November 14, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

Well, after that super-long and intense posting on poetry and hypotheco-deductivetheoretical transmutation, I thought I’d offer up a pretty short little announcement.

I’ve got lots to update you on as I’ve been traveling around to speak in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Austria, and England.

I’ve mentioned my affiliation to MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium. They’ve put on a variety of fascinating events and this year’s looks to be one of the best. If you’re going to be in the Boston area, or if you are motivated to come, I can vouch that this is one of the best venues anywhere for practical networking between peiople in industry and academia.

Here’s the announcement.

NOV. 10, 2008   CAMBRIDGE, MA–The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Futures of Entertainment 3 conference will take place Friday, Nov. 21, and Saturday, Nov. 22, at the Wong Auditorium in the Tang Center on MIT’s campus.

Futures of Entertainment 3, an event sponsored by the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium ( http://www.convergenceculture.org/ ), is the third annual conference bringing together media industries professionals and media studies academics to discuss the current state and ongoing trends in media.  This year’s conference will include panels on how value is counted in the media industries, understanding audiences, social media, the comic book industry, franchising and transmedia, media distribution in a global marketplace, and the intersection of academia and the media industries.

Speakers at the conference include Kim Moses, executive producer of  The Ghost Whisperer ; Alex McDowell, production designer for  Watchmen;  Gregg Hale, producer of  The Blair Wtich Project  and  Seventh Moon ; Lance Weiler, director of  The Last Broadcast  and  Head Trauma ; and Tom Casiello, Daytime Emmy award-winning former writer for soap operas including  As the World Turns ,  One Life to Live ,  Days of Our Lives , and  The Young and the Restless ; Peter Kim, a founder of the Dachis Corporation; as well as representatives from HBO Online, World Wrestling Entertainment, and other innovative media companies and projects.

The conference will also feature academics such as Henry Jenkins (MIT, founder of the Convergence Culture Consortium and author of  Convergence Culture  and  Textual Poachers ), Yochai Benkler (Harvard Law School, author of  The Wealth of Networks ), John Caldwell (UCLA, author of  Production Culture ), Anita Elberse (Harvard Business School, author of “Should You Invest in the Long Tail?”), and Grant McCracken (author of  Transformations ).

More information on the conference, including the program and registration, is available at  http://www.convergenceculture.org/futuresofentertainment/

Posted in Conferences & Presentation, Fandom, Entertainment Marketing, Word of Mouth Marketing | Print | 1 Comment »

October 29, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

I am writing this entry on an airplane riding out of San Francisco towards Dublin, Ireland. I was in San Francisco for the 2008 Association for Consumer Research Annual North American Conference. I’d like to report a few things about the conference to you.

But first, for today, given that I’ve been out of North America for about eight weeks, I wanted to reflect on a few things that I noticed in my five days back in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

First, I have to mention the incredible energy and excitement that permeated San Francisco surrounding the upcoming Presidential election. On the corner of Market Street and Embarcadero, the active little streetcorner situated next to my very architecturally elaborate and beautiful conference hotel, The Hyatt Regency Embarcadero (whose wireless Internet service in the heart of Silicon Valley was absolutely the worst I’ve encountered anywhere, ever), was set up a big table with Obama buttons, t-shirts, and other items for sale.

Obama in red white and blue. Obama done in traditional African ochres, oranges, and browns. Obama in Peter Max ’60s style silkscreen with the simply evocation “Change”  beneath him. Obama, hand raised, eyes forward and gaze lifting upward, trailing waves of hope as evocative as any poster of any powerfully propagandist political figure. I can’t help but think of Chairman Mao, Stalin, and Lenin when I see these posters. Check them out.

I have to say that I find the parodying of these posters pretty apt and funny. Here are a couple that tickled me, courtesy of thepeoplescube.com, which made them and retains all rights to them. They’ve got some very funny stuff on their site…much of it dedicated to skewering the Obamamania sweeping the nation.

The posters and buttons I saw on the Streets of San Francisco were not, as in prior elections, being given away to supporters with the promise of their vote of support, used as a form of inexpensive WOM and attention building, a visual popularity count.

My conclusion is pretty simple. In the time since I’d left North America, Obama has become an icon.

The imagery marketing Barack Obama is propagandistic, yes. But it’s also just good plain branding. Simple images, simple messages. That’s potent, effective branding. It’s no wonder that it looks like propaganda, since the early PR and advertsign industries actually were founded based on the model of persuasive mass communications honed to perfection by the fascist propaganda of WW2 (anyone ever heard of Edward Bernys?). Good mass marketing, particularly of the political variety, is indistinguishable from propaganda.

And in San Francisco, at least, and I suspect in much of the country as a whole, perhaps even dare I say it across the globe, the air of ecstatic anticipation, the building soaring thrill of the possibility of real change was all-but-palpable.

With the many California propositions being actively touted, pamphleted, debated, shouted-down, and counter-argued on the streets-I was educated about one against Gay marriage (”Prop 8″), and another one supporting animal rights (”Prop 2″)-there was an enlightened carnivalesque quality to democracy spilling into the streets, forming the chief locus of visual imagery, activism, and spectacle.

These propositions were the key places there was debate about politics in San Francisco. Walking the streets, overhearing people, conversing with people it was obvious that the McCain-Palin ticket had very little chance of presiding in this area. Obama buttons, t-shirts, and stickers were almost all that I could notice. I spotted perhaps four or five McCain buttons and bumper stickers, as compared with literally dozens and dozens of Obama images and buttons.

The second thing I wanted to reflect on was the sense that something has shifted, or was shifting, in the world of finance and business. Away in Australia and New Zealand, I’d certainly heard about and followed the financial crisis or meltdown. When I spoke to my family in North America, I’d also gotten earfuls about how bad the stock market was, and how it was affecting everyone’s savings, particularly those on fixed incomes, and those who were depending on the market or mutual funds for retirement or pension income.

But the financial crisis really never quite hit home like it did when I got to California. The meltdown is all over the news. People seem genuinely chastened, Dopwn but not out, certainly. The general talk I heard about the economy is fairly doom and gloom. Although in California there also was some upbeat optimism about the upcoming positive effects of regulation.

But actually, in my district, around the tourist shops of Union Square and Chinatown, there didn’t seem to be much of a slowdown. In fact, shopping for some clothes yesterday at Ross Dress for Less, the Shoe Pavilion, and the Discount Shoe Warehouse (all discount stores), there were massive unbelievable, twenty-minutes-plus, snaking-right-through-the-store-up-to-the-entrance-sign lineups and at Westfield Mall, and at Nordstrom and other high-end stores there was plenty of hustle bustle and capitalist adrenaline evident.

But I was told that this was the tourist section, and it wasn’t typical. And the real enthusiasm and buying was in the discount stores. And, gosh-darn-it, I’ll be darned if Americans like me don’t just love Love LOVE to shop. Why would they slow it down? This hedonistic excessive, contagious, and seemingly unquenchable sense of fulfillment through spending is something that has served America and Americans well through past crises. I suspect it will serve us well again.

What I am detecting is a real sense that something has shifted, that the glory days of making money the way it was made in the last twenty years or so have come to an abrupt, skidding halt. It seems like the eighties all over again, with the easy post-Reaganomic  deregulated money and Gordon Gecko materialism and Charlie Keating banking scandals all being nostalgically challenged by current events.

Something is very different. And one of the speakers for the Doctoral Symposium that I co-chaired at ACR absolutely nailed it in his speech. I’ll be happy to tell you about it in my next blog entry, tomorrow.

For now, goodbye to my friends at ACR, to dramatic mountain-ocean vistas and picturesque dining at Waterfront. Goodbye to Fisherman’s Wharf walks and to Alcatraz and the Golden Gate bridge, to Union Square and the surprising lineups, Obama buttons and No to Prop 8, and the whizzing retro-Bladerunnery  glass elevators of the Hyatt on Embarcadero.

Goodbye to wonderfully, energetic, surprisingly sunny San Francisco.

Posted in Conferences & Presentation, Fandom, Communities and Tribes | Print | 1 Comment »

August 18, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

I’m still planning to write some stuff about the CCT conference last month, but I just wanted to share something strange with you. As some of you know, I started this blog, and named it, based on the sense that what is missing from a lot of the discussions about marketing and consumer culture is a deeper appreciation for the sacred, even mystical, elements of marketplaces and consumption.

I’ve been writing a lot about this lately in my own idea journals, and will have a lot more of this topic to share with you in future blog postings and other writings. I think something is in the air. A number of my colleagues in England and Italy are researching and writing about the connection between magic (as in nature magic, paganism, witchcraft) and marketing. John Sherry and I have written a bit about neo-paganism and neo-shamanism, building on the work of anthropologists like Graham St. John (whose excellent blog is here).

We have barely even begun raising the topic of the mystical and magical side of markets, marketing, and consumption. Not in the “symbolic” or “consumers think this is sacred” sense, but in the way that Jung would write about the Mystical-as a genuine Force operating in the world.

This brings me to my little story.

Do you remember over a year ago I posted the original story that I wrote for the Brown and Sherry “Time, Space and the Market: Retroscapes Rising” volume? An unpublished science fiction story that combined my ethnographic research on Burning Man, but developed it within the literary framework of a science fiction story? Here’s an internal link to the beginning of that post on Super Hyper Ultra Post-postmodern Primitives.

Now, I had posted that post (and written that chapter, originally) as an illustration of the variety of resonant forms of representation that were possible in marketing and consumer research.

But something really pretty freakishly weird just happened.

In that story, written and submitted in December of 2001 (as John Sherry and Stephen Brown would attest), I set myself up autobiographically, as myself a professor in a Midwestern university (Northwestern’s Kellogg), but I cast the tale in the far future. I had been forcefully reincarnated using future technology, my consciousness and memory brought back into a physical body by people in the future who had need of my scholarly ability. These people, future groups of warring tribes, in fact, had need of my knowledge of Burning Man. Which sets up the tale and allow me to position my ethnographic reflections on Burning Man as a retroscape, a place that evokes the primitive past even though it also partakes in a timeless sense of the future.

Okay, that was kind of fun and I liked the result. Here’s the weird part.

I recently started reading the book Ilium by one of my favorite science fiction authors, Dan Simmons. In the book, godlike people in the future forcefully reincarnate a Midwestern professor in order to use his scholarly abilities for their own purposes.

Reading that was totally strange. It was almost the exact same idea of using professors from the past and bringing them into the future for the purposes of these future people. I was really struck by that Jungian synchronicity, that unexpected concordance.

Synchronicity, if you aren’t aware of the concept, was Carl Jung’s word for coincidences that are just too strange to be coincidences. Too weird, or repeating, patterned, or just so weirdly impossible that they give us a sense that everything in reality (”reality” or, maybe, Reality?) is connected somehow by forces larger than ourselves (cue Twilight Zone music, right?). It suggests a different notion of causality, a causality linked by meaning rather than brute physical elements.

The story gets odder.

As I’m reading this book about the reincarnated professor in the far future, I come across page 76. Some of the characters are trying to locate a strange, ancient woman, and are asking one character, named Daeman, about her.

“Where did you meet her?” asked Ada.

“The last Burning Man. A year and a half ago….Lost Age ceremonies never interested me very much, but there were many fascinating young women at this gathering.”

“I was there” Hannah said, her eyes bright. “About ten thousand people came.”

Burning Man? In the far future? I did a double, then a triple take when I read that, my heartbeat loud in my ears.

What the heck was going on here?

This was just a pileup of coincidences. A causal connection and concordance of meaning. Consider these facts:

1. Both science fiction stories are set in the far, far future.
2. The central character in the book is Thomas Hockenberry, a future-science reincarnated professor from the Midwest. My story’s central character is Robert Kozinets, a future science-reincarnated professor from the Midwest.
3. Both stories involve the idea of “posts.” In my story this is a post-postmodern primitivism that deeply involves the sacred. In Ilium “posts” are post-humans who sponsor a type of primitivism involving ancient gods.
4. Burning Man plays a peripheral role in Ilium, but a central role in my story. But this book is probably the only major science fiction book I know of that involve Burning Man at all. Burning Man in the far, far future. AND for some strange reason it occurs alongside the reincarnated Midwestern professor thing, just like my story.
5. The Ilium book was first published in 2003. That is two years after I wrote my story. There was no way I could have seen it before. The Retroscapes book was finally published in 2003 as well (with the edited, amended chapter, which had the science fiction elements excised.

Maybe the creepiest thing, the creepy coup de grace that sent a shiver down my spine is this. I started reading this book during the Olympics. Not intentionally, really, but maybe all of the Greek references in the book made it a bit more attractive to me during this time. It has lots of Olympian references, because it is about Greek gods living on Olympos Mons on Mars and an incredible re-enactment of the Homer’s Iliad.

I just went back to bookmark and re-read the sections on the story that I posted on the blog. And then I find Renan Wagner’s old comment post at the end of my story where he talk about being “in ancient Olympia” taking a course on “Olympic Studies.” And then he links up the Olympic Games, a giant burn, the lack of a marketplace, and Burning Man. Just like the book does.

This is just too weird.

Now, if you believe me that I did indeed write this story in 2001, and that I didn’t read Ilium before I wrote it, how would you explain these convergences? Doesn’t this seem to be too much intersection and patterning of meaning to be a random coincidence?

What’s your explanation? Am I missing something? Or is this just the way the universe winks at us and tells us that there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye?

Posted in Fandom, Burning Man, Mysteries and Spirituality, Marketing News & Insights, Marketing Science | Print | 2 Comments »