June 18, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

Now I want to talk a little bit about the keynote address that I was honored and delighted to give at Netnography08 in Munich, Germany last week. My presentation sought to provide a fairly broad overview of the method of netnography and to look at it from a big picture point of view. How has it been developed? How has it been used? What patterns are there in the way that it has been applied by scholars and other researchers?

I began by reminiscing a little bit about the origins of the technique in my thesis year, and gave some details on that. Then, I went straight to the definition and carefully looked at the origins of netnography in ethnography, and the ethnographic stance of participant- observation. I re-examined the goals of netnography as similar to the desired insights we get from ethnography.

Then, I turned to my assessment, and here was where things got a little bit interesting. I overviewed some of my early work, and detailed how well it did, or didn’t fit with my intended stance, and with the participative ethnographic imperative. After this I started looking at the published works that had used netnography as a method since then. What I detected was a movement, a pretty dramatic one, towards a purely observational stance, and away from a participative one. Some of my own work could definitely be included as participating and even contributing to this trend.

When I looked at the major marketing research firms that were using information in online forums, discussion groups, and the blogosphere, I could detect very similar patterns emerging, a movement towards larger datasets, a classification-and-sorting approach that necessarily decontextualized the communal and cultural elements and characteristics of the data.

After detailing this, I went back to the classics and quoted some of the most important sociologists and scholars, The Masters and Giants upon whose Shoulders we stand. I drew on their wisdom to inform the topics that related directly to online communities and the major ways we were seeing them behave.

I bumped that knowledge against the ethnographic goal of participation again to argue that different types of knowledge and insight are generated through participation. Not better knowledge and insight, necessarily, but different. The different stance and perspective afforded by participation added real value-that was why ethnography was so often held up as the gold standard of innovation-seeking marketing research (in books such as Cagan and Vogel’s classic Creating Breakthrough Products, for example).

In the next part of the presentation, I outlined my own analysis of why this movement away from participation and towards more observational and quantified stances was occurring. My conclusion was that marketing research is still related to models of marketing that are quickly becoming outdated.

Just as marketing was oftentimes still about talking instead of listening, marketing research was still about taking rather than giving. In the margins, I briefly outlined a vision, A New Hope for what marketing and marketing research could one day become. I believe that the participative options opened up by managers doing netnography could play an important role in this ongoing transformation not only of business and marketing, but even of society (yes, lofty big and maybe impractical “vision thing” thoughts for the keynote….).

I enjoyed the talk very much and plan to write it up for one forum or another, maybe develop it into the book I’m planning on writing about online communities and their range of implications.

Before I close this topic of the Netnography08 conference in Munich, I also want to mention that I had a chance to meet some very interesting colleagues there. Prof. Dr. Frank-Martin Belz from the TUM Business School in Munich. He holds the—wait for this (and it’s worth waiting for) “Chair of Brewery and Food Industry Management.” I asked him if it includes samples of beer. He smiled slowly, and nodded. Now that is a dream-job. Seriously though, we found out that we have lots in common with his work on sustainability and communities.

Nice also to see Prof. Dr. Anton Meyer again, to catch up with McKinsey’s Florian Jodl, and to see Fabian Göbel, and to meet Rita.

And here’s a major callout to Maria Horn, the Insights Strategist from the ad agency G2 in Hamburg, who is a regular reader of this blog. It was great to meet you, Rita, Maria, Fred, and all the rest of you.

Finally, a great big thank you to Hyve for their invitation and major Bavarian hospitality. Thanks to Julia J. for her limo services (don’t quit your day job), to Hans G. for soccer commentary, and to Steffen H. for his kind and able tour guiding. Mega-thanks also to Johann for the thoughtful talks and insights. As before, I had a very memorable and enjoyable time in Munich.

I came away from this conference with a renewed sense that German companies like Hyve, Beiersdorf, Adidas, BMW, and Burda are global innovators and early adopters. These are companies that are recognizing, developing, and spreading the use of netnography for marketing and innovation.

Posted in Netnography, Conferences & Presentation, Marketing Research, Word of Mouth Marketing, Marketing News & Insights, Uncategorized | 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 »

April 16, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

I love blogging. It is so incredibly interesting to be a part of the phenomenon you are studying and thinking about. It’s very ethnographic, being an anthropologist who writes about this technological revolution by participating from within it.

So yesterday “Mable” from Costco called me back at about 5:30pm. Working late, those Costco folks do. If you haven’t been following my little Coscto saga, “Mable” is “Trudy’s” supervisor in the Coscto.ca web-site customer service center, and she called me the day after I posted a pretty long and detailed blog about the customer service experience I had at Costco when I tried to get a set of missing screws.

Mable and I had a long talk about the experience. It was never confrontational, but quite enlightening for me. Mable made it clear to me that she would have called me had I been more persistent. I apparently waited too long between messages to request her. And apparently if I had used harsher language I probably could have reached her. There seems to be a sort of “freak out factor” that comes into the calculation. So if the customer is totally insanely angry then they reach a supervisor pretty fast. Or I could have just called them, she pointed out. Which is certainly true. And yes, I wasn’t freaking out, just annoyed. I don’t know if I could feel good about freaking out over a set of screws for my chair when there are so many more important and awful things happening in the world right now.

I talked to Mable about the fact that this wasn’t personal, and she did tell me again that Trudy was upset by the blog post. I asked her to apologize to Trudy. This really was never about anyone in particular.

In writing my blog, I’m still learning about the appropriate tone to take. Blogging is a new kind of freedom. Unlike my other writing, I’m not sending it out for reviews and revisions. I think it, I write it, and off it goes. And I guess that when I included people’s first names, and when I included nasty, biting side comments, that this was crossing over into a sort of cruelty that I feel uncomfortable in reading and think was wrong. I’m still just learning and I make mistakes.

I’ve gone back and edited those posts. I’ve tried to make them more humane and compassionate to the people like Trudy and Mable on the front lines. First, I’ve anonymized the first names of the people I corresponded with. Probably should have done that from the start. I’ve also added some material that can help all of us to empathize with the people who perform this difficult and under-appreciated work. I didn’t do this because anyone asked me to, but because I think that it is the right thing to do. I didn’t soften the stance against shutting customers out or acting like there is no transparency when there actually is. I just made it clearer where the problem is: not with the people, but with the system. But the way the system is set up we need to complain to the people in order to affect the system. Only people can change the system that they’re in.

Very Marxian-ideological, isn’t it?

The problems with the system became clear as I was talking to Mable. It was clear that emails were responded to by emails. Even if the customer requested a phone call (unless they were freaking out requesting…). It was clear that one person’s case file stayed with the person, and that emails sent to them stayed with them when they went on holidays and didn’t get answered by anyone else. It was clear that Coscto was acting as a middleman for other companies, and directing them to ship products from its Coscto.ca web-site, and they had little control over those companies and the way they responded to later customer service requests. Costco and its service people didn’t want to be held accountable because the company whose responsibility it was to send me the screws was not doing it.

I talked a lot about the kind of system that Mable was working within. I knew that it would be impossible for her to change it. She would need to talk to people higher up in Costco. Or have them read my blog. Respond to it. Post on it. It’s easy to do.

As I say in the post, this isn’t about Coscto. It’s about accountability and transparency in a new age of consumer-to-consumer communications. It was good to have that conversation, where I shared how I felt as a customer at one end, and she told me about what it was like to live within the constraints of being a service employee at the other end. I think we ended the conversation learning a bit about each others’ worlds. The walls had really come down. We were speaking person to person now, and the conversation had been prompted by this service incident and the blog, but it went beyond it.

Mable told me that Costco was going to be sending me a $25 gift card in the mail for my troubles. That’s very nice of them and a great gesture to help restore some faith. I’m going to match that and donate a corresponding $50 to Aid Darfur to keep things in perspective. This was a silly little set of screws. An inconveniently disassembled chair. There are much bigger problems in the world. But it’s also important to run our businesses well, and to service each other well as a set of organizations, as a society, as a community.

Posted in Netnography, Communities and Tribes, Marketing News & Insights | 2 Comments »