April 16, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

I love blogging. It is so incredibly interesting to be a part of the phenomenon you are studying and thinking about. It’s very ethnographic, being an anthropologist who writes about this technological revolution by participating from within it.

So yesterday “Mable” from Costco called me back at about 5:30pm. Working late, those Costco folks do. If you haven’t been following my little Coscto saga, “Mable” is “Trudy’s” supervisor in the Coscto.ca web-site customer service center, and she called me the day after I posted a pretty long and detailed blog about the customer service experience I had at Costco when I tried to get a set of missing screws.

Mable and I had a long talk about the experience. It was never confrontational, but quite enlightening for me. Mable made it clear to me that she would have called me had I been more persistent. I apparently waited too long between messages to request her. And apparently if I had used harsher language I probably could have reached her. There seems to be a sort of “freak out factor” that comes into the calculation. So if the customer is totally insanely angry then they reach a supervisor pretty fast. Or I could have just called them, she pointed out. Which is certainly true. And yes, I wasn’t freaking out, just annoyed. I don’t know if I could feel good about freaking out over a set of screws for my chair when there are so many more important and awful things happening in the world right now.

I talked to Mable about the fact that this wasn’t personal, and she did tell me again that Trudy was upset by the blog post. I asked her to apologize to Trudy. This really was never about anyone in particular.

In writing my blog, I’m still learning about the appropriate tone to take. Blogging is a new kind of freedom. Unlike my other writing, I’m not sending it out for reviews and revisions. I think it, I write it, and off it goes. And I guess that when I included people’s first names, and when I included nasty, biting side comments, that this was crossing over into a sort of cruelty that I feel uncomfortable in reading and think was wrong. I’m still just learning and I make mistakes.

I’ve gone back and edited those posts. I’ve tried to make them more humane and compassionate to the people like Trudy and Mable on the front lines. First, I’ve anonymized the first names of the people I corresponded with. Probably should have done that from the start. I’ve also added some material that can help all of us to empathize with the people who perform this difficult and under-appreciated work. I didn’t do this because anyone asked me to, but because I think that it is the right thing to do. I didn’t soften the stance against shutting customers out or acting like there is no transparency when there actually is. I just made it clearer where the problem is: not with the people, but with the system. But the way the system is set up we need to complain to the people in order to affect the system. Only people can change the system that they’re in.

Very Marxian-ideological, isn’t it?

The problems with the system became clear as I was talking to Mable. It was clear that emails were responded to by emails. Even if the customer requested a phone call (unless they were freaking out requesting…). It was clear that one person’s case file stayed with the person, and that emails sent to them stayed with them when they went on holidays and didn’t get answered by anyone else. It was clear that Coscto was acting as a middleman for other companies, and directing them to ship products from its Coscto.ca web-site, and they had little control over those companies and the way they responded to later customer service requests. Costco and its service people didn’t want to be held accountable because the company whose responsibility it was to send me the screws was not doing it.

I talked a lot about the kind of system that Mable was working within. I knew that it would be impossible for her to change it. She would need to talk to people higher up in Costco. Or have them read my blog. Respond to it. Post on it. It’s easy to do.

As I say in the post, this isn’t about Coscto. It’s about accountability and transparency in a new age of consumer-to-consumer communications. It was good to have that conversation, where I shared how I felt as a customer at one end, and she told me about what it was like to live within the constraints of being a service employee at the other end. I think we ended the conversation learning a bit about each others’ worlds. The walls had really come down. We were speaking person to person now, and the conversation had been prompted by this service incident and the blog, but it went beyond it.

Mable told me that Costco was going to be sending me a $25 gift card in the mail for my troubles. That’s very nice of them and a great gesture to help restore some faith. I’m going to match that and donate a corresponding $50 to Aid Darfur to keep things in perspective. This was a silly little set of screws. An inconveniently disassembled chair. There are much bigger problems in the world. But it’s also important to run our businesses well, and to service each other well as a set of organizations, as a society, as a community.

Posted in Netnography, Communities and Tribes, Marketing News & Insights | 2 Comments »

March 20, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

What’s this weird picture up here?

I had a great discussion a couple of days ago with Lois Kelly. Lois Kelly is a thinker, blogger, author and consultant who works in the area of online community as well. She’s written a book called “Beyond Buzz” which was just awarded a gold prize in the 2008 Axiom Business Book Awards in the Advertising/Marketing/Public Relations category. She also and has her own excellent blog called bloghound.

We were talking about the changed in customer relationships that have happened over the last decade or so, as technology has empowered more and more consumers, allowed them to organize with one another, and given them a voice where the didn’t have one before. I started free-associating and I came up with the metaphor that consumers were like business’s “mute slaves” for decades. Obedient and silent recipients of marketing. And then, gradually, but apparently suddenly from the company’s managers point of view, they were overcoming their muteness, starting to talk back, to resist, to assert their power.

And that’s sort of scary to most marketing and brand managers who really don’t know how to handle these changes, under what Lois aptly called their “command-and-control” mode of interaction.

After the conversation, I was thinking about that classic movie, Planet of the Apes. The feral woman that Charlton Heston encounters, and who later becomes his bunkmate is named “Nova.” As in ready to go nova. Ready to burst. She’s wild-haired and matted, mute: an obvious animal. Heston/Taylor keeps trying to civilize her, teach her to speak, starting with her own name.

In the second movie, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, his linguistic lessons finally pay off and Nova finds her vocal chords. Of course this is a very symbolic act. The whole idea of finding voice is all about organizing, overcoming oppression, becoming resistant as a group of community. The great social theorist Albert O. Hirschman even used the term “voice” to refer to a special kind of social resistance.

Consumers as company’s long-time mute slaves. For a long time companies just put out their products, moved their advertising through the mass market, got them on the shelves and the consumers obediently bought the goods. They behaved. They were at a comfortable distance. When we wanted to hear them, we paid them a few bucks, brought them into a focus group, hid behind the one-way glass and they obediently spoke.

“Talk, Nova, talk.”

Then we could turn off the volume, walk out of the room, and the voice was gone. Nice, neat, clean. But now they were actually teaching each other to speak, they were sharpening their tools and skills, they were making fun of our brands, they were making their own parody ads, they were finding our emails, they were reaching out to us, starting to knock on our doors. It’s not Planet of the Apes. Oh no. Oh no, it’s Night of the Living Dead. Our brains, they’re out to ear our brains.

So much of what is happening with many companies sordid attempts to cope with newly empowered consumers fits into this strange metaphor. Companies are using legal means to try to gag consumers, to put the muffle back on, to shut them up, get them to stop, turn them back into the obedient slaves of the good old days. Remove the threat. Stop the conversation. Make them listen. Make them behave.

So maybe that mute slave metaphor has some deeper roots to it after all. Or maybe I was just watching too much weird stuff about Eliot Spitzer. Who knows?

Posted in Netnography, Technology, Word of Mouth Marketing, Communities and Tribes | 2 Comments »

March 6, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

In a blatant act of self-promotion, today I’ve decided to post a book review of my co-edited volume “Consumer Tribes” from the international and interdisciplinary marketing journal Qualitative Marketing Research. To attempt to make up for the distasteful, unseemly, and downright rude self-interest of the post, I’m also posting some “highly collectible” alternate book covers that didn’t make it into the publication stream. I hope you enjoy looking at them.

Oh, and I’ll add an offer to the table. If you are interested in writing a blog review of the Consumer Tribes book, let me know. I have five copies of the book that I can send out as promotional copies. I’d be happy to send free review copies to the first five bloggers who contact me interested in writing a review of the book.

Many thanks to my colleague Professor Paul Henry of the University of Sydney for this wonderful book review. In actuality, this review isn’t so much a review of the book as it is, but an extension and development of a number of ideas. The review is a sort of distillation and application, more attuned to marketing and brand management than most of the book’s chapters. It draws quite heavily on the first chapter of the book, and references a lot of the other chapters sites as examples, but what it is doing is arguing for the relevance of the book and its topic not for academics so much as for practitioners, for marketers themselves. I thus thought it would be of particular interest to those of you who are practicing marketers.

Book Review: Consumer Tribes
Edited by Bernard Cova, Robert Kozinets, and Avi Shankar
Publisher Name: Elsevier
Place of Publication: Oxford
Publication Year: 2007
From: Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal
Volume 11 Number 1 2008 pp. 113-115
Copyright (c) Emerald Group Publishing Limited ISSN 1352-2752

The idea of Consumer Tribes has become a hot topic amongst both academics and practitioners. No wonder this is the case, because traditional thinking around market segmentation is looking decidedly tied. This book draws on cutting-edge research from around the world to bring the tribal concept to life across a great variety of social and product setting ranging from Harry Potter fans, Royal heritage seekers, Swedish Goth culture, Italian metrosexuals and pipe smokers, through to Star Trek and Tom Petty fans, Hummer owners, Harley bike riders, surfers and films; to name a few.

Cova and Cova (2002) drew on Maffesoli (1996) to introduce the idea to marketers that modern consumer society can be thought of in tribal terms. The core point is that need for community and social connectedness has become the priority over that of material consumption objects. The reasons for this relates to the familiar things many of us find missing in our everyday lives. For example, fragmentation of society and value placed on individualism combined with technology and time pressure have left many feeling socially isolated and disconnected.

We are after all tribal creatures. Tribal belonging is a core source of meaning. Tribal rituals perpetuate social bonding and the myths and stories about who we are and where we fit, sustain our sense of esteem.

Thus, the word tribe is used to emphasize the yearning for old style values such as sense of local identification that fosters re-enchantment with the world. Tribes are held together by shared emotions and passions amongst networks of people that often cannot be neatly stereotyped in demographics terms. The binding source is shared passions, not demographic labels such age, gender, and social class.

Smart marketers can take advantage of this yearning for communal identity by fostering and supporting communities of product users. However, they do need to understand that tribal members do not simply conform to marketer actions. They often shape product meanings and roles in relatively independent ways that marketers may not necessary anticipate. Consumers become producers. The tribal approach is different to the traditional idea of market segmentation where consumers are targeted in an individuated manner.

Consideration of consumer-consumer linkages takes priority over marketer-consumer linkages. This is because it is the human connections that provide the core source of emotional value; products simply facilitate.

Tribal is also different from traditional segmentation in that people can be in many tribes, and that tribes themselves are dynamic and fluid. The traditional idea in market segmentation is one of marketers acting on the consumer, rather than fitting in with tribal interactions. This is a challenging mind-shift for marketers looking for short-term results.

Take the case of the Paris association formed to administer the mass night tours through the city by roller skating fans that has seen up 25,000 skaters on a given night. These tours started out organically by a few skaters getting together. It was never about products per se. As it grew marketers tried to sponsor the event, yet the community rejected these overtures insisting that any marketer involvement be on the tribe’s terms, which was most importantly about retaining the tribe’s independence from the commercial.

Tribes are not primarily about the buying decisions made by individual consumers. Rather, in-tune marketers seek to understand the potential for collective action such as appropriating and adapting products in ways that are not marketer-driven. For example, the resurgence of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer in 2002 owes little to the marketing done by the company. It was adopted by alternative circles as a brand that was so out it was in. People in the know began consuming without being targeted by the company. The beer’s success is routed in rejection of aggressive marketing. Other tribes are more actively marketer-fostered. Salomon in entering the snowboard category went to great lengths to understand the ritual and practices of the tribe. They started at the micro-community level involving a small group of snowboarders in product design and testing. They embedded themselves in the culture, creating events and finding ways to the support the shared passion of tribe. They triumphed in a competitive market over the likes of Nike, Fila, and Rossignal.

The term tribe is closely aligned to another hot marketing term - brand community. These often consist of more formal organizational structures and as the name implies revolve around a specific brand. An example is The Hummer Club Inc. in the USA for owners of the General Motors (GM) vehicle. Although accredited by GM, this is a private non-profit organization. Interestingly, in-group bonds partly derive from vocal negative reactions to the “gas-guzzling monster” from non-owners.

Another example is the “My Nutella” community. This product category is different to sporting goods for youth culture or very expensive vehicles for the wealthy. Nutella is an everyday grocery product that has managed to attract a passionate following. The marketer has capitalized on this following by setting up a web site that fosters natural interaction amongst passionate consumers.

Identification and affiliative motivations stemming from group membership is an important mechanism for tribal creation. However, another feature is that given these tribes are not usually controlled by marketers is that they do not always act right. There are the extreme anti-corporate activities exemplified in the likes of Adbusters producing “sub-vertising.” Then there are the Harry Potter tribes writing their own stories - hundreds of thousands - and distributing them across the web. Actions like this can make the copyright owner uneasy.

You have to think hard before taking your most loyal customers to court. Thus, the most passionate consumers are often also the most fragile and require careful handing. There are many other examples of consumers playing around with products and even holding on to the product even when the marketer discontinues support (e.g. the Apple Newton community). The suggestion is that marketers risk stifling the shared passion through attempts to curb these activities. Hence, the imperative is to understand this flow of creative activity and foster it in productive ways. It means a rebalancing of power relations, often through consumer’s use of new technology, between consumers and producers. This constitutes a new reality for marketers.

It is important to emphasize that tribes are not necessarily centered on a particular brand or product as is typically associated with the notion of brand community. A tribe will often appropriate and adapt a range of products. Pabst beer was appropriated by bicycle couriers, along with their obvious set of bicycle-related needs. In-line skating and snowboarding participation is much more than just purchase of rollerblades or snowboards. There is whole constellation of other products and brands that tribal rituals prescribe.

Another even broader example is that of the Italian Metrosexual tribe. This tribe has appropriated a great range of aesthetic products and activities ranging across skin and hair care, fashion labels, modes behaviour and social participation. Given this, it is critical for marketers to flip their thinking from a consumer-product centricity to a social relations perspective … which just happens to involve a range of supporting products.

This book argues for a “true shift in the underpinnings of marketing,” where marketers partner with tribal networks in ways where consumers “teach marketers,” rather than the traditional approach where marketers “study consumers.” Another suggestion is that marketers may not necessarily have to send out completely formed messages to the marketplace. Given the potential for potent creative activity within a tribe, leaving gaps and disconnects opens the possibility for consumers to assert their own productive urges and fosters interplay amongst the network. This may act as a significant mechanism in which ownership is organically nurtured (rather than communicated and injected) throughout the tribe. It also leaves room for possibility of mystery and fantasy in one’s life.

Tribes personalize, authenticate and enrich members’ lives. This is far more potent than a marketer-directed brand image message.

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