June 18, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

Now I want to talk a little bit about the keynote address that I was honored and delighted to give at Netnography08 in Munich, Germany last week. My presentation sought to provide a fairly broad overview of the method of netnography and to look at it from a big picture point of view. How has it been developed? How has it been used? What patterns are there in the way that it has been applied by scholars and other researchers?

I began by reminiscing a little bit about the origins of the technique in my thesis year, and gave some details on that. Then, I went straight to the definition and carefully looked at the origins of netnography in ethnography, and the ethnographic stance of participant- observation. I re-examined the goals of netnography as similar to the desired insights we get from ethnography.

Then, I turned to my assessment, and here was where things got a little bit interesting. I overviewed some of my early work, and detailed how well it did, or didn’t fit with my intended stance, and with the participative ethnographic imperative. After this I started looking at the published works that had used netnography as a method since then. What I detected was a movement, a pretty dramatic one, towards a purely observational stance, and away from a participative one. Some of my own work could definitely be included as participating and even contributing to this trend.

When I looked at the major marketing research firms that were using information in online forums, discussion groups, and the blogosphere, I could detect very similar patterns emerging, a movement towards larger datasets, a classification-and-sorting approach that necessarily decontextualized the communal and cultural elements and characteristics of the data.

After detailing this, I went back to the classics and quoted some of the most important sociologists and scholars, The Masters and Giants upon whose Shoulders we stand. I drew on their wisdom to inform the topics that related directly to online communities and the major ways we were seeing them behave.

I bumped that knowledge against the ethnographic goal of participation again to argue that different types of knowledge and insight are generated through participation. Not better knowledge and insight, necessarily, but different. The different stance and perspective afforded by participation added real value-that was why ethnography was so often held up as the gold standard of innovation-seeking marketing research (in books such as Cagan and Vogel’s classic Creating Breakthrough Products, for example).

In the next part of the presentation, I outlined my own analysis of why this movement away from participation and towards more observational and quantified stances was occurring. My conclusion was that marketing research is still related to models of marketing that are quickly becoming outdated.

Just as marketing was oftentimes still about talking instead of listening, marketing research was still about taking rather than giving. In the margins, I briefly outlined a vision, A New Hope for what marketing and marketing research could one day become. I believe that the participative options opened up by managers doing netnography could play an important role in this ongoing transformation not only of business and marketing, but even of society (yes, lofty big and maybe impractical “vision thing” thoughts for the keynote….).

I enjoyed the talk very much and plan to write it up for one forum or another, maybe develop it into the book I’m planning on writing about online communities and their range of implications.

Before I close this topic of the Netnography08 conference in Munich, I also want to mention that I had a chance to meet some very interesting colleagues there. Prof. Dr. Frank-Martin Belz from the TUM Business School in Munich. He holds the—wait for this (and it’s worth waiting for) “Chair of Brewery and Food Industry Management.” I asked him if it includes samples of beer. He smiled slowly, and nodded. Now that is a dream-job. Seriously though, we found out that we have lots in common with his work on sustainability and communities.

Nice also to see Prof. Dr. Anton Meyer again, to catch up with McKinsey’s Florian Jodl, and to see Fabian Göbel, and to meet Rita.

And here’s a major callout to Maria Horn, the Insights Strategist from the ad agency G2 in Hamburg, who is a regular reader of this blog. It was great to meet you, Rita, Maria, Fred, and all the rest of you.

Finally, a great big thank you to Hyve for their invitation and major Bavarian hospitality. Thanks to Julia J. for her limo services (don’t quit your day job), to Hans G. for soccer commentary, and to Steffen H. for his kind and able tour guiding. Mega-thanks also to Johann for the thoughtful talks and insights. As before, I had a very memorable and enjoyable time in Munich.

I came away from this conference with a renewed sense that German companies like Hyve, Beiersdorf, Adidas, BMW, and Burda are global innovators and early adopters. These are companies that are recognizing, developing, and spreading the use of netnography for marketing and innovation.

Posted in Netnography, Conferences & Presentation, Marketing Research, Word of Mouth Marketing, Marketing News & Insights, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

June 14, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

Well, I can’t believe I been absent from feeding this blog for so long. It’s been an insanely busy, and insanely great month and a half, full of travel, presentations and practical applications of netnography to global companies. I’m going to bring you up to date in my blog postings here over the next few weeks. So let’s get started.

I just returned from Munich, Germany where I presented the keynote speech at “Netnography08,” which was, as far as I know, the very first conference dedicated entirely and exclusively to netnography as a practical marketing research method. The conference was organized by Hyve AG, the Munich-based innovation firm that I wrote about previously when I visited them in February (see the posting here). The conference was also sponsored by the Burda Group, one of the largest publishers in Germany and a digital communications pioneer in that space. I have to say that this was very exciting, and an honor, to see a technique that I developed as a Ph.D. student grow to become the focus of an entire business conference.

It was an excellent conference, held at the beautiful posh new Sofitel Munich Bayerpost. In attendance were people from BMW, IBM, G2, Swarovski, Ogilvy, Vivaldi, Ferrero, Daimler, o2, Yahoo!, Siemens, PbS, W. L. Gore, McKinsey, Wrigley, many other companies, a bunch of university people, lots of prominent bloggers, and other media people (I continue to admire and be amazed at how the academic and professional communities combine and merge in Germany). You can see a bunch of pictures taken at the event in this Flickr album.

We had some excellent and memorable presentations that really brought to life how useful applications of netnography are becoming to the conduct of marketing research, particularly emphasizing its role in generating the consumer insight that leads to new product development. Although the presentations were in German (and my German is, ahem, not very good), I was delighted to have a set of capable and very accommodating translators (one of whom was Prof. Anton Meyer of LMU).

I’m going to highlight and briefly overview three of those presentations and what they told us. The first one was by Jörg Blumtritt of the Burda Community Network. Burda’s research team, led by the very insightful and engaging Christina Heinz, seemed convinced of the value of netnography, as above and beyond the utility of other qualitative methods such as focus groups and interviews.

Jörg shared some of the findings of a series of netnographic studies about consumers’ media habits undertaken with Hyve. Interestingly, he noted that the method originally didn’t seem to work. There were no places, no forums, no boards, no real communities that they could find where people went to discuss, for example, how and where they used magazines. But a deeper look into online content revealed that consumers certainly did talk about media and the role of media in their lives. But consumers usually talked about their media habits incidentally. It appeared in the margins as people discussed fashion, business, celebrities, cooking, or TV shows. But it was ever-present.

Through the study, Burda felt that they got a much more holistic, embedded, contextualized, honest, and nuanced view of German consumer’s media usage meanings, habits, and rituals than they would have through asking direct questions in a focus group or a survey.

The next series of studies was presented by Michael Bartl and Michael Schmidt, two of the ruling troika of Hyve’s partners (Bartl is the businessman and manager; Schmidt is the creative designer; the other member is Professor Johann Füller, who is the scientist academic). They presented a couple of wonderful case studies with some rich detail.

The first one was done to find creative new ideas for Adidas shoes, and part of this study was written up in a wonderful article for the Journal of Business Research by Johann and his colleagues (you can search it here). In that study, Hyve sought out communities where basketball and other shoe “fans” were gathered to discuss shoes and also to design new shoes themselves. This was low-hanging fruit in some sense, because there are very active, engaged, creative communities. Their study highlighted some of the individual posters on some of the biggest boards, such as the incredibly rich Niketalk board, as well as some other sites, boards, and forums, and it also emphasized some of the new shoe designs.

After observing these basketball shoe enthusiasts, they drilled down from hundreds of thousands of postings in thousands of threads to a few hundred that were classified having the highest potential to inform innovative efforts. They then distilled their findings into two rich themes. First, they found that these shoe enthusiasts were also collectors. As collectors, they liked to display their shoes. The photographs that some shoe enthusiasts shared with one another depicted room after room filled with ugly cardboard boxes stacked one upon another. And there were multiple comments about how to display, maintain, and store the precious, collectible shoes.

The second theme revolved around the many pictures of shoes customized by individual users. Shoes were colored, died, cut, decaled, stenciled, painted, reshaped, melted, and altered in just about every substantial way that you could think of. Users were highly motivated to want to express their own individuality by changing the shoes, customizing them, adding their own symbols to them, making them their own.

From these two themes, Hyve came up with designs and recommendations to develop a new type of packaging for the shoes. The new packages would double as display cases, with UV-reflecting plastic allowing them to see the shoes inside and display them, but to protect them from harsh light and its aging effects. Moreover, the display packaging would have a branded seal at the top that, if it remained unbroken, would signal that the shoes remained in their pristine state. The seal would not only have symbolic value but would contribute to increased value on the after-market for shoes (and yes, if you haven’t heard it already, shoes are major collectibles; there’s a great documentary about the entire phenomenon called Sneaker Confidential).

In addition, Hyve designed shoes with a type of customizing kit, that included special paint, brushes, decals and designs so that the shoes could be easily and effectively customized by anyone.

Both of these design initiatives were adapted and launched by Adidas, and the resulting product was a huge success. Michael Bartl’s presentation really hammered home the impact and importance of netnography and its attendant insights to Adidas’ innovation process in developing this new smash product.

In the next two postings I’ll tell you more about some of the presentations at Netnography08 that really brought to light how netnography is being adapted and used by companies in their innovation processes.

Posted in Marketing Research, Netnography, Conferences & Presentation, Innovation & Creativity, Word of Mouth Marketing, Marketing News & Insights, Communities and Tribes, Marketing Science | No Comments »

May 20, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

I was recently very pleased to write a few reflective comments on “Segmenting Online Communities,” the Mater’s Thesis work of Hjalti Hjaltason and Marie Vernersson at Lund University in Sweden. They have undertaken in a very clear and concise manner, a study that seeks to empirically test the model of online community segments that I first proposed in an article in the European Management Journal in 1999.

That article, and the model in it, have achieved considerable popularity as a way to understand some of the different segments of online community member. The article has been cited 190 times (according to Google scholar), and the model’s quadrants and categories of the mingler, tourist, devotee, and insider are commonly featured in books, including many consumer behavior and e-commerce textbooks around the world.

Yet as Hjalti and Marie write in their introduction to this research, the article’s influential assertions and model have rarely been subject to empirical scrutiny. And that’s where this team of scholars come in.

Using a large sample (they aimed for an N=1000) of online poker players active on the Facebook, they administered a questionnaire that asked them a battery of questions about themselves and their online behaviors. For their theory-testing purposes, chief among these questions were queries that asked about their identification with the consumption practices of poker, and with their affiliation with the online community of poker players.

Their findings were quite interesting, and a bit surprising. In my 1999 article, I had speculated that, following the Pareto rule that seemed to dictate producer-like behavior in the offline world, we might expect only about 20% of online consumers to be assuming the more active, producerly roles of the devotee and the insider. However, Hjaltason and Vernersson instead found that Devotees (at a whopping 36%) and Insiders (at 25%) together account for 61% of their entire sample. Tourists (at 33%) and Minglers (at a paltry 6%) account together for a minority of online consumers, at only 39 percent.

The results themselves are interesting, and most interesting, I believe, because they open up this area to further investigation and questioning. Now, in the same interest of science, I had to ask myself why these results were so different from my own speculations. And I came up with several reasons that might assist further refinement and investigations of these topics.

First, I think that we must be very cautious about choosing field sites that are supposed to be representative of the entire phenomenon of online communities. When I originally wrote my 1999 article, almost all of my research had been based in newsgroups or bulletin boards, which were the main form of online community for over two decades, pretty much since the inception of the Internet. In those speculations of mine, I was including the many lurkers who pass by bulleting boards without ever posting on them. I think that recent research, by key people in this area like Anne Schlosser, indicate that for every person who posts, there are somewhere in the range of 50-100 (at least) who only read the posting and move along. These numbers have been repeated recently as the “Rule of 100,” “One Percent Rule,” or the pyramid, featured in a number of books about online consumer behavior like O’Connell and Huba’s Citizen Marketers.

So there are actually two anomalies to this field site. First, it is a fairly new social form, a social networking site. That makes it significantly different, in my eyes, from the newsgroups that I originally based my theory building upon. So perhaps the original theory holds for bulletins boards, but not for SNS groups. This is then boundary testing research rather than confirmatory or disconfirming research. And the confirmatory or disconfirming research is truly yet to happen.

The next anomaly has to do with the way that community is defined. It seems to be leaving out the lurkers that I explicitly sought to include when I brought in the Pareto rule (on p. 262, I state that “Boards also have wide exposure and influence, because they are perused frequently by tourists who merely lurk and do not post messages.”). So what is the universe of the online community? Is it all of those who visit? Or only those who post? Could it also be those who rate? On an SNS, could it be those who link? This sort of definitional work is important in a field as nascent as online community studies.

Another aspect of the site that makes it quite odd is that there are almost no female members, and it was composed mainly of Icelandic males (about whom I actually know very little). This seems to me to make it quite different from many of the sites I studied, such as fan sites, which had much larger female concentrations. As well, the nature of the site seemed particular. On this site, people actually were given the opportunity to go and play the game they were interested in—and thus to directly consume. Therefore, we’d expect a lot more “activity” to show up, and a logical suppression of “merely social” consuming attitudes of minglers and tourists. And this is just what we observe.

Methodologically, I take issue with the idea that self-reports reveal actual behaviors, especially those as subtle, intertwined, and complex as the various types of identifications and communications of online community members. I think that it would be interesting to see what would happen if we observed actual behaviors. All that is being measured here is the self-reports of behaviors. So if we concur that devotees and insiders are the highest status members of online communities, then people who are subject to social desirability and self-enhancement biases would be much more prone to classify themselves as devotees and insiders than as minglers or tourists. Thus, the results would overstate these two categories.

In conclusion, I’d like to say that I actually don’t know if my Pareto rule speculation will hold up to closer scrutiny. I sort of doubt it. I definitely believe that we are seeing new rules, such as the aforementioned One Percent Rule of 1% emerging to help explain some of the new phenomena were are seeing through emergent online community behaviors.

I’d also like to point other scholars to some of the other elements of the theory I proposed in that article. In particular, I speculate and link these four categories to different relational modes linked to motivational elements: the recreational, the relational, the informational, and the transformational. I also link these motivational aspects to a progression of online community involvement that transpires over time. The theory is actually quite a bit more complex than is accounted for here. It accounts both for a cross-sectional view of community membership, a motivational component, as well as a longitudinal element in which members progress through various stages, from uninvolved to more centrally involved. Well-designed, thorough studies that look deeply into these propositions would be most welcome and, I think, would be well received in the literature.

In conclusion, it has been enjoyable to read what these students have done with this model. We need more solid studies like this one to get the conversation moving about what is actually going on among all of these interesting, consumption-based online communities. We need more scholarship like this work on “Segmenting Online Communities,” by Hjalti Hjaltason and Marie Vernersson to help us to understand and really “crack the code” of online community membership and behavior.

Posted in Netnography, Technology, Word of Mouth Marketing, Communities and Tribes | 1 Comment »