June 30, 2009 by Robert Kozinets.

Well, after a long absence Brandthroposophy is back online. There’s been a lot of busy craziness in my household, and lots of productivity on the writing front (which I will be happy to fill you in on in future postings). I have a lot of new material in store for you and I’m planning some exciting changes with the Brandthroposophy website and form.

No, the changes aren’t that kind of hard-core. There’s enough of that on the Internet already. But they’re the kind of material that this blog has become known for, stuff that challenges contemporary marketing thought, develops methodologies, and keeps you up-to-date on the latest theory and practice merging anthropology and cultural studies with the needs of consumer researchers, and retailers, and marketers.

I have some ideas coming up that are going to take this blog, um, where no blog has gone before (sorry).

Thank you for hanging in there. Here we go.

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March 27, 2009 by Robert Kozinets.

These postings are about the current “deep” “recession.” As CNN reported yesterday, “the U.S. economy suffered its largest drop in 26 years during the fourth quarter.The nation’s gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic activity, fell at an annual rate of 6.3% during the final three months of 2008″ (see original story on CNN.com). Worldwide, similar, and worse, is being repeated. And the pain isn’t likely to end yet.

In this post, I’ll briefly discuss the first of three critically important factors that make this global recession different from past recessions, Globalization, which I defined loosely as continental shifts in capital flows.

The evidence is everywhere. Foreign investors own 45% of U.S. Treasuries, with Asian investors alone holding more than 30%. U.S. stocks made up 69% of the world market capitalization in 1970; today they make up 42%. And Western Europeans and North Americans are increasingly hiring programmers and designers from Asia and Eastern Europe. These include hiring “virtual personal assistants” on other continents to screen phone calls, pay bills, and even handle customers. One example is that the website Pasadenanow.com hired two India-based reporters last year. Their assignment? To cover Pasadena city council meetings that are broadcast over the Web. Information tech and globalization obviously are intertwined in different ways such as these, although I discuss them separately for the sake of intelligibility. I’ll deal with infotech in my next post. So let’s turn to globalization.

Continental shifts in capital flows acknowledges that a lot of the productive labor has shifted to Asia, in particular, China and India (Thomas Freidman’s The World is Flat book has publicized this well-known trend). These major flows of capital — not only monetary, but human capital, the kind that creates innovations and brands, and even social capital — have been shifting radically for well over a decade with relatively little corresponding reaction at the level of markets and currency. If that’s true, then the shifts we have already seen might be moderate compared to the ones to come.

In other words, if North American car companies can’t build cars that global consumers want to drive and buy, then propping them up artificially only means that they’re going to come down harder when they do, eventually, fall. The United States and much of Western Europe is dependent upon a number of industries that are being similarly propped up. The market is beginning to reflect that. And, even as companies in these countries survive but find themselves with growing liabilities, they’re going to be spending much more of their capital servicing their increasing their debt rather than making investments in brands and innovation that will pay off into the future. If currency rates continue to decline, those foreign debts become harder and harder to service, for governments as well as companies.

On the ground level of consumers and consumption these shifts in capital manifest as unemployment and general belt-tightening. People lose their jobs in the Rust Belt, the support services that serve them fold, housing prices drop, tourism recedes, and so on. Government artificially stoking spending only works if the spending can be directed into areas that are going to create lasting jobs and redistribute capital away from its current configuration — the configuration that is at least partially causing these shifts.

That’s trend #1. Trend #2 is Informationalization, which I’ll talk about in the next post.

Posted in Economy and General Business Management, Technology, Marketing News & Insights, Green marketing, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

August 19, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

The ink is, literally, just drying on the contract.

A little while ago, a senior editor at Sage publications, approached me about writing a Sage Research Methods book specifically devoted to netnography, the conduct of online anthropology. I thought it was a great idea, and enthusiastically began developing the outline for the book. That outline proposal went through a quick and careful review at Sage, resulting in some useful comments and suggestions. I incorporated them into a revised plan, and now we’ve got a signed deal.

I’m delighted to be working on this book for the esteemed Sage Research Methods series.

Here is a little overview of the book, and I’m sure I’ll be providing more information about it as I write it and we get closer to publication.

“Netnography: Researching Cultures and Communities Online” is going to be a methodological primer on a (relatively) new (yet established!) research technique: “netnography.” Netnography is a qualitative, interpretive, contextual research methodology that adapts the traditional, in-person ethnographic research techniques of anthropology to the study of the online cultures and communities formed through computer-mediated communications (“CMC”).

The Sage Research Methods book will thoroughly introduce, explain, and illustrate the method of netnography to interested scholars and other researchers. The book is needed because there are currently no other books that fill this void. With a history stretching back over twelve years in consumer and marketing research, netnography has been widely accepted by these constituents in this field of research. Netnography therefore differs from past qualitative Internet research techniques in that it offers, under the rubric of a single term, a rigorous set of guidelines for the conduct of online ethnographic research.

The overarching justification for the book is that netnography is an important and distinct technique and compares favorably with other research methods. The distinctive feature of netnography is that it combines the contextual strengths of ethnography with the reach and accessibility of Internet-based research techniques.

The technique has been well received within the fields of marketing and consumer research, and has begun to spread to other fields with recent publications in sociology, game studies, travel, cultural studies journals. The intention of this book is to broaden the reach of this methodology, offering and explaining it to scholars across a range of academic disciplines, as well as to continue to systematize and develop the approach.

The book will achieve its objective of introducing, explaining, and illustrating the method of netnography by offering a structure that initially overviews the history and explains the importance of online culture and community. The next parts of the book present and summarize various approaches to performing research online, and introduce and detail the method of netnography. Netnographic procedures are illustrated with a range of examples from published and ongoing research across a variety of fields, and in a variety of international contexts. The book will be written for a global audience of interested students, scholars, and researchers from any social scientific field that might include qualitative data analysis in its research.

The book concludes with a discussion of the ways netnography has already been adapted and altered, a presentation of the multifarious ways that the online space of culture and community is currently changing, and a discussion about how the method can be further adapted by individual researchers and teams to realize its full potential in this rapidly changing research environment.

In summary, this book will introduce the method of netnography, explain it and illustrate it. In so doing, it will also help to provide an organizing frame around the conduct of online research attuned to its cultural qualities. The book will provide guidelines for a rigorous application of Internet research methodology for social scientists across many disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, business and marketing.

The book is scheduled for release in late 2009.

Posted in Technology, Netnography, Virtual Worlds, Marketing Research, Word of Mouth Marketing, Marketing News & Insights, Communities and Tribes, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »