The Social Media Turf Wars: Are Marketing and PR on a Collision Course?

July 19, 2010 by Robert Kozinets.

I have been presenting for the last couple of years about The Future of Marketing and PR for a number of different audiences. It’s a topic that fascinates me no end because it is deeply related to the topic of social media and its impact on industry and organization in general.

In my presentation, I use a slide adapted from iPressroom’s “Digital Readiness Report” survey in 2009 that shows which “Departments” (really, I think the PR side of this is often outsourced) handle which elements of the business. It’s a bit surprising. More than a bit, actually.

According to Diagram 6 on p. 8 of that report (have a look, it’s definitely worth reading), it turns out that PR is way ahead of marketing in terms of who “manages” working with bloggers, podcasting and RSS feed. It’s way ahead in managing microblogging (i.e., Twitter), social networking sites, and social search. Marketing and PR are pretty much neck-and-neck in managing SEO and the management of “web content” (that’s a pretty major category). The only category where marketing is completely, definitively in the lead, is…guess.

Yep. It’s email marketing. Whoah. There’s a real red-hot category for the future for you corporate marketers. Leave social media to the PR firms. You get to be the spambots. Happiness and high fives all around.

If we believe that these results are generalizable and representative and applicable to the present day (three big ifs, I will grant you that), then I’d say Marketing as a field is in big trouble. It’s being seriously threatened and undermined in the rapidly emerging and incredibly important areas of social media by Public Relations.

So it was with some interest that responded to a recent request from Paolo Debellini who is an avid reader of this blog. Paolo is an Italian Master’s student in Public Relations from the Dublin Institute of Technology who has a prior degree in Marketing. His dissertation research looks at consumer public relations and how it is evolving since the wake of WOM marketing. He is looking at how WOM Marketing impacts the practice of consumer public relations.

The basic idea, which I have explored many times, is that the approach of marketing is switching from a primarily persuasive unidirectional broadcast mode to a more multidimensional, multimodal form that also incorporates conversation. So WOM marketing essentially oversteps into PR terrain. The big question in that case becomes one of understanding how the communications landscape is changing and what kind of challenges different communications practitioners will be facing.

Of course, there’s a whole reptilian territoriality to the exercise. If I’m hunting here, and you start hunting here, even though maybe you aren’t quite eating my lunch, not yet, are you threatening my food supply?

“Marketers,” say the PR peeps, “Stay away from PR kinds of activities. Stick to what you know: advertising and sales. Broadcasty kinds of stuff. Leave the subtle influencing and the conversationalizing to the professionals.”

“Are you kidding?” say the Marketing mafia, “You guys are the ones who are out of your element. Don’t start a conversation you can’t finish. The social media revolution simply underscores the fact that marketing is evolving into something much bigger than any single set of conversations. This is exactly what marketing needs to do, and the tactically minded PR people have no business interfering in anything that is so central to general management and strategy.”

Let the games begin. As always, I’d love to hear what you think.

If you’re interested, here’s an edited version of my interview with Paolo.

Paolo Debellini: According to your experience, what is the difference between “Online PR” and “Social Media Marketing”? Do you think the roles of Consumer PR and Marketing are overlapping each other nowadays?

Rob Kozinets: Yes, they overlap. But PR is still about managing and manipulating communications—its communications focused. Marketing is much broader. It’s about the entire interface of company with consumer group, including innovation, new products, channels, and everything else. Marketing is developing into an aspect of general management, or general management is recognizing the centrality, as Peter Drucker had it, of marketing mission and innovation to the successful enterprise. In my view, marketing overrides PR. PR should probably never have separated from marketing. It’s the same game. And PR will always be subservient to marketing because marketing is strategic and linked to general management. Sorry PR, but right now that’s the way I see it.

PD: How do you think the commercial-communal tensions mentioned in your article (2010) are going to shape the communication landscape?

RK: The March 2010 Journal of Marketing article is pretty explicit (and it’s worth unpacking and sharing on the blog, for sure). We are moving to a world of networked communications, where the voice of the marketer is just one voice among many. It is not “management” anymore, in the sense of controlling or even directing, but a type of spontaneous, dynamic, evolving relationship. It’s a set of constant adjustments and compromises, a slow merging and emergence from an old system into a new one.

PD: How do you perceive the relationship between WOMM and traditional marketing and what kind of challenges are communications professionals going to face in the future?

RK: Traditional and WOMM media feed on each other in complex ways. Each channel, each medium, has it particular sets of messages and forms. Social media feeds off of the legitimacy and power of consensual traditional media. Traditional media feeds off of the authenticity, freshness, and groundedness of social media. They are one ecosystem, but its an ecosystem that, sort of like many of the worlds ecosystems, is constantly reeling as resource supplies and territorial hunting grounds change. It’s a great avenue to investigate and theorize further. New and open-minded scholars—take note.

PD: From my research it emerged that the role of marketing has been switching from “persuasion” to “conversation”, and therefore from a “one-way asymmetrical”  to “ two-way symmetrical” communication. In other words, the role of marketing is now somehow tracing the role of public relations. Would you agree with that statement? Is this evolution going to revolutionize the communications landscape in the near future?

RK: But the marketing conversations are still persuasive! Marketers have only taken tiny little steps towards where they need to be going. They recognize the need to have relationships, but they don’t know how. How do I have a conversation with you that doesn’t involve me telling you my needs and trying to manipulate you into doing what I want to do. Marketers have been conversational pick up artists for sixty years, and now we expect them to stop being players, settle down, and have honest heartfelt conversations. Good luck with that transition, because it’s not going to come easy. And PP. PR is just as persuasive, but it’s a lot subtler. That’s its edge, its advantage. The problem is that PR has spent a lot of time learning how to convince people that increasingly less people listen to, like newspaper reporters. They have to learn a new game, too.  Neither one really recognizes the power of Consumer Tribes (see the intro chapter to the book for many more details on this relationship). Not yet. But some do, and they will soon.

PD: How should Marketing and PR roles and competencies be inserted in this particular context?

RK: Yow. That’s a big fat hairy question. It all depends on the particular contexts (see JM article from some ideas about some details to examine).

PD: What kind of challenge will Online PR, and WOM Marketing agencies be facing over the next couple of years?

RK: Vast ones. The growth and corresponding legitimacy of alternative, social media based forms of marketing will bring major integration challenges with traditional channels. How to manage the complexity of the overall marketing environment, the mediascape, the retailscape. How to be accountable to the various constituents involved. What metrics to use to measure success—click throughs and other short-term measures are just silly if we’re talking about brand-building. Ethical issues around how to do this stuff. The FTC was starting with the most obvious breaches, but there are plenty of subtle manipulations going on all the time. It’s a brand new game in many ways.

PD: Consumers are becoming more and more sophisticated; How do you think they will perceive, in the near future, this sort of “latent persuasion” generated by WOMM campaigns?

RK: They are already skeptical. It is going to require a lot more than a Facebook fan page to convince people that you “get” social media. The idea of incorporating consumers into corporate decisions, giving away more and more decision power, is growing and seductive. How can that power balance re-equilibrate? It will take decades to work this through. It’s not a question of chance this tactic and make more sales. This is a fundamental shift that will recalibrate the whole economy and ramify for decades.

PD: Last question (not strictly correlated with my research topic, just feel free to answer):In Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” the decline was associated with the elevation of the private domain over the public domain, and therefore the focus on personal happiness was correlated with the decline of a nation or civilization. In addition the research company Mintel (2009) has highlighted the fact that the current economic climate has provoked a context whereby people tend to spend more time with their friends/family and less time pursuing consumerism; do you see any correlation with the current social media trend? How do you think social media are going to evolve?

RK: It’s a fascinating question. But in many ways I see social media as an element of this general reversal of our decline of community or “civilization”. In my upcoming chapter on social media for social change for the Transformative Consumer Research volume, we see how social media allow communities to take on social issues, to gather and create new public spaces. If you look at all of my work, from e-Tribalized (written in 1998) marketing forward, you will see this theme repeated—we are seeing a renaissance of a new public space and public consciousness building online, beginning from the consumer sphere but inexorably spreading outwards. This is an awakening of a mass mind. It’s often, like many mobs and crowds, a very stupid mind. But it also has moments of shining potential, shining brilliance. I’d love to see marketers and PR people stop and recognize that what is emerging with this world of interconnected consumers is potentially something very special, not just a resource to be tapped, but a fundamentally new way that culture and community are opening to us and beckoning us to grow.

Thanks to Paolo for initiating this conversation, and for kindly permitting me to share it on the blog. And thanks to the people at leading PR firm Environics, especially Bruce MacLellan who invited me in, new age PR firm Environics Sequentia and its guru Jen Evans, Matchstick & Patrick Thoburn,  & friend and colleague Chris Irwin, all of you for the long-standing and fascinating conversations around these very important topics.

Posted in Marketing Research, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Word of Mouth Marketing, Communities and Tribes, Branding, Marketing News & Insights, Marketing Science | 2 Comments »

Upcoming Social Media Ph.D. Course in Bergen, Norway–August 23-27, 2010

July 12, 2010 by Robert Kozinets.

I just got back from a Europe and have some things to recap and share with you about some interesting experiences there. But first I wanted to share some exciting news about a course on Social Media Marketing and Marketing Research that I will be teaching/facilitating in beautiful Bergen, Norway, at the NHH School, next month.

The course will run from Monday, August 23 to Friday, August 27. It a one week intensive, and students should expect to put in some long days, as there will be full days of discussion and instruction followed by full evenings of research homework. Expect to be fully immersed in social media theory, practice, and action.

The course is a combination of readings, intense discussion, and hands-on research research experience. It it aimed at beginners and those with intermediate abilities and interests.  The goal is to have a dedicated and fully up-to-date Ph.D. course on these important matters for students from around the world to take.

Ingeborg Kleppe at NHH initiated the course, and the school has been extremely generous in that they are providing the course for free to interested Ph.D. students. Students will be required to bring their own laptop computers to work on. And, believe me, they will be using them a lot. This is a course about doing netnography, not just talking about it.

The catch is that to provide the optimal experience we are limiting enrollment to 15 students. We currently have about 20, I believe, so there are 5 slots currently available.

Interested Ph.D. students should write to Ingeborg Kleppe as soon as possible. Her email is  Ingeborg.Kleppe@nhh.no

Instructors, students, and others might be interested in the syllabus for the course, so I include it here in its entirety (although please note that there will likely be updates and substitutions in the actual course as this material is part of a rapidly growing and rapidly changing body of work).

Course title: Social Media Marketing– Web 2.0

Program of study:PhD

Course responsible Professor Robert Kozinets, Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto

Associate professor Ingeborg Astrid Kleppe, NHH

Semester Fall 2010 Teaching language English

Objective/ course outline

Online communities, social networking sites, blogging, and other interactive uses of information technology are changing the way people communicate and understand their world. Social media is changing society, and changing the nature of marketing.

An understanding of online communities and online WOM are critical for the marketers of today and tomorrow, who are trying to be heard in a mediascape cluttered with advertisements and drenched in consumer distrust. Companies are trying to discover how to speak to consumers in a way that is more authentic, and social media marketing are being tried as an alternative to traditional marketing tactics. But how should it best be used? What are the rules for success? It’s all brand new and uncertain.

The purpose of this course is to introduce PhD students to research in social media marketing and social media marketing research. In several classroom discussions led by the professor, students will learn about the theories and practices that inform this new set of marketing techniques, and will study actual and ongoing social media marketing campaigns.

Specific topics include (subject to adaptation and revision):

• Terminology issues: distinguishing the different types of social media and social media marketing campaigns
• Similarities and differences between new and traditional media, and between organic and amplified WOM
• Overview of useful theories about social media and word-of-mouth
• How networks of social influence work
• Marketing Metrics: Tracking online and offline word-of-mouth and influence
• Building social media marketing into strategy and tactics
• Ethical aspects and codes of the industry

Literature

We will be using a reading package and online materials to conduct a ‘real-time’ learning experience that blends theory and practice and talk and action, as well as school and business.

Teaching

The course is designed to help students answer the following important questions about social media marketing and research:

1. What is social media? What are its key characteristics?

2. What are the underlying characteristics of social media? How is it consumed? What principles underlie its consumption? Why do people use it? What is its historical basis? How can we better understand it?

3. How can we research social media? What methods are available and how do they work?

4. What characterizes a good or successful social media communications campaign? How can we create one? What are the keys to its planning and implementation?

5. What are the underlying principles regarding the production and consumption of social media? How do they inform our theoretical understanding?

Requirements for course approval 

In order to complete this course successfully, students must meet the following minimum criteria:

• Do the readings
• Participate in class discussions
• Come to class prepared and with an open mind
• Work hard on the in-class and out-of-class assignments
• Take Feedback
• Submit final paper on time
• Take your Learning to the Next Level

Individual Terms Papers

• * First outline of paper due August 25, 2010
• * Presentation and initial research presentation due August 27, 2010
• * Final paper: Due on September 3, 2010

 Other remarks

Course aims

By the end of this course you should:

• Be familiar with all of the key authors readings in the field of social marketing
• Be able to use key concepts in social media marketing
• Be able to reflect on the practical business and marketing implications of social media marketing across a wide set of industries
• Be able to identify current gaps and opportunities for future research in the current theoretical domain of social media marketing studies

Learning and teaching activities

* This is a highly interactive, workshop-oriented and discussion-oriented class that depends upon student involvement

* Therefore, assigned readings should be read prior to attending class each week

* Lecture style presentations will introduce topics and develop ideas

* In-class discussion require active participation by all students

* Workshops in class will be highly engaging and require intense student involvement

* Professor’s blog and other blogs may be helpful additions to course material (brandthroposophy: Kozinets.net)

Required Course Readings

* Kozinets, Robert V. (2010), Doing Ethnographic Research Online, Sage: London.

* Course Package readings

* Many course readings and, especially, cases, are available online

 Evaluation

* There are no exams in this course.

Final Grades will be based on the following assessments, weighted as indicated:

*Class Participation and Contribution -25%

Social Media Project –Stage 1, Presentation and Summary -25%

Social Media Project—Stage 2, Final Paper -50%

Final grades in this class will follow the usual distribution for electives.

Class Participation and Contribution

Your Class Participation and Contribution Grade will be based on your attendance, contributions to in-class discussions, and awareness of issues in required readings. Your participation grade will be assigned by the instructor based on these factors.

Social Media Marketing Research Project

As the major deliverable from the course, you will engage in a multi-stage social media marketing research project. Your project will be directed at one of two goals. Either you will research a social media marketing campaign and its response, formulating refined principles for marketing practice. Or you will examine a marketing or consumer research topic or site of interest, formulating refined theoretical insights to enable enhanced understanding. The two goals can also be combined, but this is a more challenging endeavor.

Marketing Practice Project: For this project you will use netnography to investigate, report upon, and analyze the online environment, which may include company’s and competitors existing online initiatives, and will include social media activity related to a particular campaign.

What communities and cultures exist in this online social space? What sort of presence does the focal company or client have in the social media arena? What general brands are being promoted? What intelligence is being gathered? Are campaigns successful or not? Why or why not? You will use your netnographic research and analysis skills in order to examine and benchmark consumer activity and marketing responses in this field and to suggest guidelines for marketing practice that are grounded in sound research. A 15-20 page written report on your specific research findings, with a data appendix of up to 10 extra pages—is your Stage 1 project deliverable. You will submit it in hardcopy, double-spaced, in 12 point New Times Roman font. It is due by email softcopy one week after the end of class.

Marketing Theory Project: For this project you will use netnography to develop our conceptual understanding of a site or topic. Beginning with a concentrated field investigation, you will circle into theory development based, at least initially, upon relevant and related course readings. You will follow sound theory development and theoretical positioning practices in order to craft a paper that could potentially be submitted to a research journal.

A 15-20 page written report on your specific research findings, with a data appendix of up to 10 extra pages—is your Stage 1 project deliverable. You will submit it in hardcopy, double-spaced, in 12 point New Times Roman font. It is due by email softcopy one week after the end of class. This will be your Stage 2 project deliverable.

On Friday, August 27, a full report will be made to the class in a 10-15 minute PowerPoint presentation, followed by a Q&A/comment session. The presentation—consisting of the PowerPoint deck with 1-page executive summary—is your Stage 1 project deliverable.

CLASS SCHEDULE AND READINGS

 * Note: Because of the rapidly changing nature of this course’s topic matter, new, updated, online material will likely supplement some of the readings for the course.

CLASS 1: The Cultural Foundations of Social Media—MONDAY, AUGUST 23, 2010

1. Dichter, Ernest (1966), “How Word-of-Mouth Advertising Works,” Harvard Business Review, 16, 147-66.

2. Whyte, William H., Jr. (1954), “The Web of Word of Mouth,” Fortune, 50 (November), 140-143.

3. Feick, Lawrence F. and Linda L. Price (1987), “The Market Maven: A Diffuser of Marketplace Information,” Journal of Marketing, 51(1), 83-97.

4. Cova, Bernard (1997), “Community and Consumption: Towards a Definition of the Linking Value of Products or Services,” European Journal of Marketing, 31 (3/4), 297-316.

5. Levine, et al. (2009), The Cluetrain Manifesto, Revised Edition, Chapter 1

6. Kozinets, Robert V. (1999), “E-Tribalized Marketing?: “The Strategic Implications of Virtual Communities of Consumption”, European Management Journal, Vol. 17, No. 3, 252-64.

7. Cova, Bernard and Cova, Véronique (2002), “Tribal marketing. The tribalisation of society and its impact on the conduct of marketing,” European Journal of Marketing, 36 (5/6), 595-20.

8. Muñiz, Albert M. and Thomas C. O’Guinn (2001), “Brand Community,” Journal of Consumer Research, 27(4) 412-432.

9. McAlexander, James H., John W. Schouten, and Harold F. Koenig (2002), “Building Brand Community,” Journal of Marketing, 66 (January), 38-54.

10. Schau, Hope Jensen, Albert M. Muñiz, Jr., and Eric Arnould (2009), “How Brand Community Practices Create Value,” Journal of Marketing, 73 (September), 30-51.

11. Fournier, Susan and Lara Lee (2009), “Getting Brand Communities Right,” Harvard Business Review, April, 105-111.

12. Kane, Gerald, et al. (2009), Community Relations 2.0, Harvard Business Review, November, 45-50.

 

CLASS 2: Principles of Online Social Behavior and Social Media—TUESDAY, AUGUST 24, 2010

1. Adam, T. L. and S. Smith (2008), “A Tribe by any Other Name,” in Adam, T. L. and S. Smith (eds.), Electronic tribes. The Virtual Worlds of Geeks, Gamers, and Scammers, University of Texas Press, Austin, USA, 11-20

2. The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler, Chapter 1-2.

3. Sunstein, C. Infotopia, Chapter 1

4. Simmons, Geoff (2008), Marketing to postmodern consumers: introducing the internet chameleon,” European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 42 No. 3/4, pp. 299-310.

5. Brown, Jo, Broderick, Amanda and Lee, Nick, (2007) “Extending Social Network Theory to Conceptualise On-Line Word-of-Mouth Communication,” Journal of Interactive Marketing, 21 (3), 2-19.

6. Kozinets, Robert V., Hemetsberger, Andrea and Hope Schau (2008), “The Wisdom of Consumer Crowds: Collective Innovation in the Age of Networked Marketing,” Journal of Macromarketing, 28 (December), 339-354.

7. Molesworth, Mike, and Janice Denegri-Knott (2007), “Digital Play and the Actualization of the Consumer Imagination,” Games and Culture, Vol. 2, No. 2, 114-133.

8. Jenkins, Henry (2007), Convergence Culture: When Old and New Media Collide, Chapter 1.

9. Jayanthi, Rama K. And Jagdip Singh (2010), “Pragmatic Learning Theory: An Inquiry-Action Framework for Distributed Consumer Learning in Online Communities,” Journal of Consumer Research, 36 (April), 1058-1081.

10. Tsai, Jessica (2009), “Everyone’s Social (Already),” Customer Relationship Management, June, 34-38.

11. Rettberg, Jill Walker (2009), “‘Freshly Generated for You, and Barack Obama’ : How Social Media Represent Your Life,” European Journal of Communication, (24), 451-466.

12. Kaplan, Andreas M. and Michael Haenlein (2009), “The fairyland of Second Life: Virtual social worlds and how to use them,” Business Horizons, 52, 563—572

* CLASS EXERCISE: Finding, describing, and evaluating social media marketing campaigns

* Case Study: Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, from www.nowisgone.com

 

CLASS 3: Applied Netnography: Social Media Marketing Research —WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 25, 2010

1. Kozinets, Robert V. (2010), Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online, Chapters 1-7

2. Kozinets, Robert V. (2002), “The Field Behind the Screen: Using Netnography for Marketing Research in Online Communities,” Journal of Marketing Research, 39 (February), 61-72.

3. Kozinets, Robert V. (2006), “Click to Connect: Netnography and Tribal Advertising,” Journal of Advertising Research, 46 (September), 279-288.

4. Brown, Stephen, Robert V. Kozinets, and John F. Sherry, Jr. (2003) “Teaching Old Brands New Tricks: Retro Branding and the Revival of Brand Meaning,” Journal of Marketing, 67 (July) 19-33.

5. Muñiz, Albert M., Jr. and Hope Jensen Schau (2005), “Religiosity in the Abandoned Apple Newton Brand Community,” Journal of Consumer Research. 31(4), 737–747.

6. Nelson, Michelle R. and Cele C. Otnes (2005), “Exploring Cross-Cultural Ambivalence: a Netnography of Intercultural Wedding Message Boards,” Journal of Business Research, 58, 89-95.

7. Annamma Joy, John Sherry Jr., Alladi Venkatesh and Jonathan Deschenes (2009), “Perceiving Images and Telling Tales: A Visual and Verbal Analysis of the Meaning of the Internet, Journal of Consumer Psychology, 19, 556– 566.

8. Locke, Karen and Karen Golden-Biddle (1997), “Constructing opportunities for contribution: Structuring intertextual coherence and ‘problematizing’ in organizational studies,” Academy of Management Journal, 40 (October), 1023-1062.

9. P. N. Limerick (1993), “Dancing with Professors: The Trouble with Academic Prose,” New York Times Book Review, 31 October.

* Case Analysis: Communispace, published by New Communications Review

* Case Analysis: NetBase Solutions, Inc.

* HANDS-ON WORKSHOP 1

* Deliverable and Discussion: Social Media Marketing Research Plan

 

CLASS 4: Overviewing Strategies and Tactics in a Social/WOM World—THURSDAY, AUGUST 24, 2010

1. Mike Molesworth, Janice Denegri-Knott, (2004) “An exploratory study of the failure of online organisational communication”, Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 9 Iss: 4, pp.302 - 316

2. Godes, David, Mayzlin, Dina, Chen, Yubo, Das, Sanjiv Dellarocas, Chrysanthos, Pfeffer, Bruce , Libai, Barak Sen, Subrata, Shi, Mengze and Verlegh, Peeter (2005), “The Firm’s Management of Social Interactions,” Marketing Letters, 6 (3/4), 415–28.

3. Pitt, Leyland F., Watson, Richard T., Berthon, Pierre, Wynn, Donald and George Zinkhan (2006), “The Penguin’s Window: Corporate Brands From an Open-Source Perspective,” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 34 (2), 115-127.

4. Kozinets, Robert V. (forthcoming), “Brand Fans: When Entertainment + Marketing Intersect on the Net,” in Tracey Tuten, ed. Enterprise 2.0: How Technology, E-Commerce, and Web 2.0 Are Transforming Business Virtually, Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin.

5. Wang, Youcheng and Daniel R. Fesenmaier (2003), “Assessing Motivation of Contribution in Online Communities: An Empirical Investigation of an Online Travel Community,” Electronic Markets, 13 (January), 33 – 45.

6. Kozinets, Robert V., Kristine de Valck, Andrea Wojnicki and Sarah Wilner (2010), “Networked Narratives: Understanding Word-of-mouth Marketing in Online Communities,” Journal of Marketing, 74 (March), 71-89.

7. Avery, Jill J., Protecting the Markers of Hegemonic Masculinity: Consumer Resistance to Gender-Bending Brand Extensions (May 2008). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1088802

8. Füller, Johann, Gregor Jawecki, and Hans Mühlbacher (2006), “Innovation Creation by Online Basketball Communities,” Journal of Business Research, 60 (1), 60-71

* Case Analysis: Fiskateers

* HANDS-ON WORKSHOP 2

* Discussion: Initial Findings–Social Media Marketing Research

 

CLASS 5: Practices and Projects: Metrics, Ethics, and Research—FRIDAY, AUGUST 27, 2010

1. Kozinets (2010), Netnography, Chapters 8, 9 and 10

2. Kozinets, Robert V., Frank-Martin Belz, and Pierre McDonagh (forthcoming), “Social Media for Social Change,” in David Glen Mick, Simone Pettigrew, Cornelia Pechmann, and Julie L. Ozanne, eds. Transformative Consumer Research to Benefit Global Welfare. Rokka, Joonas (2010), “Netnographic inquiry and new translocal sites of the social,” International Journal of Consumer Studies, 34 (4), 381-387.

3. Rokka, Joonas and Johanna Moisander (2009), “Environmental dialogue in online communities: negotiating ecological citizenship among global travelers,” International Journal of Consumer Studies, 33 (2), 199-205.

4. Tsai, Jessica (2009), “Taking the Measure of Social Media,” Customer Relationship Management, July, 17-18.

5. Clemons, Eric K. (2009), “The complex problem of monetizing virtual electronic social networks,” Decision Support Systems, 48, 46–56.

6. Social Media: 20 free e-books about social media: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/20-free-ebooks-about-social-media/ (scan and read at will)

7. Social Media: Research, see: http://www.danah.org: 80/SNSResearch.html, a bibliography from communication, information science, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, cultural studies, computer science, etc. (scan and read at will)

* DELIVERABLE: CLASS PRESENTATIONS AND DISCUSSION (HAND IN POWERPOINT FILES)

 

Posted in Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Ethnography, Consumer Culture Theory, Qualitative Research Methods, Academic Life, Word of Mouth Marketing, Marketing Research, Netnography, Conferences & Presentation, Marketing News & Insights | 1 Comment »

Reflections on CCT 2010, Part 3–Publics and Professionalization

June 17, 2010 by Robert Kozinets.

In my review of CCT 2010, we’re now up to 10:30am on the morning of Friday, the first day. I chose the session “Who is in Charge Here? Contesting Public Goods.” This was an All-Star session with some of the biggest, most established names in CCT presenting. As well, the topic of the session, public space and public goods, was of great interest to me.

The session started with research presented by Linda Scott of Oxford University on the Goddess Pageant in Glastonbury. Using maps and a lot of on-the-ground video, Linda’s work with Pauline Maclaran showed how the annual Goddess Pageant subverted traditional patriarchal and religious patterns, traversing a traditional Catholic parade path in reverse and temporarily claiming and public space for ancient pagan rituals and modes of being. She also nicely tied success in the ritual to commercial action on the retail strip of the city.

Next was work on street artists across a number of cities in North America and Europe by Luca Visconti and Stefania Borghini of Boconni University in Milan, Laurie Anderson of ASU in Phoenix, and John Sherry of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. This fascinating presentation examined how street art is emphasizing the role of public participation in art and in civic life, showing how what seems a trivial act (painting or spraying on city walls) can be seen as an empowerment of citizenry to claim public space as their own, and to beatify and improve it (or use it as a place to comment on how society could be made better).

Finally Russ Belk of the Schulich School at York University spoke about the tension between private and commercial ownership. Providing a dizzying array of thought-provoking examples (water, eggs and sperm, the military, higher education) Russ expanded upon the ideas in his recent article on sharing in JCR to talk about why privatization was occurring around the world, and what its consequences might be. He linked the Internet to a resurgence of sharing activity and new forms for that sharing to take place. He also sounded a call for more research in this area that could be directed at policy-making in the public interest, rather than simply following the blind path of laissez faire, a social slippage in which everything become commoditized.

This theme of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the models of moderns Economics was picked up quite explicitly in the lunch speech by John Deighton, the current Chief Editor of the Journal of Consumer Research.

John began his talk, which I found inspiring, pretty much where the last talk, from the 2008 ACR in San Francisco, began. He spoke about the opportunity we had before us in marketing, and perhaps in CCT especially, to institutionalize CCT from a bankrupt economics. He must have said several times during the presentation that he believed the people in the field of consumer culture theory were doing the most interesting and most important work being published in JCR, and in the field of consumer research, today.

That seemed like going out on a limb, sort of like Jacob giving Joseph the magnificent coat of many colors. I am fully expecting our field to thus be abandoned by its sibling disciplines and sold into slavery (perhaps to Sociology or, gasp!, Urban Studies). Well, we haven’t actually got the coat yet.

But John did say that we are over-represented in JCR. If you count the percentage of the ACR membership who are CCT researchers it is twelve percent. And if you count the page space in JCR devoted to CCT articles it comes out to about sixteen percent of all of the articles. So, as John pointed out, that is an extra four over twelve percent, a thirty-three percent over-representation.

So when people tell you not to do cultural research, you can tell them you crunched the numbers and it automatically gives you a thirty-three percent edge. True.

John was asking what made us impactful as scholars. It’s a matter that I have thought about, talked about, and presented on a lot lately. John said he thought that we were publishing the best stuff because this is the stuff that would be remembered in forty years. That’s a pretty high bar. And quite difficult to judge in advance, for certain.

Then, John’s powerful talk challenged us to move beyond journal publications for our legitimacy. He asked “Who among you will have an impact on the way that not just marketing, but management will be done?” As I do, John sees the Field of Marketing changing. Changing into what is anyone’s guess.

But he also said that Harvard Business School did a study of its courses over an, I believe, 80- year or so history. He said many courses and names and disciplines for business education came and went, fashion and fad, boom and bust. On the bottom were two sets of lines that were constant and unwavering. Finance and Marketing. The two core disciplines of all business schools. The rests come and go.

 So the question became how can you do work that will impact management, how management is done?

And from that or interrelated with its answer, another question: how will we, CCT, as a field, professionalize? John highly recommended a book: Andrew Abbott’s The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor

The book was drawn from Abbott’s research about how the American Medical Association had taken over so many disparate disciplines and associated itself with so many phenomena. The example John used was alcoholism (a very appropriate example for our little group), which used to be treated by the clergy and by the police (the former, spiritually, and the latter, punitively). Using “science” and “medicalization,” the AMA declared and pushed the idea that alcoholism is a “condition,” something that required medical treatment by a licensed physician, rather than spiritual guidance. To consolidate power, they got the police on board.

So, what did this book tell us about what we need to do as a field? Again, see my blog post about Gokcen Coskuner-Balli’s excellent opening presentation-the topic is a hot one and the ideas dovetail. I used an article by Andrew Abbott called “The Order of Professionalization: An Empirical Analysis” to get a sense of Abbott’s work, while my book is on order from Amazon.

Abbott’s work argues that there are various stages to professionalization, but that they usually include the following:

• The rise of association and an Association
• Control of Work (through, e.g., certification, reviews, fees)
• Interest in Professional education
• Pursuit of professional knowledge, and the “Scientific” transformation of knowledge
• Tangential knowledge
• Profession dominated work sites

I won’t offer details on these just yet because they are rich concepts that deserve their own posting and further unpacking. However, what seems clear to me after reading Abbott’s work and after hearing John’s interpretation of it is that we do not yet offer ourselves up to relevant decision-makers as offering any kind of advantage. We certainly could, because I think that activities like ethnography or netnography put companies at an advantage. But we do not.

The way that John put it was to ask which areas we, as consumer culture theorists, we could could own. Which practical areas of business or policy-making could we stake out a claim to be better at informing.? I think Grant McCracken has already begun doing this with his work in Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation and of course beyond. And so have Rita Denny and Patti Sunderland with the Practica group and their work.

The bigger question is what jurisdictions or practical areas can we own or make a play for? 

From what I saw at the CCT conference this year, I think we have excellent claims to understand holistically the following areas:

1. Branding and Brand Management;
   
2. Social media in marketing and management;
   
3. Retailing;
   
4. Consumer Subcultures, Cultures, and Communities;
   
5. Consumption Rituals and Marketing
6. Sustainability;
   
7. Consumer Insight, Innovation, and Ideas. 

For starters. 

The key is to find and solve the right problems for the right people. Another nice turn of phrase John offered up was that we need to move from micro explication to macro proscription. We are good as a field at analyzing problems and providing nuanced explanations of what is going on. But we are weak at offering normative proscriptions after that of what to do. What should managers and decision-makers, those who act on the work, do with our knowledge? That is key.

Another incredibly interesting set of sessions. And more review to come (although perhaps not so detailed or it might take until next year to recount them all to you…).

Posted in Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Book Reviews, Consumer Culture Theory, Qualitative Research Methods, Academic Life, Marketing Research, Netnography, Conferences & Presentation, Marketing Science | 1 Comment »