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 | 1 Comment »

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 | No Comments »

June 4, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

Welcome to Brandthroposophy, my new-yet-long-planned blog. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m an anthropologist who is also professor of marketing at a business school, and I’ve been investigating topics at the intersection of consumer culture, entertainment, and technology for over a decade. The title of this blog derives from a weird hybridizing of consumer culture, management science, entertainment and mysticism, in keeping with the theme of much of my thinking and writing.

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was a prominent thinker, philosopher, and mystic who founded the Waldorf schools and biodynamic agriculture, both of which have had lasting impact. He called his spiritual science “anthroposophy” and founded it on the cultivation of thinking that transcended the limits of the senses, or in other words, that moved beyond the sphere of the material. It was an ethical and individualistic approach to mysticism and spirituality, one that struck a lasting chord with American seekers in particular.

Without getting overly esoteric, and without sounding too grandiose about it, I’d like to use this blog to try to move our thinking about branding and consumer culture in some parallel directions. I’d like to see more individualistic thinking about marketing in today’s world. Steiner wrote about how questions about the meaning of life were like a form of hunger or thirst; I’d like to see us question the meaning of consumer culture in our lives and our society: see it for all its good and all its pitfalls.

I’d like us to be agnostic and rigorous as we seek to answer some of the great questions of our time. What do we make of technology, and what does it make of us? How do we live as communities? What sources of deeper meaning do people hunger for? And how do we understand and manage phenomena such as consumer tribes, co-creating prosumers, online communities, ubiquitous entertainmentized themes, and pervasive commercial control over the myths and meaning-making apparatus of society? How do we do it in an age of potentially devastating environmental degradation, rapid technological change, increasing multiculturalism and the consequent dynamic shifts of power these three forces portend.

Moreover, I’d like to keep this blog somewhat autoethnographic. I’d like to keep the personal thread in this ongoing global story. I’d like to build on life reflections and ideas and personal experiences, not sit atop some high theoretical hill. I’m going to really try to keep it real.

And from the beginning I welcome your ideas, your content, and your feedback.

So welcome to Brandthroposophy: the new science of ethical marketing magic.

Posted in Mysteries and Spirituality, Branding | 5 Comments »