The enemy within: Philistines in the contemporary corporation

The study of culture and its meanings is the raw material of branding and the contribution of anthropology to marketing. In this article, eminent anthropologist Grant McCracken describes how this core discipline is often missing in the ways companies study their markets. He fingers the culprits – the formal disciplines and the bogus gurus – that, in their different ways, obstruct the proper understanding of the importance of culture to marketing

Levi Strauss, the American maker of blue jeans, missed a change in culture, a shift in consumer taste and preference. The penalty: $1 billion. Quaker missed a change in culture. The penalty: $1.4 billion. Recently, Facebook broke faith with many millions of users and put its rocketing value cap at risk. If only these corporations had had a CCO, a chief culture officer, a senior manager who understands culture, spotting the opportunities and dangers contained therein.

What the corporation has instead is a chorus of professionals who are prepared to treat culture as noise, as a distraction from the matters that really matter, as superstructure that conceals the facts at hand. I review these professionals below. My criticism is disdainful and, let's be honest, rude. But time is short and the costs of ignoring culture are high.

THE BUSINESS SCHOOL

When I taught at the Harvard Business School I would sometimes refer to the movie or the TV programme of the moment. Frequently my students would look at me with confusion in their eyes.

'What's the matter?’ I asked. The answer ‘Well, we understood that when we came to school here we were being asked to put the things of childhood behind us. Now it was going to be economics all the time.'

How very grim. Here was a very good business school that persuaded its student to forget the things they knew about culture. They would graduate actually knowing less about the thing I was there to teach them about.

A couple of years ago, in an article in The Wall Street Journal, Clayton Christensen, Scott Cook and Taddy Hall endeavoured to set the field of marketing back a hundred years. If they were merely three cranks in a coffee shop this wouldn't matter. But Christensen is a deservedly influential professor at the Harvard Business School, Cook is the co-founder of Intuit software, and Hall is the chief strategy officer for the Advertising Research Foundation.

They asserted that a simple rule has been forgotten. To build a product that people want, you need to help them do a job that they are trying to get done. The marketer's fundamental task is not so much to understand the customer as to understand what jobs customers need to do – and build products that serve them.

Here it is again. A deliberate repudiation of the role of culture in the life of the consumer and the professional practice of the marketers. The ‘purpose brand’ proposition is bad thinking. Brands, at their best, are, among other things, bundles of meanings, some of them robust, some of them delicate, all of them poised to speak to one or more segments and to deliver an understanding of not just what the product does but what it means – its cultural meaning.

To reduce the brand to ‘purpose’ is to dumb down the enterprise, diminish the art and science of marketing, beggar the consumer, and so displace the marketer. Our three wise men are conducting themselves as proverbial bulls in the china shop of the marketing concept, method and action, destroying advances made over the past hundred years.

Economists

We know why culture is missing from capitalism. Adam Smith removed it. He said in effect: ‘To understand this thing called a market, we need two parties, engaged by interest, in an act of exchange … and that's all. The social and cultural context we can leave aside.'

It was a liberating idea, but a partial one. We have been trying to recover from its partiality ever since.

Smith's ideas, sufficient in the 18th century, seemed to lose their candle power as markets shifted from a producer focus to a consumer focus, from supplying ‘needs’ to supplying ‘wants'.

Economic actors appeared driven by something larger than self-interest. Furthermore, it was capitalists who addressed the culture deficit, smuggling it back into the pursuit of markets and profits.

The newspaperman Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) talked not about interest but interests. The president of CBS, William S. Paley talked about taste. Charles Revson of Revlon wasn't interested in ‘interest’ at all. Something more was animating markets, he thought. ‘In the factory we make cosmetics; in the store we sell hope.'

These capitalists were quietly, unofficially restoring the thing Smith had excised. After all, to talk about taste is to talk about culture. It is culture that informs the eye, supplies the imagination, and shapes desire.

It is culture that says what a ‘person’ is and the ideas of gender, age, status, ethnicity, beauty, personality and emotion that we use to classify any particular person. Culture is the platonic cave containing the ‘originals’ from which our thoughts and feelings spring.

This rehabilitation of Smith's ideas continues by fits and starts. We dolly back from interest to taste, and from taste to intellectual stopgaps of every kind: demographics, status, psychographics, lifestyle, personality, motivation, decision-making, information processing and attitudes. All have been proposed as ways to understand the secrets of the economy. The business literature of the 20th century is littered with eureka proposals, but from an anthropological point of view, all swap one partial view for another.

CODE-CRACKERS

Every time I hear the name Clotaire Rapaille, I remember a marketing conference a couple of years ago.

We were sitting around a table, four or five of us. It was late. We were deep into our cups. The evening was over. Rapaille's name came up.

Someone said, ‘Oh, yeah, that guy. We hired him. He told us our ATM machine was "mother".' Heads shot up around the table, and almost simultaneously, several voices protested: ‘That's what he said our product was.'

'Hmm,’ I thought, ‘that's the trouble with Jungian archetypes. There only a few of them, and eventually you have to start recycling.'

This is unkind. Rapaille and I are in the same business (now that I make my living as a consultant). And he's a big success. According to a recent story in Fast Company, Rapaille has a mansion in Tuxedo Park, a ninth century castle in France, his own helicopter and millions of dollars. Until recently, I lived in a rickety condo in Montreal where I lived without a car, a chateau, a helicopter or much in the way of a bank account.

But this is not the only provocative thing about the guy. Rapaille claims to have understood Japanese, Chinese, German, American and Indian culture by ‘cracking the code'.

He says the code is like an access code. How do you punch the buttons to open the door? Suddenly, once you get the code, you understand everything. It's like getting new glasses.

When I listen to this kind of thing I think of Milton Singer, the great anthropologist at the University of Chicago, who devoted his life to the study of India. ‘Did Professor Singer discover a code?’ I ask myself. ‘Did he breakthrough the south Asian security system?'

The head spins. I know enough about India to know that it encompasses an almost limitless diversity. And this was true before it embraced the postmodernism that has reshaped global and local cultures. The idea that there is a code and that someone can crack this code with a simple proposition, a lively phrase, a striking image is simply ludicrous.

There is no code, no prefab archetypes, no Jungian dart boards, no deep metaphors that stretch across cultures. Just good listening. To suggest otherwise is to engage in junk science.

THE CORPORATION

The corporation has deeply anticultural instincts operating within. It wishes to believe it is a fully rational enterprise speaking to fully rational consumers. But the notion of rationality is always defined too narrowly.

Take the case of Doug Ivester, once CEO at Coca-Cola. A brilliant tactician with a deep understanding of the mechanics of the company, Ivester nevertheless managed to offend several parties at Coke, from kingmakers on the board to the bottlers on the company's perimeter. He was asked to resign in December 1999, a brief two years after taking office.

There were several ‘incidents’ that suggested Ivester was the wrong man for the job. But the clearest case was his proposed reinvention of the vending machine.

The boys in the lab came to Ivester with what they thought was good news. It was possible to re-engineer the Coke machine so that it would raise prices in warm weather. Ivester was interested. Surely, he speculated, a cold Coke was worth more on a hot day?

Well, yes, a reinvented Coke machine could raise prices on a hot day. And, yes, they would speak to the economic forces of supply and demand that organise every marketplace.

But culturally speaking, would this make any sense? Actually, no, it wouldn't make any sense at all.

This is not that hard to reckon. Imagine a consumer on a dusty Alabama roadside in deep summer, thrilled to find a Coke machine. Relief. But as he reaches for his wallet, the consumer notices that the price is ten cents more than he paid yesterday in Birmingham.

He's heard about this machine but he can't believe it. And in that instant, more than a hundred years of marketing and millions of dollars of advertising vanish without trace. In an attempt to capture ten cents of value, Ivester's machine would destroy much of the brand … at least for this consumer.

But it's actually worse than this. Ivester had talked about selling pricier Coke to legions of fans as they poured from a sporting event. And if the team won? Wouldn't it look like Coke didn't care about the victory? And what if the team lost? Wouldn't it look like Coke was piling it on? The vending machine might be a technological wonder. It might be sound economics. It might be a great profit opportunity, but it was a bad idea because it was inevitably going to make Coke look clueless or cruel.

There is an opportunity here. If Ivester had some cultural training, he might have seen it. Coke could use the new vending machine not to charge more, but to charge less. Charge less when it's really hot outside – an act of sympathy. Charge less when the team loses badly – to share defeat. Charge less when the team does well – to celebrate the win. The vending machine was a marvellous marketing opportunity, not a revenue opportunity.

This is what chief cultural officers are for: to see that supply and demand always play them out in a world shaped by cultural meanings.

CULTURE IS MISSING FROM THE WORK OF MOST ECONOMISTS

Even when some economists try to escape Smithian assumptions, culture seems somehow still to elude them. In Freakonomics, Steven Levitt contemplates an important puzzle: that in the 1990s violent crime in the US fell suddenly and steeply

He reviews, and finds wanting, the usual explanations. He says the drop in violent crime cannot be exhaustively explained by any one, or combination, of the following factors: innovative policing strategies, increased reliance on prisons, changes in crack and other drug markets, ageing of the population, tougher gun control laws, a strong economy, increased number of police, increased use of capital punishment, concealed weapons laws, gun buybacks, to name most of them.

Levitt prefers his own, now famous, account legalised abortion diminished the population most likely to commit crime, specifically teens brought into the world by reluctant mothers. But there is a simpler, I think, more obvious explanation. And it comes straight out of culture.

As Levitt points out, we are talking not about crime but violent crime. Lesser crimes, burglary, robbery and car theft, for instance, have a ‘direct financial motivation! Violent crimes (assault, rape, homicide) appear to have an extra-economic motivation.

They damage not only the material interests of the victim, but something more. Victims of assault and rape say that they feel diminished and even humiliated, and that this immaterial loss creates injury every bit as grievous as the loss of money and possessions.

Violent crime is a crime against esteem as much as it is a crime against property. And it is as a crime against esteem that it is sometimes committed. This is to say, that the diminishment and humiliation felt by the victim is the outcome that the criminal intends.

If violent crime began to fall in the 1990s, the question is why was the need to commit crimes against esteem felt less urgently? What had changed?

To answer this, we must answer several smaller questions. First, we must ask who would commit a crime against esteem? And the answer: those who have suffered attacks upon their own esteem. And who has suffered attacks upon their esteem? Those who suffer poverty and stigma and stereotype, as a result.

The criminal commits violent crimes as an act of revenge. He or she is punishing the victim for having so much esteem when the criminal has so little. The criminal may even hope for redistribution.

REDRESS IS ACCOMPLISHED

The criminal doesn't get to ‘keep’ the esteem he/she ‘takes’ from a victim. But something like redress has been accomplished. The criminal might not have more esteem, but the victim has less.

So what changed the world of the urban criminal? Hip hop happened. The world of the criminal was transformed by the rise of the single most important development in popular musical taste of the past 30 years.

Rap is seen to be the creation, the voice, of the urban teen. And it's rise in popular culture and its domination of taste in matters of music, clothing and styles of speech had a very interesting outcome.

It bestowed new esteem upon impoverished urban teens. As long as it remained the possession of impoverished teens, black and white, rap music did not change the esteem equation. But in the late 1980s it crossed over into the mainstream, black and white.

The Beastie Boys and Run-DMC were calculated to have crossover appeal, and the former's Fight For Your Right entered the top ten in 1986.

In 1988, Public Enemy released It Takes A Nation and NWA released Straight Outta Compton. Rap was now headed for the suburbs. And once this diffusion of musical form had taken place, the position of the impoverished teen went from scorned loser to a creature of standing, status and credibility.

So utterly did rap win the day that, with a brief but interesting interruption in the form of ‘alternative music! the children of the suburbs now wanted very much to walk, talk and otherwise conduct themselves as if they came from very different socio-economic origins.

The rise of rap represented a huge transfer of esteem from the teens of the middle-class suburb to those of the impoverished city. There was in short an abrupt and thoroughgoing reversing of the asymmetries.

Those who once suffered esteem shortages now enjoyed whacking great surpluses. Violent crime? To protest what exactly? To exact a revenge? To appropriate esteem? Violent crime was now an antique of another age, the dangerous preoccupation of another generation, an activity that was now just odd. I believe this is why violent crime began to drop in the early 1990s. As the suburbs began to absorb rap, the esteem economy began to tip in a new direction. Violent crime had become an increasingly pointless enterprise.

Adapted from McCracken, G., Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation, Basic Books, 2009. Grant McCracken is a research affiliate at C3 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

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