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 | Print | 1 Comment »

July 26, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

This is a spooky tale of branding horrors that is going to continue for a few days. Are you ready for it, kiddies, cuz it ain’t gonna be pretty…..

During my recent travels in Europe, I had the opportunity to stay with a good friend in the small, old, beautiful town of Poschiavo, Switzerland, in Italian Switzerland, at the base of the Alps. It’s part of the whole region also called Poschiavo, or the Valley of Poschiavo, branded as Volpasciavo. A few years ago, following the major success of the St. Moritz region and their sunshine logo and branding campaign, came up with the logo above and branded themselves. So far, so good. The place has a ton of natural beauty, great hiking trails and access to skiing in Winter, some wonderful old churches, great restaurants with Swiss-Italian food (great pizzas!), and access to the Bernina Express train line through the Alps, one of the most scenic train rides in the world.

It also has some very cool features that you’re not likely to read about in any tourist book or pamphlet, and that’s what this blog is about today. My famikly and I were very fortunate to have our good friend, who is also a tourism official and local politician, as tour guide. He provided all kinds of insider information that made me wonder: why doesn’t anybody else know this?

Here’s the first part of my touristic tale. It starts with dinner out on our first incredible evening in the Albici hotel, an old and elaborate Manor called piazza del Borgo, owned by the 18th Century Baron De Bassus with ties to the strange and powerful mystical movement termed the “Illuminati.” Here’s some great detail that I found on the wonderful “Conspiracy Archive” website which draws upon the work of one of my favorite modern mystical writers, the late Robert Anton Wilson:

The baron Thomas Maria Freiherr De Bassus was born in Poschiavo, Switzerland, in 1742. He studied jurisprudence at the University of Ingolstadt. Weishaupt (code name Spartacus), who founded the Order of the Bavarian Illuminati, on the 1 May 1776, was his schoolmate. De Bassus practiced for a year as an Adviser of court to Münich in Bavaria. In 1767 he became Patron [Podestà] of Poschiavo, a task already taken from his father Giovanni Maria. . . .At the premature death of his father, he inherited the palace of piazza del Borgo in Poschiavo, known today as the Albrici Hotel, in addition to his wealthy possessions in Valtellina and in Val di Poschiavo. . . .

Entering the Order of the Bavarian Illuminati with the code name of Hannibal, De Bassus had the assignment, like the pseudonym suggests, to spread Illuminism beyond the Alps, above all in the Three Leagues (Swiss) and in the north of Italy. De Bassus acquired a printing company that, with the help of the Illuminatus typographer Joseph Ambrosioni, became the center of the diffusion of Weishaupt’s ideas from Poschiavo. The edition of De Bassus (1782) of the first Italian translation of the Werther of Goethe, written by Gaetano Grassi from Milan, was famous.

In 1787, police searches of the Baron’s castle turned up incriminating evidence against himself and the Illuminati. He was a great recruiter for the Order. In letters to Weishaupt he boasted of his conquests at Bozen (in the south of Austria), initiating “the President, the Vice-President, the principal Counsellors of Government, and the Grand Master of the Posts.” Later, in his travels to Italy, he sends back word of having initiated “his Excellency the Count W…” in Milan. [AB: 605]

Perhaps most powerfully of all for all for me were the paintings that surrounded us in the dining room, each of a mysterious sibyl. The Sibyls, of course, were the oracular seeress’s of Greek mythology, but these paintings had a variety of different sibyls, not simple the Delphinians, some of the paintings have mysterious signs and iconography. Here is my photo of one of the paintings.

This is of the Roman Tiburtine Sibyl, who is famous for an apocalyptic prophesy in which a final Emperor actually slays the Antichrist. As I start my very superficial investigations into these mysterious paintings, I can see how they can weave an amazing tapestry of history, myth, and legend, a lot like the Da Vinci Code book by Dan Brown (but in this case, the quality of the research is up to all of us, these are genuine mysteries, and a genuinely mystical secret society; of course Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons was about the Illuminati).

But maybe the strangest thing about these paintings is their lineage. No one seems to know who painted them, or why, or where or when the Baron got them…they are, like the entire Illuminati movement, shrouded in mystery. They really are a sight to behold, amazing to see, fascinating to investigate, and my picture does not do them justice at all.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about the much gorier and horrific Alpine Witch trials, and we’ll continue to wonder…how might this connect to the branding of place and touristic marketing?

Posted in Mysteries and Spirituality, Word of Mouth Marketing, Communities and Tribes | Print | No Comments »

June 25, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

Maybe this will shake things up a touch. On Friday, “This is London” covered an official air-miss report that was filed several weeks ago and which had appeared in Pilot magazine. Aurigny Airlines captain Ray Bowyer, 50, flying over the Channel Islands close to Alderney first spotted an object that he described as “a cigar-shaped brilliant white light.” His sighting was confirmed by passengers, by radar imaging on the ground, and by another pilot flying for another airline.

After realizing the distance to the object, he estimated the size of the object to be a mile wide. Later in his approach, he saw another object. He said it was visible for about nine minutes, which seems to rule out all sorts of optical effects. His interview with ITV News is posted on YouTube and seems quite revealing. The guy seems shaken up and sincere.

What does this have to do with Marketing and Consumer Culture? Well, nothing and everything.

My posts on Philip K. Dick and ontology assert that the way we think about Marketing and Consumer Culture is deeply shaped by our underlying view of what we believe reality to be, what we believe is possible and worthy of study. It’s a guiding assumption of this brandthroposophy blog that we should all stay open minded. There could definitely be an interesting story about the marketing of this story, about UFO stories, about the marketing tie-ins between mystery and controversy and marketing. In fact, my very first conference paper and very first publication were about X-Files fans (”X-Philes”) and in that paper I wrote that X-Files fans

consume mysterious and mystical notions through The X-Files show and through their Internet activities and membership in the fan community. As noted by Belk, Wallendorf and Sherry (1989), mystery is an important element of the sacred. Mystery is “above the ordinary” and derives from “profound experiences and meanings” (p. 7). Consumers are increasingly turning to secular sources –such as television shows, and the subcultures of consumption that spring up based on them– to fulfill their deep-seated need for connection with the sacred. It is also possible that in our faithless, hyper-rational and scientific society, many people crave the excitement and energy that the only the unexplained can inspire.

So, I’ve believe for a long time that there is a massive market for the unexplained. MIT Scholar Geoffrey Long has written about the “negative capability” of fictional characters who are sketched out fairly well in terms of identity and motivation but leave much of the details of their backgrounds and lives for fiction readers to fill in from their own imaginations. Fans love characters with negative capability because they fill in their missing details. There is a lot of conceptual room for them to do identity work with them and inject them with deeper meanings and significance. Boba Fett in the Star Wars universe is a great example.

I suggest that we think about major mysteries such as religious miracles, Virgin Mary sightings, miraculous healings, and modern UFO sightings as a type of supernegative capability, an aporia or conceptual gap writ large. We all seem drawn to their openendedness, to figure them out. There is much that matters and much to explore about our own exploration of these matters.

I enjoy the controversy swirling around this recent UFO news story particularly evident in the hundreds of comments on the digg story. There are true believers and equally hardcore skeptics. The very first comment was someone lamenting the fact that they had a flight to catch that day, right after reading this story. A statement of fear. That was followed by 6 comments chiding the person and mocking their belief, comparing it to an iiratonal faith in “the Flying Spaghetti Monster.”

Something interesting seems to have happened over Aurigny, confirmed by multiple eyewitnesses. But we will almost certainly never completely understand it. There are mysteries left in our world that we won’t solve. And these mysteries are what keep me fascinated by future prediction, big thinkers, utopian dreamers, edgy science fiction and also edgy nonfiction such as that written by Daniel Pinchbeck and Erik Davis, thinkers who don’t shy away from mysteries simply because they are popularly viewed as pseudo-scientific or on the margins of respectability but who also treat them with a healthy degree of skepticism and subject them to rigorous evidentiary claims.

If we are going to adapt to the many global-scale challenges that will face us in the coming years, to innovate brilliantly and effectively, we are going to need to embrace ambiguity on an emotional and intellectual scale we can scarcely conceive of right now.

In marketing, in business, in innovation, and in consumer culture, there are still mysteries left. These systems of thought are highly rational, highly structured, dominated by mathematical and engineering approaches. But the topics they impact–life and society–contain entire universes of fuzzy ambiguities, boldly bizarre belief systems, endless portals of complexity. If we are truly seekers after the novel and the new, I don’t think we should turn away from the darkness and the strange. I am a student of unflinchingly peering into the void.

UFOs in 2007? Weird? Significant? Interesting?

Posted in Mysteries and Spirituality, Marketing News & Insights | Print | No Comments »