August 16, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

I don’t know how many of you are reading the comments to this blog, but some of them are really spectacular, and I’ve been commenting upon them myself a number of times.

Faithful reader and Marketing Professor Jeff Podoshen, of Franklin & Marshall College (fandm.edu…is that a place to study fandom or what?) in Lancaster, Pennsylvania recently wrote a short confessional in response to one of my blog entries about fandom. I thought it was great. So great that I’m going to excerpt some of it here. He is referring to a Journal of Marketing article in which my co-authors and I analyzed Star Wars fans who wrote about Episode 1: The Phantom Menace and absolutely skewered its authenticity.

I’m probably one of those fans who postings you read. Now, up until SW Ep 1 I probably spent about $10k on the SW brand lifetime prior to Ep 1 launch. Yeah, its a lot. (FYI - my kitchen to this day features SW curtains) I waited in line for hours to see Ep 1 the night it opened. I thought it sucked Bantha poodoo. I went again the next morning just to make sure… yeah it sucked. After SW Ep 1, I was extremely upset and felt like hitting Lucas over the head with a shovel. He ripped my still beating heart right out of me…. like in Indiana Jones. I remember going home, looking at all my SW collection and feeling like a total sucker. Total dejection. Ep 2 was slightly better, but not great. Ep 3 was slightly better than 2 and lots better than 1, but still generally sucky. After Ep 3 I realized that there were really TWO SW brands. The first was the authentic SW brand - which featured characters and concepts from the original trilogy and there was also the “new” brand.In order to make peace with myself and not have the “magic” of SW ruined I decided to pretend that SW Eps 1-3 just plain didn’t exist. I purged myself of all Ep 1-3 merchandise (which nobody will actually buy - I took it all to a shelter… I wonder if they just tossed it) and decided to pretend that after Jedi - that was it. Quite honestly, I feel much better about it now. I still do buy new SW merchandise, but ONLY if it has no references to Eps 1-3. Today, on the brand community that I am a part of - there are places for those who collect only Original (OT) stuff, those who collect only New (PT) stuff and those who collect both. There is little interaction between the groups of collectors in the one community. In fact, when a PT person jumps into a OT thread, they’re immediately flamed - and the mod has to step in. The opposite is also true. The lines are pretty clear. Hasbro, the license holder of SW created a huge issue when the re-issued the Stormtrooper action figure with removable helmet. The Stormtrooper of course is OT - but the head under the helmet in this new fig was a clone head - from Ep 2. We were all torn as to whether or not to purchase this figure - it was a great sculpt, but sacreligious. Most of us agreed we could buy the fig, but never ever take the helmet off.

To me, this just smacks of the religion analogy. Fandom and hermeneutics have some much in common. In some of my earlier writings about Star Trek fandom, I used a great quote by legendary SF writer Frederick Pohl (1984) who compared fan culture to the culture of “Cellar Christians”

It is very difficult to explain science-fiction [fandom] to anyone who has never experienced it. The closest analogy, perhaps, might be to the “cellar Christians” of pagan Rome, small, furtive groups of believers, meeting in secret, shunned or even attacked by outsiders, or as fans came to call them, the “mundanes.”

But this isn’t an insider versus outsider division that Jeff is talking about. It is the far-more-interesting insider-versus-insider division, and it also has a generational element to it. To me, this is the Old Testament believers and the New Testament believers. The New Testament believers see the New Testament as fulfilling the prophesies and promise of the Old Testament. The Old Testament believers see the New Testament as a recent work not actually bearing the sacred qualities of being written by God. As Jeff puts it, there is the old, sacred, perfect “authentic” brand, and then there’s the new brand. And never the two shall meet. Unless them meet across a sea of “flames” (which I find very satisfyingly Biblical as well).

His posting is wonderfully rich with Jeff’s emotional relation with the Star Wars text—it doesn’t get much more emotional than having the alleged Dark Creator (now sort of like a Phildickian evil god toying with his creations and the pawns in his universe) rip a still beating heart from the fan’s chest, a Dark Mayan sacrifice if ever there was one.

Buying the beautiful new figure, but keeping its helmet always on is just such a perfect, wonderful ritual gesture. It’s like a form of sacrament, a practice that marks one group of believers from another.

Jeff, you should really write about this stuff. It’s so evocative and powerful coming from you. But I also have to say that I wonder what the future holds for fans. My kids see no differences between the old and new texts at all. To them, they are all Star Wars. And I sense that as this generation moves through, that’s the New Order that will prevail. Those who hang onto the sanctity of the original Star Wars texts (even, gasp, those texts as they originally appeared before Dark Sacrifice-Demanding Mayan gods tampered with their scenes, special effects, and titles) are, quite probably, a dying breed. Yet another old religion, slowly fading to black….

Posted in Fandom, Entertainment Marketing, Communities and Tribes | 1 Comment »

August 15, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

Is Burning Man fading out or about to hit the mainstream, selling out or growing up? It seems like this is the biggest year yet for debates about the (ir)relevance of the greatest countercultural events of our times. So I thought I’d continue to chime in with a little list.

I remember in the 1990s being fascinated with a field of science called “Catastrophe Theory” that often got lumped in with the (then) emerging science of Chaos and Complexity Theory . Malcolm Gladwell later used and popularized a lot of this material to write the monster bestseller The Tipping Point, but the basic idea was that at a certain point you would see a rare phenomenon become dramatically more common. In sociological terms, the tipping point is when a trend, belief, or practice moves from a small, underground, subcultural types of phenomenon to the mainstream. The idea of a tipping point is of course very interesting to marketers, who all want to take little brands and businesses and make them universally accepted. Word of mouth marketing is based on this idea of targeting influential or influencers and then riding the wave to mass acceptance.

With a lot of naysayers decrying that Burning Man has finally, truly, really-really jumped the shark this year, I’m going to go contrarian. This year might mark the biggest transition yet between Burning Man as an one-week long event, and Burning Man as a Utopian Social Project, as a cresting manifestation of a Social Movement or, even better, a New Social Movement in itself.

Here are the Reasons I think Burning Man is at the tipping point, heading for mainstream infiltration, and ready for prime time.

#1. Solid Ideology: 10 Principles. Forget memes, they are determinist and inflexible. Ideologies have always been the way to go: complex, compact, portable, contagious, and complete; ideologies are promiscuous and intermarry, but stay loyal to their bloodlines. Burning Man has a polished and solid ideology developed from a range of intellectual locales such as Situationism and Surrealism but branching it with different New Left Movements. Check it out. Ten internally consistent countercultural commandments “principles that guide our regional communities” but that were developed in the Black Rock desert crucible as if it were some sort of social R&D lab: Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-Reliance, Radical Self-Expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation, and Immediacy. These are values to guide behavioral change on the individual, small group, and communal level. From a social movement perspective, that’s a key ingredient.

#2. The Spores of Diaspora: The Regional Burn Network. How do you nail down ideology and make it come alive in daily life? With Rituals and Practices, dudes and dudessas. Burning Man is nothing if not ritualistic. There’s the honkin’ big Burn o’ the Man, but there’s also the more sombre and introspective Temple Burn. Then there are all the behaviors, the costuming and performance art and self-expression that bring to life the ideology. Burning Man participants have been linking up online since 1998, but also using that network strategically to connect physically in the meat world. There are 128 “regional contacts” worldwide. Many local contact and communities have organized events that bring the ethos of the Burning Man event to a local level. Often it involved a camping trip to a remote region, striving to leave no trace, some participative theme camp forms, and then a ritual burning of some object: a figure shaped like a chicken, a moose, a cow, whatever. Larry Harvey writes about “a new movement” involving regular local town meetings that organize particular ongoing local projects in cities like Portland and Seattle, and a mentoring of one region with another. Rituals combined with institutionalization. That makes the Burning Man event more than an isolated one-week-long event.

#3. Net Presence: The Burning Man Network. For a while, Burning Man was described as the Internet in physical space. The analogy worked for a while, in the time the Internet was new and different. As a creature of cyberspace and California culture, whose growth has been intimately tied to Silicon Valley and the Information Economy, Burning Man has always used and developed Internet presence to its advantage. Its web-page, www.burningman.com contains all you need to know to get to the event, “survive” it, enjoy it, and connect with others on the “eplaya.” It’s a genuine community web-site that leads people seamlessly between where they are now and where Burning Man and its new values can take them. That makes it highly accessible to the mainstream. And an effective tool for keeping the disparate community together for the other 51 weeks of the year when they’re not in the desert. I’ll bet that the site gets a lot of traffic from people who have never been to the event. Burning Man’s DNA contains the new interface between cyberculture and culture-bearing.

#4: Mediated Disintermediation. Burning Man has always been media-friendly and known how to use and manage media contacts and contexts. That’s important for reaching the mainstream. Radio Free Burning Man and a zillion local stations are used locally at the event to broadcast Burning Man news. Now, they can podcast it to the world. Big uncontrollable media like MTV have been held at bay. But Current TV started up a netcast in 2006: TV Free Burning Man. As Larry Harvey said “We’re eager to communicate what we are doing.” Burning Man convinced Current TV to change their business model in order to work with them, further promoting their values out into the mainstream (the value, in case you’re interested, is biggie #3: Decommodification). Current TV gave Burning Man participants cameras so they controlled the content, they erased their logos, and they ran the programs commercial free. From private to communal enterprise, courtesy of Burning Man. And out into the public sphere via mass media distribution.

# 5. The Non-Profit Connection: Burners Without Borders. Taking their cue from Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, the humanitarian NGO group of physicians and healthcare workers who practice medicine wherever it is needed regardless of political interests, Burners without Borders took the Burning Man ideals of civic responsibility and communal effort out into the world. In their first project, 299 volunteers spent six months rebuilding and helping to reconstruct some of the damage done by Hurricane Katrina. They also fashioned some of the storm debris into works of art, sculptures that they would later burn in bonfires. The ideals manifest; the rituals performed. See the pattern? Again, away from the event, in other locations. And providing volunteer humanitarian aid, assistance, and relief. The effort has spread: there are Burners without Borders groups now working in Chicago and Reno, and other places.

#6. The Controlled Corporate Experiment: Green Man Pavilion Project. As I’ve written about in another blog entry, Burning Man is experimenting this year with a new form of conceptual art: the repurposed corporation. There will be about 30 different individuals and organization involved contributing “installations” to the Green Man pavilion. Although the majority of these projects have no commercial profile, there are a few smaller entrepreneurs. These brave souls have agreed to bind themselves into a restrictive covenant that would have made The God of Abraham proud. No logos, no branding, no brochures or flyers, no sales reps of any kind. So, for example, people will be able to see a solar carport. The most high-falutin’ display sounds like it will be a huge solar array that is going to power the Man and the pavillion (to which I say: Yay! the alternative is burning a lot of fossil fuel to power them). After Burning Man concludes in fiery spectacle, the company and the Burning Man organization intend to install the solar array in the little Nevada towns of Gerlach and Lovelock to provide clean, renewable power to a public school and hospital, respectively. The little town of Gerlach might become the first American city to create more solar power than it actually consumes. Some have called this year’s experimentation a deal with the devil. It might be also seen as yet another way Burning Man is carefully building the institutional bridges that will move it from an event into a social movement.

#7. Google’s Burning Man Earth. Google and Burning Man have teamed up to bring to live a three-dimensional model of Black Rock City as it actually exists from year to year. You can find an early beta version of the project here that captures Burning Man 2006 in Google Earth format. The grand idea is to bring to life and make accessible to everyone, anywhere, any time, some of the Black Rock City experience. Digitally, people will be able to access and seem to travel down the streets (and presumably even into the portapotties) of Black Rock City. Here’s another interesting part/ They might also be able to make contact with every person who settles into the virtual Burning Man world. It sounds like Second Life, Burning Man style. And I have to note here that Second Life does indeed already have its very own Burning Man event that takes place annually (see pic below from Burning Life). The plan is, yet again, to make the Burning Man ethos, rituals, and even simulated digital experience open to all people everywhere, from a groups of 30 thousand or so in the desert, to something that millions and hundreds of millions of people worldwide can experience and learn from. And the idea within that is to allow direct contact, immediate contact between interested people to happen. And where contact and communication happen, community forms and culture is forged and shared. And then borne anew, like spores.

So that’s my list. Seven reason that the Burning Culture of Burning Man is spreading far beyond the desert, and why I think this year will be the most important year yet.

Posted in Burning Man, Word of Mouth Marketing, Communities and Tribes, Marketing News & Insights | 1 Comment »

August 10, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

Here’s a call-out to all my former Kellogg School of Management students. I’ve heard from several of you lately (hi to Adam, Mark, and to Allison). If there are any of you out there, you can link up to me at LinkedIn.com. Or drop me an email. I’d enjoy hearing how you’re doing.

In 1999, I started and taught the first Entertainment Marketing and Culture course at Kellogg. It was a great course, and I ran it in a manner similar to the GIM (Global Initiatives in Management) program courses that were already taking students on trips around the world. We did ten weeks of classes, mostly with entertainment industry people from music, movies, videogames, and TV, and then followed it up with a one week trip to Hollywood, California. In Los Angeles we would tour a variety of different studios and entertainment oriented businesses, including Disney, Viacom, Activision, Sony Pictures Imageworks (terrific people there!), Dreamworks, and Univision. We would also meet up with students and faculty from the Anderson School at UCLA. It was a memorable course. I don’t know if they are still running it at Kellogg. I started it and, as far as I know, it left when I left.

We had all heard about MP3s and MP3 players and this was the hot management topic we were always coming back to in class. Did they pose a threat to the music business? I said absolutely. No question about it. People feel ripped off and this gives them an opportunity to rip the music companies off right back. At the time, I had an ambitious young grad student visiting me from Germany (the inimitable Markus Giesler). Markus and I had talked about this topic a lot as he worked on his Master’s dissertation as a visiting student. We formulated a number of ideas together that he later developed further and wrote up.

I remember an early guest speaker in 1999, who flew in to talk about music marketing. In class, the executive passed around one of the early MP3 players. The thing was playing some blues song and as the students took the headphones, you could see them start to bob their heads and shrug their shoulders in time with the music. When everyone had listened, he asked the students if they thought that what they heard was a threat to the sale of recorded music. Most said yes.

He then proceeded to explain why it was not. “What you heard was a very compressed version of the music with very poor fidelity. When consumers hear how poor the sound quality is of MP3 files, they aren’t going to be willing to settle for it.” My jaw dropped. The evidence that people couldn’t hear the difference (or didn’t really care that much) was in front of this guy, but he wouldn’t see it. Students were bopping to the tune, but he was explaining from an audiofile connoisseur’s position why the compressed music format wasn’t good enough for the average consumer. He was weighting the costs in sound fidelity without concern to the benefits in terms of portability, conveinience, tradeability, storage, and cost.

I have seen the exact same sort of horse-with-blinders mentality in the entertainment industry ever since. Unfortunately, I have many more stories like that one, stories about entertainment industry execs refusing to believe that the dam is bursting, that people would actually share their precious digital properties with one another over the Internet. ‘How dare they? This must be stopped.’

Back in 2000, I started talking to my students about file sharing of videos and motion pictures, something with much larger financial ramifications than spilling the entire musical catalog out onto the Internet. I said back then that the genie for music was already out of the bottle. And there is no way it is going to go back in. I still enjoy thinking about later classes where we would usually have a few outspoken advocates of Apple’s iTunes, saying that now that there was a user-friendly legal interface, most of the file-sharing would go away. That was a common stance. P2P would gradually decline and be replaced by legal download and streaming methods like iTunes and Rhapsody. Statistics are hard to find, and I’d appreciate hearing from you if you have recent figures on P2P music & video traffic versus legal downloads. As it stands, I strongly believe that iTunes accounts for only a tiny fraction of the music exchanged online. A figure I’ve heard but not been able to validate is that there are over two billion songs exchanged using P2P in the average week. iTunes has sold just over that volume the entire 6 + years they have been operating. The model for the music industry has changed in ways that I predicted seven years ago, but surprisingly few people are talking or writing about it.

The reason that I’m writing about DRM (digital rights management, in other words, the software encryption that locks in the rights to use digitized entertainment like music or movies so that only paying customers have the right to hear and/or see it) is that I saw an interesting story in the news yesterday that only proves my point further. TV Squad (a great media blog) ran a story called Hackers discover how to download streaming video from Netflix. The funny thing is, I wrote a case about a company just like Netflix (called “Networked Flicks Inc.”), several years ago, in which one of the management alternatives being considered was a streaming video service. The big concern that we discussed in this case was DRM–would they be able to keep out hackers and keep the entertainment companies happy that their works were secure? Pretty prophetic, I guess.

In class my argument was that any code that can be encrypted is just a challenge to hackers. Hackers will break any encyrption, and they’ll do it pretty quickly. I still stand by my position and here’s why. Breaking codes is a challenge, it’s fun, it gets you free stuff like movies and music, and people admire you for it. Free crap and undying glory. How about those Norwegians who cracked the original encryption on the first DVDs. What did it take them, two weeks to do it?

The analogy I always used with my students for file-sharing services and for DRM hackers is the same. It’s the old carny game of Whack-a-Mole. One P2P service, like Napster or Kazaa, goes down and then another one, like Limewire or Morpheus or BitTorrent or eDonkey comes up. You encrypt your film with one DRM software service. It will get cracked, decrypted, and your stuff will get shared and copied. You encrypt it again with another service (even though it’s now all over the Internet distributed across file-sharing servers). It gets cracked and copied again.

Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s a futile game (hmmm…what a “wiki” game to play).

Here’s another recent example. How many of you have HD-DVD or Blu-Ray players? Well, here’s good news for you, and bad news for believers in DRM “protection.” The rights management on both of these high def DVD formats have already been cracked and shared with the world online (here’s the story). And several groups of programmers are very likely working on user friendly GUI interfaces for shareware and freeware programs that will allow consumers to rip their high def DVDs and share them over P2P networks just as easily as they are now ripping their CDs and regular def DVDs. Ingenious and resourceful, aren’t they? But you know, when you think about it, that easy rippability makes the high def players that much more attractive to potential purchasers (and as I’ve blogged about previously, those purchasers have gotten off to a pretty slow start).

Entertainment executives (most of them, anyways) are still swimming against the tide or hiding their heads in the sand. They’re protecting and locking their properties up. But they can’t win. They are going against the collective intelligence of the crowd, and defying communal imagination and motivation. Even after all these year, entertainment companies haven’t even come close to getting it. When they do, they’ll learn to work with the trends and not against them. That’s going to be an interesting day.

Until then, I have a special educational tool for anyone who works or wants to work in the entertainment industry. I’m a great believer in computer simulations of business scenarios for management training. Click here and press play for your simulation of DRM and rights management work in the industry. Enjoy!

Posted in Entertainment Marketing, Marketing News & Insights | No Comments »