No Play for Yoplait

Sometimes you’ve just gotta laugh at either the brand managers who thought they were smart enough not to have to bring in a strategic consultancy to give them some insight-driven guidance or the ad agency that figured they’d read enough Malcolm Gladwell to proudly announce to their client that the tipping point on yoga was a go with osteoporosis-worried female yogurt eaters. That’s the sad laugh we can all have at the new Yoplait product, released a few months back but definitely a few years late on tapping (not tipping) into yoga culture. Asana yogurt? Are you effing kidding me? If they haven’t been cremated, dead Swami’s around the world are rolling in their graves. If they have been cremated, why didn’t Yoplait suggest a product with ash flavoring instead of raspberry? Ridiculous. Perfect with yoga jeans. Next…

 

A Louder Roar

Jan Chipcase has a post up about how $1 DVD rentals available from Redstar boxes in L.A. are another sign of his future perfect, something he hails by referring to cheers for the death of Blockbuster, saying, “That roar? That’s you and you and you and me standing by the sidelines cheering in relief at knowing we’re never going to put up with that kind of experience again.”

Really? Listen a little more closely. Hear that? It’s the death of DVD, even out of a box for a buck. And it’s called….

Anything that eliminate costs, walks and scratched DVDs from any source is a by far louder signal.

 

Basement Archaeology Archive 2

 

Basement Archaeology Archive 1

 

My literacy is lagging. In two months I’ve read dozens of journal articles on tea preparation and consumption, gendered beverages, why anthropology has ignored defecation as an area of inquiry, gaming and alternative identifications, the implications of hypertext and phatic communication on narrative structure and social organization, the role of alcohol as a performative tool and so on. But I’ve managed to finish only one book, Clive Barker’s Mister B. Gone.

That’s not good. Most people in my business don’t have a lot of time in their busy lives to read beyond necessity; that is, read books that will amp up their work game or, in the case of a few books by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, prop up their monitor. I’ve been doing that a lot (reading for work, not propping up monitors) and, when I return to the first or fifth floor after playing hookie past the official holidays, the journal article reading will continue. But will they add the kind of value to the work mind that (and here’s the elevator pitch Clive should be tweaking to deliver to Hollywood’s money men) the greatest buddy road movie about two 16th Century demons terrorizing the European countryside as they make their way to witness and cast their darkness across the birth of the printing press will add? I doubt it.

As a writer, Clive explores the edges and places between the places of the imagination. I first interviewed him in 1988 when he was on a book tour in Canada to promote Weaveworld, his epic first big novel. He knows the value of The Good Read. I know, I know – I know, too. That’s why, on what I thought was a roll during flu season, I finished him and picked up Arundhati Roy’s The God Of Small Things from my wife’s table and became quickly immersed in one Kerala family’s life. It’s brilliant. Not only do I fall for well-crafted reads that return me to India (even if it’s not set in a state or lives I know) but Roy shapes little observations and descriptions like few authors I’ve read.

Roy’s observations and descriptions or Clive’s eye on events as they unfold are far richer and grander than most of the best ethnographic writing. Ethnography and, to a lesser extent, anthropology is the art and science of telling stories about people’s stories. So I should be reading more fiction and less of the journal stuff on gaming an alternative identification or phatic communication – an activity (racing Italians on Mario Kart with my daughter) and a topic (arthritic clients finally forging a “social media strategy”) I find myself increasingly participating in lately.

But I’m still lagging in neutral at the one-third mark on Roy’s book, and now there’s Graham St. John and Grant McCracken scheduling time. I should read Graham’s book, Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures, because a) I’m interested in the subject that consumed six years of my PhD life; b) as the editor of Rave Culture and Religion, Graham published one of my essays six years ago; and, c) that essay is cited in a number of the contributions in this book. I should read Grant’s book, Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation, because a) I’m interested in a subject that I constantly promote to clients that just don’t get it; b) in the forward to the book and as a deft early release marketing ploy leveraging the power of Google Alerts, Grant sneakily thanked what I suspect were all of his LinkedIn and Facebook connects; and, c) if my sole purchase leads to greater sales karma for the book it could mean that I might stop having to convince clients and, instead, supply them with the tools and ideas to make them live and breath better.

Until then – and that could be an eternity – the mission is to finish Roy, get Patty to remove Csikszentmihalyi from under the monitor, talk with my daughter about Raymond E. Feist and work on part two of the literacy equation – writing. Apologies for no posts in months.

 

Word to Dell Hymes

The world of anthropology lost a true giant this week in Dell Hymes. I paid my respects to him silently this week as I considered the value of what was simply said – and not witnessed as ‘authentic’ ethnography, according to a client – during a lone research interview that blossomed into an insanely successful metrics bonanza. Hymes’ approach to understanding communication was certainly more complex than words alone, but I did point out in April that, were he dead, he’d be rolling in his grave at those touting authentic ethnography as witnessed, not worded. Word to Dell Hymes. Read his obit in The Washington Post.

 

Toboggan Innovation

Talk about an innovation that could transform the winter experience that’s about to blizzard into our lives – saw these SnowShorts at the Orvis store in Boston the other day. Now that’s meeting an unmet and unarticulated consumer need!

 

The Power of 80’s Mythology

As part of her first week in Grade 7, my daughter (and her entire class) was assigned to conduct a peer-to-peer interview with a classmate as an exercise to socialize the kids and transform them from a disparate group of previous-school attendees to a current-school community. The value of quickly constructing a community among Grade 7 students who will only spend two years together is very high at this particular school; in October they will spend three days at a camp where they will engage in the kind of team building activities that the corporate world pays big money for on occasion to connect the human dots between its employees and that we, at Idea Couture, typically weave into our Noodleplay process. But enough of Business Development; back to the peer-to-peer interview.

One of my daughter’s questions to her interview subject was, Who is your hero? His response was surprising to me and, as 12 year old girls are prone to saying these days, so random to her…but only after I explained who the hero was: Chuck Norris.

Chuck Norris!?!? What 12 year old boy names Chuck Norris as his current hero unless he belongs to the right-side of the Larry King watching Republican? My suspicion is fairly obvious: a kid whose dad was into Chuck Norris 10 years before the birth of his son. That Chuck got the nod from a kid whose potential list of pop culture heroes could include Alexander Ovechkin, Georges St. Pierre, Tony Hawk or – if he’s prone to building his game with the girls – Rob Pattinson or Taylor Lautner – is about as left field as it gets. But not when you consider how pop culture heroes are an enduring part of our cultural mythology.

Film and TV, alongside music, are the most powerful receivers and transmitters of our mythologies. The Internet is certainly catching up, but it has yet to produce the sort of mainstream, focused narratives (as opposed to activities) that we like to latch on to as a way to formulate our thoughts, values, languages, attitudes, opinions and practices. To quote from the school of consumer insights, it has yet to truly fulfill our “unmet and/or unarticulated needs” for plot, storyline, character, drama, passion, intrigue, romance and so on.

Granted, there is some content of mythical proportions being generated online and, if your TV is on the semi-fritz like mine or you don’t like to schedule your life around your favourite shows like me, the Internet the most effective way to transmit the myth-rich content of HBO, Showcase and the wonderful world of DivX streaming video.

So where did this kid discover and latch on to the POW-rescuing Texas Lone Star sherriff? Maybe through YouTube: score one point for the Internet and its wealth of throwback content. Possibly at the local video store: score one point for Blockbuster for still eeking out some profit in the face of BitTorrent and DivX streaming. Or maybe in a home with some dusty VHS tapes and a dad who, like this one making his daughter watch Harry Hamlin in Clash of the Titans or listen to Monty Python records, wanted to keep a mythology particularly close to his heart stay alive through his son: score one point for the power of transmitting narratives and their heroes through the ancient media of family time.

Thoughts like this percolate during personal time. Maybe I’ll bring it up during my meeting with those insurance execs this week in the States when I tell them that their brand could use a little Chuck Norris action. You think they’ll get it?

 

Innovation and Early Adopters: Beyond The Bell Curve

When it comes to product, service or marketing design, following the bell curve can sometimes lead you astray. This is certainly the case for businesses and brands courting the highly coveted, often elusive consumer category known as early adopters.

Early adopters are typically described as curious, adventurous consumers who buy first, talk fast and spread the word to others about the pros and/or cons of what they have purchased. According to Everett M. Rogers in Diffusion of Innovations, the landmark 1962 textbook that popularized the study of how new ideas and technologies spread through societies, early adopters make up 13.5% of the consumers who will adopt an innovation.

If you’re facing the bell curve, they occupy the initial climb upwards, right after the 2.5% of those people who create an innovation. Following them is the early majority (34%), consumers who make their moves through the market more carefully, but tend to adopt a new product more quickly than most. At the hump of the bell curve is the late majority (34%), consumers who adopt a new product only after the majority has weighed in on its value. Finally, sloping downwards are laggards (16%), the critics, curmudgeons and haters who do their best to resist making the purchase but will eventually do so.

The problem with this bell curve is that it is a mathematical model, one that was never designed to represent the social context of innovation, the diffusion of innovation or early adopters. In looking to crack the code and harness the coveted word-of-mouth that can be generated by the approval of early adopters, designers, brand managers and researchers need to look beyond the numbers. Without a deep understanding of and appreciation for early adopters, they risk operating in a cultural void where assumptions can lead to product ideas that have no relationship to reality.

Those assumptions can be traps, particularly if chasing numbers on a bell curve leads to designing products that target only early adopters and, in the process, destabilizes brand identity or alienates core consumers. I’ve identified potential traps that brands and businesses often make when pursuing early adopters. To learn about them visit Noodleplay.

 

Makes You Scratch Your Head…

Check this highly cerebral performance from the Scratch Bastards.