July 21, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

I had the glorious opportunity to spend most of last Saturday hanging around Tokyo’s Shibuya districts.

I spent the morning in Ginza. Here’s a picture I like a lot of me with one of my wonderful hosts, Professor Junko Kimura of Tokyo’s Hosei University. We are at the Nissan Showroom in Ginza, standing next to one of the most coveted objects in the automotive fan world, the new Nissan GT-R, a very exclusive performance car that has been until very recently cloaked in mystery.

Although Shibuya is known more for its centrality as a location for youth culture and fashion, and Akihabara is often cited as a center of otaku-culture, I found that there was plenty in Shibuya to send my mind reeling about the wonders of Okatu-hood.

‘What is an otaku?,’ you may be wondering. Well, the original meaning of otaku is that it is the Japanese word for a fan, and the term has gathered many of the same unfortunate and denigrating connotations as fan has in the English language.

According to Wikipedia, a highly fannish undertaking of its own, which, in matters such as these (which involve fans of many stripes and non-fans talking about things fannish), and many others, is wrong more often than it is right, the term’s popularity in English is owed to its frequent mention and use in William Gibson’s 1996 Idoru.

In one part of Gibson’s Idoru, the term was defined in the stereotypical and stereotyping way: as a ‘pathological techno-fetishist with-social-deficit.’ The Wikipedia entry, of course, misses the context, irony, and satire in the remark, and seems to offer it up as an actual serious definition. Sort of like going to the dictionary and finding the word fandom described as “just a bunch of geeky, nerdy, obsessive losers.”

According to the Wikipedia entry, “In modern Japanese slang, the term otaku refers to a fan of a particular theme, topic, or hobby.” That’s a pretty all-encompassing definition. Let’s explore it.
Here are the two most common uses:

• anime otaku: a devoted fan of anime

• manga otaku: a devoted fan of Japanese comic books or manga-these are targeted at adults, and some are literature of a very high order, like the masterful work of Osamu Tezuka, the graduated M.D. who never practiced medicine, widely hailed as the creator of manga and anime.

Those are probably the two core, original uses of the term otaku. And there is no downplaying their central importance to the term. Just as the term fan has begun spreading in our cultural vocabulary from the world of entertainment—TV show fan, movie fan, music fan, celebrity fan, videogame fan, and so on—to the world of general consumption, so too has the term otaku been anchored in its entertainment industry origins.

And apparently the officials at the Japanese cultural ministry still not quite woken up to the significance of manga and anime. A major, recent two-page story in the English language “Japan Times” began by stating:

“It’s a fact that has long puzzled devotees and plain old tourists alike. Japan’s manga and anime arts have been wowing the world for more than a decade, and yet the national government still hasn’t got around to setting up a proper museum for their enjoyment, preservation and study. After so many years of inaction, though, it is surprising to note that two days ago on Friday, a minor breakthrough occurred. The head of the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Tamotsu Aoki, announced that the advisory panel he had tasked with finding ways to improve Japan’s “dissemination of culture abroad” had come out and stated the obvious. In an interim report, Aoki’s panel made six recommendations “requiring prompt attention.” Number two on the list was that the establishment of a ‘facility for the collection, preservation and provision of information regarding the media-arts (manga, anime and video games) be considered.’”

Some much-needed appreciation, as the objects of otaku desire move into the mainstream, the trajectory I have noted above, and which was in many ways the basis of the insight behind the pop art movement of the mid-1950. And certainly Takashi Murakami’s work in Japan is an interesting combination of both otaku culture and pop art.

Tomorrow, let’s take this deeper by digging into the ways that otaku-hood expresses something integral to consumer culture today.

Posted in Fandom, Entertainment Marketing, Marketing Science | 1 Comment »

July 8, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

Here’s something kind of cool. A short post about a nice little web-site that was programmed by one person, but which leverages the power of the connected web (Web 2.0) pretty nicely. A few people have sent me the link already to Brand Tags.

Here’s the story on it from the Wall Street Journal’s blog. As the story says, a blogger strategist at Naked Communication, Noah Brier, created this web-site, Brand Tags, as an exercise in programming. The site that has a simple premise. It shows visitors brand logos and then asks them to type in the first word or phrase that popped into their head upon seeing the logo. The results are presented graphically, as a tag cloud where the most common answers are shown biggest.

The results are interesting, not only for the meanings they reveal, but for the diversity they show. Although the Wall Street Journal entry journalistically emphasizes the negative side, mentioning the association of “fat” with Burger King, “boring with Toyota, and “evil” with Wal-Mart.

But I checked out Coca-Cola. Whoah. Coca-Cola covers the alphabetical spectrum, from acid, Atlanta, American, brown, bubbles, classic, capitalist, crap, to evil, global, good, high fructose, monopoly, original, Pepsi, red, refreshing, Santa, soda, tasty, unhealthy, worldwide, yummy, yuck, and zero. What a vast, contradictory array of findings. What an amazing sample. I suspect that the same person might have different responses to the logo at different times, across different experiences. As I’ve written about with Stephen Brown and John Sherry, brands have this amazing inner contradiction, this “schismatic core” (to borrow Alex Shakar’s phrase), this polarity that powers them and keeps them vital.

Take a look at brand tags and relish its amazing diversity.

As consumer researchers, how might we use this tool? How might we build similar tools? What suggestions would you have for how the site might be extended or improved?

Posted in Marketing Research, Technology, Word of Mouth Marketing, Communities and Tribes, Branding, Marketing Science | No 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 »