May 8, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

Well that’s enough book promotions and griping about bad service for a while. I promise. I want to get back to the focal concern of this blog, and that’s exploring the interface between business and academic research as it pertains to online communities, technology, and entertainment,

I’m in Boston today at a retreat for the Convergence Culture Consortium’s partners at MIT. Writing this from my hotel in Cambridge. We’re going to have a very full agenda that combines academics with businesspeople, and these events are always very stimulating and thought provoking. I’ll post an update for you after it’s done and fill you in.

But first I wanted to provide a little update on a wonderful conference I attended lat week on May 1-2 in Philadelphia. It was the 27th Annual Advertising and Consumer Psychology conference on the topic of “Virtual Social Identity and Consumer Behavior.” The conference got a lot of interest and, again, was one of those boundary-spanning events that drew both academics and working practitioners.

Jeremy Bailenson, the director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford talked about how applications of psychology work out in the virtual world of avatars. His work does a lot of testing of different social psych theories of attraction and repulsion. So, for example, tall avatars are liked better and are more popular than short avatars. Better looking avatars also have an easier time. And, using software, if you get an avatar to mimic your own gestures, or to facially resemble you (with a sort of morph), you will like and trust that avatar more. That was pretty cool stuff.

Lyle Wetsch from St John’s Memorial University presented some very promising and intriguing research he’s doing with students on the socialization in Second Life—they are keeping logs of their own socialization experiences as they move into the culture of Second Life. Alison Bryant from Nickelodeon and MTV, and Anna Akerman from Adelphi, presented fascinating work on the match between kids and particular virtual worlds, and how this linked to their stage of cognitive and social development. I’m over-simplifying, but it was sort of like kids begin with Webkinz tamagotchi-like play world, then they move up to Habbo Hotel, then they get into some of the TV properties like Virtual Hills, and then they graduate into places like Second Life and World of Warcraft. A life cycle of virtual world migration.

Rockstar Georgetown marketing professor Gary Bamossy gave a wonderful presentation on the sacred and profane aspects of online game playing in China, based on his research with Jeff Wang and Xin Zhao. And I thought Bill Minnis, from the company & Billion People, gave a really interesting talk about the problems with online retailing and where it would need to go in order to become as popular and as acceptable as physical retailing. He also compared Second Life programming with cave art and Harry Potter—wondering if the “next Harry Potter” would be a virtual world or a game. This comparison of world creation to art creation is very appealing to me, and I think that conceptualizing these sorts of creations as forms of art could be enlightening to our conceptions.

Newcomer Leila El Kamel from the Universite Laval gave a very scholarly and thorough linkage of Metaverses as Consumer Experiences that drew on a lot of interesting and relevant postmodern theory and philosophy. In such new places, we almost need to draw on elements form science fiction (this was a continual theme) and postmodern theory (Leila was one of the only ones to really push this important point).

I also like newcomers Lauren Labrecque and Ereni Markos presentation on consumption, marketing, and flow in Second Life. Their research explored the implications of marke4ting and brands in Second Life with a number of interesting observations. I also liked that they got theatrical, dressing up in wigs and gloves so that they physically embodied an “avatar-like” presence during their presentation. And, of course, I also loved that they quoted this blog during their presentation. How cool is that? Readers, you are not alone. In fact, this blog is getting some impressive readership now, well over a thousand unique visitors a day, and rising.

Seeing Lauren and Ereni walk in with their wig and costume on while I was presenting (with my co-author Richard Kedzior) was a Burning Man moment for me. It made me remember just how Burning Man Second Life sometimes feels. This Frontier sense and Wild West mentality with different rules, different social structure, a love of technology and technological possibility, a loose feeling of social chaos, of possibility, of anything can happen. Except that I think Second Life’s lack of rules and greater freedom actually makes it a less interesting place than Burning Man. Burning Man has new rules, participative rules, collective identity rules, rules that build community, while Second Life more anarchist approach actually ends up with a more barren, individualistic, predatory feel. Or maybe that’s just because Second Life has become overly commercialized, while Burning Man has kept the black hounds of business at bay….

The best part of the conference was the conversations. One lively discussion was about the future of Virtual Worlds and who to understand them. I made the point that we really don’t have an adequate overview of the different kinds of virtual world marketing elements that are out there yet, and a link to how that relates to our business models. Are they games that are pay-for-play or subscription? Are they advertising, which supports content development? Are they like e-commerce, stores where we buy something online and which replace brick and mortar? Are they add-on services, providing things like customer service or access to a community? Are they themselves a different kind of service, separate from a game, offering some new element to our product? We just don’t know.

There was also a nice set of volleys about whether there is anything really new here at all. Professor Bamossy made some very good points that there wasn’t anything all that theoretically interesting being show here. People were just showing that theories that apply in one domain (like tall people are more successful and more well-liked) also apply in the virtual world domain of perception. Okay, that begs the crucial question: so what? Richard and I had tried to argue that there were key elements of virtual world experience that were actually quite unique. I’ll share those with you another time. But Gary was pretty adamant that we didn’t need new theories to explain how people behaved, even under those new circumstances or contexts, and that the old ones seemed more than capable of doing the job. Goffman explained how people presented themselves in avatars pretty well. Piaget explained the way kids moved through stages. Freud explained why there was so darn much sexual activity in Second Life. This didn’t seem like it was really “new” at all. It’s a very interesting and important point, and certainly in a half-hour of discussion we only got to dig underneath the surface level just a bit. But that’s what these conferences are great for.

On the plane ride home, I began to sketch out a way to understand and focus our attention on virtual worlds, to organize what is still, in a lot of ways, the Wild Untamed West for Consumption and Marketing Theory and for Business Practice.

So thanks to Natalie Wood and Mike Solomon of Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia for co-chairing and organizing such a stimulating and exciting conference. I think the ripples from this conference will continue to spread and build into many worthwhile contributions to our growing knowledge of this fascinating development of virtual world.

Posted in Virtual Worlds, Conferences & Presentation, Technology, Burning Man, Communities and Tribes, Marketing Science | No 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.

Posted in Netnography, Technology, Word of Mouth Marketing, Communities and Tribes | No Comments »