June 14, 2010 by Robert Kozinets.

I just returned yesterday from attending the 5th Consumer Culture theory (or CCT) conference in Madison, Wisconsin, held at the Grainger Center of the University of Wisconsin’s Wisconsin School of Business. The conference is an annual get together dedicated to people who are doing cultural research in the field of marketing and consumer research.  I thought this was the best CCT Conference yet, with some lively conversations, great facilities, and the highest quality sessions ever.

I’m going to provide some recap and reflections of the conference in the next few blog entries this week. I’ll start in this entry with the first session, which provided plenty to think about, as it seemed like it was intended as the “kick-off” session of the conference. 

 The session was called “Pushing the Theoretical Boundaries of CCT” and it began with a very nice overview of the CCT research by Gokcen Coskuner-Balli of Chapman University. Gokcen’s presentation reflected on marginalization and stigmatization in the field, looking at a range of different marginalized consumer groups, including Star Trek fans, stay-at-home dads, and immigrant women, and comparing them to the out-group or marginalized status of CCT researchers in the overall field of consumer behavior and marketing. Her presentation offered lots of strategies and practical advice on negotiating and ameliorating the low-status, less-access-to-material-resources implications of this lower status.

The session closed off with a good presentation by Lotte Salome of Tilburg University that presented some of her subcultural research on lifestyle sports and argued that we need to build in more emphasis on producers, something that has been argued by a lot of people, such as Norm Denzin, and brought in through a lot of research over the years, including that by Lisa Penaloza, and, I think, by the American Girl and ESPN Zone research I have been involved in with my research team members.

The middle presentation of the session is the one I’ll focus in on. It was delivered by by Eric Arnould of the University of Wyoming, and was co-authored with Craig Thompson of the University of Wisconsin, and Markus Giesler my colleague at York University’s Schulich School of Business. It was titled “Three Waves of CCT: On Transcending Anachronistic Rhetorical Conventions.”

The presentation took a historical overview of consumer culture research, and argued that there were three distinct stages of waves of this type of research that we can understand by virtue of the way the work was written, or its rhetorical gestures.

This was a fairly complex presentation with a lot of diagrams, terminology, and slides, and the presenter, Eric Arnould whipped through most of them at a pace that left me wishing he had more time to linger on and digest their richness. I hope there’s a paper published out of this (Craig just told me via comment to this post that there is indeed one).

Looking at cultural articles in the area of retail (a fairly small subsegment of overall cultural consumer research), the authors purported to examine the genealogy, the rhetorical scientific language “games” of the articles, and to examine the epistemology, ontology, and axiology of certain key “exemplary” texts.

Now, for those of you who are not up on your philosophy of science, it’s well worth brushing up on.  I learned this from classic works in our field authored by Beth Hirschman, Laurie Anderson (then Hudson), and Julie Ozanne,:

• ontology is how scientists and philosophers reason about the nature of reality,
• epistemology is what the nature of knowledge or understanding consists of, and
• axiology is about our purpose or goals

You can find much more detailed definition on Wikipedia, or other online philosophy encyclopedias if you like. Reading through this stuff brings into sharp relief (belief?) the torturous birth pangs of the field of what is now called CCT in the 1980s.Back to the presentation….

They termed the First Wave to be the Romantic Era, which ran from the 1970s to late 1990s. The ontology was the reality of “the cultured consumer,” the epistemology was “scientism, post-positivist, and assimilationist” and the axiology was anti-establishment (as exemplified by the study of alternative retail markets such as swap meets, etc., such as in John Sherry’s work, like Sherry and McGrath).

The Second Wave’s ontology was that of “cultured groups” (a move, apparently from the reality of individuals to groups-change in level of analysis?), the epistemology was “narrative reflexivity” and the axiology was critical engagement with firms. Exemplary texts here were Lisa Penaloza and John Sherry’s work on Niketown, or Penaloza and Gilly’s work on the Changer and the Changed that looks at marketers as cultural change agents who teach immigrants to be consumers.

The epiphanous present moment is included in the Third Wave, which they called “Towards cultural marketing management” and in that third waves they saw the ontology as one that engaged or focused upon “networks, post-natural and post-authentic” (again, the networks seems like a level of analysis change), an epistemology that is multimodal, multiple method, multisensory, and uses multiple diverse teams, and an axiology of engagement with both consumers and managers.

So there seem to be two trajectories in the historical overview. The first was towards a more network-embedded view of consumption. The second was towards an engagement with both producers or firms and consumers or consumer communities. We could see both trajectories as interlinked.

The presentation highlighted the very interesting differences from seeing brands as collections of associations in people’s information processing noggins (a la Kevin Keller) to seeing brands as part of a “brand matrix,” a type of actor-network theory of brands and branding in which brand are cultural insertions that take on a life of their own and affect various constituents and stakeholders (beyond the consumer-sounds a bit like Kotler’s megamarketing on the brand side).

But the defining moment in the presentation, and the biggest controversy and most pointed attention to it came from the summary, in which the presenter called for there to be “no more case studies” in consumer culture research. Apparently, this is part of the epistemological trend towards more multiple methods research, more diverse research teams, and, apparently, the move to multi-sited ethnography.

No more case studies? Let’s pick up that discussion-and it was one of the big discussions at this year’s conference-in tomorrow’s posting.

Posted in Ethnography, Consumer Culture Theory, Qualitative Research Methods, Academic Life, Marketing Research, Conferences & Presentation, Marketing Science | Print | 6 Comments »

June 1, 2010 by Robert Kozinets.

I thought for a while before writing this blog entry, which is really about a personal matter, a death in my family of my father’s first cousin this week. I just attended her funeral. I thought: “is it right to mix a personal family matter with this blog, which usually discusses more formal, business stuff, like my research work.”

After contemplating it for a while, I came to the realization that a lot of this blog actually is about personal matters. In fact, a lot of my research is sort of personal and introspective. I recently have given a few doctoral consortium talks about research topics and research impact, and I’ve noted how personal good research often is. So, if there’s one thing I’ve discovered lately that feel important, it’s that the personal and the “business” oriented concerns mix and merged together in my thoughts and in my research.

Blogs are interesting places where we can do this sort of exploration. This blog in a way gives you a little insight into some of the stories behind my other writing, and it gives me a forum for exploring my own thoughts in a way that’s a lot less constrained and forced than my more formal writing like articles or book chapters.

So I am writing this blog entry about my late cousin Julie Garden, was also known as Joy Hall. Joy had a lasting impact on my life and interests and I wanted to share some of the impact she had on me in on the world in general.

Joy was an entrepreneur. After getting her accounting degree (one of the first women in Canada to do so), in the 1950s, she had an idea for a new company that she started with her husband, Moe. The company was called Ambassador Leather Goods. Her idea was to make a type of file folder for credit cards and build it into a stylish wallet. They distributed it through mail-order sales, in a time when the mail order company was cutting-edge marketing science.

Joy was an innovator. The idea behind the company was to merge two at that time cutting-edge trends: the rise of credit cards, and the consequent need the people and organize them, and the efficiency of the mail system and the ability of it to look deliver goods and services through direct mail and catalog-based businesses. This was like riding the Internet wave of the 1950s.

Joy was extremely successful. The business Joy and her husband started was wildly successful, moving from Toronto to Niagara Falls, Canada and from there to Niagara Falls, New York. In the memorial service today, her brother quoted the astonishing figure that at one time 87% of the mail going to Niagara Falls, New York was headed to Ambassador Leather Goods. The company later relocated again, this time to Phoenix, Arizona, which at this time in the mid-1960s was still largely undeveloped, but whose potential Joy, again presciently, recognized.

One of the things that I noticed when I read about Joy’s business in some of the reflections that people had about it online, one of thing that people found most memorable about the Ambassador Leather Goods catalog was the picture of Joy and Moe on the inside front cover and it was signed Joy and Moe Hall. People reflected on that picture. They opined that this was a happy family, a family that somehow by buying these wallets in different goods through the mail they were partaking in. I have no doubt that this personal touch, with their actual signatures, was Joy’s idea.

In a way this was a brand community, maybe even one of the first brand communities. It was a mixing of familial and close knit communal feelings with the commercial and economic workings of the business.

That theme, the relationship and interrelationship of the communal and the commercial, has been a central element of my research work throughout my career. It certainly was a part of Joy’s business and her family’s business as well, as they experimented with forms of multilevel marketing that tried to combine various social relationships with the logics of business. Ruminating on them, writing about them, I had contemplated these interesting social interminglings for decades before I even entered my doctoral program.

It was during her time in Phoenix that Joy had a serious health issue that led her to distrust conventional medicine and to embrace alternative forms of treatment. She was diagnosed with a terminal disease, but she resisted conventional treatments and drugs and sought out alternative treatments, which cured her.

After this incredible experience, she became an evangelical advocate of various sorts of alternative remedies and alternative belief systems. Later, she would be instrumental in institutionalizing, fundraising, and bringing naturopathic medicine to Canada. Because of this work, naturopathy has thrived in Canada, and on practically every corner in my neighborhood there is a naturopathic and homeopathic clinic.

Joy was into healthy food. I remember first learning about the merits of organic food and about vegetarianism from Joy when I was just a kid. And colonic irrigation. Wheat grass juice. Chelation therary. And aura reading. I remember that she insisted that green grapes had powerful anti-toxin properties. She had cheated death once, and I think she planned to continue cheating it, perhaps indefinitely. She was very interested in life extension, and I believe she had ties to the early post-human movement.

Joy was an iconoclast. Another way that Joy influenced my thinking, probably the most profound way, was her introduction of a range of alternative thinkers and writers to me. I remember one of the early books she gave me to read I was probably about 11 years old) was Vera Stanley Alder’s “The Finding of the Third Eye,” and T. Lobsang Rampa’s “You Forever.”

She introduced me to the work of Baba Ram Dass and Dr. John Lilly. I even met some of the spirit channeling and UFO worshiping Unarians at a meeting in her home where, as an impressionable 12 or 13-year-old, I was told by one of their leaders and ’sensitives’ that I had an “extraordinarily high vibration level” (I felt really special at the time). That exposure contributed to a lifelong interest in mysticism and alternative and particularly Eastern religions, some of which is apparent in my writings about Burning Man (particularly the book chapters).

Joy was a freethinker, she used her wealth and influence to explore and share new ideas. I remember her enthusiasm and her clear bright eyes, the passion with which she spoke, and my own thrilling excitement when I heard the ideas I had never heard from anyone else before being shared. She would take the time to invite my sister and I to share in these ideas, coming to meetings as if we were sort of modern-day cellar Christians, in her wild, extravagant penthouse mansion on Toronto’s Bloor Street was our secret hiding place.

This is my tribute to my cousin, Joy Garden, to a dynamic, independent, free spirited, and compassionate woman who changed the lives of so many she touched.

Joy, you are loved, and you will be missed.

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