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…

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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.

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August 1, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

Now, we return to Switzerland, to the beautiful and historic little town of Poschiavo, nestled beneath the Alps, Italian speaking, with great food, clean air and sparkling water, and lots of happy, happy cows all around. But what mysteries do those smiling bovine faces hide? As it turns out, there is a dark past to this pretty little town. The picture above is taken from an old courthouse in Poschiavo whose upper floors used to double as a jail. You can’t perfectly make it out, but the long hallways towards the stairs slopes downward. The reason? Because shackled prisoners were dragged downstairs to be tortured and, eventually, executed. The slope made the guards job easier.

During the Seventeenth Century, and probably reaching a peak between 1671-1678, Poschiavo was Witch Hunt territory. There are estimates that the Witch Hunts here took the lives of 100 people over a period of ninety years. That is a remarkable stretch of time. The courthouse and prison cells are fairly creepy and resonant of darker times. But I must confess, I had a very hard time finding anything about this interesting period of history on the Internet, or anywhere in English (with the exception of a few references to the feminist side of the Witch Trials, for which Poschiavo seems to be famous).

Now consider for a moment and for comparison the super-famous Salem Witch trails that took place starting in the late 17th Century in Massachusetts, in the good old U.S. of A. These Witch Trails were gory and fascinating, resulted in the execution of twenty people, and took place over one year. And look at the tourist industry they’ve spawned! American style touristic excesses abound around the Salem Witch Trails. There are, of course, numerous Salem Witch tours to choose from. Do you want to travel to the Witch Trials Memorial? See The Burying Point? There is a also a wonderful Salem Witch Museum in Boston. All around Salem you can find a huge variety of merchandise that is branded with the place and the Witch Trials. You can find books, of course, DVDs, and innumerable t-shirts. But you can also get accessories, jewelry, clothing, cards, games, novelties, housewares, and more. Sign me up for a Salem Witch Trials backpack. Who doesn’t need a set of Salem With Trials tumblers? Of course, if you’re a real witch, you are going to want to pay your respects to the Craft and the Sisterhood and shop locally at Crow Haven Corner: The First Witch Shop in Salem Massachusetts. There are, in short, numerous opportunities to explore and to tangibly realize consumers’ collective fascination with these historical matters of the Dark Arts, and equally wonderful ways for good capitalists to cash in on those needs.

So how about those Alpine Witch Trails? That’s my name for it, I trademarked it, I own the symbol and all the rights are reserved. We need to sensationalize this! Right? We need some gruesome pictures. Some big quotes from the well-stocked Poschiavo archives translated into six languages and put on a board: “Confess, Witch, else Thee Shall Feel The Fresh Anvilled Heat of the Devile.” We need some ancient torture apparatus. Maybe a daily or weekly “re-enactment” using tourist volunteers. I’m a marketer, forgive me, but this is kind of like discovering oil on public land for someone who is attuned to the potential of touristic marketing.

So why, I wonder, doesn’t Poschiavo do some of these things? I didn’t even mention the creepy Memento Mori full of skulls in the town square, the reminder that we are all mortal, and that the Reaper waits for each of us. I didn’t mention an entire generation of Witchcraft and Wizardly fanatics, via Harry Potter craze, with its Harry Potter Spoiler fever (need I mention it, after so recently writing about it here). I also didn’t mention the growing important of Halloween as a European family holiday, imported from the USA. How important and central Poschiavo becomes in this mystical, historical, horror-drenched Halloween-oriented touristic trend is up for grabs.

I wonder if there is a type of high-class European disdain as the prevailing sentiment here. Poschiavo is an “authentic” place, pretty low key, not a lot of neon, no big hotels with names like “The Venetian.” It is quaint, quiet, and beautiful. Maybe it doesn’t need or want the sort of crass commercialism and promotion that such publicity would bring. Writers about tourism from John Urry to Kevin Hetherington to Shelley Hornstein have all noted consumers’ desire for authenticity in their travel experiences.

Would publicizing the true and truly horrific events of Valposchaivo that took place for NINETY YEARS really undermine the place’s authenticity? Or would it increase it? Would a touristic rush of witch-fans tip the touristic scale and make the place less desirable for Alpine travelers and hikers? Is there a Terrible Touristic Tradeoff that one must account for when branding and promoting a place? Does it cheapen history? Does it degrade the memory of those who perished? I suppose we should ask the same question of the people who profit from and who visit places like the Salem Witch Museum, Gettysburg, Normandy, the Auschwitz concentration camps, and other places of historical interest.

It’s worth thinking about the branding of authenticity in terms of place a lot more, and untapped touristic resources like the Mysterious Sibyls of piazzo del Borgo and the Alpine Witch Trials of Poschiavo are great places for thought experiments like this one, or even more, careful enactments that could start from, oh I don’t know, some blog entry by some marketing professor who is oddly attracted to strange and wonderful things.

But I’ll tell you what: I’d love to go back there to Valposchiavo and help them plan it out. Find the right balance. But let people know what happened there, and what it means, and what mysteries the place holds. And maybe, when I’m done, you’ll have heard about the Alpine Witch Trials, learned their lessons, and those of you who want them will have your t-shirts, Sibyl calendars, torture chamber museums, and Memento Mori toothbrushes to choose from, and to remember. And the residents of Poschiavo can take their town’s amazing history and its authenticity to the (Swiss) bank.

Posted in Mysteries and Spirituality, Word of Mouth Marketing, Branding | 1 Comment »