October 11, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

From all the developmental work on Consumption Studies, I now turn to an illustrative example of bricolage that I wrote seven years ago, near the very apex of the dot com boom, about high technology consumption. This work has never been published before.

Introduction

Ever-increasing consumption of high technology is currently a privileged practice within many important cultural streams, such as Western business, government and academia (Venkatesh et al. 1997). Derived from the Greek words for crafty art, “techne”, and word or discourse, “logos”, technology itself means, literally, the realized word, the artifice from discourse, the materialization of thought science through active, crafty artisanship.

Traditionally, the control of fire, invention of agriculture, speech and the alphabet stand as awesome human technological achievements (Marvin 1988). However, the term technology, particularly its elevated “high” variant as we have come to know it in the past three decades or so, has been appropriated largely by information and telecommunications industries.

Situated in this milieu of networked infotech as high technology, the illustrative work of bricolage offered in this bloggy demo centers on the particular contexts embodying its consumption meanings and practices (see also Mick and Fournier 1998; Venkatesh 1996, 1998a, 1998b; Venkatesh et al. 1997). This investigation takes as its starting point a phenomenological instant, a moment of connection. This moment linked a technocentric magazine ad and a man, an infotech commercial and a reader, a message and a target in a bond of consumption meaning that encircled the present in Western cultural history. Tacking back and forth between the semiotic, intertextual, intersubjective subtexts of the advertisement and the subjective introspection, social history and situation of the reader-writer-researcher, my very personal little investigation inserts critical commentary that seeks to peel back and expose the fleshy, sheltered, and oft-hidden ideological underbelly of high technology.

The advertisement is presented in Figure 1. How I love this ad. It appeared on the inside back cover of the April 13, 1998 issue of BusinessWeek magazine (a McGraw-Hill publication with wide circulation). A stark black and white ad, it was part of a campaign of similarly dramatic ads for Sun Microsystems, one of the industry’s largest purveyors of workstations and networking software and, with its JavaTM and JiniTM technologies, a major rival and frequent challenged of mega-gorilla industry monolith Microsoft. Sun has long cultivated a digital frontier cowboy brand image of freedom and rebelliousness based upon the unconventional uses of networked computing. As Business Week (1999, p. 37) reported, “For years, Sun Microsystems Inc. Chief Executive Scott G. McNealy has been one of high tech’s most vocal rebels against the digital world order set up by software king Microsoft Corp.”

The power struggles can be read from the emphasis on cyberspace (Microsoft was a late entrant) and networked computers (its forté, rather than Microsoft’s) in Sun’s advertisement (see Figure 3). The ad’s huge, bold, upper-case, ragged font headline declares “CYBER-SPACE: THE FINAL FRONTIER,” as if the words issued from a gigantic typewriter. The tiny text positioned at the ad’s bottom then reads:
The agricultural age transformed business. The industrial age revolutionized business. The networked age? It’s reinventing business. Not so much with computers. But with they ways they work together. (It’s been our frontier for the past 16 years.) With out JavaTM technologies, we’re helping companies leverage the Internet, intranet and extranet to launch their enterprises in completely new directions. Networked age? Try golden age. THE NETWORK IS THE COMPUTER.TM

The ad’s reader, this article’s researcher and writer, shares a range of subjective contexts that served to focus attention on the advertisement. First was the prosaic moment of exposure, in which I, as subscriber and member of the magazine’s target group of business professionals, actively browsed. Second was the topic matter of technology that, as an instructor of techophiles, and owner and maintainer of five personal computers, is always interesting. Most important, and clearly reflective of my own subjective interests, was the linkage of techoscience and science fiction.

In the combination of science fiction (SF) author William Gibson’s neuromantic (or should that be “neo-romantic”) term “cyberspace” and “the final frontier” there was overt reference to SF-one of my passions-connecting it with technological meanings. In fact, this exact headline had served previously as a heading in my SF-inspired thesis dissertation (on p. 64), published in July 1997. Clearly, there was resonance -if not Jungian synchronicity -at work here. It offered a chance to explore deeper what I believed to be an important and often overlooked topic. Acting as a “deliberate introspectionist,” here, my choice of research topic reveals some of the inescapably subjective introspection that, as Levy (1997) documents, inform our research choices.

In order to pursue these meanings in an illustrative manner, this exemplar combines:

• (1) a textual and historical analysis of the intersubjective system of consumption meanings suggested by the intertextual referents of this advertisement,
• (2) an introspective analysis of the reception and personal connection of these meanings in one target’s lived experiences, and
• (3) a critical theoretic perspective that examines some of the social and ecological limitations of these consumption meanings as consumerist ideology.

The illustration thus coordinates four doctrine, methods or schools of thought:

1. textual or symbolic interpretation and analysis (e.g., Arnold and Fischer 1994, Mick 1986, Stern 1989, Scott 1994),
2. historical research (e.g., Smith and Lux 1993)
3. introspection (e.g., Gould 1991, Holbrook 1995), and
4. critical theory/green criticism (e.g., Hetrick and Lozada 1994, Ozanne and Murray 1991, Ross 1991).

In so doing, it attempts to utilize some of the distinct strengths of each method -the symbolic richness and rhetorical strength of textual analysis, the sociocultural denaturing of historical research, the verisimilitude and phenomenological depth of introspection, the ‘fanged’ (Hetrick and Lozada 1994) conscience of critical theory.

Being-In-Technology

In personally using the Sun Microsystems ad to reflect upon my own semantic consumption network, I wish to start this exploration using the same socially situated, reflective narrative stance adopted by Gould (1991), Holbrook (1995) and Brown (1995). It is important to note explicitly and describe my subjective contexts -to situate my story historically, geo-politically, personally and socially.

Situated knowledges are about membership in communities, they promise a “view from somewhere” rather than a splitting of subject and object (Haraway 1988). Providing an important bridge, they link the objectivity of social categories to the subjectivity of my own perceptions.

As a thirtysomething assistant professor, member of a community of scholars at an American university, I believe myself to have a lot of utility, and a fair share of fetishistic pleasure, tied into my consumption of high technology. This morning, September 9 1999, as I do almost every morning, I walk into my office and the first thing I do after propping my door open is to boot up my Dell Optiplex Gx1 computer, flick on my Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 6P, ScanJet 5000C, and 21″ Sony Trinitron monitor, place my 3Com Palm III into its cradle and press the “hotsynch” button. With a bit of pride I reflect that these are the tools of people of means, people “on the go.” After feeling comfortable familiarity at the preschool rainbow colors of the Windows startup screen (as if boundless, Where do I want to go today?), I load up some technopop MP3 files, “go” into Eudora and check my messages, seeing if anyone today has responded to my web-page. (Yes, I’m struck by how antiquated all this then au currant technobrand talk is…funny, ain’t it…but it also serves as part of the lesson now..like reading an old newspaper.)

Is technology a frontier? Is it a harbinger of a golden age? As an aspect of my own lived experience, high technology consumption has become a supramundane extension of my ears and eyes.

For my generation at least, high technology as a consumption concept has been largely naturalized. But because its specifics change so rapidly, it retains the sheen of the ever-new. Screensize and clarity and thickness, beta versions, RAM and hard drive size, acronym knowledge, skill at web-page design, distance learning development and digital presentation, all become daily and almost phallic modalities of my own tale-spinning (or tail-chasing?) worlds of competition and self-elevation.

The rapidity of technological change and ubiquitous reminders of its current social importance make it fashionable and edgy, frightening in a sense (as when a format changes, and all your files -and knowledge!-of one type suddenly become threatened with obsolescence). That makes technology feel frontierlike.

Technophilic pursuits act as my instruments, symbolic means to the egoistic end of heightened social stature. Discoursing with students and peers, they become more than social markers. Statements starts to ring with overtones of prophetic inevitability, engaging revolutionary sphere of possible freedom, egalitarianism, social experimentation and exploration whose potential only neo-Luddites would deny or suppress. With its identity intimations of young, tough, hackery relentlessness and the quest for increasing equality and freedom, who wouldn’t want to be the (secret) change agent, blazing a new path through the frontier?

Yet, reflecting on the origins of these techno-consumption meanings, I can’t help but be drawn backward -not forward-in time. I clearly remember myself at age fourteen, head and heart saturated with science fiction daydreams, face pressed up against the retail glass of the new computer-kit store that was only doors down from my favorite sci-fi bookstore on Queen Street West in blessed Toronto.

I was peering with purest unadulterated (literally) covetousness at the cassette-tape driven Commodore Vic-20 when it was the first and last word in home computing power. I was a young, white, urban, lower-middle class male just itching, like all of my young, white, urban friends, to get my hands on this t(echnol)o(g)y.

It was still over a decade later that technology would garner associations of productivity, proficiency, professionalism, as business put its shoulder behind information technology and, between 1960 and 1995, invested over four trillion dollars in it. Only later that IT would attain the strange glow of a heralded acronym. At that point, in the late 1970s, all we knew was that these new screened things -with their Asteroids and Space Invaders-screamed sci-fi. They were new, cool, and they were for us. We were bored and desperately seeking our futures and these strange white boxes stunk unmistakably of inspiration.

The Reading will continue tomorrow….

Posted in Technology, Marketing Research, Marketing Science | 1 Comment »

October 4, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

I can’t believe it. Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, the Canuck equivalent of USA Today just called the entire Canadian population, and I quote the headline, “suckers.” (Thanks to my pal Don Hicks for passing along the article link).

Amazing. Here’s the link to the story by a very brave and insightful writer, Neil Reynolds. He is picking up one of the themes of my recent blog about the problems with living in Toronto, and by extension living in Canada. One of them was why we have currency parity with America, but everything here is higher priced. A quick for instance is Jackie Huba’s 2007 book Citizen Marketers: US price is $25. Canadian price is $31. Why?

Similarly, Mr. Reynolds is talking about is the high cost of American goods in Canada, which is completely out of line with the cost of getting those goods here. The Canadian public has been royally ripped off by a bad system for years.

He quotes several strudies of the phenomenon of the so-called “border factor.” These economists

“looked at the prices of identical goods on each side of the border and accounted for all the possible costs, leaving the mysterious “border factor” as the only variable. On the U.S. side, this was the equivalent of the cost of shipping the goods an additional 47 kilometres. On the Canadian side, they found product prices were higher by the cost equivalent of shipping goods an additional 108 million kilometres - or 141 round trips to the moon. Unbelievable, indeed. What’s happening here? In what way can the U.S.-Canada border, all by itself, defy fundamental laws of economics? In its own analysis of this mystery, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco decided that consumer prices are often set by factors that have little to do with actual cost - factors that operate independently of exchange rates.”

So what are these mysterious factors that defy economic rules and confound economists? Why it’s that usual suspect: Mr. Culture, of course!

“What explains the extraordinary divergence in retail prices between the U.S. and Canada? Put it down, in the end, to a deeply entrenched Canadian willingness to pay more for many goods than they are worth. Put it down to consumer laziness. Especially now, Canadians can pay much less by crossing the border or by ordering direct from the U.S. Most Canadians, though, won’t. Merchants will continue to price to the market - to charge what people will pay. This is why we will keep paying intergalactic prices - whether we have parity or beyond.”

Intergalactic prices: 141 round trips to the moon’s worth of price jacking. Mr. Reynolds starts scratching away at the surface of the deep dark Canadian secret in his article, but I can pick up my trusty shovel and keep right on excavating.

I wrote a few days ago that “the Canadian dollar broke through and made it to parity with the US dollar for the first time in 30 years. But have we seen the significant savings of the Canadian dollars’ climb?” No way. In fact, the savings have not been passed on to consumers. They’ve been kept by Canadian businesses.

I asked, Why? And then answered by own question. Because of complacency. Consumers are complacent. Content with what they have. Happy to pay exorbitantly more for their flat screen TVs and salty snacks than their neighbors in Buffalo New York. And come on, Mr. Reynolds, we can’t expect people to drive to the USA to do their shopping. For big purchases like that HD plasma screen TV, the government forbids it. And practicality demands it. And when you order from the USA by mail, guess what happens? The government tacks on big customs and duty bills that make the savings moot. I learned that as soon as I moved here.

The Canadian government favors business interests over consumers. And that’s a cultural issues as well as a political one. You would have thought that the “socialist” Canadian government would have regulations to protect consumers from price-gouging, but apparently they don’t or they won’t enforce them. I can tell you that buying a home here was like the Wild West. No disclosures, no enforcement mechanism. Nothing. Buying a house in Illinois was far, far, far more regulated and tightly enforced. And the consumer benefited (and by extension, we’re all consumers).

Canadian Businesses are happy to overcharge, and keep on over-charing. And why shouldn’t they? It’s a caveat emptor, take-it-or-leave it nation. They aren’t competitive in the way US companies are. They don’t drive down prices. There are probably too many smaller local players, and they are just too familiar, and all-too comfortable to really compete. There are no Canadian-spun Sam Waltons and Richard Bransons who enter fat industries and cut prices to the average consumers’ benefit. Why would they? The government does nothing. The people let them. So why wouldn’t Canadians pay intergalactic prices?

Are any Canadian politicians interested in this issue? Any business people? Any consumers?

Wake up. Wake up! Suckers!

Posted in Oy Canada! | 1 Comment »

October 2, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

Building a strong product or brand community, especially online, has become a key part of marketing plans in the twenty-first century. That’s a big leap forward from a past where consumers were treated as solely individualist and isolated. But this emphasis on communities leaves practitioners and theorists at a loss. The idea of “building” communities is a very new and somewhat radical idea. Let’s think about it for a minute.

What might be one of the big keys to building strong communities?

What if I said the answer was exclusion? What if I said it was about building external boundaries that glorify those who are “in the know” and keep out the riffraff? What if I said it’s about having a strict, challenging hierarchy with lots of levels, where people have to struggle for glory and recognition and are constantly being pitted against one another. It seems to work for Coke and Pepsi. For Apple and Microsoft. For Star Wars versus Star Trek fans.

In fact, a lot of the competitive positioning we see, in this world dominated by global and local oligopolies, is all about favoring us versus them, about hierarchies within hierarchies.

One of my Ph.D. students, Andrew Feldstein of Pace University in NYC, just sent me a great link to a fan-based insight on this topic of boundary setting and hierarchies. Check out this terrific chart, which I reproduce here from its source at Brunching Shuttlecocks http://www.brunching.com/images/geekchartbig.gif

Check out the original chart here.

You can’t really read it here, but it is hilarious, and also pretty true. The fan community is filled with hierarchies that they chart here. Not so much who is cooler than whom (that goes without saying) but who is less geekier than whom (that’s the true content for debate). At the bottom of the char, the very bottom, are “people who write erotic versions of Star Trek where all the characters are furries.” Slightly above them are “erotic furries” and above them are just “furries.” Funny, the same chart could probably already be drawn up in Second Life. Second Life has lots of furries.

Now, only slightly above furries are “Trekkies who get married in Klingon garb.” Um, that should read Trekkers, but nevermind. This group is roughly equivalent to “13 year old gamers of all sorts,” “Pokemon fans over the age of six” and people who collect expensive replicas of famous fantasy swords. And so it goes, with “Trekkies” higher in the right-to-brag foodchain than “Trekkies who speak Klingon” all the way up to the penultimate high culture category of “Science Fiction and Fantasy fans.” This last category is only trumped by published SF and Fantasy authors and artists.

I have to say, with significantly puffed-up pride, that I would make it to the topic of this little org chart of geekdom. Yep, as this link proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, I am a published science fiction author. Go look it up, if you dare. One day maybe I’ll share the story on this blog. I may even try to publish some more one day (you’ve seen one of my past efforts here).

But the Sad Truth is, there are even hierarchies above the top category of published SF or fantasy author (which is Olympian to SF fans according to the geek chart).

• Published only one story is trumped by published several stories.
• Published in a second-tier, long-defunct magazine like Aboriginal is trumped by publishing in a top-tier, still-thriving mag like Asimov’s.
• Writing a novel versus a short story.
• Writing a best-selling novel.
• Writing a string of best-selling novels.
• And, to top it all off, writing academically and critically deconstructing about an author’s string of best-selling novels (yeah, right).

So, all humor aside (for the moment), what’s the significance of this? Not only in my research, but in research published on all subcultures and communities, including the influential brand community work by my colleagues Al Muniz and Tom O’Guinn, people in communities were found to differentiate themselves from outsiders by structural boundary rules and conditions. We love the Mac and Apple but we despise all things Microsoft and Bill Gatesian. We love Coke, how can you like Pepsi? We love rock, but we hate country, or classical, or whatever. Insiders versus outsiders. Welcome to the human condition, capitalist-style.

I love the visual representation of geekdom in this Flickr photoset by Scott Johnson. After looking through his set of 56 geeks it dawned on me that this was humanity in all its silly splendor. How lovable and wonderful: we’re all geeky through and through, in our emotions and our passions and our inner childishness.

As an anthropologist, I have to say that this is of great interest, but that social hierarchies being used as corporate tools also concerns me. Anthropology has in the last 20 years at least championed a renewed respect for “the Other” (yes, it sounds like a ‘50s sci-fi movie, but that’s the term used in anthropology circles, honestly). That new respect is an attempt to transcend cultural anthropology’s objectivist and colonialist past.

“The study of culture tends to produce bounded entities and, in so doing, it produces human separation if not, progressively, hierarchization and invidious comparison.” (Fernandez 1994: 162). Fredrik Barth (1995), writing in the Journal of Anthropological Research, contends that culture tends to be used to refer to differences in customs, which leads to exoticizing and depersonalizing groups and identities. The idea of brand communities having distinct “rituals and traditions” comes immediately to mind.

It’s not just the study of culture, but now the study of brand and product communities that is furthering these boundariers. The idea of culture as “an integrated, locally shared way of life” leads to an image of culture with a “geographical locus and boundaries”, and turns “physical persons and their behaviors into cultural specimens” (Barth 1995: 66).

We can say the same thing about brand and product communities and, to a similar extend, online communities, like the “virtual communities of consumption” and the “e-tribes” I’m pretty fond of studying and writing about. Barth (1995) argues that these biases are lessened when we stop classifying people into cultural categories and adopt a more cognitive perspective that recognizes what they actually know or don’t know. Knowledge then becomes the major modality of culture.

I also believe that in our writing and research we should be attempting to harmonize Self and Other. Full participation has always been a big theme in my methodology explanations. I believe very much in the anthropological standard , of the researcher being fully accepted as a cultural or community member, and psychologically accepts her or his membership in the culture or community.
Researcher introspection of one’s own thoughts then becomes another source of cultural data, as the cultural legacy is internalized and understood from the most authentic vantage point possible. The point is not that an ethnographer can live the lives of Others, but that she can live them close enough to begin to understand how their worlds have been constructed. Thus closeness and intimacy with the Others’ perspectives and lives are what is required in the post-crisis age of ethnography.

Critiquing the earlier, primarily observational, practice of ethnographic fieldwork, Van Maanen (1988: 9) says that

fieldwork is not of an ethnographic sort when it is pursued by a team of social researchers as a sort of expedition or Foucault-like panopticon observation-and-interview project. Fieldwork of an ethnographic kind is authentic to the degree it approximates the stranger stepping into a culturally alien community to become, for a time and in an unpredictable way, an active part of the face-to-face relationships in that community.

In marketing, full participation in ethnographic inquiries has been inconsistently and rarely applied. John Schouten and Jim McAlexander joined the Harley-Davidson biking community and subculture in a long-term immersion project in order to research and write about it. Their work is iconic in our field. Overall, however, marketing ethnographies seem to emphasize the observational element of participant-observation. The participative element gets mighty short shrift. And as a method, researcher introspection suffered a premature and suspect demise.

Hierarchization as the key to community building? Absolutely. Invidious comparison? Yup. It’s the human condition. But I wonder about the human level ramifications of all these separations. What does it feel like to be on the wrong side of these community relations?

Posted in Fandom, Word of Mouth Marketing, Communities and Tribes, Branding | 1 Comment »