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 An unpublished science fiction story that combined my ethnographic research on Burning Man, but developed it within the literary framework of a science fiction story?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 | 2 Comments »

September 4, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

Oh, in case you were wondering, the Man burnt on schedule this year despite the adversity I reported earlier.

Bocking: A premature burn. A suicide. A serious injury. Lots of weird publicity.

And a very big crowd. The Associated Press reports that 48,011 people showed up for Burning Man this year. That’s the biggest crowd ever, and a whopping 23 percent increase from last year. Quite remarkable given that the event’s attendance has been flattening for a while.

I can’t help but to try and interpret all of these events not only for what they mean for Burning Man as a Project and a social movement, but also for what they harbinger in terms of an understanding of the theme of The Green Man this year, about our relationship with the Planet at this point in time.

And it makes me wonder…

Posted in Burning Man, Mysteries and Spirituality, Green marketing | No Comments »

August 8, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

After writing about so-called trivial culture and commercialized society, I can’t hold back any more. I need to write about the truly important stuff in the world. I’ve written and published about breakfast cereal and its fans before in an article for the Journal of Customer Behavior with Stephen Brown and John Sherry about Quisp consumers/fans. It’s time to write about breakfast cereal again.

Now, yesterday I was commenting about consumer society and its penchant for collecting and merchandising just about everything. I mentioned the Onion’s wonderful article about how everything in the world is now collectible. The lead photo in that article is a picture of the limited-edition box of PowerPuff Girls cereal. From the Onion article:

With everything on the planet officially collectible, collectors have more items to choose from than ever. Objects such as plastic twist ties from speaker-wire packaging, the tin-foil lining of chewing-gum wrappers, and the little rubbery residue left in magazines when attachments are removed have all jumped sharply in value–and investors see no signs of a slowdown.

Manufacturers have caught on to the trend, releasing mundane products such as cigarettes, beer, and snack chips in special collector’s “platinum” editions at marked-up prices. As collector mania spreads, even items like floor polish, paper plates, and rubber bands are becoming prohibitively expensive for many Americans.

What makes the article funny is that we recognize the behavior and we recognize the marketing response. The Onion even asked, in an earlier article, whether the government should get involved in curbing the supply of what they subtly term “Incredibly Stupid Shit?”

But what is behind the story? Why do people want Jar-Jar lollipops and musical Austin Power sun visors? I think that we need to turn to breakfast cereal for answers. Yes, breakfast cereal. Kids’ sweetened breakfast cereals are fascinating to me because they are a product that is also tightly tied into the entertainment industry. They are inevitably constructed of equal parts food and character. The commercials are highly entertaining, they make an impression upon kids, and then the entertainment continues with the packaging, promotions, and even the cereal product itself. When successful, they all tie into one another: myth becomes matter. Mmmm…matter.

When I was younger, Lucky Charms was pretty much about the Leprechaun bestowing gifts, or getting caught and chased. Catch those Lucky Charms, they’re magically delicious. He was kind of an easy mark. Well, Lucky Charms has come a long way, baby. I’m sitting in front of the box of Chocolate Lucky Charms I bought for my kids and I can tell you, this thing is so packed full of symbolic references that Dan Brown would have a party interpreting it.

What is most intriguing to me is the side panel that invites us to “discover the magic of each charm.” The marshmallows of course, are the treats of the cereal, but they are also magical talisman, each conferring a particular power. The blue moon is “Invisibility.” The orange star gives the power of “Flight.” The purple horseshoe gives “Speed,” while the red balloon gives the power to “Float.” Similarly, the pink heart grants “Life” and the yellow crowned oval gives “Illumination” (oh, Illumination, is it?). The green shamrock is of course “Luck” and finally the rainbow offers “Travel.” Well, if that isn’t mystical fodder for young imaginations, I don’t know what is. Write a book or a story about the charms and their mythic power? Easy. A movie? A theme park? Multiple spin off collectibles? Why not!

I’ve been asserting for a while that commercial culture weaves its spell through mythical associations. Commercial culture offers us a variety of rich, deep stories that have immediate material manifestations. And I believe that humans, as a species, are constantly thirsting for stories, for meaning, for mythical connection. We crave it. How else can we understand the universal penchant for drama and entertainment, and the content of those dramatic forms? Drama and story telling are our religion at base, our fount of meaning and source of inspiration. And that story-telling task, once held almost solely by institutions like religion, has been seriously taken up by commercial culture in the mass mediated years since the last World War.

In the Journal of Marketing article that Stephen Brown, John Sherry and IU wrote, we argued that the key to retro beanding was story-telling. I’ll expand that and state, along with a number of contemporary writers who have caught on like Lawrence Vincent, MArk Gobe, and Scott Atkins, that story-telling is the key to all sorts of branding, and that the elements of branding and story-telling intersect:

1. Attractive Characters
2. Interesting Plots
3. Arresting Conflicts
4. Meaningful Themes
5. Involving Settings

How hard is it to tease out these elements for successful brands like Apple? My colleagues Russ Belk and Gulnur Tumbat did exactly that in their wonderful film/article on “The Cult of Mac.”

Back to the story in the cereal bowl. So you’ve got the Leprechaun and the Kids involved in some sort of quest (what is it? we don’t really know yet? are they searching for Horcruckzes?). Where is the conflict, the villain, the challenge? What’s the theme? Is the Leprechaun trying to save the power of Childlike Imagination from the adult-like Dweebs? Does it involve a quest through many places, such as the ancient, powerful, and mysterious “Charmhenge”? We can see that this Lucky Charms tale is not just idle myth-making, either, but it siphons a sort of universal resonance. It has mystical ambition as well. With a generation raised on high technology miracles, videogames, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter, the lingua franca of the New Consumption Age is a variety of Mystical Materialism.

General Mills and their Luck Charms cereal are a wonderful example. If you go to the Lucky Charms web-site you can see how they have built out the charms into a variety of exciting and entertaining games. Every aspect of the cereal is on its way to meaningful status. Below, I provide a screenshot from the videogame that I took today, of a place called “Charmhenge.”

Is it witchcraft, black magic, or just good marketing? Maybe those activities are more connected than we usually think.

Posted in Mysteries and Spirituality, Marketing News & Insights | 1 Comment »