January 13, 2011 by Robert Kozinets.

The retail consumer in Canada is finally going to catch a break. After putting up with a dreary, outdated, ho-hum retail market for decades, in which retailing has consistently been about 20 years behind its US neighbors, there are changes afoot.

First came Costco. Great success.

Then Wal-Mart. Big success.

Then came the Apple store. Monster success.

Then Victoria’s Secret. Looking gooooood.

Now, Target. Minneapolis, MN-based Target Corp has just announced a deal to acquire the leasehold sites for up to 220 locations from Zeller’s Canada.  They plan to open 100 to 150 Target locations across Canada during 2013 and 2014, after investing about $1 billion in improvements and upgrades. And hiring a load of happy Canadians.

I have been using Target as an example of excellence in branding, customer service, and retail delivery in my marketing classes for years. They have been outstanding competitors in a tough marketplace, and they have managed to maintain a lower-price higher-quality positioning that has proven nearly impossible for Wal-Mart to beat. As a consumer, I always felt that Target provided a far superior shopping experience to most other retailers, including Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart was about price, Target was about the experience.

I believe that Target has likely come to Canada for a few reasons:

1. Slowing growth in the domestic US retail market
2. Fierce competition in the domestic US retail market
3. Saturation with Target stores in the US (they always stated they were going to saturate the US first before going international)
4. Lots of cross-border shopping, which would have shown up on their radar
5. The Canadian economy and consumer market’s resistance to recent economic dips
6. Stronger than ever Canadian dollar (at par)
7. Long-term prospects for strong Canadian dollar (petro bucks and the fact that all retail has an arbitrage element)
8. Canadian dissatisfaction with retail service and choice levels
9. Weak Canadian retail brands (Zellers? The Bay? Canadian Tire? come on….)
10. Great brand recognition, awareness, and positive attitude among Canadian consumers towards Target already (who travel frequently to the US)
11. Target’s convenient format: one-stop shopping for food, clothes (decent ones at that), sports equipment, electronics, toys, small appliances, bedding, kitchenware, linen, furniture, pharmacy and health care
12. Target is clean. It’s customer service is outstanding.The format of the store, with wide spacious aisles and clear signage, is best in class. The experience–as I said before, and have written about already in some of my retail work–is what Target is all about.
13. The French pronounciation may or may not have been a deciding element. Repeat after me…Tar GHAY est tres Canadian, eh?

My wife puts it this way: “I feel happy when I shop there.” We have missed the Target retail experience ever since moving to Toronto from Madison. I think that the Canadian consumer is going to richly reward Target for this decision, and the warm and wonderful feelings are going to be mutual. I know in my house we can hardly wait. The slow countdown to 2013 begins. When will they open already? And, oh…

When is The Cheesecake Factory opening in Yorkdale for goodness sake?

Posted in Book Reviews, Economy and General Business Management, Oy Canada!, Canada!, Marketing News & Insights | Print | 2 Comments »

June 17, 2010 by Robert Kozinets.

In my review of CCT 2010, we’re now up to 10:30am on the morning of Friday, the first day. I chose the session “Who is in Charge Here? Contesting Public Goods.” This was an All-Star session with some of the biggest, most established names in CCT presenting. As well, the topic of the session, public space and public goods, was of great interest to me.

The session started with research presented by Linda Scott of Oxford University on the Goddess Pageant in Glastonbury. Using maps and a lot of on-the-ground video, Linda’s work with Pauline Maclaran showed how the annual Goddess Pageant subverted traditional patriarchal and religious patterns, traversing a traditional Catholic parade path in reverse and temporarily claiming and public space for ancient pagan rituals and modes of being. She also nicely tied success in the ritual to commercial action on the retail strip of the city.

Next was work on street artists across a number of cities in North America and Europe by Luca Visconti and Stefania Borghini of Boconni University in Milan, Laurie Anderson of ASU in Phoenix, and John Sherry of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. This fascinating presentation examined how street art is emphasizing the role of public participation in art and in civic life, showing how what seems a trivial act (painting or spraying on city walls) can be seen as an empowerment of citizenry to claim public space as their own, and to beatify and improve it (or use it as a place to comment on how society could be made better).

Finally Russ Belk of the Schulich School at York University spoke about the tension between private and commercial ownership. Providing a dizzying array of thought-provoking examples (water, eggs and sperm, the military, higher education) Russ expanded upon the ideas in his recent article on sharing in JCR to talk about why privatization was occurring around the world, and what its consequences might be. He linked the Internet to a resurgence of sharing activity and new forms for that sharing to take place. He also sounded a call for more research in this area that could be directed at policy-making in the public interest, rather than simply following the blind path of laissez faire, a social slippage in which everything become commoditized.

This theme of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the models of moderns Economics was picked up quite explicitly in the lunch speech by John Deighton, the current Chief Editor of the Journal of Consumer Research.

John began his talk, which I found inspiring, pretty much where the last talk, from the 2008 ACR in San Francisco, began. He spoke about the opportunity we had before us in marketing, and perhaps in CCT especially, to institutionalize CCT from a bankrupt economics. He must have said several times during the presentation that he believed the people in the field of consumer culture theory were doing the most interesting and most important work being published in JCR, and in the field of consumer research, today.

That seemed like going out on a limb, sort of like Jacob giving Joseph the magnificent coat of many colors. I am fully expecting our field to thus be abandoned by its sibling disciplines and sold into slavery (perhaps to Sociology or, gasp!, Urban Studies). Well, we haven’t actually got the coat yet.

But John did say that we are over-represented in JCR. If you count the percentage of the ACR membership who are CCT researchers it is twelve percent. And if you count the page space in JCR devoted to CCT articles it comes out to about sixteen percent of all of the articles. So, as John pointed out, that is an extra four over twelve percent, a thirty-three percent over-representation.

So when people tell you not to do cultural research, you can tell them you crunched the numbers and it automatically gives you a thirty-three percent edge. True.

John was asking what made us impactful as scholars. It’s a matter that I have thought about, talked about, and presented on a lot lately. John said he thought that we were publishing the best stuff because this is the stuff that would be remembered in forty years. That’s a pretty high bar. And quite difficult to judge in advance, for certain.

Then, John’s powerful talk challenged us to move beyond journal publications for our legitimacy. He asked “Who among you will have an impact on the way that not just marketing, but management will be done?” As I do, John sees the Field of Marketing changing. Changing into what is anyone’s guess.

But he also said that Harvard Business School did a study of its courses over an, I believe, 80- year or so history. He said many courses and names and disciplines for business education came and went, fashion and fad, boom and bust. On the bottom were two sets of lines that were constant and unwavering. Finance and Marketing. The two core disciplines of all business schools. The rests come and go.

 So the question became how can you do work that will impact management, how management is done?

And from that or interrelated with its answer, another question: how will we, CCT, as a field, professionalize? John highly recommended a book: Andrew Abbott’s The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor

The book was drawn from Abbott’s research about how the American Medical Association had taken over so many disparate disciplines and associated itself with so many phenomena. The example John used was alcoholism (a very appropriate example for our little group), which used to be treated by the clergy and by the police (the former, spiritually, and the latter, punitively). Using “science” and “medicalization,” the AMA declared and pushed the idea that alcoholism is a “condition,” something that required medical treatment by a licensed physician, rather than spiritual guidance. To consolidate power, they got the police on board.

So, what did this book tell us about what we need to do as a field? Again, see my blog post about Gokcen Coskuner-Balli’s excellent opening presentation-the topic is a hot one and the ideas dovetail. I used an article by Andrew Abbott called “The Order of Professionalization: An Empirical Analysis” to get a sense of Abbott’s work, while my book is on order from Amazon.

Abbott’s work argues that there are various stages to professionalization, but that they usually include the following:

• The rise of association and an Association
• Control of Work (through, e.g., certification, reviews, fees)
• Interest in Professional education
• Pursuit of professional knowledge, and the “Scientific” transformation of knowledge
• Tangential knowledge
• Profession dominated work sites

I won’t offer details on these just yet because they are rich concepts that deserve their own posting and further unpacking. However, what seems clear to me after reading Abbott’s work and after hearing John’s interpretation of it is that we do not yet offer ourselves up to relevant decision-makers as offering any kind of advantage. We certainly could, because I think that activities like ethnography or netnography put companies at an advantage. But we do not.

The way that John put it was to ask which areas we, as consumer culture theorists, we could could own. Which practical areas of business or policy-making could we stake out a claim to be better at informing.? I think Grant McCracken has already begun doing this with his work in Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation and of course beyond. And so have Rita Denny and Patti Sunderland with the Practica group and their work.

The bigger question is what jurisdictions or practical areas can we own or make a play for? 

From what I saw at the CCT conference this year, I think we have excellent claims to understand holistically the following areas:

1. Branding and Brand Management;
   
2. Social media in marketing and management;
   
3. Retailing;
   
4. Consumer Subcultures, Cultures, and Communities;
   
5. Consumption Rituals and Marketing
6. Sustainability;
   
7. Consumer Insight, Innovation, and Ideas. 

For starters. 

The key is to find and solve the right problems for the right people. Another nice turn of phrase John offered up was that we need to move from micro explication to macro proscription. We are good as a field at analyzing problems and providing nuanced explanations of what is going on. But we are weak at offering normative proscriptions after that of what to do. What should managers and decision-makers, those who act on the work, do with our knowledge? That is key.

Another incredibly interesting set of sessions. And more review to come (although perhaps not so detailed or it might take until next year to recount them all to you…).

Posted in Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Book Reviews, Consumer Culture Theory, Qualitative Research Methods, Academic Life, Marketing Research, Netnography, Conferences & Presentation, Marketing Science | Print | 1 Comment »

December 5, 2009 by Robert Kozinets.

I just finished reading an interesting new book (actually, new because it’s an updated 2009 version) about marketing research. The book is called More Guerrilla Marketing Research: Asking the Right People, the Right Questions, the Right Way, and Effectively Using the Answers to Make More Money by Robert J. Kaden, Gerald Linda, and Jay Conrad Levinson. Someone at Stray Dog Media sent me a free review copy, which was good of them (there.. my FTC disclosure guidelines have been satisfied). In sum, the book is a nice, succinct set of ideas and guideline for managers who want to understand why and how to employ marketing research, and how to understand it.

Most of the book covers the fundamentals of marketing research. Budgets, Research professionals. Research plans. Focus groups. Surveys. Questionnaires. Sampling. Applying the results of research into marketing practice.

It is a good, solid book for practitioners, particularly those in smaller ands medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that don’t have much exposure or understanding of marketing research. It explains very well why and how marketing research is vital for understanding, testing, and growing a business.

However, the book is quite weak when it comes to qualitative techniques beyond the old-style focus group, or explanation of newer techniques. Ethnography? It is not even mentioned. Depth interviews? Nope. Netnography? Are you kidding? They do mention “data mining” however, in a fairly cursory and introductory fashion. I was expecting a bit more innovation and forward-thinking from the “guerrilla” part of the marketing research. But the book is pretty old school and established. There’s not much surprising or new, or which challenges the marketing research status quo.

The part that I found most interesting, and which got me thinking the most, was the final chapter of the book, which they called “The Future of Marketing Research.” On p. 327, they quote the interestingly named “Doug User” (the perfect guy, it would seem, to conduct “User Research”) who is a Ph.D. and a senior VP with Widmeyer Research & Polling, who talks about how the “fragmentation” of consumer makes it hard to find and understand target audiences using “traditional” marketing research.

The answer according to the quote in the book is “new metrics and new methods: video blogs, online portals, emotional measurement, data harvesting, analysis of comments in online forums, and private online communities.”

This sounds like a bit of a techno-hodgepodge to me, but I think this is thinking that is moving in the right direction.

It started me wondering about the best and most informed usage and combination of newer methods for tracking market changes, diagnosing marketing problems, identifying opportunities, and staying on top of brand positioning challenges.

How might we think about mixing and matching social media marketing research and other marketing research techniques such as:

1. Ethnography
2. Netnography
3. Data mining such as social media and blog monitoring
4. Engineered or managed online brand communities
5. Social networked brand response groups
6. Online panels
7. Online focus groups
8. Online surveys
9. Crowdsourced information-providing contests
10. Brand wikis
11. Neurological and physiological scans (yikes! how did that get in there?)
    

How are these techniques similar, and how are they different? Where and with whom are each of them more effective, or less effective? How can they be combined for maximum effectiveness and minimum cost (i.e., for real efficiency)? How can they be used along with traditional techniques to maximize the delivery of time-sensitive information to where it is nedded for maximum impact?

Taking these ideas even further….When will marketing research become indistinguishable from or inextricably linked with marketing itself? When will both of these actions become interlinked with management itself (i.e., instead of managing sales figures, and motivating a sales force, managers would also need to manage brand mention and opinion figures, and motivate a word-of-mouth consumer force)? Where would those boundaries be? Where would research end? Who would perform this new blend of research, marketing, and motivational management? How would this Social Marketing Research interface with the company management, and with Enterprise 2.0?

I postulate here that some of the most successful managers of the coming decade will find their unique competitive advantages in the living, breathing, insight-laden answers to marketing/research questions such as these.

Posted in Economy and General Business Management, Social Media, Book Reviews, Qualitative Research Methods, Netnography, Marketing Research, Technology, Marketing News & Insights | Print | 1 Comment »