CULTUREMAKING

Culturemaking encoded

A little old now but I still like it.

Culturemaking gets Coldplay's X&Y treatment.

The cultural resolution

A few months back, when the plannersphere was going a bit myth crazy, it triggered a build that's been hiding at the back of my thought cabinet.  So here it is, finally.  For John it's the 'conflict resolution approach', whilst for Faris it's a turn to the 'dark side' of the force.  In both cases, they are essentially alluding to the way that brands draw on myths to resolve cultural contradictions. 

Faris pays a nice homage to the myth-meister general himself Claude Lévi-Strauss.  A structural anthropologist who described the purpose of myth as 'provid[ing] a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.'  Contradictions stem from opposing structural relations, made up of universal binaries, which Lévi-Strauss considered to be universal concerns of all cultures. 

One of the first people to apply Lévi-Strauss' thinking to the branding world (commercially at least) were the UK marketing semioticians Ginny Valentine and Monty Alexander, who started using the myth quadrant around the early nineties.  This is basically where two binaries - that have high structural relevance to the category - are paired off against each other to generate two 'cultural norms' and two 'cultural contradictions'.  The two cultural contradictions provide an opportunity for brands to engineer a resolution that has the potential to transform the category.  Here's the model brought to life based on the fundamental structure of female beauty, featuring the ever-popular blog case study, Dove ... 

Various explanations have been offered for the success of Dove, but I'd argue that this is one of the more powerful ones given that Dove is ultimately resolving the modern day contradiction of female beauty - attractiveness with 'real' curves, in larger sizes etc.  The irony of course, is that Dove's images are still not a 'real' depiction of female beauty as such, since they remain an aspirational ideal for many 'everyday women'.  On browsing through a selection of ads for this example generally, it was quite disturbing just how few ads use 'everyday women', other than insurance, anti-smoking and other government-led campaigns. 

That said, it's certainly a more motivating and realistic goal for most women compared with all other cosmetic and beauty communications, which only draw on 'unreal(istic) beauty'.  Dove broke the mould, and the rest, as they say, is history.  I can't say that I know how the insight really emerged, possibly from a stream of insecure, fed-up women in focus groups and interviews.  Be that as it may, this insight turns out to be a glaring opportunity once we turn our attention to locating modern female beauty within culture.

I would also like to turn briefly to another case study favourite, Persil's 'Dirt is Good'.  I don't wish to debate whether the campaign's really working for Unilever in financial terms here (this has already been discussed at length elsewhere), only to show that it's really a simple semiotic inversion strategy at heart ...

Admittedly the examples that I've used here are a little crude to serve the model's structuralist ends, so please, no hate mail or spam for suggesting that everyday women are unattractive - hopefully you get the point!  It's also worth noting a number of theoretical limitations.  To start, it offers a snapshot of a reality at a fixed moment in time; it does not account for the instability and historical specificity of cultural meanings over time e.g. during the Victorian period in England appreciation of 'real beauty' was the dominant norm by far. Nor are the contradictions necessarily applicable cross-culturally.  Beyond this, it is also fair to challenge the very notion that universal binaries structure culture, as not only does the model account for a limited set of structural relations at any one time, but it strips away, and is unable to cope with, the sheer cultural complexity of everday life.  Although I subscribe to these (poststructuralist) criticisms theoretically speaking, when it comes to the 'practical crunch' these limitations are less problematic, and it still remains one of the more powerful semiotic-type tools around.

A more nuanced cultural reading of female beauty ideals in the West might reveal how they are changing over time, broadly inline with global and local fashion, film, music, and other significant culture/media industries.  The cultural resonance and success of Dove's campaign for 'real beauty' for example, is also due in part to the broader naturalness tsunami that is sweeping across everything from food and healthcare to holidays and architecture.  The root cause of which is a backlash against the philosophy of scientific progress to a large extent, and the detrimental environmental and societal effects it’s being blamed for.  This also includes a cultural backlash against cosmetic surgery (despite its increasing popularity), airbrushed pictures, perfect models, celebrities and the like (think Getty Images vs Flickr).  But it's important to keep in mind a sense of cultural relativism at this point.  Dove is only 'real' because the rest of the beauty industry is so 'unreal'.  And with the exposure and influence of people generated content rapidly increasing, I suspect the real 'real beauty' resolution has only just stepped off the catwalk.

References

Lévi-Strauss, C.  (1977) Structural Anthropology, Harmondsworth: Peregrine.

Alexander, M.  (1996) "The Myth at The Heart of The Brand", The Big Brand Challenge ESOMAR Seminar, October.

Masters at work

Managed to cobble together some relaxation hours yesterday night (a somewhat rare occasion at the moment!) to watch the C4 repeat of the 100 Greatest Comedy Stand Ups – having missed it the first time around.

I actually think comedian's are great working examples for brands – regardless of whether the strategy is a humour-based one – in that their whole profession/act is based on cultural relevance and constant reinvention.  Their attention to news/media issues, societal tensions and cultural norms is second to none – putting most marketers, planners and cultural researchers to shame.  And as one critic pointed out, their ability to talk about high brow subjects in a low brow manner, and vice versa, is often a core part of their stand up strategy - an effective way of 'doing interesting'.

I was happy to see Chris Rock riding high on the list – one of my personal favourites alongside the overall voted number one Billy Connolly.  Here’s a classic clip of Rock in action, which ties in quite nicely with a previous post on the cultural construction of race …

Presenting Beardyman

                        

Last year, around June time, I went along to a rather brilliant design presentation night at Sadlers Wells.

On the lineup was a guy called Bernhard Steinerhoff who was billed as an Austrian environmental design thinker.  After a promising start, he randomly transformed into a human beatbox machine and delivered a bizzare yet outstandingly talented performance - I was truly blown away.  Did anyone else see it by chance?

Anyway, found out the other day that he’s only the UK beatbox champion aka Beardyman. 

Here’s his MySpace site and humorous personal website – well worth checking out.  Particularly enjoyed his Tim Shaw radio interview on Kerrang Radio.

Race, the floating signifier

This video isn't branding specific, but I think it's well worthwhile venturing outside of the branding bubble from time-to-time (at least).  It's a clip of Stuart Hall in action at Goldsmiths College talking about representation and signification in the context of race.  More generally, it encourages us to question taken-for-granted scientific truths and think about how meaning is socio-historically or culturally constructed.  If inspired, then you may want to check out the MEF for more cultural and media goodies.

AF's new testament

                                                                                    

Following up on Neil's lead, I finally got round to checking out NMEs' free premiere streaming of Arcade Fire's Neon Bible - and must say that I'm pretty impressed.

Track 4, Keep The Car Running, steals the show for me, quite possibly a contender for tune of the year even.  Kind of has a Christmas feel-good vibe without being Christmas-y if that errr, makes sense?  Must be the choir thing going on, which does straddle on the cusp of cheese at times, but heh, a little cheese never hurt anyone right?

Anyway, definitely worthy of a purchase.  You'll need to register and load the media player first - but all straightforward.

Enjoy.

Transculturalism: putting culture into community

Sometimes it can take a number of years for a term or idea to catch on, in this case, around sixty or so.  Transculturalism, a word that's slowly creeping its way into marketing-orientated books and blogs, was actually first coined back in 1940s by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz.  What is even more astonishing, is that his thinking was based on an article published much earlier in 1891 by José Marti entitled 'Nuestra America'. 

An extract from this article, featured in the rather aptly named London Journal of Canadian Studies, captures the dynamics at play:

Ortiz, following Marti’s lead, defined transculturalism, in its earliest stage as a synthesis of two phases occurring simultaneously, one being a deculturalization of the past with a métissage with the present. This reinventing of new common culture is therefore based on the meeting and the intermingling of the different peoples and cultures. In other words one’s identity is not strictly one dimensional (the self) but is now defined and more importantly recognized in rapport with the other. In other words one’s identity is not singular but multiple. As Scarpetta stated earlier “Each person is a mosaic.” (p.8)

But I doubt even Marti or Ortiz realised just how relevant and powerful the idea of transculturalism would become, especially following the increasing ubiquity of the Internet throughout the world.  Transculturalism: how the world is coming together is a more modern take on this idea, which features a number of essays and personal tales about people who consider themselves ‘transculturalists’:

This book is about identity, and the modern quest for belonging.  Still, it’s not about conforming.  At its core, we will explore how certain curious, open-minded intelligent people manage, through perseverance and affinity, to adapt to new alien culture, in order to explore, examine and infiltrate foreign culture. (p.25)

What I like about the transculturalism idea generally, is the important role that it assigns to culture in the way that communities develop.  Reducing community to conformism based on psychological drivers is not sufficient in my humble opinion.  Transculturalism reminds us that cultural pre-understandings and diversity influence the way that communities are formed, and that grass-roots communities in turn influence the future by bringing ‘cultures’ together, not just ‘people’.  The fact that London is one of the most transcultural places on the planet (with around 270 nationalities blurring, bleeding, clashing, colliding), and quite possibly the most creatively diverse, clearly speaks volumes in this sense.  Which begs a key point: we need to be sensitive to the way in which transculturalism is not just a special case for globalisation studies and cross-cultural research, to varying degrees, transculturalism takes place at all levels of geography i.e. national, local and increasingly virtual.  Yes, cultural diversity is now more prevalent than ever, so let’s embrace it, and learn from it.