Next Results for articles with tag 'culture' (8 total)
03/08/2009 08:37:47 AM 
Philip Roth-1961
This close to 50 year old quote is used by Gordon Burn in his amazing article on media saturation published by The Guardian.
Posted by Ed Cotton
08/04/2008 08:21:40 PM (1)
(1) Many analysts tell us that brands have to deliver consistent experiences if they want succeed and that homogeneity is what consumers want and desire.
It's therefore interesting to read about the demise of Starbucks in Australia.
According to the BBC..
"The mighty Starbucks coffee empire has been handed a heavy defeat by thousands of small Australian cafes in the fight for a nation's taste buds.
Eight years after it began selling its espressos and frappucinos in Australia, the US giant has succumbed to powerful financial and cultural pressures and has closed 61 of its 85 shops across the country.
Savouring a morning cup of coffee has become a ritual for millions of Australians - yet one that Starbucks failed to capitalise on, in spite of the way the chain had become a global cultural phenomenon during the 1990s.
"It was maybe too standardised," says Michael Edwardson, a consumer psychologist in Melbourne.
"Early on it was unique and different, but as it became a global chain the standardisation made it lose some of that coolness and edginess. It was quickly copied and lost its lustre.”
What does this suggest for brands?
Perhaps brands need both consistency and inconsistency; they need to flex and play with both elements. It's clear that consumers today probably need a mix of both. Certainly parts of brands need standardized elements, but they also need to surprise and delight their customers. They need to get ahead of the curve, rather than behind it.This is incredibly demanding and challenging for brands; the idea of staying ahead and bringing surprise to consumers depends on having great intelligence and brilliant execution, not to mention the investment required to support change.
Too often, brands sit back and wait too long to make changes. Instead of getting ahead, they wait until the last minute to do something. They try to get away for the longest possible time without making changes.
As this story shows, culture has the power to move much faster than brands. Brands need to recognize the rapid pace of change and invest not just in the intelligence to stay ahead, but act on it before it's too late.
Posted by Ed Cotton
10/10/2007 07:22:53 AM
The Pop-Up Store has been the most recent manifestation, the problem is that these ideas follow the rules of old school 1.0 Marketing, they are just extensions of exisiting campaigns placed into a three dimensional format- they don't give much back.
If brands get involved in cultural and social debate just like Dove has done, surely these experiences could be richer and more rewarding?
This weekend, the Serpentine Galley is pushing the cultural envelope yet again with another 24 Hour Marathon experience that involves dozens of "experiments" performed by artists, architects and scientists, including: Marina Abramović; Simon Baron-Cohen; John Brockman; Peter Cook; Tim Etchells; Sophie Fiennes; Armand Leroi; Gustav Metzger; Steven Pinker; Pedro Reyes; Matthew Ritchie; Israel Rosenfield; Tomas Saraceno; Angela Sirigu; Andreas Slominski; Luc Steels; and Lewis Wolpert.
It's an idea that seems crazy and impossible to execute, but it will sell out and people who attend will talk about this for years to come.
What meaningful and rewarding cultural experience could your brand create?
Posted by Ed Cotton
07/12/2007 06:43:40 AM
Asia thinks about "we" and America thinks about "I".
"Keysar believes the Chinese students had an easier time understanding the director’s perspective because they come from a more collectivist society than their US counterparts. He speculates, for example, that compared with children in China, youngsters in the US are more likely to feel that it is "all about them".
In another example, he describes how a Texas corporation "aiming to improve productivity, told its employees to look in the mirror and say 'I am beautiful' 100 times before coming to work. In contrast, a Japanese supermarket instructed its employees to begin their day by telling each other 'you are beautiful'."
Posted by Ed Cotton
05/15/2007 07:48:17 PM
1. Can you tell us your background?
I majored in physics at Bowdoin College, and later got my Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, after an M.Sc. at Cornell. What led me into this study was attending the Santa Fe Institute's Complex Systems Summer School in 2002, where I met Dr. Matt Hahn (Biology/Informatics at Indiana University). Matt showed me how population genetics provides an ideal set of tools for studying culture change.
2. What were the main findings of your research into change in popular culture?
Our first studies, published in 2003-2004 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, showed how a simple model of random copying, with a small amount (i.e., < 2%) of innovation, can explain many patterns of popular culture change at the national level, including "long-tail" distributions of popularity, discussed by Chris Anderson's book ('The Long Tail', Random House 2006). Our studies suggested that popular success does not necessarily require any inherent qualities -- it can happen just by luck through the process of people randomly copying each other. What was amazing is that such a simple model could work so well -- that at a population level, a model of random copying with occasional innovation can explain the data as well as anything else.
In the random-copying model, predicting which particular innovation will become the next big hit is fundamentally impossible, because we model the copying as random. However, what is very predictable is the fact that new successes will replace old ones at the top of the charts, and they do so at a remarkably consistent rate. To show this, we looked at the Billboard Top 200 chart and found that it turned over at a constant average rate for 30 years, from the 1950s to the 1980s. The number of albums entering and exiting the chart varied from day to day and month to month, but overall the turnover averaged about 6% per month for the full 30-year period. In collaboration with collaboration with Dr Hahn, Dr. Carl Lipo (California State University, Long Beach) and Prof Harold Herzog (Western Carolina University), we discovered a similar consistency in turnover for the top baby names and dog breeds. We showed how this same consistency of turnover resulted from a computer simulation of the random copying model, in which we kept track of the Top 40, Top 100 etc. most popular ‘fashions’ and monitored their turnover.
Particularly surprising was that the rate a list changes depends on the size of the list – a Top 100 changes proportionally faster than a Top 40 – but not the size of the population. So while a larger population means more new ideas, it also means more competition to reach the top, and the two balance each other out: the turnover on bestseller lists remains steady as population size changes.
3. Experts talk about culture speeding up- with new ideas coming at us faster, did you find any evidence of this?
Absolutely - by the 1990s we see an increase in innovation rate in many areas, particularly baby names. A century ago, it was common for girls and especially boys to be named after their parents, whereas nowadays much fewer kids in Western cultures are named after their parents, and many parents strive to come up with unique names. However, even as novelty in and of itself becomes more popular, the result still fits a model of random copying with only a small degree of innovation -- it's very hard to be truly original!
4. You found "innovators" have an important role to play. What are the characteristics of these innovators?
Innovators introduce something new, and that's it. The explanatory insight in our model lies in its simplicity - just a population of copiers with occasional innovation. The innovations are represented by random numbers, i.e., with no inherent "superiority" or desirability over what is already circulating in the population. Nevertheless, every new innovation has a small, but still finite chance of becoming the next big hit, just through the process of random copying. In the model it is absolutely inevitable that what is currently popular now will eventually be replaced by something that began as an obscure innovation.
5. How might your research help those looking to induce positive change amongst consumers? - energy saving for example
For fashions like baby names and pop music, copying is fine, as the inherent content of a baby name or pop song is not what's important. However, for behaviors whose content does matter in society (saving energy, voting, buying responsibly), copying is bad. Copying is what underlies random drift in the market, leading the market to become detached from rational needs. If people think independently about their consumer choices, then it is very likely that the average of all those decisions will converge on something intelligent, and something that does track the situation in the real world. A great book on this phenomenon is James Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds (Anchor, 2005).
6. What does it mean for brands and their new product development efforts?
There should be certain aspects of products that are just subject to random drift in terms of popular choice. There is little value in expending R&D into these aspects, since their popularity is inherently unpredictable. In contrast, other aspects should be subject to independent decisions, i.e., selection, and will be predictable because they track real consumer needs. This may sound obvious -- e.g., consumer preferences for food packaging may drift more than their preferences for the food itself -- but the model provides the potential to resolve this much more finely: what parts that we thought were important actually drift in popularity? What things we thought were just style, are actually important? Instead of surveying customers to find out, you can address these questions more directly by looking at the market data themselves.
05/11/2007 09:29:50 PM (1)
(1) Bureaucracy runs counter to the very DNA of Google that's thrived on creativity. The finger is being pointed squarely at the invasion of MBAs who are attempting to turn chaos into order.
For many Google watchers the rapid growth of the company was always a cause for concern. No one could understand how the company could possibly maintain its culture , when it’s hiring 100 new employees a week. Now it looks as if the growth might be coming back to bite them and the MBAs are to blame.
This is not a new problem almost every successful new company seems to suffer a cultural crisis as it grows. Perhaps its just part of a company’s natural evolution. The original DNA that created the entity and gave life to the founding idea has to be jettisoned for a new more balanced culture that’s capable of leading the company to maturity.
The problem is rapid growth creates a cultural rift between the old guard and the new guard. The old guard believes they are responsible for success and know instinctively how to achieve it. The new guard lacks the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of the old guard and tries to out analyze, resulting in bureaucratic paralysis.
To see fingers pointed squarely at MBAs has to be cause for concern for educators, the MBAs themselves and anyone who believes an MBA is the ticket to success in corporate America.
Brand MBA appears to be in trouble and this has been going on for sometime, in certain circles, the MBA has in been an unattractive stereotype, for at least a dozen years. It’s not as if educators weren’t aware, they have had a decade to course correct. However, it appears the brand is still plagued with the same image problem.
The challenge for business educators is to breed a new generation of MBAs who have the balance of left and right brain skills and can truly embody the “Whole New Mind’ that Daniel Pink writes about.
However, don’t these people need a new brand, to differentiate themselves from the MBAs?
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Articles for tag culture (8 total).