June 26, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

This is going to be a fascinating year at Burning Man.

For those of you not familiar with the event and The Project, let me provide a little background. Burning Man is a weeklong festal gathering that takes place every year in the desolate Black Rock Desert of central Nevada. The event, which began in 1985 when two friends decided to burn a wooden effigy of a man on San Francisco’s Baker Beach, has grown steadily in popularity. In 2000, the event attracted almost 40,000 people to a gigantic celebration in the middle of the desert. They call their gathering place Black Rock City, an “ephemeropolis” (to use Stephen Black’s wonderfully evocative term) that exists only for one week out of the year.

I’ve had the pleasure of attending Burning Man as a participant observer for four years., and have written about it in an article and several book chapters (many of them co-authored with John Sherry). I believe that Burning Man is among the premiere social experiments of our times. That’s why the media cover so closely this gathering that is not even as large as most trade shows or fair. It’s not just the “freak-fest” appeal, although that’s a part of it. It is because this is a group of people on the edge of culture, living out where we are in bold relief and charting out what we want to and could become.

So what is happening this year is particularly fascinating.

As I have written about in several places, most notably my Journal of Consumer Research article entitled “Can Consumers Escape the Market?” Burning Man has sought to contain some of the negative effects of the marketplace: it’s tendency to isolate us from one another and to quash our individual expression and creativity, namely.

In that article, I went to town on some of the apparent differences between life in the world of work and business, and the liminal ludic realm experienced Burning Man’s participants:

“The most bizarre thing I saw at Burning Man was a man dressed in a three-piece business suit and carrying a briefcase, rushing along through the desert one evening. He brushed by a group of us quickly, saying “Excuse me, gentlemen,” as if he were late for a meeting. Our group burst out laughing (Fieldnotes, August 30, 2000). Like the full office cubicle, replete with inspirational posters and gobs of reminding Post-ItTM notes that someone had set up in the middle of the desert, the source of the humor was the realization that this is a place set far apart from the logics that drive everyday business behavior in the world of large corporations. Our mock businessman’s attire, emoting, utterances, and rushing were pure performance art in this desolate and distant location.

Art at Burning Man is socially constructed as a purely self-expressive practice that is radical, communally interactive, and not-for-sale. It is placed in dialectical opposition to the efficiency of modern industrial production in which designs are functional, divorced from public view, and conducted for profit. Burning Man’s emphasis on self-expression and self-transformation rather than practical matters provides it with a useful differentiation from the prevailing ethos of productivity and efficiency used by market forces. Ironically, this differentiation is co-opted by companies that send employees to Burning Man for “team-building” and to ‘expand creative thinking’ (Hua 2000). The fact that corporations use Burning Man to enhance the very characteristics that they are criticized for lacking points to an interesting irony. It also points to the inescapably porous boundaries between Burning Man and the market system. Inevitably, Burning Man’s participants return to a corporate world, albeit perhaps with a fresher perspective or some heightened artistic or communal sensibility.”

To set up this free-spirited creative playzone, Burning Man has suspended ordinary social logics by setting up some interesting rules that seek to control the effects of markets and large corporations in particular.

Chief among those rules are the “No Commerce” rule that forbids monetary exchange and encourages a Gift Economy. Important is an individual and group emphasis on “Radical Self-Expression” that encourages individualized participation. Also crucial is an injunction against wearing or displaying brand names. Finally, the event has always banned (and something ejected) corporations that seek to promote or advertise themselves or their wares at the event.

That last injunction is being suspended, sort of.

In a fascinating story in Business 2.0 this month, “Future Boy” and Burning Man participant Chris Taylor talks about how Burning Man has “grown up.” It is “coming of age.” It is a ten million dollar revenue “business.” But most controversially and most importantly the Burning Man Organization has invited a bunch of companies into the event to show off their wares.

What? This goes against twenty years of anti-corporate rhetoric. It blasts open some of the carefully cultivated divisions between Burning Man’s communal-utopian interview and the harsh manipulative commodified world outside. B2.0 has really scooped Wired on this one. What in the world is Burning Man up to?

Posted in Burning Man, Communities and Tribes | 2 Comments »

June 25, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

Maybe this will shake things up a touch. On Friday, “This is London” covered an official air-miss report that was filed several weeks ago and which had appeared in Pilot magazine. Aurigny Airlines captain Ray Bowyer, 50, flying over the Channel Islands close to Alderney first spotted an object that he described as “a cigar-shaped brilliant white light.” His sighting was confirmed by passengers, by radar imaging on the ground, and by another pilot flying for another airline.

After realizing the distance to the object, he estimated the size of the object to be a mile wide. Later in his approach, he saw another object. He said it was visible for about nine minutes, which seems to rule out all sorts of optical effects. His interview with ITV News is posted on YouTube and seems quite revealing. The guy seems shaken up and sincere.

What does this have to do with Marketing and Consumer Culture? Well, nothing and everything.

My posts on Philip K. Dick and ontology assert that the way we think about Marketing and Consumer Culture is deeply shaped by our underlying view of what we believe reality to be, what we believe is possible and worthy of study. It’s a guiding assumption of this brandthroposophy blog that we should all stay open minded. There could definitely be an interesting story about the marketing of this story, about UFO stories, about the marketing tie-ins between mystery and controversy and marketing. In fact, my very first conference paper and very first publication were about X-Files fans (”X-Philes”) and in that paper I wrote that X-Files fans

consume mysterious and mystical notions through The X-Files show and through their Internet activities and membership in the fan community. As noted by Belk, Wallendorf and Sherry (1989), mystery is an important element of the sacred. Mystery is “above the ordinary” and derives from “profound experiences and meanings” (p. 7). Consumers are increasingly turning to secular sources –such as television shows, and the subcultures of consumption that spring up based on them– to fulfill their deep-seated need for connection with the sacred. It is also possible that in our faithless, hyper-rational and scientific society, many people crave the excitement and energy that the only the unexplained can inspire.

So, I’ve believe for a long time that there is a massive market for the unexplained. MIT Scholar Geoffrey Long has written about the “negative capability” of fictional characters who are sketched out fairly well in terms of identity and motivation but leave much of the details of their backgrounds and lives for fiction readers to fill in from their own imaginations. Fans love characters with negative capability because they fill in their missing details. There is a lot of conceptual room for them to do identity work with them and inject them with deeper meanings and significance. Boba Fett in the Star Wars universe is a great example.

I suggest that we think about major mysteries such as religious miracles, Virgin Mary sightings, miraculous healings, and modern UFO sightings as a type of supernegative capability, an aporia or conceptual gap writ large. We all seem drawn to their openendedness, to figure them out. There is much that matters and much to explore about our own exploration of these matters.

I enjoy the controversy swirling around this recent UFO news story particularly evident in the hundreds of comments on the digg story. There are true believers and equally hardcore skeptics. The very first comment was someone lamenting the fact that they had a flight to catch that day, right after reading this story. A statement of fear. That was followed by 6 comments chiding the person and mocking their belief, comparing it to an iiratonal faith in “the Flying Spaghetti Monster.”

Something interesting seems to have happened over Aurigny, confirmed by multiple eyewitnesses. But we will almost certainly never completely understand it. There are mysteries left in our world that we won’t solve. And these mysteries are what keep me fascinated by future prediction, big thinkers, utopian dreamers, edgy science fiction and also edgy nonfiction such as that written by Daniel Pinchbeck and Erik Davis, thinkers who don’t shy away from mysteries simply because they are popularly viewed as pseudo-scientific or on the margins of respectability but who also treat them with a healthy degree of skepticism and subject them to rigorous evidentiary claims.

If we are going to adapt to the many global-scale challenges that will face us in the coming years, to innovate brilliantly and effectively, we are going to need to embrace ambiguity on an emotional and intellectual scale we can scarcely conceive of right now.

In marketing, in business, in innovation, and in consumer culture, there are still mysteries left. These systems of thought are highly rational, highly structured, dominated by mathematical and engineering approaches. But the topics they impact–life and society–contain entire universes of fuzzy ambiguities, boldly bizarre belief systems, endless portals of complexity. If we are truly seekers after the novel and the new, I don’t think we should turn away from the darkness and the strange. I am a student of unflinchingly peering into the void.

UFOs in 2007? Weird? Significant? Interesting?

Posted in Mysteries and Spirituality, Marketing News & Insights | No Comments »

June 22, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

Just a quick follow on post to my prior post on innovation.

My good friend, Department Chair, and colleague Eileen Fischer emailed me a great comment that I’m going to incorporate here.

She has a bone to pick with the way that the Conference Board measured innovation for its report. They measured innovation as proxied by two things. One was patents and the other was scientific journal articles, both measured per capita. There are many problems with both measures. Patenting in America and a few other places is out of control because people are making a lot of money on legal challenges (as witness the recent debacle that nearly shut down Research in Motion, and ended up making their legal aggressor plenty rich). The second measure, journal publications, seems to have a whole host of problems. Are we talking good quality journals? Only hard science journals? What do publications have to do with innovation, really? What to we mean by innovation then?

As I think about Eileen’s great points, it seems we are desperately in need of better measures of innovation.

And those improved measures need to start with better definitions of innovation. My friend Gerald Haman of Chicago’s SolutionPeople brainstorming company defines innovation as a practically applied idea or invention. That’s a solid start. We’re not just talking about ideas, but applied ideas, commercialized ideas.

I’m also thinking that we need to be much more open-minded about the kinds of innovation that matter now and that are going to matter in the future. And the kind of cultural systems—local, familial, regional, national, and global—that are going to support them.

Measuring patents, Nobel Prizes, and hard science journal publications smells to me like a smokestack economy. Is that all that we’re really after here? New products only? New flavors of potato chips and new squeezy things for our toothpaste containers? Or are we also looking for major changes in lifestyle, in thinking, in doing, experiencing. The kind of innovation that we should be looking for are innovations on a cultural level, as well as including a material goods and services component.

I think the kinds of creative thinking we see in the entertainment industry, in the software industry, in themed retail, and online in the so-called Web2.0 economy are highly significant. Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class sorts of innovation. Seen in that light, I’ve been studying innovators and innovation my entire research career and I think we’re seeing major changes across society in the way we “do” innovation.

What might be some good measures of cultural innovation to add to the list? Per capita percentages of bloggers, wiki-participants, and content adders? Percentage of tinkerers? Of fans? Amount of Do-It-Yourself stores in a neighborhood? Prevalence of basic HTML literacy in the population? Percentage of people who start their own small businesses? Percentage of people who had one or more entrepreneurial parents? Tax rates on small business and small business owners? Amount of general risk-taking propensity in the culture?

If we don’t come up with better measures and definitions, we’re not going to get what we really need.

Next week, I’m going to talk about one of the most innovative places on Earth: Burning Man. And I’m going to examine the controversial sell out that its organizers made this year, a sell out that a lot of good people fear will destroy much of what is good about it.

Posted in Innovation & Creativity | No Comments »