January 28, 2009 by Robert Kozinets.

That last blog posting generated some interest and I’ve been thinking more about the idea of word clouds as a possible adjunct to what we do as qualitative researchers.

Lois Kelly, who is a brilliant word-of-mouth marketer, had a very interesting comment and turned me on to psychologist James Pennebaker’s work. Pennebaker, a psychology professor at the University of Texas, has published some interesting research about his spin on content analysis. His systems counts and classifies the different types of words that people use (such as adverbs, adjectives, verbs, and even pronouns), and also catalogs them by their different emotional implications. He has published, along with co-authors, some interesting work analyzing and comparing different types of written texts and spoken words. He had even started a business from it, selling the LIWC, or Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software program.

It is intriguing, relevant, high-end, sophisticated stuff, and I am seeing a lot of work in this area as different companies are working hard to develop software that can do sophisticated content analyses of all of the textual information contained online. Companies like netbase, AC Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Cymfony, and Motivequest are all over this emotionally-oriented, passion-and-enthusiasm content coded stuff, and for good reason. It makes good sense.

But when I was speculating about word clouds and their qualitative research usage, I was being a bit more open-ended in my ruminations. I wasn’t thinking about such well-developed systems, ones that provided you with such well though out schemata for analyzing texts.

I was thinking more about doodling. Perhaps even diddling with the doodling.

I was wondering what we could do with the simple word clouds we generate with online engines like wordle.net, which I’ve been playing around with a bit after the Latin American marketing research visionary Pablo Sanchez Kohn set me up with it in one of his online experiments.

I’ve been tooling around with it, and I like it. Why? Well, the people who post it online call it a “toy” and that’s a real insight. It’s just a lot of fun to play with it. It makes decent art, too. The pictures are nice to look at. And to think with, I think. I may frame a couple, or turn them into t-shirts. Why not?

In the play, in that visual appeal, I think there is something deeper that can happen. Because we get some good analysis packed into an at-a-glance form, I think we have opportunities to use that ultimate piece of ’software,’ the human mind and imagination, to glean insight from these word pictures. We can run poetic comparisons on these scrambled word omelets. And then we can use them to launch creative inquiries into the text. Delving deeper using all our other tools, from content analysis word counts to hermeneutic mindful deep breathing.

A couple of examples today, and then maybe a few in the next post.

Below, I have posted a couple of recent blog pages from Brandthroposophy run through the word cloud generator at wordle.net. I think they’re fairly easy to identify. See if you recognize them.

That one was the recent set of postings having to do with netnographic resources. It is interesting how that big http dominates the frame; the posting is full of links. But it also captures at a glance some central meaning on the page about a community of Internet research scholars coming together to offer a list of new and different places and things to study. The cloud somehow captures all of this for me rather quickly. You get the academic content, the variety of internet forms, as well as the sense of a knowledge network that is building.

Here’s another one. Do you recognize it?

For that one, I took one of my favorite postings, the sad saga about my screws from Costco.com. Can you see at a glance how different these two postings are? This one tells a story about Costco, please Trudy, the screws, the wall, the chair, in March. It’s all somehow squeezed in there. And nice to look at, too.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to read in my entire blog, all of the entries from day one, and then construct a single word cloud from it. The software just pulled up one page or entry at a time. That’s too bad, because it would have been exciting to see what the common words have been for the 18 months or so this blog has been in existence. I wonder…

Word cloud: toy, art, or serious research tool. Why should we have to choose?

Posted in Qualitative Research Methods, Marketing Research, Innovation & Creativity, Marketing News & Insights | 4 Comments »

June 14, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

Well, I can’t believe I been absent from feeding this blog for so long. It’s been an insanely busy, and insanely great month and a half, full of travel, presentations and practical applications of netnography to global companies. I’m going to bring you up to date in my blog postings here over the next few weeks. So let’s get started.

I just returned from Munich, Germany where I presented the keynote speech at “Netnography08,” which was, as far as I know, the very first conference dedicated entirely and exclusively to netnography as a practical marketing research method. The conference was organized by Hyve AG, the Munich-based innovation firm that I wrote about previously when I visited them in February (see the posting here). The conference was also sponsored by the Burda Group, one of the largest publishers in Germany and a digital communications pioneer in that space. I have to say that this was very exciting, and an honor, to see a technique that I developed as a Ph.D. student grow to become the focus of an entire business conference.

It was an excellent conference, held at the beautiful posh new Sofitel Munich Bayerpost. In attendance were people from BMW, IBM, G2, Swarovski, Ogilvy, Vivaldi, Ferrero, Daimler, o2, Yahoo!, Siemens, PbS, W. L. Gore, McKinsey, Wrigley, many other companies, a bunch of university people, lots of prominent bloggers, and other media people (I continue to admire and be amazed at how the academic and professional communities combine and merge in Germany). You can see a bunch of pictures taken at the event in this Flickr album.

We had some excellent and memorable presentations that really brought to life how useful applications of netnography are becoming to the conduct of marketing research, particularly emphasizing its role in generating the consumer insight that leads to new product development. Although the presentations were in German (and my German is, ahem, not very good), I was delighted to have a set of capable and very accommodating translators (one of whom was Prof. Anton Meyer of LMU).

I’m going to highlight and briefly overview three of those presentations and what they told us. The first one was by Jörg Blumtritt of the Burda Community Network. Burda’s research team, led by the very insightful and engaging Christina Heinz, seemed convinced of the value of netnography, as above and beyond the utility of other qualitative methods such as focus groups and interviews.

Jörg shared some of the findings of a series of netnographic studies about consumers’ media habits undertaken with Hyve. Interestingly, he noted that the method originally didn’t seem to work. There were no places, no forums, no boards, no real communities that they could find where people went to discuss, for example, how and where they used magazines. But a deeper look into online content revealed that consumers certainly did talk about media and the role of media in their lives. But consumers usually talked about their media habits incidentally. It appeared in the margins as people discussed fashion, business, celebrities, cooking, or TV shows. But it was ever-present.

Through the study, Burda felt that they got a much more holistic, embedded, contextualized, honest, and nuanced view of German consumer’s media usage meanings, habits, and rituals than they would have through asking direct questions in a focus group or a survey.

The next series of studies was presented by Michael Bartl and Michael Schmidt, two of the ruling troika of Hyve’s partners (Bartl is the businessman and manager; Schmidt is the creative designer; the other member is Professor Johann Füller, who is the scientist academic). They presented a couple of wonderful case studies with some rich detail.

The first one was done to find creative new ideas for Adidas shoes, and part of this study was written up in a wonderful article for the Journal of Business Research by Johann and his colleagues (you can search it here). In that study, Hyve sought out communities where basketball and other shoe “fans” were gathered to discuss shoes and also to design new shoes themselves. This was low-hanging fruit in some sense, because there are very active, engaged, creative communities. Their study highlighted some of the individual posters on some of the biggest boards, such as the incredibly rich Niketalk board, as well as some other sites, boards, and forums, and it also emphasized some of the new shoe designs.

After observing these basketball shoe enthusiasts, they drilled down from hundreds of thousands of postings in thousands of threads to a few hundred that were classified having the highest potential to inform innovative efforts. They then distilled their findings into two rich themes. First, they found that these shoe enthusiasts were also collectors. As collectors, they liked to display their shoes. The photographs that some shoe enthusiasts shared with one another depicted room after room filled with ugly cardboard boxes stacked one upon another. And there were multiple comments about how to display, maintain, and store the precious, collectible shoes.

The second theme revolved around the many pictures of shoes customized by individual users. Shoes were colored, died, cut, decaled, stenciled, painted, reshaped, melted, and altered in just about every substantial way that you could think of. Users were highly motivated to want to express their own individuality by changing the shoes, customizing them, adding their own symbols to them, making them their own.

From these two themes, Hyve came up with designs and recommendations to develop a new type of packaging for the shoes. The new packages would double as display cases, with UV-reflecting plastic allowing them to see the shoes inside and display them, but to protect them from harsh light and its aging effects. Moreover, the display packaging would have a branded seal at the top that, if it remained unbroken, would signal that the shoes remained in their pristine state. The seal would not only have symbolic value but would contribute to increased value on the after-market for shoes (and yes, if you haven’t heard it already, shoes are major collectibles; there’s a great documentary about the entire phenomenon called Sneaker Confidential).

In addition, Hyve designed shoes with a type of customizing kit, that included special paint, brushes, decals and designs so that the shoes could be easily and effectively customized by anyone.

Both of these design initiatives were adapted and launched by Adidas, and the resulting product was a huge success. Michael Bartl’s presentation really hammered home the impact and importance of netnography and its attendant insights to Adidas’ innovation process in developing this new smash product.

In the next two postings I’ll tell you more about some of the presentations at Netnography08 that really brought to light how netnography is being adapted and used by companies in their innovation processes.

Posted in Marketing Research, Netnography, Conferences & Presentation, Innovation & Creativity, Word of Mouth Marketing, Marketing News & Insights, Communities and Tribes, Marketing Science | No Comments »

July 23, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

Revolutionary times happen in every industry as technocultural change keeps on keeping on. Everyone knows that the Internet has seriously deflated the traditional adult entertainment industry. Adult entertainment once upon a time made major profits printing airbrushed pictures of beehived babes on dead trees. Along came videocassettes, along came cable, and then boom, along came the Internet as a major challenge. How those brands have adapted and not adapted to the changes wrought by technoculture might provide some food for thought for all media companies facing major challenges from rapid technological change among their consumer bases (and that’s just about everyone in the media).

A few years ago, I did an interview with BusinessWeek magazine about the Playboy brand (see the article here). I said that the brand and the bunny icon had some residual appeal, however, a kind of kinder and gentler sexuality that had some kitsch appeal. I thought at the time that a positioning around playful sexuality made sense for Playboy, and indeed, with the Hefner name attached to Playboy, it seems like they can’t move too far from their emotional roots. Playboy is like Adult Disney, it isn’t particularly threatening, dangerous, or perverse. Once it moves into Hustler’s terrain, the brand is, um, screwed.

That’s where the marketing insights of Christie Hefner really seemed to shine. Playboy followed the lead into all forms of New Media–they’ve had to. Although Playboy is the mainstream brand, Playboy Enterprises has built its Spice brands into a hardcore heavyweight. Catering to divergent needs with different brands, Playboy is able to maintain a mainstream corporate brand that offers porn to the masses (and the masses are loving, it by the way, as this recent popular machinima YouTube video attests). And with Spice, they also have a complete range of offerings to satisfy many adult tastes. Diverse tastes, legitimacy concern, multiple brands. I called it “decoupling” in the BusinessWeek article, and Christie Hefner called it the use of a flanker brand. Whatever you call it, it made good sense to me.

The results seem to bear out that this strategy makes sense. I see the Playboy brand around, adorning women’s jewelry and clothing, more than ever. Although we don’t often acknowledge it, sexual repression is alive and well in our contemporary society, and it inspires resistance. Clearly the brand’s meanings of an open, guiltless, approach to sexual pleasure have resonance with young and old.

Penthouse’s brand hasn’t been doing nearly as well. Entering Hustler’s space, Penthouse went hardcore and its sales suffered. Channels closed up, and in 2003 its publisher filed for bankruptcy. As Abram Sauer writes in an interesting online posting about the brand for brandchannel.com, Penthouse has been restructured and re-launched into the same mainstream segment that Playboy occupies. Like Playboy, Penthouse now features only “tasteful” full nudity and now has at least 11 international editions and a circulation around 350,000. There is little doubt that this brand is struggling, and Sauer opines that Penthouse needs to find its proper customer segment. Which group of people, which set of needs, is the brand going to appeal to?

But I think my initial observations paid far too little attention to the revolutionary changes that technoculture–the combined impacts of technology and culture–has brought. How do adult entertainment brands find and create meaning today in such a rapidly changing, high-demand, instant access, everything available, porn, porn, everywhere world? Consider first some alternatives, like the Suicide Girls, Burning Angel and SuperCult web-sites that spotlight a different type of young woman, exposing a grittier and more realistic, more 3-dimensional view. As you can see in the quick posterview comparison in the graphics above, sites like these seem to cater not only to a different target but to a different aesthetic thank Playboy and Penthouse, and I think that’s important (BTW, I don’t mean to ignore or bypass the many important and worthwhile alternatives to mainstreamy straight porn in this blog, I just don’t have the bandwidth to deal with everything in a focused way this time).

But I think what is going on simultaneously is something even more fundamental than a particular target’s needs not being served. What if parts of the porn industry are shifting, just like parts of so many industries are shifting, into a more communal and do-it-yourself (DIY) model. What if increasing numbers of people don’t have the same taste for professional porn that they once did, and prefer the amateur variety?

What if the porn industry is becoming wikimediated the same way that Star Trek and other media properties are, the same what that YouTube is democratizing the media, and blogs are engaging the news? What if a rising tide of people (yes, people, male, female, and every possible combination) is actually *enjoying* the combination of voyeurism and exhibitionism that they can only get by DIYing their porn?

There are many business models out there for monetizing this trend and its activity. Go check out RedClouds, WhatBoysWant and YuVuTu web-sites, for instance, to see adult entertainment brands that brand themselves around user-generated content. And there is an awful lot of room for free content out there. People seem much happier consuming their porn rapidly on screens rather than slowly on dead trees. What works and what doesn’t in the adult entertainment industry is going to be an interesting lesson that is going to help us understand the nature, appeal, trends, and business models of user-generated content across many other new and old media industries.

Posted in Innovation & Creativity, Branding | No Comments »