Marketing Pop Culture

Gladwell on the Black-White I.Q. Gap

Elsewhere on this blog, I've talked about how culture provides a context not only for how marketing communications are understood, but also for how we understand the world.  Malcolm Gladwell comes at this from a slightly different angle as he explores the supposed I.Q. gap between Blacks and White in his review of James Flynn's  "What is Intelligence?", where he reaches the following conclusion:

I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person's mind but the quality of the world that person lives in.

This should put to rest all of those who want to make the case that Blacks are somehow intellectually inferior to Whites based on genetics.  More importantly, it highlights how providing an environment rich in experiences helps the mind become accustomed to "cognitive complexity".  The brain is, in fact, a muscle that requires exercise like any other part of the body.

Read the full New Yorker article here.

Hard[er] out here for a CMO

As reported in Adweek, CMO tenure is down:

the global nature of today's economy and the speed at which it moves has left many CEOs with unrealistic expectations, said Ian Beavis, vice president of marketing for Kia Motors America. Many chief executives, he said, are looking for a "magic bullet" to solve their bottom-line problems. "Marketing is a complex combination of art and science that requires ruthless pursuit of strategy and tremendous flexibility of execution depending on market conditions," he said. "There are a lot more CEOs from a financial background who don't know that."

One of those “market conditions” is culture. As Grant McCracken and I talked about, marketers will have to get better at reading culture’s Matrix-like code in order to get a better sense of what's coming at them across the landscape and what the landscape might look like when they launch their campaigns. Yes, they’ve got sophisticated marketing dashboards at their disposal. But these dashboards only give them a sense of what they can control and influence. A captain can only guide the ship, he/she has no control over the waters on which they sail. Therefore, an ability to understand what’s traveling through the medium of culture will become a competitive advantage.  Perhaps this tool would do something like this.

"Flock and Flow": Harvesting Chaos

One of the cool things about blogging, at least for me, is the ability to interview marketing thought leaders.  Later today, I’ll be conducting an interview with cultural anthropologist and fellow blogger Grant McCracken. As I noted in an earlier post, I share his interest in understanding how culture impacts our understanding of brands.   

Here’s one nugget from the book that I plan to probe: Successful marketing organizations of the very near future will be those that become adept at harvesting chaos.  In a nutshell, it’s about making sense of the cultural innovation that’s crackling—even now!—all across the marketplace. 

Some questions that his book addresses:

• In a time of permanent, discontinuous change, how can a company tell which cultural trends are worth following? 

• How can a company ascertain where it sits in relation to these trends?

• How can it build a long-term strategy for dealing with constant change?

Stay tuned.

Culture: The Newest Medium

Amid all of this talk about new media, culture is the one medium that’s rarely discussed.  Most people take culture for granted.  But as the marketplace—the cultural landscape—fragments into niche upon niche, culture will take on increasing importance for marketers.  Soon, effective communications planning will not only hinge on the ability to determine the right message sent at the right time via the right vehicle, but also understanding the cultural medium through which the message must travel.

Wikipedia defines culture as:

Culture has been called "the way of life for an entire society." As such, it includes codes of manners, dress, language, religion, rituals, norms of behaviour and systems of belief.

And, the Random House dictionary provides a useful definition of “medium”:

An intervening substance through which something else is transmitted or carried on.

Culture colors how we see the world and, more importantly, how we process communications.  On a national, regional and local level, culture determines how we frame everything.  For example, in an earlier post I’ve highlighted the work of Clotaire Rapaille, who continues to successfully document the cultural “codes” that exist for services, product categories and even concepts (like seduction, work or shopping).  His work is valuable precisely because it exposes the frames that shape our perceptions and it gets us even closer to understanding why one size fits all communications don’t work.

Perhaps it’s also useful to think of culture as a medium because we often speak of ideas traveling through it.