March 9, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

Rob Boostrom, a Ph.D. Student at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale sent me this news flash about the way Joanne “J.K.” Rowling is interacting with some of the Harry Potter fans who have made her a British billionaire richer than the Queen. And this one has lessons to behoove all marketers, methinks.

The story, from Yahoo’s OMG entertainment news site, is titled “JK Rowling bashes ‘Harry Potter Lexicon.” Harry Potter author Joanne Rowling has filed a lawsuit in Manhattan against a fan named Steven Vander Ark, for trying to publish an unauthorized reference work entitled the Harry Potter Lexicon.

Mr. Ark is what I’ve termed a “superfan” in my thesis dissertation work. He is the editor of a web-site, also called the Harry Potter Lexicon, which contains fan-created essays and encyclopedic material on the Potter universe. Check it out. It contains lists of spells and potions found in the books, a catalog of magical creatures, and a listing of the different people mentioned in the wizarding world. In short, the fans have gone through the different books in the series and cataloged the material, presenting it in a new way. And this is one of many such sites that do things like this.

Rowling has accepted the fan-based web sites, but-in old school fashion-does not want the work published on paper. Even by a small Muskegon, MI-based published called RDR Books. RDR Books’ website contains lots of very interesting material on the lawsuit.

One of the main bases of the lawsuit, according to the OMG article, is that Rowling “intends to publish her own definitive Harry Potter encyclopedia.” So the main reason here seems to be that J. K. Rowling wants to publish her own book, apparently to make even more money. A lot of the community comments on this new story (there were a whopping 3679 this morning) are about how greedy Joanne seems to be. “Doesn’t she have enough money?” Those sorts of comments. Then there are those who defend her, citing her legendary rags-to-riches story” “You go, girl. Protect what’s yours,” they say.

Her statements are indeed interesting and paradoxical. She says that failing to accept her position to restrict fan’s freedom to publish derivative works will lead, in the end, to less freedom for fans to work with material online: “a severe alteration of author-fan relations.” Hmmm. That must be much worse than suing them for publishing a few fan-like books.

The attorney for RDR Books, Lizbeth Hasse, said last week that Rowling is seeking a monopoly over the work, which is not part of copyright law. She called the lexicon-making activity of the fans ” a very legitimate literary activity, like a reference book or a guide to literature.” Apparently, Joanne Rowling thanked Steven Vander Ark, and has praised the online lexicon.

Ms. Hasse is certainly correct that there is a long history of fans working through authors’ material and collecting it in a way that is “fan-friendly.” That’s a very fannish activity. I wrote about such fan activity in my thesis, in which I relate this activity to “Superfans.” I again quote from Kozinets (1997):

“Bjo Trimble exemplifies a superfan. Bjo (pronounced “bee-JOE”) was one of the original series’ fans responsible for the letter writing campaign that saved the show from early cancellation and resulted in the third season of Star Trek (a decisive season in Star Trek history because, without it, there would not have been sufficient episodes for syndication).”

With some help from Gene Roddenberry, Bjo and other fans organized and implemented the successful and very famous campaign and, in many Star Trek culture members’ perception, started the age of television activism, a media-related form of consumerism. She also wrote one of the first, and still one of the best, fan reference works on the original Star Trek series, the Star Trek Concordance, which was professionally published and gained mass distribution and collectible status.

The Star Trek Concordance was the Harry Potter Lexicon of its day. It collected the episodes, credits, cast, and plot summaries of the Star Trek television shows-all of the 79 original episodes, plus the 21 animated episodes. The concept for the book was based on a privately printed fandom publication established by Dorothy Jones Heydt in 1968. Trimble worked on the book extensively and it was first published professionally by Ballantine Books in 1976. Later, the book was endorsed by Paramount Pictures.

The big difference in these cases was that Gene Roddenberry was the quintessential community manager. Her knew how to work with–not against–his creation’s enthusiastic fans, to share his creation, to use fandom to spread influence and build allies. Roddenberry and the fans were  on the same side. I can’t imagine Gene Roddenberry (to fans, he is always referred to as “Gene”) suing Bjo Trimble for writing the Star Trek Concordance instead of him. In fact, I’m sure he thanked her for it.

Bjo Trimble was also one of the founders of the first and longest-lived consortium of Star Trek fan clubs, the Star Trek Welcommittee. “Among active members of the Star Trek culture, Bjo Trimble is a star. She had her own set of roles that complimented and enhanced Gene’s. Her ability to bring active fans together and draw them to Star Trek conventions is comparable to the drawing power of an actor from one of the television series. She is thus a frequent guest at cons. In convention brochures, she is described as a “superfan.” In one of the Star Trek conventions on whose planning committee I worked, Bjo was considered as a fan guest because she was not only a star, but still considered “one of us” (Kozinets 1997).

In my Ph.D. dissertation, my behavioral observations of fan activity revealed a category of fan not accounted for in past written accounts of the types of fans. To quote the unpublished thesis:

This type of fan was the “superfan,” a person who had risen from the ranks of fandom to become a celebrity, someone famous for being a fan, someone paradoxically who was “one of us” and yet now elevated and apart from common fandom. The mixed emotions that can come from such transcendence of “common fandom” seem evident in a conversation I had with Wilfred, a fellow FanTrek member, when we were minding fan club tables together at a fan-run convention.

“It’s funny,” Wilfred said, rubbing his eyeglasses on his yellow sweater. “A couple of friends of mine, old friends, were guests of honour at [something] con in Niagara Falls, New York [just recently]. They were sitting at an autograph table, with a lineup of people getting autographs. And I wondered if I should have asked them for their autograph.” He laughed, a boyish, high-pitched little giggle (Convention Fieldnotes, 10.28.1995).

This is a high-status category of fan, where the average Joe Shmoe consumer turns into a “superfan.” The person is valued as equivalent to celebrities, as valuable producers of material for further consumption. These superfan and the “Trekkie” fan classifications seem to transcend descriptive delineation by providing cultural archetypes of sacred achievement and profane degeneration -the angels and demons of the Star Trek fan community.” From the elevated producer-consumer to the denigrated, passive über-consumer-these categories defined fandom relative to levels of active ascendancy or torpid thralldom.

Is Steven Vander Ark a “Superfan”? Does he have drawing power? Linking power? Community power? Would he be a guest at a Harry Potter Convention (and there have been many thus far)? 

I’ve been writing and thinking about prosumers for all of my academic career. “Prosumers” are those groups of productive-consumers that Marshall McLuhan first theorized about in the 1960s, and Alvin Toffler named in the 1980s in his book “The Third Wave.” We’ve know they exist for a long time, but there are very few thinkers (until recently) who have thought about them and their social and business implications. Two brilliant exceptions-both of them at MIT-are Eric von Hippel, with his essential work on lead users, and Henry Jenkins with his pioneering work on fan culture.

It seems to me that after flirting with this topic for about a quarter of a century, we are finally starting to take prosumers and the prosuming that they do seriously. But we lack a vocabulary for what is going on. We lack frameworks to put it in. We lack theories to help make sense of it. So much of what is being written is description without theory or organization.

During the late 1990s, we were seeing a lot of this “sue the fans” activity. I wrote about it in several places. Grant McCracken wrote about it in his masterful classic “Plenitude” (a book everyone interested in popular culture and consumption should read). Henry Jenkins has been writing about it and still is. Stephen Brown has noted it in his work on the Harry Potter phenomenon.

This recent lawsuit is a sign that businesses (and Rowling is, in this case, without a doubt, acting as Rowling, Inc.) still don’t know how to deal with active, creative, participative fans. According to Stephen Brown of the University of Ulster (and a one-man publishing empire himself), there has been a long-standing “uneasy” relationship between Harry Potter fans and Rowling (Brown 2007; in the Consumer Tribes volume).

“[Rowling’s] legal representatives have been quick to quash any infringement of copyright law. School plays based on the boy wizard are forbidden, Tributes websites have received threatening cease-and-desist letters. Legitimate schools of witchcraft have been shut down by order of Warner Bros. Books about the phenomenon have been removed from sale….” (Brown 2007, p. 185).

Indeed, Prof. Brown, who has written a wonderful book on the marketing of the Harry Potter phenomenon entitled “Wizard! Harry Potter’s Brand Magic” (Brown 2005) characterizes the three “phases of development” of Rowling’s relationship with her fan community. It began with “enthusiasm” and a reciprocal relationship. It later developed into “exasperation” as she became frustrated with and tired of all the attention. Finally it developed into “exploitation” and she discovered how to direct and use the fan community to achieve her own ends.

The idea of exploitation doesn’t leave much room for superfans. Superfans are powerful. Superfans are builders, creators, doers. Superfans are connectors. Superfans are a challenge to creator’s “official” legally-entrenched power. They are out to produce, as we noted in the Consumer Tribes volume. They are entrepreneurial. They are members of inno-tribes, creative groupings. They are pushing at the boundaries of our current system, opening up gaps for new institutional arrangements in which consumers have the power to do much more than traditionally consume.

Here’s what is interesting for our greater understanding and theory development.

“The consumption of the superfan has likely now become professional -since they are being paid by fans to be up-to-date, the avocation has become vocation. Superfans attend conventions in order to promote their newest book, to sell, sign and personalize, as well as to teach and commune with other members, sharing in the experience in a way that real “stars” -outsiders, actors, distant phenomena-will not, and perhaps can not. Superfans are famous for being fans, for their distinction in consumption practice, their cultural competence, their ability to act as communication channels and sources. The endlessly devoted consumer becomes the endlessly invoked producer, the subject of advertising now its object, the market self made self-marketer. At the superfan level, consumption has been replaced by production: the cycle is somehow at this stage satisfyingly complete” (Kozinets 1997).

We don’t really know what superfans are, or what they can be.

• Are they only there to be exploited and used for our own gain?
• Are they WOM & PR promotion machines—for good and for bad?
• Are they a breeding ground for community-building activities?
• Are they ambassadors?
• Are they partners who have financial and legal rights?
• Are they managers in training?
• Do they have any rights, any claims to the brands, symbols, and myths that they purchase and play with?
• What are the tradeoffs involved in dealing with them?

These issues are ones that many brand managers are increasingly facing. Both as an opportunity and as a threat. And not just in the media industries. Some very interesting books have been written recently that begin to grapple with these issues and how to address them. Three that I like are The Culting of Brands by Douglas Atkin, Citizen Consumers by Ben O’Connell and Jackie Huba, and Brand Hijack by Alex Wipperfürth.

When someone creates a video parody of your ad-what do you do? When someone creates a blog or a web-site that uses your brand in a negative way, steals your music, insults your trademarks, inverts your characters, what do you do? A video of the Jolly Green Giant trying to pick up Betty Crocker in a singles bar appears on YouTube: what do you do? A ripped mashup rap song about your brand starts gaining massive play. Kids start teaching each other how to turn cans of WD-40 into deadly weapons: what do you do?

This isn’t just about the straightforward use of your branded material. This isn’t just about taking your brand and making classifications or books out of it. Superfans, superconsumers, active innovating prosumers are everywhere. Building alliances. Building knowledge. And every quarter they are growing in power. The possibilities are nearly endless…

There are lots of ways to deal with them.

And not all of them involve legal prosecution.

REFERENCES

Atkin, Douglas (2004), The Culting of Brands: When Customers Become True Believers, New York: Portfolio.

Brown, Stephen (2005), Wizard! Harry Potter’s Brand Magic. London: Cyan.

Brown, Stephen (2007), “Harry Potter and the Fandom Menace” in Cova, Bernard, Robert V. Kozinets, and Avi Shankar Consumer Tribes, Oxford and Burlington, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann, 177-192.

Kozinets, Robert V. 1997. To boldly go: A hypermodern ethnography of Star Trek fans’ culture and communities consumption. Ph.D. dissertation, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

McConnell, B. and J. Huba. 2006. Citizen marketers: when people are the message. Chicago, IL: Kaplan.

McCracken, Grant (1997), Plenitude, Toronto, Canada: Periph.: Fluide.

Wipperfürth, Alex (2005), Brand Hijack, New York, NY: Portfolio.

Posted in Fandom, Entertainment Marketing, Word of Mouth Marketing, Communities and Tribes | 2 Comments »

January 25, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

This blog has been getting a lot of interesting comments lately, and those comments always spark further rumination. Ruminate. Ruminate. I may not always respond right away, but you should know that I’m ruminating on them.

Recently, Ron “humbly submitted” (hey, I recognize another Twilight Zone fan when I hear one), “that there are a couple pieces here that the industry, or the profession [of community management teams] has down much better than academia [because] we’re in this stuff up to our necks every day.”

I agree we always have a lot to learn from the people in the trenches. Problem in the trenches is, it’s a lot about problem-solving, sometimes not so much about understanding. Ron said that “community managers” are a special breed. They are engaged in an honest, open dialog with the community”jointly engaged in a long-term relationship,” acting, ideally, as “an authority in good standing.”

Ron says that”the whole gig” of being a community manager “is to maintain a trusting relationship with the community.” Sounds like the idea of being a brand manager. But in other words, the community manager is both part of the community, and a leader of it, an authority figure, at a higher lever in the hierarchy because she controls the resources.

Here’s what Ron had to say:

“The community manager guides it, at times with an iron fist, but only so long as their actions can be accepted and seen by the community as good for the community. It’s very much a case of leading by running slightly faster than the others, only with a handful of bright shiny objects to occasionally use for course correction as well as an ultimate authority to basically boot anyone who gets too far out of line.”

I like the Pavlovian feel of “bright shiny objects,” “iron fists,” and course corrections. They have the carrots and they’re not afraid to use them. “Well done, Jeffrey, here’s a free membership to Wii-Monthly and a ticket to see “Aeon Flux: The 3-D IMAX Edition.” And the stick and the trapdoor. “You, you with the big potty mouth: Out!” The community manager is in charge. They are in control. Boo-yeah.

“There is nothing wrong with your community. Do not attempt to adjust the culture. We are controlling transmission . . . we will control the feedback. We will control the commentary… For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all you see and hear… You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery that’s reaching from the Corporate Mind to… The Online Community.”

Now, as Ron points out, this is control for the greater good. The greater good being The Company’s greater good. Corporate community managers are beneficent rulers, online baron landlords with velvet gloves as well as “iron fists.” But even they have limits to their jurisdiction or credibility. Can’t push the people too far.

In case of a disastrous event, they need to deal honestly and directly, “always with the view that the goal is prolonged positive relationship.”That’s interesting because it says to me that this community might outlast any particular company or any particular brands–especially true in online land, and in the world of entertainment offerings, like games. So it’s not just this particular community, maybe, in part, but it’s relationships with a holistic, pre-existing community that also matter. And so it is “a very active and meaningful role.”

Although I’m having fun here, there’s really nothing I disagree with of Ron’s statement, except the notion that all communities can or should be managed. In fact, when you pose the question like that it sort of seems ridiculous. Should the Chinese-American community be “managed”? Well, not really. Should the Catholic community be managed. That’s interesting. How about the African-American community? Well then why would you want to “manage” the science fiction or RPG or MMOG or young mom or low-carb dieting or Cola-drinking community? The question of course is managed by whom, for what ends? And why the heck wouldn’t you just let the community manage itself, while you interact with it? You: emissary, ambassador of corporate community. Them: receptive-but-at-times-understandably-skeptical consumer community. Not necessarily Leader of the Communal Charge, Chief Online Overlord, Corporately-Appointed-Ruler of This Hear Brand Coh-munit-tee.
The key of course is what Ron is talking about in relation to what I’m talking about. We’re actually comparing mangoes and pomegranates. My big interest is in these grassroots, self–managed, organic, naturally-occurring gatherings, often based more on a group of individual’s common structures of interest than a particular brand or corporation’s interests.

But Ron says it himself: what he is talking about is “online community in a site, a social setting, built around and hosted by the corporation (this is not etribes, this is a community dedicated to an ongoing relationship with a game, product, brand, etc.).” Not etribes. Managed brand communities. It’s a social site, but it is built around and hosted by the corporation. That’s why they control transmission. That’s why community managers can dish out bright shiny objects (”Would you like to win an Underdog Pez for your suggestion this week?”). That’s why they have their hands on the trapdoor level (”Away with you, Foul Potty Mouthed One! An Never Return!”). They control the resources, therefore they are in control.

And so this was a response to my blog about Dean Devlin and the Godzilla board, definitely a corporate run site. But it could also have been in response to my many other blogs about Communi-space and the idea of managed, created, community. And that’s where I like to draw some differences and maybe a few lines in the communal kitty litter.

I’m back to a particular metaphor that I like, which is the managed community metaphor. Kinds of works with online and offline communities equally well. I think that managers have been working with the idea of the manager as Good Cowboy. As I’ve explained it in a number of presentation, the community of consumers is conceptualized pretty much in this way:

• As A Community of Consumers Needing to be Directing
• Community Needing to be Controlled (for their own good)
• Community Needing to be Owned (if we don’t Own them, our Competitors Will!)
• Communities Needing to Fed (if we feed them, they we like and trust us; and need our food)
• Communities Needing to be Weeded (mangy unkempt things!)
• But always Managing Community to keep consumers happy
• Happy, happy consumers

Mooo. Yeee-haw! Come on, Bessie. Move em out!

Yes, we’re “joint participants” in this community, but I’ve got the stick, the horse, the pen and the gun and it’s your job to eat the hay and make the milk. Or make the Wool and lie down and get shorn when we tell you to. Pick your metaphor. Don’t matter much to me.

Okay, that’s extreme. My point is that community is ALSO an emergent phenomenon. The E in eTribes Stands for Emergent. They emerge on their own. They are a phenomenon of Self-Organization. That doesn’t at all mean that they don’t have anything to do with managed communities. Of course they do. They are both manifestations of culture world and online world, two permeable, connection-seeking realms that dissolve boundaries. They merge, combine, and hybridize in all sorts of interesting ways.

An interesting example of this hybridizing just given in a BusinessWeek article about SmugMug.com, the online photographic service. It’s a family run business, but where did they hired their additional 22 workers from who weren’t family? They recruited them from their message forum, Digital Grin (dgrin.com). They found people they knew, people they could trust, fellow members of their interest community, their affinity group, who already had an affinity for their service, brand, and company, and they helped them turn their hobby into a career (just as the owners had done). I saw the same sort of fan-amateur to professional evolution happen all the time in the fan community. Those are very permeable borders, and in the past I’ve called fandom a breeding ground for professionals. Why wouldn’t it be? And the same thing holds true oftentimes for online communities.

But Emergent etribes are different from the managed herd that Ron and the Communi-space people talk about, lead around, and experiment with. There are lots of interesting real-world intersections between these two types of communities that we need to explore, but they seem like two distinct categories. The Exchanges are different. The Benefits are different. The Rules are different. And what might be nice to manage and contain in one situation might be much better left in its feral state in another. I know that the instinct in companies is to want to manage their environment: that’s what they do. But there are also phenomenon that are best left alone. Or, hey how’s this, PARTS or ASPECTS of the phenomenon that are best left alone.

So that raises an interesting question. What’s a good mix of Domesticated to Wild Community for a company to have? Two parts to One? Depends on types of company, brand, consumption, community, I’d say. Depends on the company’s goal. Depends on the history. But I do think we need to think more subtly about Communities and company’s and organization’s relationships with them. These categories are important, and they’re constantly evolving. And it’s our job to think about them, understand them, and figure out what to do.

Posted in Netnography, Technology, Fandom, Entertainment Marketing, Communities and Tribes | 2 Comments »

September 12, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

It’s been a bit of a media feeding frenzy lately in the entertainment and business pages. For starters, let’s talk Britney. Britney Spears appeared last night on the MTV Video Music Awards in a performance that is being ripped into by the media. CNN.com made perhaps some of the cruelest cuts of all in their story, which I quote here:

“As in most train wrecks, it was hard to focus on just one thing as the Britney Spears disaster unfolded. There was just so much that went wrong. Out-of-synch lip-synching. Lethargic movements that seemed choreographed by a dance instructor for a nursing home. The paunch in place of Spears’ once-taut belly. At times she just stopped singing altogether, as if even she knew nothing could save her performance. Designed to drum up excitement for her upcoming album, Spears’ kickoff to the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday night became another example of how far she has fallen.”

Beyond that, on page after page of Internet assessment, and gossipy TV show after TV show, stories asked if Britney is Washed Up? and, apparently even worse, “Is Britney Fat?”

Everyone, apparently, loves a train wreck. And it is this aspect of media, which acts delightedly to knock heroes from their perches, that I believe traditional media and media reception theories don’t account for very well. In many of the blog comments I read today, fans stood up for Britney, seeing her as a victim of needless media cruelty (and maybe I just like to side with the underdog but count me among those). But the media keeps on ripping. Britney was idolized as a near-child star, a Golden Girl. Now that she’s a mother of two and getting older, and a little bigger, the media seems to have turned on her like a rabid raccoon. “The paunch in place of Spears’ once-taut belly.” Whoah. That’s definitely hitting below the belt.

In a related story, I actually feel a little bit sorry for poor old Mattel–but only a little bit. The embattled and venerable toy company is really taking it on the chin with its toy recalls for lead paint and tiny magnets that little kids can swallow. Mattel is a brilliant company but like all manufacturers of physical toys they are fighting a difficult battle to keep kids attention and get their “share of playtime” among a generation that loves videogames and screentime.

Mattel has been brilliant in building the Barbie franchise that every academic loves to hate. They have done interesting retro things with the Fisher-Price brand of late, releasing a series of classic toys that appeal to nostalgic boomers and Gen Xers as they have their kids. They also recognized the immense value in the American Girls brand and have done a masterful job of managing that franchise.

But these three waves so far of recalls, August 1, August 14, and September 5, have really begun to put pressure on the company and the stock. Robert Eckert, the company’s chairman and chief executive warned at a press conference last month that there may be more toy recalls. He said that the company was stepping up its investigations into its Chinese factories. He released a statement last Tuesday saying that:

“As a result of our ongoing investigation, we discovered additional affected products. Consequently, several subcontractors are no longer manufacturing Mattel toys.”

It’s interesting the spin that the story has received, with Mattel being linked with its (usually hidden behind the scenes) Chinese factories. This reminds me a bit of the way Nike came out and blamed its subcontractors during the sweatshop furor of the late 1990s. And Mattel’s share price has been, according to the financial reports, “surprisingly resilient.” That’s amazing, given the incredible amount of press that this story has received and the sheer scale of the recalls. Why hasn’t it been more affected?

I think that the media needs to ask more questions about the Chinese-finger-pointing spin the story has received. Senate hearings are going to help a lot with that, and thank goodness for a US Government that isn’t afraid to put its corporations on the stand. Where are the lessons learned? Or isn’t this just business as usual, and look-at-you, you’re the one who just got caught?

Britney and Mattel: two flavors of train wreck. The media seems to love to report on them. But the media makes money either way. Mattel is going to have to advertise even more to regain the faith and trust of their consumers. So they’ll need bigger media spends. And if they crash and burn, that’s a big story too, and the media reports on it, and sells advertising while they’re doing so. Bad news is good news.

And even on the financial and entertainment pages, baby, if it bleeds, it leads.

Posted in Entertainment Marketing, Marketing News & Insights | No Comments »