August 16, 2010 by Robert Kozinets.

This is true. On March 26 of last year, a woman I had never heard of before named Maria Xenitidou, or just “Maria X” contacted me. She is a British post-doc, a Ph.D., and so I feel justified in calling her “Professor X”. Or perhaps, since the X-Men are Legend, “The Young, Female Professor X.”

So, Maria, the Young, Female, Professor X, contacted me out of the blue with an email. She began by telling me that she had “recently undertaken a project with colleagues at the University of Surrey in which we are trying to locate innovations in social science research methods.” Her purpose? They were interested in identifying innovative research practices in the social sciences outside the UK, in other words, research practices that had not  yet filtered through to typical research methods courses. And, the reason she was contacting me was that my work “had been identified as involving innovative research practices especially with reference to netnography.”

That was pretty exciting. A completely non-marketing, non-consumer research group of scholars was interested in my work. These were sociologists and cultural scholars for the most part.

I wrote Maria back. We talked. We interviewed (on Skype of course). And on the basis of the material I sent her and our interview, she wrote up a very interesting document about innovative research practices that included netnography. The document was published. And then she invited me to a Research Methods Festival in Oxford at the University of Oxford on July 5th. In particular, to a smaller Workshop at the beginning of the Festival called “The Process of Methodological Innovation Workshop.”

The Festival was timed to directly follow EACR. By “coincidence.” Or, perhaps, if you are a Jungian, by synchronicity. That amazing synchronicity.

So of course, thinking that I would already be in England, and that I’d never been to Oxford before, I said yes. And I am very glad I did.

The session she assigned me to was called “Promulgating New Methods” and my mission (PhD students and post-docs like to hand professors missions, by the way) was to offer ideas and experiences about “Concentrated Activity, Networks and Diffusion Mechanisms of Methodological Innovations.”

That sounded heavy. Weighty. Meaty. I like heavy.

So I put on my Thinking Hat and started to ponder what I had learned in 15 years developing, tooling-up, and blabbing about this new methodological approach of netnography. What I came up with, and what I presented, was a way of thinking about what I do, about my approach to scholarship that I wanted to share with you here in blogglyand. But first, we continue the Oxford thing. I had to write something to present.

 In one of those annoyingly parenthetical postmodern fragments of titling, I named the presentation: “Netnography: Prom/ot(ulgat)ing a New Method.” The idea was that Promulgation, Professor X’s mandate to presenters in my slot, is always also Promotion. Science is always marketing.

That observation of course must be credited to J. Paul Peter (my department Chair when I was at the University of Wisconsin) and Jerry Olson, who wrote a wonderful, now-classic article in the Fall of 1983, during the dark depths of Marketing’s Crisis of Legitimacy. Under apparent attack from the challenge of qualitative methods, and like many of the academic business fields that were undergoing scientific rationalization in the face of the Gordon-Howell Report and the Pierson Reports, the field of Marketing “Science” was defending its legitimacy and honor by insisting that it was, indeed, as scientific as any other field, thank you very much. While so many people were writing and debating about whether Marketing was a Science, Peter and Olson came around the back door with a big rubber Foucaldian hammer and bonked those “positivist/empiricist” dumbbells on the head, arguing very convincingly that we were asking the wrong question.

It is not “Is Marketing a Science?” that is the interesting question, their 1983 article in the Journal of Marketing asserted. It is “Is Science Marketing?” And of course, it was and it is.

This inversion is what makes that article so interesting and, indeed, timeless. They showed how scientists regularly:

• use marketing strategy to target their theories and their work (where will this fit?),
• use positioning to show differentiation from extant scholarship (how is this new?),
• and employ marketing mix variables (the good old 4 Ps of product, place, price, and promotions) to effectively “sell” their theoretical innovations and their new view of the world (how do we get people to read and cite this work?).

So it was drawing upon this perspective that I decided to think about how I had Promoted the approach of netnography on an unsuspecting and obstinately ambivalent world over the last 15 years. (I didn’t need to recap Peter and Olson very much, since it is 2010 and of course no one believe that science is “the truth” anymore, everyone knows it is just a language game and a social construction. Right? Um, not.)

After a brief introduction to the method, I introduced the four waves or strategies that I used. They overlap and still overlap. They are not exclusive discrete steps. They are not a how-to. They are merely observations collected and organized for the format of the talk about how I can in retrospect think about sharing and diffusing a new qualitative approach.

The first wave, perhaps the most obvious one, I called “Legitimation Through Academia.” I will provide the details on that Wave in the next blog posting, as the context stuff goes into full swing.

How do you promote and promulgate a new research method? In four fuzzy sets of initiatives or four overlapping waves, as we will see. And these sets will set the stage for me to make some new declarations for this blog, and open the door to some new envisioning of what the heck it is that I am trying to do.

Thanks, at least in part, to the Mysterious Young Female Professor X.

Posted in Academic Life, Qualitative Research Methods, Consumer Culture Theory, Conferences & Presentation, Netnography, Marketing News & Insights, Marketing Research, Marketing Science | No Comments »

July 21, 2010 by Robert Kozinets.

From Word-of-mouth marketing to spreading the word on the method or approach of netnography. I was surprised that there were no comments yet on the marketing versus PR post. Actually, people seem to comment more on my Facebook page postings about these blog postings than they do on the blog itself, which is interesting. Because I know you’re out there…you keep coming up to me, and emailing me, and you show up on my Google Analytics radar pretty clear. And I thank you for your loyalty and interest, and hope to keep on writing for you for a long, long time.

Last post was my 400th blog post, by the way. That’s pretty exciting. To me at least. A bit. Maybe not so much to you. Probably not, actually.

In this post, I wanted to come back to the topic of Netnography that has been a major area of interest lately. I’ll blog more about how I have been presenting the topic in my next post, but for this one I wanted to share an exciting initiative.

Because (1) we have such a global culture, (2) the Internet has attained such global impact, and (3) because my work as an educator makes me very aware of what is happening outside my little North American bubble, it has become obvious to me that Netnography has been written about by me exclusively in the English language. And although English is important, it is certainly not the only game in town (at least, not any more).

And if spreading the word around the world is important, then keeping netnography texts as mainly “English-only” is not only counterproductive and Anglo-centric, it’s downright stupid.

I’ve been seeing a lot of non-English texts written about netnography showing up in Google searches of the term netnography. For the most part, I have no idea what those texts say. I do know that I didn’t write them.

So for the last year or so I have been very “subtly” floating the idea of offering translated versions of some of my writing of Netnography for non-English speakers over the Internet. A few of the languages I’ve considered are  Japanese, German, Spanish, and Portugese.

But the first one to come through is Mandarin Chinese. Did you know that about 23% of all Internet use takes place in Chinese (versus about 28% in English) according to recent stats by the excellent and helpful Internet World Stats?

A smart and kind Ph.D. student at our school, Yikun Zhao, generously offered to translate my work into Chinese. We decided to use the White Paper I recently wrote for NetBase, as that document is clearly written, accessible, aimed at academics and business audiences, and it is current and not yet outdated.

I’d like to thank NetBase for agreeing to allow us to do this with that paper. They asked me to note that the NetBase semantic search engine does not read and analyze Chinese at this point. It is currently an English-only search and analysis tool.

So here, without further ado, is the Mandarin Chinese version of the Netnography: The Marketer’s Secret Weapon White Paper. Netnography White Paper in Mandarin Chinese. It is presented as a pdf file. I hope that our Chinese readers and those who are interested in Netnography find it useful. Thank you once again, Yikun and Michael O.

Netnography White Paper in Mandarin Chinese

Posted in Qualitative Research Methods, Economy and General Business Management, Ethnography, Conferences & Presentation, Netnography, Marketing News & Insights, Communities and Tribes, Marketing Research, Marketing Science | 1 Comment »

July 19, 2010 by Robert Kozinets.

I have been presenting for the last couple of years about The Future of Marketing and PR for a number of different audiences. It’s a topic that fascinates me no end because it is deeply related to the topic of social media and its impact on industry and organization in general.

In my presentation, I use a slide adapted from iPressroom’s “Digital Readiness Report” survey in 2009 that shows which “Departments” (really, I think the PR side of this is often outsourced) handle which elements of the business. It’s a bit surprising. More than a bit, actually.

According to Diagram 6 on p. 8 of that report (have a look, it’s definitely worth reading), it turns out that PR is way ahead of marketing in terms of who “manages” working with bloggers, podcasting and RSS feed. It’s way ahead in managing microblogging (i.e., Twitter), social networking sites, and social search. Marketing and PR are pretty much neck-and-neck in managing SEO and the management of “web content” (that’s a pretty major category). The only category where marketing is completely, definitively in the lead, is…guess.

Yep. It’s email marketing. Whoah. There’s a real red-hot category for the future for you corporate marketers. Leave social media to the PR firms. You get to be the spambots. Happiness and high fives all around.

If we believe that these results are generalizable and representative and applicable to the present day (three big ifs, I will grant you that), then I’d say Marketing as a field is in big trouble. It’s being seriously threatened and undermined in the rapidly emerging and incredibly important areas of social media by Public Relations.

So it was with some interest that responded to a recent request from Paolo Debellini who is an avid reader of this blog. Paolo is an Italian Master’s student in Public Relations from the Dublin Institute of Technology who has a prior degree in Marketing. His dissertation research looks at consumer public relations and how it is evolving since the wake of WOM marketing. He is looking at how WOM Marketing impacts the practice of consumer public relations.

The basic idea, which I have explored many times, is that the approach of marketing is switching from a primarily persuasive unidirectional broadcast mode to a more multidimensional, multimodal form that also incorporates conversation. So WOM marketing essentially oversteps into PR terrain. The big question in that case becomes one of understanding how the communications landscape is changing and what kind of challenges different communications practitioners will be facing.

Of course, there’s a whole reptilian territoriality to the exercise. If I’m hunting here, and you start hunting here, even though maybe you aren’t quite eating my lunch, not yet, are you threatening my food supply?

“Marketers,” say the PR peeps, “Stay away from PR kinds of activities. Stick to what you know: advertising and sales. Broadcasty kinds of stuff. Leave the subtle influencing and the conversationalizing to the professionals.”

“Are you kidding?” say the Marketing mafia, “You guys are the ones who are out of your element. Don’t start a conversation you can’t finish. The social media revolution simply underscores the fact that marketing is evolving into something much bigger than any single set of conversations. This is exactly what marketing needs to do, and the tactically minded PR people have no business interfering in anything that is so central to general management and strategy.”

Let the games begin. As always, I’d love to hear what you think.

If you’re interested, here’s an edited version of my interview with Paolo.

Paolo Debellini: According to your experience, what is the difference between “Online PR” and “Social Media Marketing”? Do you think the roles of Consumer PR and Marketing are overlapping each other nowadays?

Rob Kozinets: Yes, they overlap. But PR is still about managing and manipulating communications—its communications focused. Marketing is much broader. It’s about the entire interface of company with consumer group, including innovation, new products, channels, and everything else. Marketing is developing into an aspect of general management, or general management is recognizing the centrality, as Peter Drucker had it, of marketing mission and innovation to the successful enterprise. In my view, marketing overrides PR. PR should probably never have separated from marketing. It’s the same game. And PR will always be subservient to marketing because marketing is strategic and linked to general management. Sorry PR, but right now that’s the way I see it.

PD: How do you think the commercial-communal tensions mentioned in your article (2010) are going to shape the communication landscape?

RK: The March 2010 Journal of Marketing article is pretty explicit (and it’s worth unpacking and sharing on the blog, for sure). We are moving to a world of networked communications, where the voice of the marketer is just one voice among many. It is not “management” anymore, in the sense of controlling or even directing, but a type of spontaneous, dynamic, evolving relationship. It’s a set of constant adjustments and compromises, a slow merging and emergence from an old system into a new one.

PD: How do you perceive the relationship between WOMM and traditional marketing and what kind of challenges are communications professionals going to face in the future?

RK: Traditional and WOMM media feed on each other in complex ways. Each channel, each medium, has it particular sets of messages and forms. Social media feeds off of the legitimacy and power of consensual traditional media. Traditional media feeds off of the authenticity, freshness, and groundedness of social media. They are one ecosystem, but its an ecosystem that, sort of like many of the worlds ecosystems, is constantly reeling as resource supplies and territorial hunting grounds change. It’s a great avenue to investigate and theorize further. New and open-minded scholars—take note.

PD: From my research it emerged that the role of marketing has been switching from “persuasion” to “conversation”, and therefore from a “one-way asymmetrical”  to “ two-way symmetrical” communication. In other words, the role of marketing is now somehow tracing the role of public relations. Would you agree with that statement? Is this evolution going to revolutionize the communications landscape in the near future?

RK: But the marketing conversations are still persuasive! Marketers have only taken tiny little steps towards where they need to be going. They recognize the need to have relationships, but they don’t know how. How do I have a conversation with you that doesn’t involve me telling you my needs and trying to manipulate you into doing what I want to do. Marketers have been conversational pick up artists for sixty years, and now we expect them to stop being players, settle down, and have honest heartfelt conversations. Good luck with that transition, because it’s not going to come easy. And PP. PR is just as persuasive, but it’s a lot subtler. That’s its edge, its advantage. The problem is that PR has spent a lot of time learning how to convince people that increasingly less people listen to, like newspaper reporters. They have to learn a new game, too.  Neither one really recognizes the power of Consumer Tribes (see the intro chapter to the book for many more details on this relationship). Not yet. But some do, and they will soon.

PD: How should Marketing and PR roles and competencies be inserted in this particular context?

RK: Yow. That’s a big fat hairy question. It all depends on the particular contexts (see JM article from some ideas about some details to examine).

PD: What kind of challenge will Online PR, and WOM Marketing agencies be facing over the next couple of years?

RK: Vast ones. The growth and corresponding legitimacy of alternative, social media based forms of marketing will bring major integration challenges with traditional channels. How to manage the complexity of the overall marketing environment, the mediascape, the retailscape. How to be accountable to the various constituents involved. What metrics to use to measure success—click throughs and other short-term measures are just silly if we’re talking about brand-building. Ethical issues around how to do this stuff. The FTC was starting with the most obvious breaches, but there are plenty of subtle manipulations going on all the time. It’s a brand new game in many ways.

PD: Consumers are becoming more and more sophisticated; How do you think they will perceive, in the near future, this sort of “latent persuasion” generated by WOMM campaigns?

RK: They are already skeptical. It is going to require a lot more than a Facebook fan page to convince people that you “get” social media. The idea of incorporating consumers into corporate decisions, giving away more and more decision power, is growing and seductive. How can that power balance re-equilibrate? It will take decades to work this through. It’s not a question of chance this tactic and make more sales. This is a fundamental shift that will recalibrate the whole economy and ramify for decades.

PD: Last question (not strictly correlated with my research topic, just feel free to answer):In Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” the decline was associated with the elevation of the private domain over the public domain, and therefore the focus on personal happiness was correlated with the decline of a nation or civilization. In addition the research company Mintel (2009) has highlighted the fact that the current economic climate has provoked a context whereby people tend to spend more time with their friends/family and less time pursuing consumerism; do you see any correlation with the current social media trend? How do you think social media are going to evolve?

RK: It’s a fascinating question. But in many ways I see social media as an element of this general reversal of our decline of community or “civilization”. In my upcoming chapter on social media for social change for the Transformative Consumer Research volume, we see how social media allow communities to take on social issues, to gather and create new public spaces. If you look at all of my work, from e-Tribalized (written in 1998) marketing forward, you will see this theme repeated—we are seeing a renaissance of a new public space and public consciousness building online, beginning from the consumer sphere but inexorably spreading outwards. This is an awakening of a mass mind. It’s often, like many mobs and crowds, a very stupid mind. But it also has moments of shining potential, shining brilliance. I’d love to see marketers and PR people stop and recognize that what is emerging with this world of interconnected consumers is potentially something very special, not just a resource to be tapped, but a fundamentally new way that culture and community are opening to us and beckoning us to grow.

Thanks to Paolo for initiating this conversation, and for kindly permitting me to share it on the blog. And thanks to the people at leading PR firm Environics, especially Bruce MacLellan who invited me in, new age PR firm Environics Sequentia and its guru Jen Evans, Matchstick & Patrick Thoburn,  & friend and colleague Chris Irwin, all of you for the long-standing and fascinating conversations around these very important topics.

Posted in Marketing Research, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Word of Mouth Marketing, Communities and Tribes, Branding, Marketing News & Insights, Marketing Science | 2 Comments »