • 1 comment

Last night, I inhaled Grant McCracken’s latest book, Chief Culture Officer. In it, Grant argues that corporations need a new role and position to assimilate and navigate the cultural waters: the Chief Cultural Officer.

The book is one-part manifesto, one-part how-to manual, and one-part blogroll for everyone and everything you should be paying attention to right now. When I first picked it up, I thought, “Boy, this sounds just like me!” and then about half way through I realized, “this sounds just like me and most of my colleagues and friends.” Full disclosure, Grant name checks me on page ninety-one, but in no way has Grant asked me to write about the book or recommend it to my readers.

For many years, brands were the backward little brother of the cultural world, not as extravagant as film, not as experimental as art, not as forceful as fiction. Brands had a simple task, to bang the drum on behalf of a product or service, to play carney barker for the corporation. Brands were predictable. They were tedious. The subordinated intelligence and creativity for marketing’s favorite rhetorical devices: repetition, good humor, simplicity, and of course repetition. (p 142-143)

I thought the best way to urge you to buy a copy or borrow one from a friend would be to share with you some of my favorite passages from the book.

On the importance of culture to the corporation,

Let’s be clear. Without a connection to culture, Coke is merely carbonated water and syrup. Without culture, it’s just a fizzy drink. So culture counts. Let’s be clearer still. The fundamental terms of the Coke proposition are changing. The carbonated soft drink is now contested by new ideas of what a drink should be (Snapple, Gatorade, Poland Springs, Vitamin-water, Red Bull). In the traditional case, culture matters. In the present case, it matters more. (p 10)

Thousands of little experiments,

For we are a culture with a third term, a restless creativity. If once we were a mainstream and avant-garde, now we are a great wilderness, with thousands of little experiments happening everywhere. Point, counterpoint is dead. The struggle between status and cool is over. We are now a culture over-flowing with variety and noise. (p 78)

On status and cool,

Taste now comes from a mastery of change, not a mastery of status. [...] Cool is an outsider’s sensibility now completely internalized, built into every individual and our entire culture. [...] it is anthropologically more rewarding, I think, to see cool as a measure of our culture’s ability to absorb conflicting impulses and embrace contradiction. (p 70,77)

Grant’s advice to the newly minted CCO,

The most important rule here: Don’t be partisan. Don’t be cool. Treat everyone as more knowledgeable than yourself. (p 111)

Tracking, measuring, and scrutinizing your wins and losses,

The big picture will oblige us to pick up things that are surviving infancy and moving forward. We must decide where we expect them to stand in three months, six months, and a year. And then we must scrutinize our successes and our failures and see how the algorithm needs to be changed. (p 105)

A CEO can’t go it alone,

But media is now so finely segmented and in the case of mainstream radio so repetitive, consuming media does not guarantee broad acquaintance. (p 156)

The final chunk of the book is literally a list of lists – content creators and publishing houses that demand your attention to be better connected to culture. That alone is worth the purchase price.

BTW, if you buy the book on Amazon today, they’ll have it shipped in time for Christmas. Stocking stuffer, anyone?

an authentic brand, continuity and multiplicity

16 Dec, 2009 • posts i've written • 4 comments

A brand’s perceived authenticity is the product of making one crucial decision – which extreme to strive for.

Authenticity is a hot topic these days for three reasons: 1) we have and are a culture that evolves and cascades more rapidly, 2) the inability, so far, for brands to identify a clear strategy for this culture, and 3) millennial studies – the realization of a generation more versed in our modern culture that brands can’t navigate these waters as successfully as they can.

In response to the attention, we’ve written books, we’ve made complex lists and rankings of the most authentic brands, and we’ve generally beaten our heads against the wall.

Authenticity doesn’t exist – at least not in the measurable way a sale or transaction exists.

Authenticity is a negotiation of perception – of the future. Brands were built on this model of time perception – after major corporations killed off your friendly milk-man (h/t to Alex Erster Chung), we needed assurance that our shelves would be stocked with our favorite products on our next visit to the store, and that those products would maintain a standard level of quality.

In other words, brands are the result of our need for continuity. If it were a Radiohead song, authenticity would be No Alarms and No Surprises.

Brands perfected continuity. Pick a message, pick an audience, repeat. And repeat again.

But then came this darn new culture of ours. With the change came our new expectation for corporations to be more responsive – to our changing needs and to our changing times.

But the Titanic wasn’t renowned for its maneuverability.

In the face of change, brands fumbled, sure, but they also experimented. In exploring culture, Unilever discovered uncharted territory in Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty but because of their Axe ads, the authenticity of each were called into question. This giant portfolio brand was telling two contradicting stories.

Grant put it best,

We can’t refuse Unilever the right to make an Axe campaign without giving someone the right to refuse Unilever the right to make the Dove campaign. If we can say “no” to a sexist campaign, someone can say “no” to a feminist one.

Nothing should be foreign to brand. [...] This is precisely what is wrong with the authenticity argument now being promoted by Gilmore and Pine. In fact, brands have no native voice. They may have a brand heritage. Some brand meanings may come more easily than others. But there is nothing a brand must say, and nothing, within limits, it mustn’t say. Brands are designed to be exemplars of responsiveness.

In my opinion, the underlying issue was less the result of what both brands had to say in response to culture, and more of how infrequently they did respond to culture. Dove uncovered a real bit of truth but that truth had been lying around for decades waiting for someone to find it. Axe hasn’t responded to culture since their initial insight into their male consumer; they’ve followed the continuity route and have kept their heads down simply repeating the same Axe ad over and over again. Being highly responsive to culture is a pre-requisite for modern brand building.

Ultimately, the answer to the authenticity question is increased responsiveness + (continuity OR multiplicity).

Multiplicity is a term both Grant and Henry Jenkins use in contrast to continuity – from Henry’s transmedia work posted yesterday, multiplicity can be described as many differentiated versions of messages/meanings/characters being produced by the creator.

I would argue that cries of inauthenticity erupt when 1) a brand fails to be responsive and 2) falls too near the middle of the spectrum between continuity and multiplicity.

In response to culture, there should either be one ideal upheld and oft-repeated, or a shotgun approach of variations and innovations.

If you’re interested in this post, I highly recommend Grant’s new book, Chief Culture Officer.

tiger and the old cultural guard

15 Dec, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

Yesterday, Salon published an article entitled, Tiger Woods nails our culture: The golf legend’s harem of Hooters beauties and porn stars is a metaphor for our quick-and-dirty times.

In the article, the author makes the argument that Tiger’s behavior (and the behavior of his many extra-marital female partners) is a clear sign and product of our current culture:

The Tiger Woods debacle, which started with a fender bender and possible domestic dispute and grows more absurdly, endorsement-losingly epic by the hour, serves not just as a reminder that even seemingly unimpeachable heroes get their freak on but also as a flamboyantly cringe-worthy metaphor for our quick and dirty culture itself.

I disagree. Tiger Woods is a tarnished icon of the old cultural guard.

Tiger Woods created an impenetrable persona of perfection around himself – young-legend on the golf course, consummate family man, smiling spokesman for almost any brand – and ultimately that visage only amplified the shock over recent reports of his fallibility. Everything down to his carefully unbuttoned golf glove said the man had risen to his status only after years of immaculate planning and deliberate action. The events following this Thanksgiving demonstrate a much more frail human being; his teenaged text messages, ability to place his family in such distressing harm, and overall weakness for the fairer sex.

Our new athletes and cultural icons understand that social currency is traded through the perception of transparency, not an iron curtain. True, many may have staff or interns manning their public profiles, but they all realize that in order to maintain the relationship with their fans, they sometimes have to be available at the drop of a hat.

While I watched Tiger-gate play out, I wondered if anyone else was reminded of Don Draper…

tonight: chief culture officer @ cooper union

07 Dec, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

Culture is an essential piece of the intelligence an organization needs in a turbulent world. And you’d think we would have found a way to “factor it in” to the decisions make by an organization. This has not happened. Most C-suites (the managerial team made up of the CMO, CFO, CIO and CEO) are out of touch with culture. They cannot factor in culture because they do not have an expert in the field.

– an excerpt from Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation, by Dr. Grant McCracken

Grant will be speaking tonight (Monday) at Cooper Union in Manhattan, more details here.

I will be going to there.