December 13, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

Have you seen this Immanuel Kant attack ad on YouTube? How to “market” philosophy. Not how to market philosophically.

The source of the humor is really about the manipulative way that we use marketing to market political candidates (and by extension all sorts of people, and services, and products). The heavy hand of the marketer just becomes so obvious when we replace political candidates with the Great Dead White Men of Philosophy. The use of weird visuals, unflattering twisting turning unnatural images (countered with happy plain images), sneering tone of voice (countered with simple plainspeaking tone), negative moody music (countered with upbeat melody), and simple wrong/right good/bad dichotomous statements is bang on. And funny. That’s well done satire.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

December 5, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

Actualy it was 12 degrees Celsius (that’s 54 degrees for those of you in Bushland) here in Bergen today. But very rainy. Very pretty.

Just wanted to say that the Norwegians are treating me right. After a wonderful sushi dinner today with two professors and one Ph.d. student from the NHH Marketing Department we went out for a couple of beers. Topics for conversation ranged from the scary sociocultural implications of Norwegian heavy metal bands (I now have two degrees of separation from the guitar player from Immortal, and the Satanist guy who burned down Bergen’s oldest church), to the banking scandal here in Norway (related to the sub-prime stuff in the US), to whether Condy Rice would have made a good presidential contender.

On the work side, I’m teaching a Ph.D. level course on online and offline consumer communities. I’m learning tons, and the student projects (studying things like tattooing communities, BMW online cultures, Flickr, Podzilla, and Swedish knight re-enacting communities) are off to a great start. I’m going to try and see if maybe I can post some of them here. I’ll keep you posted.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

December 5, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

For some reason, I’ve been getting a ton of hits from readers in Poland. That happens to be the land of some of my forebears, which is pretty intriguing in a way. And I heard that Krakow is the new Prague, whatever that means…

Anyways, I wanted to say hi and call out to my new Polish Pals. Don’t be invisible (and on the net, it’s hard to truly be invisible). Let me know how you’re doing,with a comment or an email. And thanks for reading. Dziêkujê!

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »