August 1, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

I had to post on this latest ad, already much blogged about, from John McCain’s new campaign team headed by ex-Bush campaigner Steve Schmidt. You’ve probably heard or seen the ad already, which uses images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton to try to suggest that Barack Obama is some kind of breezy, superficial, fame-seeking attention-starved dilettante, while its voiceover questions his ability to lead. Notice the celebrities not being used in the ad: admired people like Oprah Winfrey and Robert Redford, who actually support Barack Obama for President.

Here’s the ad on YouTube.

Here’s some interesting coverage of it in the LA Times on how it is playing in Hollywood.Anyways, amid all the other vast blogospheric coverage of the ad (see this Wired article on some of the response it has generated among bloggers; see this blog from the SF Gate on more responses), I was thinking that it actually starts a new kind of advertisement.

We already know a lot about celebrity endorser ads, where people employ celebrities so that some of their positive cultural meanings will “rub off” onto the product or brand. Michael Jordan advertising Eveready batteries is a good example. MJ really isn’t a credible source of information about batteries, as he is with shoes, but his image was so strong he sold batteries, perfume, and lots more. Grant McCracken wrote a classic article on the Celebrity Endorser which you can link to here.

But this new McCain-supported ad isn’t just negative advertising, as everyone is calling it. It is an anti-celebrity de-endorsement. A de-legitimizing strategy. A negative inference using celebrities (and the notion of fame itself, it seems) to appeal to a particular target. It uses celebrities (widely disliked ones) in order to discredit a brand or product (of course the political candidates are like brands or products; that’s just basic marketing at this point in marketing’s evolution).

This use of celebrity images for negative rather than positive impact seems to me to be new, and noteworthy. I wonder if anyone is going to study it culturally, or in a more controlled setting like a consumer lab.

I also think it’s wonderfully ironic and kind of silly that the McCain-ex-Bush camp is talking about how awful it is that Barack Obama is using “marketing” (that devilish technique, so avoided in Washington), to make himself “popular.” They even say that he is being marketed like soap or candy bars (horror of horrors–the technique is, <gulp>, generalizable; does that mean it could spread…um, everywhere?).

They are saying this as they are experimenting very deliberately with new marketing techniques. Like the anti-celebrity de-endorsement.

However, there are two problems with your plan, McCain marketers.

Number one: Good marketing is premised on the idea of segmentation and targeting. And number two, it’s premised on old, outdated assumption about controlling your message–it’s a different media world than it was four years ago, when blogging and the Internet weren’t such a force.

So when a message targeted at blue collar Americans spills over and gets wide attention among many who are not of that target, all sorts of interesting things can happen. It also changes things when the message gets transformed, altered, transmogrified in this amazingly wild terrain of the Internet and blogosphere. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing now.

So it’s not exactly good marketing, by any means. New, probably. Effective, unlikely.

I’d expect to see a boomerang effect on the negativity. People posting responses of their own. For example…something like ‘if you want your President to be a serious man, in charge of the issues, above the realm of popular culture, and “ready to lead,” then it may be worth revisiting this video of Senator McCain.’

And this catchy little consumer-generated ditty+video that it inspired.

Boom-boom-boom boom-boom-er-ang.

De-endorsement, indeed.

Posted in Culture + Ad Jamming, Marketing News & Insights, Branding | 2 Comments »

July 8, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

Here’s something kind of cool. A short post about a nice little web-site that was programmed by one person, but which leverages the power of the connected web (Web 2.0) pretty nicely. A few people have sent me the link already to Brand Tags.

Here’s the story on it from the Wall Street Journal’s blog. As the story says, a blogger strategist at Naked Communication, Noah Brier, created this web-site, Brand Tags, as an exercise in programming. The site that has a simple premise. It shows visitors brand logos and then asks them to type in the first word or phrase that popped into their head upon seeing the logo. The results are presented graphically, as a tag cloud where the most common answers are shown biggest.

The results are interesting, not only for the meanings they reveal, but for the diversity they show. Although the Wall Street Journal entry journalistically emphasizes the negative side, mentioning the association of “fat” with Burger King, “boring with Toyota, and “evil” with Wal-Mart.

But I checked out Coca-Cola. Whoah. Coca-Cola covers the alphabetical spectrum, from acid, Atlanta, American, brown, bubbles, classic, capitalist, crap, to evil, global, good, high fructose, monopoly, original, Pepsi, red, refreshing, Santa, soda, tasty, unhealthy, worldwide, yummy, yuck, and zero. What a vast, contradictory array of findings. What an amazing sample. I suspect that the same person might have different responses to the logo at different times, across different experiences. As I’ve written about with Stephen Brown and John Sherry, brands have this amazing inner contradiction, this “schismatic core” (to borrow Alex Shakar’s phrase), this polarity that powers them and keeps them vital.

Take a look at brand tags and relish its amazing diversity.

As consumer researchers, how might we use this tool? How might we build similar tools? What suggestions would you have for how the site might be extended or improved?

Posted in Marketing Research, Technology, Word of Mouth Marketing, Communities and Tribes, Branding, Marketing Science | No Comments »

April 12, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

If you haven’t read Thursday’s blog entry about Costco, you’ll probably need to check it out to make sense of this one.

On Friday, the day after I posted my little nag about Costco, my mobile rings during a meeting. I pick it up. Guess who? Yep. It’s “Mable” from Costco. Trudy’s supervisor. And she’s like, you wanted me to call, so I’m calling.

She seemed to be really curious about what I wanted. I had my screws. So what else did I want? I told her, I think I got what I wanted. Inspiration for a tale. Material for the blog. I made a reasonable story out of a bad service experience. And it tells a story about the way businesses don’t know how to deal with empowered customers today.

She tells me that “Michelle was very shaken up” by what she read on the blog. Well, I didn’t do it to try to upset Michelle. I really don’t mean this to be personal (So I’ve gone through and taken out her actual name and called her “Trudy”). And if “Trudy” is taking this personally, I’d like to apologize to her and hope that she understands that this is about the decisions that her bosses at Costco are making, the systems they are putting in places, rather than what she specifically did. I know that, of course.

This is about Costco, and customer service more generally, and the way companies do things, and the way they really don’t understand that when they talk to one consumer they are talking to thousands or more of them now, and that this was what this was about.

“Trudy did everything above board,” she said. “Everything she did was by the book.”

“Well,” I said, “have you looked critically at the book lately? Does that include leaving customers in limbo for an extra week while your employees go on vacation?”

What a great illustration of the power of the web and of blogging.

Most companies, it is widely claimed by interesting business authors like Lois Kelly and Joe Jaffe that businesses really don’t know how to engage in a conversation with their consumer groups, particularly these groups online. In Citizen Marketers, by O’Connell and Huba, they give plenty of examples of companies that are completely flat-footed and staring-like-does-in-the-oncoming-headlights in the face of consumers’ posting complaints or similar customer service issues online in places like forums and on YouTube videos. It’s awfully hard for them to handle the fact that the wall is down.

How can companies plan in a world where there is transparency and where consumer communities gather and think about how to hold companies accountable for what they do? That’s a major and important question for business today.

That blog entry about the Circus Elephants at Costco is getting about 1400-1500 unique visitors a day since I posted it, far outweighing all of the positive personal word-of-mouth I’ve given to Costco over the last decade as a devoted customer. Which in a way is too bad, because this wasn’t the hugest complaint. Certainly not on the order of the people who were forced to post about and then sue Terminix because they missed a huge termite problem in their home appraisal.

And I’m hearing from all kinds of people in emails and now posts about their own Costco and other service experiences, and how this one resonates. Thanks to everyone who has written and posted. I think it’s very important that we keep in perspective the importance of having a voice as consumers. If we demand more from companies, and try to do it as humanely as we can while showing the people who are working on the front lines respect, and trying to maintain their dignity even when we are angry and faced with a broken system, then I think we can improve business and through it our entire social experience.

It means persistence. It means reaching out. It means humanizing the entire business experience. That’s what two-way communication is. That’s what happens when walls come down.

Posted in Word of Mouth Marketing, Communities and Tribes, Marketing News & Insights, Branding | 3 Comments »