Often these are great stories.  Inspiring.  Fabulous work.  But as the theme of this conference suggests, there also seems to be something missing—the need for innovation is real.   I’m going to talk today about some of the changes in first, perspective on what brands do, and second, in the way we approach research, that I think will help bring real innovation  in the space a lot closer.   It’s got three big parts instead of four, some nice pictures, probably too much theory, and no spectacular case at the end, but I’m hoping it is provocative and provides you all with some things to think with.  So first, ‘the work brands do’ .

Brand strategy is a very good thing to have, but when brands get out into the world things don’t always happen as planned.

Old & New 'Dynamic Ribbon'

As I’m sure you all know, Coca – Cola recently made a change to one of its key identity elements – swapping the old plain white dynamic ribbon for a new, ‘effervescent’ one .  It takes an incredible amount of time, effort, and money to manage a change like this, everything from delivery trucks to billboards to cans, to vending machines and the cartons for 12 packs had to be carefully thought through

Coke logo in the real world

Just so the Coke logo can eventually end up in a setting like this one, in a London Neighborhood.

Similarly,

Virgin is one of the most recognized logos in the west, and Mr. Branson and his companies have worked hard to make sure that it stands for a level of quality, service and value across markets.

Which this retailer certainly recognized and respects – along with his respect for t-mobile, O2, orange, and Vodafone.

Mobile Brands in the real world

Which is the point I’d like to make here.  At some point, brand strategy has to leave the strategy binders, and go out into the world.  Because the world, with all of its mixing of contexts and concepts, with all of its unexpected juxtapositions, is where consumers interact with the products, the messages, the images, and the services which are constitutive of their idea of the brand.

Those contexts matter.  From our perspective – as researchers, as social scientists, it is just as important to understand the experiential aspects of context, as it is the functional ones.  We’re not thinking of experience as if were a ride in a theme park either.  We are instead, focusing on meaning, and how it is actively constructed in everyday life.

For instance, part of a strategy in the media or technology of home entertainment might involve positioning the brand and the products as central to a family’s time together.

But how well do we know what that entails?  How often is the idea simplified into a few assumptions about ‘family rooms’, media, technologies, and time spent watching media on a technology?  We need to get away from pre-forming the investigations like this.  In a worldwide in-home study we are currently conducting, one of the things we’ve done is to step back from specific questions and ask people to show us what the ‘center’ of their home is, and to leave it open so that they can elaborate on what that means to them – a kind of ethnographic projective test.

Slide 9 – China 01 ‘center’

What’s clear even early in our study is that the idea of the center has an incredible range of realizations.  This first image is from China, while this second one

Slide 10  – Spain 03 ‘center’

From Spain, is markedly different along any number of dimensions.  And if you look, it isn’t really national differences that are being reflected here, not ‘markets’ made up out of geographical boundaries, but differences in value, in expression, in the kind of story that is being told about what matters to the folks who live here.

People use brands, they don’t simply receive them or perceive them.  More specifically, people use all kinds of products, embedded in contexts to tell important stories about themselves, and brand is only one – though an important one – of those dimensions.

In the work we’ve been doing to study the domestic context around the world – marrying an ethnographic, visual survey with a large scale worldwide consumer survey – we’ve been seeing this range in some detail.

Slide 11 – Lovely London main room

Yes, sometimes a living room can look like a shot from a lifestyle magazine, where the direct influence of culturally proffered aesthetic values is pretty clear– this flat in central London, for example, clearly  exudes a “good taste” that we all recognize because we’ve seen the elements so often –

Slide 12 – teddy bear couch

But far more often, in ways that are interesting and varied, they look something like this living room in Moscow.   Interesting enough.  I’m sure as you look at this you begin to get some ideas about who lives here and what they might value.  But what is even more fascinating to us is that a room, like this one

Slide 13  Ornate Russian Bedroom

Is from the same household.  The level of variation, the range of contexts, the mix of styles, uses, and patterns of consumption vary even within homes.  And yet, to the folks who live here, it is all of a piece, it fits, it works, and it matters.

When we say that people “use” brands, we’re not just talking about so called “aspirational” or “lifestyle” brands:  the conspicuousness of a Burberry Plaid or the ubiquity of a Nike swoosh, – in fact, explicit “brand consciousness” is only a small part of the way in which people use brands and products.

Slide 14:  Kitchen with refrigerator

Consider this nicely appointed kitchen – cooktop, stainless hood, side-by-side refrigerator complete with Mona Lisa magnets.  It could be a suburban kitchen almost anywhere in North America.

Nothing really stands out about it unless you know that it is actually in a suburban area of Beijing.  Then you realize that it is in fact saying something – saying ‘western’, saying progressive –to the friends and colleagues who visit this home.

But let me stress again that what we’re talking about is not a one sided interaction, it is not consumption but construction, it is in fact, a dialogue with the companies who provide and produce the brands and products that people can use to say things that are important about themselves.

Just as it is important to understand that people are not passive recipients of brand messages, it is equally important to understand that brands, companies, and products actively shape the ways that people interact with and understand their worlds.

This is where the other side of the dialogue comes into play.    As individuals, we look for two things:  a suggestion of what’s possible to say, and someone in whom we trust and have confidence to make that suggestion.

And here’s the nice part:  brands have increasingly become one of the most important places where people look for those suggestions about what they might be.  Great brands are the ones where people trust that the brand knows the complexities and possibilities of the situation better than they do.  They help people do both expressive work, and instrumental work.

Let me give you a pair of examples to make this point in a bit more detail:  if I ask you, “what time is it?”

Slide 15  Clock face

You won’t run outside and see how high the sun is in the sky, or where your shadow is cast on the ground.  One of the “Consequences of Modernity”, as the noted social theorist Anthony Giddens puts it, has necessitated that we all – around the world, across cultures, — have a shared understanding of this experientially fundamental thing, time, BUT what we all use to make sense of that experience are essentially a collection of abstractions – time zones, the international date line, “am” and “pm” ,12 or 24 regular units named ‘hours’ — to be able to work together, to keep trains and planes and markets moving.  The watch on your wrist, the clock on the wall are simply the technologies through which you participate in this complex, global abstraction of what, long ago, was concrete and local.

More and more parts of life are, or are becoming like that.  And in many ways brands are the tools people trust to help them through the complexities of anything from their health to getting to work and back each day.

Do you know, really, how an airplane works?  But you get on it, you look at the flight attendant’s smile, the shiny surfaces of the wings, the purposeful activity of the ground crew, and – despite how far any of these things might be from what really makes it work, you say, “this will fly”

Brands matter in this.

Slide 16  BMW kidney grilles and nose badge

Most of us would be unlikely to buy a new car from someone named bob who was going door to door selling cars that he designed and built in his garage.

But a company like BMW can successfully deploy something like “adaptive cruise control,” a technology which adjusts the car’s speed to the density of traffic around the vehicle — that folks like me have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER about how it actually works.   and we will buy it.

Brands are things we trust not in a blind faith kind of way, but in the same way that we might use a map to find our way through new territory. Brands, products and services are  an intimate part of the stories that we are all constantly in the process of telling about ourselves – to ourselves, our closest friends and family, our peers, and to neighbors and passers by and to the larger world.

Knowing what people are saying with your brands, knowing the way in which products are used in the real world is an essential part of realizing a brand strategy.  And the only way to do that, is to pay attention.  Deeply, globally, and in context.

Slide 17 A research problem

I’d like to step back and come at some of these same issues from a slightly different direction now.   I think that there are two necessary keys to enabling the kind of fruitful collaboration between research and design in the Brand Strategy space that has marked so much of industrial and product design and development over the last decade.  As I’m sure many of you know, prior to the early ‘nineties, research was often understood as antithetical to design, and especially to innovation.

Amsterdam DMI anecdote

It took a shift in perspective (from product centered to user centered)  as well as a change in tools (the widespread acceptance of ethnographic techniques) and in research framework (direct collaboration/integration of research & design teams)  to change this kind of thinking.

So what might those two types of change (perspective and research approach) look like in the brand space?   The shift in perspective – is what I’ve started to outline in the first part of this talk.   It needs to be a bit more pragmatically drawn though, for it to become clear both what to study – the all-important question of the research object – and how to study it in a way that makes it actionable for strategists and designers.

Slide 18 Shannon-Weaver

The Basic Shannon-Weaver model of communication

I was hoping for at least a few miserable groans from the audience on this one.  Yes, it is the venerable Shannon-weaver model.  But I’m not going theoretically medieval on you, I’m just using this as a jumping off place for a short, historical story.

We can’t really escape the fact that this space – understanding the effectiveness of brands, increasing their value and the efficacy of brand strategies – has at its base a pretty simple, triangular relationship.  And in the middle of last century, the Shannon-Weaver model was adopted from communications/signal theory as a way to represent this relationship.

Slide 19 SW w Noise

Adding 'noise' to the arc

The original intent of the model wasn’t simply to describe sending and receiving, but to provide people working in the communications field with a way to focus their attention away from too few points where things could go wrong, and to start to see the entire communication loop as needing attention.  This was a good thing.

Slide 20  Interpretation

Intention and Interpretation

Over time, branding theory got a bit more sophisticated, and a little less message-centric.  The notion of mediation, the impact of different media and channels on reception, all came to play a critical part in thinking about communication.  Moreover, breaking out the ideas of intention and reception (under many different names) enabled companies to pay close attention to effectiveness by looking at how well the reception matched the intent.  An entire industry was spawned around doing this, at least in relationship to  advertising and communications.

Slide 21 more brand things

At the same time, more and more brands were getting to be bigger, or at least more complicated, than single products.

Slide 22 competitors

Combining that proliferation with the core issues of positioning a brand (and the various things that carry it) vis a vis competitive products and companies, and the field starts to look a little more complex.   But the direction of those arrows is still pretty much all one way.

Slide 23 Agent Change

Which brings us to the shift in thinking about the consumer.  I know that for years, people have studied the consumer, have tried to understand motives, attitudes and ‘needs’, and have dissected endlessly the impact of various demo- and psycho- graphic factors on all of the above.

However, paying attention to who people are or what they value isn’t the same as assigning them a different, more critical role than recipients or decoders, nearly as passive as wind vanes, or the needle on your car’s speedometer.

By  shifting the role of the consumer in this model, you necessarily add a whole new set of relationships.  Important ones.

Slide 24 The social field

As important as this relationship (the central arc) is, from a consumer’s point of view it is still nearly incidental to everyday life, though it is there.

More central is the social field in which people live, work, and play.  And that gets us back to a couple of points I was trying to make in the first half of the talk.

First, the notion that a big part of the brand dynamic is the communication not between the brand and the consumer, but between the consumer and  his or her social field, the ground against which the “presentation of self” as Berger and Luckmann so aptly characterized it, takes place.  A BMW or a Previa?  Zegna trousers or blue jeans?  It is not always a matter of what you can afford, but of what you want to say about who you are, to the people you interact with in ways that matter to you.

Slide 25  Activity

Second, and just as important is the role that brands play in providing access and confidence to the tools and systems that are a necessary part of doing what one does, in enabling people to engage in meaningful activity – this is the instrumental counterpart to its expressive role, the trust we have in technologies that let’s us drive at 75 miles an hour – remembering that when the first locomotives were being tested scientists warned that human beings could not survive moving at speeds above 30 miles an hour.

Slide 26 The sliding of categories

Something else interesting happens to this central arc when you re-conceptualize the role & the context of the consumer in this way.  The range of choices that will help a consumer accomplish either an expressive or an instrumental task might no longer defined by a product category.  A bike might not be arrayed against other bicycle options, but against running shoes or a week on a backcountry hike.   Take, for instance, the emergence of energy drinks, which realigned not just the soft-drink category, but coffee as well, especially in the critically important Gen-Y group.

Slide 27  bottom of the loop.

Finally, is the phenomena that may make you sound like a freshly minted graduate student for saying it, but it’s the right word:  disintermediation, or the removal of ‘middlemen’ whether those be channels, institutions, or — most salient to this discussion – vehicles for messages such as ads, brands, and products.  Consumers now have tons of opportunities to see the behavior and values of whole corporations directly, to address them directly;  and companies can and do spend more time communicating directly with consumers on more levels.  This means that there is yet another influence on the way in which anything you (as producers) do is understood and interpreted.

It’s pretty messy, isn’t it?  It looks much more like a diagram of a social or political system than it does a transmission model.   Which is good.

Slide 28  red lines model

Its much easier to study something circumscribed, something of which you can ask, “do they get it?”  than it is to study this – the process of constructing not just ‘getting’ message and meaning.   A shift in the central research question from the  objects – which are always shifting anyway – to the processes.  To focus on the how instead of the who or the what.

Still, in some ways, though complex, this picture isn’t actually all that much of a methodological stretch.  We can figure out how to figure this out.    But now multiply this by 10, or by 20 or by 50 countries, and all their subcultures and subgroups.  Far more product lines, more brands, more companies are trying to come up with products in not just their home markets, but in large numbers of  very different markets around the world.  You do that, and this complexity is multiplied, not just enlarged.

Slide 30 Break –global scale

Any of you familiar with me or the work done at E-Lab and Xmod over the past decade or so probably assume that this is all just a longwinded buildup to announcing that Ethnography is the answer.

Were that it were so.

Slide 31 Margaret

Not that ethnography isn’t a good thing.    By looking closely at the places where people interact with brands everyday — which is what a good ethnography would do –  it can  provide a description of these contexts and systems, and an interpretation or understanding of how those systems work.  Good ethnography isn’t just about the data gathering techniques that provide direct access to these contexts, though those are critical, it is also centrally concerned with making a useful interpretation of that data, a story about how experience is organized from the users point of view.  When we are doing research on brands, we’re building a model that describes the ‘conversation,’ the dialogue, between the brand and the consumer, as it is played out in everyday life.

Ethnography is a great approach for this.  And as I’ve argued ad nauseum elsewhere, an approach that has a natural affinity with the way that designers work.

But the scale of the problem has changed, and to work at that scale –

globally, multi-nationally, etcetera-ly, the way ethnography has been done in the past no longer offers a big enough hammer.

I’ve used this old stock photo of Margaret Mead in Samoa for years to talk about some of the critical components of ethnography.  But looked at again in the context of the problem we’re talking about today,  it cuts both ways – an ethnographer talking to one or two people at a time, in a single country, and taking a very long time to turn those interviews and observations into something that the rest of her colleagues can engage with.

Slide 32 Lotsa margarets

Even a couple dozen margarets wouldn’t meet either the scale or the time tables most of you are faced with.  And thinking of three or four ethnographers – the average size of an ethnographic research group these days — doing the project is no long practical or effective or even that smart.

Just as there was a shift in how the research was done when social scientists started to work with product design or ad planning groups, there is a clear need for a rethinking of research in relation to the demands of global brand strategy.

And (I swear that this will be the last one of these)–once again, I think there are two parts to such a re-imagination:

First is for ethnography – really ethnographers –  to shift its position from insisting on the  personal experience of the ethnographer, on ‘directly observed (by me)’ as a necessary condition of the work, and thus go from focusing on the first hand collection of data to a focus on the work of interpretation.  Which still means that  someone, somehow, has to  provide data at scale.  Who knows how to do that well?  Survey researchers.

Slide 33  qual v. quant

So the second point is to get rid of this divide

Slide 34 qual v. quant with the red circle thing

I think we need to reinvent the model for ethnographic research, again.   To lose the qual quant distinction.

Slide 35 interp quant?

This is work that needs to bridge both of those ‘us and them’ divides:  research and design, as well as qualitative and quantitative. I’m not exactly sure where this will end up, or what it might be called — Interpretive quant research?  Statistical ethnography? But I know it’s the right direction.  Here’s what  we’ve been trying.

Slide 36 emerging approach

We’ve started to tie very specific ethnographic data – at the household level — to globally-scaled databases on behavior, values, demographics and more.  We’re developing scalable processes for keeping ethnographic data in addressable databases rather than having every study be a one-off, an island that never gets revisited.

We think it is important to plan methodologies and fieldwork at a global scale, but also to integrate local expertise  — so we’re developing a global network of senior researchers the tools and project processes to co-ordinate across continents, languages, and time zones.

Divide and conquer – ethnography has almost always meant “custom” research, with little leverage available because of the specificity of the questions.  By working closely with our quantitative research colleagues and paying attention to the models of syndicated research, we’ve begun to figure out how to split the problems up in ways that allow for some work to be done as analyses of existing data (even while we are building those datasets), while others are tightly focused new investigations.

Finally, we think of the whole enterprise as a longitudinal investigation.  We know that there is immense, untapped value in being able to compare and contrast over years, not just across groups or countries.

We’ve been working on this for almost two years now, and it isn’t easy.   The data is fabulous.  We need some more problems to throw at it, some more experience in working with different kinds of issues and questions.  But that will come.  Several of the companies represented here at the conference are some of the brave early adopters helping us work our way into this new model.

So.     It isn’t the pretty new version yet.  It’s got all the warts and wrinkles of  a work in progress actually.  But we think it is the right direction.  We’d love feedback, comment, and engagement on it.

thank you



I don’t have a pat answer.  I think that thinking about thinking in an open-source sort of way does entail some risk of a form of idea piracy.  That’s not without basis, given the fact that a great deal of work in the design/research intersection has been ‘citation-free,’ largely, I think, due the perception among all kinds of practitioners that they need to be able to claim uniqueness in order to offer value, and that uniqueness has been understood as pure invention.  Differentiation is seen as the offer of value to clients.  In a  practitioner-heavy field, that becomes the dominant ethos.

We started pulp because we think the field will grow more robustly if it is more open, if the contest of ideas happens with the ideas rather than in marketing claims.  But if the zeitgeist of the space is going to change toward an everyday comfort with saying, “We got this idea from Dr. X, and man is it cool”  two things have to happen:  Dr. X has to put his idea out beyond the margins of his own practice, where it may have huge holes poked into it, and the folks who use it, build on it, have to be willing to say that Dr. X works for their arch-competitor, Xcorp.

I think that’s worth it if I get to see more of Dr. X’s stuff in return.  And if I’m Dr. X (which really, I’m not.  Honest.  But I’ve met him), I would like to be able to tell my next prospective customer that the model or the method I’m suggesting for their work has been raked over the intellectual coals and turned inside out by the entire field, and remains standing.  My apologies for the terribly mixed metaphors, a habit I picked up from John Cain.

Here’s why I’m putting this up as a strand:  I may well be wrong about the idea of having readers, as well as writers and critics.  Maybe the only way to get the kind of depth of engagement, quality of interaction over work in progress is to wall the garden, to make the space only available to folks who have put something in.  I’m trying to avoid a game/sports analogy here, folks.  I’ll leave it at that.  I’ve gone back and forth on this a thousand times during the floating of the idea for pulp and the building of it, and have come down on the side of thinking that the folks out there who read, but don’t contribute are for the most part not pirates but instead nascent writers and thinkers themselves.  And the best thing to do is set the example of being open about the work and equally committed to citation, acknowledgment.

So I’d like to open it up.  Get comments, points of view.  It’s early in the life of pulp, and we could change the way it works.   Or see where it goes, how it goes.