We’ve been running ethnographic projects at Idea Couture since go. Almost three years ago, when I first joined what was then a five-person team on the fifth floor of our building, I was jettisoned into the field on a CPG project designed to examine the role of the kitchen in people’s lives. Since then – dozens of hires and a second floor later – I’ve led the research side of business challenges in banking, insurance, health, investing, mobile phones, travel, alcohol, retail, education and more.

From the front-end of boardroom to pitches clients to the back-end (TW) of the research findings & recommendations presentations and Noodleplay workshops, one of the key learnings I’ve taken away is how valuable good research can be to addressing and solving these challenges once they are put into the shared hands of designers, experience architects, strategists and technologists. And I’m not just talking about good ethnographic research but also good usability, human factors, social psychology, quantitative and design research. Putting a different lens on an issue or, even better, multiple lenses from different disciplines, is the only way to conduct research for innovation.

But how do you – the client – know when you’re paying for a good quality lens? With every consultancy and its uncle parading their ethnographic method and its goofy, branded name online and in your boardroom, quality control is critical to your budget, your project, even your reputation. Dodgy ethnography can be a waste of time, money and resources. It can lead you astray with weak insights or no insights. And it can deliver little or no more than what you’d get from traditional market research.

So how do you know when you’re getting the good goods? In researching firms, tapping colleagues working in other organizations for recommendations or asking questions during the first meet & greet, these give tips should get you started on separating what Steve Martin in The Jerk referred to as the difference between shit and shine-ola.

DISCIPLINE, DISCIPLINE, DISCIPLINE
Ethnographic research emerged from cultural anthropology circa 100 years ago. Anthropologists have done it, taught it, built it up, torn it down, debated it, evolved it, revised it, anguished over it and written about it more than anyone. Since then, sociology, social psychology, education, nursing, human computer interaction and other disciplines have adopted and adapted it to enrich their encounter with and understanding of humans.

When hiring a firm to conduct ethnographic research, ask about discipline. What were the people who are going to conduct the research trained in? What school of thought are they coming from? How will they draw on their discipline’s method and theory to make their work and findings more than just same-old, same-old market research?

DEGREES OF SEPARATION
One of the simpler ways to discuss discipline is to get your potential research providers to divulge their degrees. While there are a number of institutions that include ethnographic methods as part of programs in design research, there are few, if any, people with undergraduate degrees out there who have been trained in and conducted rigorous ethnographic fieldwork. The methods, theories, politics and pains of conducting ethnography – and there are many – aren’t even taught to undergrads in most university programs.

When hiring a firm to conduct ethnographic research, ask about the qualifications of the people who will be going into the field. A Masters or Doctoral degree in one of the social sciences, like anthropology, can be a first sign of the researcher’s qualifications and experience as well as an indication of the kind of rigor and/or insights you might be paying for. Then again, it might not. As someone recently pointed out to me, there are a lot of PhDs who couldn’t consult their way out of a wet paper bag in the business world.

DIFFERENT QUESTIONS, ODD QUESTIONS
Anthropologists are fascinated by what inspires, motivates, structures, influences and inhibits people and social systems. They want to understand performances, rituals, mythologies, genders, codes, interactions, spaces, places, systems and more. Believe it or not, in the context of your new soda, your frozen food, your car insurance or your consumer segmentation algorithm, these areas of inquiry can be critical to your business and its future growth. Exploring big, human, cultural, social, enduring and evolving issues is key to innovation. Otherwise, you’re just doing market research.
When hiring a firm to conduct ethnographic research, consider the topics its team wants to explore and the questions it wants to ask. If they plan to ask consumers what they think of a test flavor, chances are you’ve been bilked. That’s for focus groups, not the field. Some of the issues and questions you will be familiar with, but there should be an original or unfamiliar spin on them. Some you might be unfamiliar with, but the ethnographer should be able to explain why investigating them are critical. And some might seem just plain strange. That’s okay. Strange is good. It creates room to explore and, sometimes, discover valuable surprises.

FIELD FLEXIBILITY
Business anthropologists know when they’re beat: sometimes a client doesn’t have the budget or time to go into the field, sometimes the field is inaccessible because the subject is too fleeting, private or otherwise unobservable to justify designing an ethnographic project around it. And so we have to find another way to deliver the “actionable” insights every client needs. Enter the anti-focus group. Idea Couture offers a variety of less on-the-fly research approaches. Depending on the method, the setting or the purpose, we call them Customer Context Labs or Co-Creation Sessions. Part participative design (getting consumers to join in on the ideation process for nuggets of inspiration), part informal chat sessions (getting consumers to open up about their lives and the topic at hand), a room or a skate park or a bar or a restaurant or a mechanic’s garage becomes the setting for gathering the raw materials of innovation.

When hiring a firm to conduct ethnographic research, understand and appreciate what they’re saying when they tell you they can’t. Sometimes there’s a better way. I’m constantly astounded by the quality of insights and information that I get every time I sit down with groups of six boomers, Millennials, tweens and so on. Sometimes I even break those market research rules on ‘group think’ by inviting a group of friends to join me. Often, I combine this approach with more traditional ethnographic fieldwork. Either way, if designed and conducted properly, sessions like these can be invaluable to answering critical business challenges. The one caveat to guaranteeing more successful sessions is the Bob Marley approach: who feels it, knows it. Clients who join the ethnographer in these sessions will be better able to understand, appreciate, own and socialize the findings in their organization.

TEAMWORK
The classical model of ethnography is romantic: lone anthropologist struggles to get funding to traipse into the wild, arrives in the wild, embeds herself in the lives of her informants, does her work, and madly scribbles notes between bouts of dysentery that will one day get published as a monograph. The business model of good ethnographic research is anything but solo – and there’s not that much dysentery. One anthropologist can conduct the fieldwork, but I prefer bringing designers, experience architects and strategists into the field when it’s feasible and fiscally sound. That way, when it comes to synthesizing, presenting and socializing findings and recommendations, the whole spectrum of a client’s needs are accounted for. 


When hiring a firm to conduct ethnographic research, look for the team. Bad ethnographic work is bad ethnographic work. You paid for it. It’s too late. But reams of paper deliverables have been delivered to clients as a result of solid ethnographic research that are gathering dust under all those Mintel reports simply because they were written up by someone who didn’t appreciate the scope of the business challenge, didn’t have the support to bring their work to life in tangible product, service or platform ideas, or didn’t have the management consultancy types to successfully socialize work with the C-suite.

That socializing – of the work, the insights, the recommendations, the ways forward – is critical to the people who conduct ethnography. We don’t do this just for the fun, the money, the endless nights in hotels away from our families, the thrill of understanding humans or the glasses of Pinot Noir with dinner before clubbing with Millennials into the wee hours of the morning. We do it because we want to make businesses better, products more powerful, services more smooth and experiences richer than ever before. Do you?

Product or service design to introduce new or tweak existing sales is one thing. Service-cum-experience design for the purpose of encouraging healing and transformation is another. A brief article on Fast Company details some inspiring ethnography+ methods that informed Astorino’s design of the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. To get the full scoop, make sure you download the Research PDF.

Early adopters are typically described as curious, adventurous consumers who buy first, talk fast and spread the word to others about the pros and/or cons of what they have purchased. According to Everett M. Rogers in Diffusion of Innovations, the landmark 1962 textbook that popularized the study of how new ideas and technologies spread through societies, early adopters make up 13.5% of the consumers who will adopt an innovation.

If you’re facing the bell curve, they occupy the initial climb upwards, right after the 2.5% of those people who create an innovation. Following them is the early majority (34%), consumers who make their moves through the market more carefully, but tend to adopt a new product more quickly than most. At the hump of the bell curve is the late majority (34%), consumers who adopt a new product only after the majority has weighed in on its value. Finally, sloping downwards are laggards (16%), the critics, curmudgeons and haters who do their best to resist making the purchase but will eventually do so.

The problem with this bell curve is that it is a mathematical model, one that was never designed to represent the social context of innovation, the diffusion of innovation or early adopters. In looking to crack the code and harness the coveted word-of-mouth that can be generated by the approval of early adopters, designers, brand managers and researchers need to look beyond the numbers. Without a deep understanding of and appreciation for early adopters, they risk operating in a cultural void where assumptions can lead to product ideas that have no relationship to reality.

Those assumptions can be traps, particularly if chasing numbers on a bell curve leads to designing products that target only early adopters and, in the process, destabilizes brand identity or alienates core consumers. We’ve identified potential traps that brands and businesses often make when pursuing early adopters.

1. Early adopters are 13.5% of the general population.
This is a common misconception. Rogers’ curve isn’t saying that there are 880 million early adopters in the world; it’s a visualization of the13.5% of a population that – in the context of an innovation – adopts early. Early adopters are not a demographic, a cohort or a segment; they are a cultural phenomenon identifiable only by how they perform.

2. Early adopters are opinion leaders.
This is not always true. It’s only true if the early and late majorities actually follow the lead of early adopters who feel compelled to talk about a new product. If they don’t, the first-to-buy crowd is just that. Or they’re the suckers who bought HD DVD, Motorola’s ROKR E1 or Windows Millennium Edition.

3. Early adopter word-of-mouth is the goose that lays golden eggs.
It can be. But six months later – if they discover a flaw in your product, get bored with it or see everyone else jumping en masse on to it – early adopters often drop an innovation. The majority notices and they too might abandon ship.

4. Early adopters are fiends for the new and sexy.
This is true if new and sexy are part of a product category that fulfills their interests and/or needs. But new and sexy exist across categories, and early adopters drift through categories depending on what they need or are interest in. One consumer’s treasure could be another’s trash. Context determines if an early adopter of one category will consider a product in another category new and sexy enough to be relevant, and worthy of purchase.

5. Early adopters are cool.
Some are, some aren’t. Confusing early adopters with ‘cool’ and the fluid, contextual boundaries that define it – or any other litmus test used to define a market research cohort – is a strategic misstep. Rather than seeking to identify cool cohorts who might spread the word about a new product, it is more useful to identify the product categories that cohorts consider cool as well as the degrees to which their talk may or may not be generated in the context of a new Twinkie flavor vs. a new iPhone application.

To help interested parties get over the bell curve, avoid the pitfalls of false assumptions, and begin to appreciate the context and complexity that exists beyond the numbers, we have compiled a series key insights garnered from our team’s extensive research on early adopter culture in the U.S., U.K. and Canada.

FUTURE VALUE AND POSSIBILITY

Early adopters have a greater degree of product prescience than most consumers. They look at something new and say to themselves, “This is going to…” or “I can use this for…” or “What if I?” They recognize the different or latent values and benefits of a product as it relates to functionality (How am I going to use this?), usability (How will this work?) and sociability (What’s this going to do for me in public?). Intrigued by possibility and familiar with the challenges in a product category through previous experience and research, they are more willing to absorb the risks that are associated with purchasing something in its 1.0 or beta phase. In fact, without the sense of a first frontier being designed into or lying dormant in a new product, many who would be early adopters are less apt to purchase something that is merely a tweak on an existing concept.

PLAY AND MASTERY

To forge into that final frontier, early adopters experiment with innovations. They engage in play to master a product. They go beyond instruction manuals to the guts of a product and engage in practices of deconstruction, alteration and customization. They collaborate with their trusted networks of like-minded alchemists to learn what others have done with and thought about the new product. And they go to their imagination where the possibilities await them through play. Their drive to push the boundaries of an innovation is driven by the personal and the public: early adopters tend to be curious and adventurous people; many derive great pleasure and personal satisfaction from displaying the knowledge and status that comes with mastering a new product.

INNOVATION AND THE BODY

As any wise brand sensei will tell you, the best brands often function as extensions of a consumer’s personality or as communicative symbols to express identity, social membership, cultural affiliation, prestige, desire, priorities and more. Brands help us perform and display ourselves as we walk through a world where the tiniest of symbolic flourishes can make all the difference in standing out and being counted. One way to attract early adopters through design is to consider the degree to which an innovation will engage consumers by making their performances more embodied and more physical. During the inspection and discovery of a new product, early adopters consider how visual and/or tactile features add value to products by helping them navigate realms of “How?” and “What If?” through physical play and performance. Products with new, sense-centric ways of ‘doing’ that challenge the interaction status quo will stand above and apart from others, but only if they tap into intuitive or latent ways of doing. Consider the thumb stroke on an iPhone, the physicality of the Wii and how their accelerometers connect hands and eyes so that users navigate and dominate the digital world through embodied, analog performances.

THE EXCLUSIVITY CYCLE

Experiences of exclusivity motivate many early adopters to take risks on a new product. There is a thrill (and status) to being the first to explore, adopt and adapt. Take the underground club DJ, the first adopter and ultimate tastemaker for an early majority that followed his product lead in music on the dance floor throughout the latter half of the 20th Century. Like most early adopters, his exclusivity cycle begins with attraction and anticipation: hearing through the DJ network about a new music genre or crazy track and imagining how it will fit into the context of his set. This is followed by pre-release research: digging deeper into the source, style and sound by hunting down details through niche media, word-of-mouth and social connections. Then comes ownership, play and mastery: purchasing a limited release 12” record, playing it and (hopefully) rocking it like nobody’s business. Finally, there is the possibility of rejection and release: somewhere between that track being released on CD (for the early majority), radio (for the late majority) or the soundtrack to a car ad (for the laggards), the cool factor is gone and the DJ moves on to pursuing the next exclusive sound. By that time, he has already told his followers on the dance floor that the track is dead and they too move on to the next new thing.

DISCOVERY CHANNELS

Believe it or not, you can learn a lot about early adopter retail behavior from Shark Week. What, you ask? Well, how about….

• the never-ending search for the richest source of product
• the subtle forms of communication that pass between members of a herd about where to find product and how best to consume it
• the confident knowledge that once they have arrived at their destination few (if any) other consumers can compete with them
• the constant and voracious appetite for new product.

In exploring the ocean of innovation, the channels most frequented by early adopters function, like Discovery, as destinations for learning. Like feeding grounds for sharks, they are social places to exchange knowledge and experience about what it means to be a member of the species and how to perform that membership. When seeking to decode the culture of early adopter retail, it is critical to understand three key and related areas.

• Interaction competency, the know-how required to socialize and communicate in a specific social context. By virtue of their interest, research and/or previous experience, early adopters are proficient in the rituals and decorum of retail behavior related to a product category.

• Language constituency, the subtle or seismic shifts in consumer vernacular that transcend traditional market research segmentation models to manifest within a specific product category. Talk is never cheap, and early adopters prove and earn the privileges of membership in retail spaces through the language of product knowledge.

• Cultural capital, the display of knowledge and status that comes from owning and using a product first. To cultivate and display their cultural capital, early adopters often gather in channels where staff and customers are equally adept in participating in a feeding frenzy over product knowledge.

BROADCASTING

In seeking to climb the bell curve, many brands and businesses limit their interest in and investigation of early adopters to their capacity for broadcasting – their ability to transmit viral-like information and excitement about a new product to a next wave of consumers. Whether through old media (e.g. hipster print), new media (e.g. Twitter) or even street level word-of-mouth, the cultural capital cultivated by early adopters and recognized by the early majority makes them trusted sources of information, opinion-formers and co-authors of new knowledge on what’s hot and what’s not.

In recognizing the potential value of early adopters in the launch of a new product, many brands and businesses want to bum rush the bell curve and get as quickly as possible to this feature of early adopter culture. But to focus on designing or leveraging word-of-mouth at the expense of not investing more resources and research in the other features of early adopter culture would be a major, if not fatal, flaw. Talk – especially good talk – isn’t cheap, and it doesn’t come freely. Nor does it come first.

A recent article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette describing how consumer feedback (or lack of it) impacts the design of cars once again reinforces how ethnographic studies trump focus groups in concept development and testing. It points out that the 2010 Ford Taurus and Buick LaCrosse were designed with input from ethnographic studies. That’s a step in the right direction for Detroit. Problem is, the article unknowingly outs those who conducted this car ethnography as having only conducted one-on-one interviews and sat with owners in their garages talking about favorite features. Talk is great, but how about a test drive? Like a prospective buyer, a research firm might want to consider hitting the highway with consumers before claiming their insights represent any kind of heavy metal thunder.

Last year around this time they redesigned the cans. Millions of dollars in the making, the result, as many critics loudly announced when it first dropped, is a flop – little more than a played-out font from 2004. A while back they redesigned Tropicana. Also in the making range of millions of dollars, the result, as consumers railed, was such a flop it was recanted from the marketplace. And I noticed on Grant McCracken’s blog a while back that they followed those up in fine flopping fashion with a third misreading of the intersections between consumers and “design sensibility” by messing with Gatorade.

Sales numbers on the horizon suggest that a big G and a small lightning bolt have confused consumers once again. I would have noticed the change on store shelves, but my wife refuses to drink the stuff any more because it’s too sugary so I don’t look there anymore. Maybe it’s not even in Canada. When it comes to Gatorade or, for that matter, Tropicana, I don’t really care. But more on that later.

In discussing the Gatorade switch, Grant points to that maddening corporate drive to be “cool,” “hip” and “edgy,” rightly pointing out that this youthful cachet is worth about 2% of the culture. Arnell certainly seems to be a guy who has had much success in flexing his cool so, I guess, when the decision from the top down was to engage in some redesign he probably thought his ideas would “evolve the brand.”

Whether it was genetic drift (chance deciding a trait like a bad font will be passed on from designers who used it in ‘04) or random mutation (caused by an error during meiosis or DNA replication), PepsiCo’s evolution has been something of a Darwinian debacle of late. Perhaps the reason for its recent failures is that PepsiCo does not understand evolution or, at the very least, appreciate that the brand-as-being is about so much more than its phenotype.

Let’s begin with the most known of Darwin’s ideas, natural selection. For those of you who didn’t have to teach Intro to Anthropology over the course of too many years, this is when genetic mutations that enhance reproduction become more common in later generations of a population. Like innovation itself, successful changes in the traits of a population rely on the degree to which change is introduced and maintained in that population. PepsiCo’s redesigns are mutations of the kind that are introduced from outside the population and, because they don’t “work,” are rejected. In the world of cola, they’re no Rae Dawn Chong. The lesson here is that, in the quest for brand fire, make sure you hire a design consultancy that doesn’t just understand the brand but, when possible, has love for the brand.

PepsiCo’s failure to understand its own evolution is, ultimately, a failure to understand itself as part of an organism collective that consultants typically refer to as “consumers” but, for the sake of being an anthropologist who hates ascribing nouns to people that transform them into distant others who we are not, I will call the “population.” Were PepsiCo’s new brand traits to be found particularly robust, useful and pleasing to the population, they would have been selected. Instead, they’ve been rejected.

As a lifelong citizen of the Pepsi population, this saddens me. But I know why Pepsi failed. It failed because these redesign efforts behaved, with Arnell as the figurehead and fall guy, as if they were nomadic marauders from another population thinking they could roll up and shoot some of their sperm into what was a perfectly happy, peaceful population and turn our hair blonde and our eyes blue.

With Tropicana, as soon as we saw the smoke from your fire we got our spears, snuck up on you in the grocery aisle and killed your ass. To doubly punish PepsiCo for its transgressions, some of the population started spreading the word like wildfire about how Tropicana is made. So much for the fresh & natural branding, huh? Who knows what the state of the design intruder might be when the Gatorade numbers come in? Oh, and by the way, my population and I remain ready, willing and able to form a hunting party to kill the Pepsi redesign.

With Pepsi, PepsiCo made the mistake of the outsider. Pepsi isn’t Nooyi’s brand. It’s mine. I was there before her. I will be there after her. It isn’t Arnell’s brand either. His Newsweek ranting about washing his hands over the entire affair makes that very clear.

Who are these outsiders who think they can mess with my brand? Given the extent to which social media figures in our lives, how could they ignore evolution by population consent and put their hopes of introducing new traits into the hands of one man?

You’d think that there would have been some kind of co-creation exercise planned way in advance of Arnell getting his designer hands on Pepsi. Between “consumers” and “cool” something along the lines of an online Design Your Pepsi campaign might have fared better. I say might because, in terms of design, the Pepsi population was doing just fine, thank you very much. Those of old enough to remember had already survived and adapted to the evolution of the can and, within the existing ecosystem, continue to keep that DNA alive by ordering a bottle from nearby Central American restaurants.

It’s the DNA I’m worried about. Mess with it too much and you’ve got a sick and dying mutant. Don’t test its limits and you’ve got a weak and apathetic brand. The middle ground is not visual design – phenotype is an expression of change, not change itself. The middle ground is the DNA itself – code, culture and the memories of a population.

Memories rule. For a brand like Pepsi, memories are the DNA. In the cool consumer consultancy realm of brand heritage, they are the lifeblood. This is where PepsiCo should be investing – on and in the population itself. Through the narrative modes of words, pictures, songs, dances, whatever, populations tell their stories, transmit their myths and values, teach the young, celebrate the past and maintain the Durkheimian organic solidarity that, quite frankly, PepsiCo is lacking.

My memories are rich: Mom buying a case every Saturday; a Pepsi and a Mars bar during Love Boat and Fantasy Island every Saturday night; sitting on the front porch on a sweltering August day during a rainstorm with a cold one; accompanying the first beef patty I ate in Negril while watching Tiger and Frankie Paul on stage; the disappointment every time I go into a fast food joint and discover it’s aligned with Coke; and so on and so on.

Memories are a basic, 101 ingredient of Web 2.0. How could PepsiCo have missed that and spent on Arnell? I don’t know, but every time I pop a can in the office I wonder why my drink is in such a lame can. Then, wrapped in memories of bottles in the days before online contest codes when you peeled the rubber from the cap to see if you’d won a free one, I wonder who relied on a focus group (not the population!) to tell them that Pepsi Natural was a better name for Americans than Pepsi Raw. After that, I wonder when PepsiCo in Canada is going to get it on shelves here. All this wondering….shouldn’t I know? I’ve been living in the Pepsi population since I was first allowed to drink pop. Like my most recent memories of the brand, that’s sad. For PepsiCo, sad is bad.

The biggest brand in the world right now isn’t selling search, touch or performance: it’s wooing consumers through a historically unparalleled romance with the undead.

Google? Apple? Nike? Whatever. For all of the passion, love and sex that’s happening between humans and vampires right now, Twilight and True Blood are leading the way in cultural brand currency. Innovation has something to do with it.

But Twilight and True Blood are not the brand in question, merely the vehicles of it. Granted, they are their own brands. Stephanie Meyer’s series of books – Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn – have crested the 30 million copies mark, with the last installment selling 1.3 million copies in the U.S. on its first day of release. The film adaptation of book #1 grossed over $380 million in American theatres, the DVD (still selling) sold over 3 million copies on its first day of release in the U.S., and the buzz at the end of filming New Moon is so loud that its debut will likely trounce the franchise’s last set of day-one numbers. Then, of course, there’s the merchandising: vampire kits, t-shirts, calendars, jewelry, jewelry boxes, posters, key rings, buttons, The Complete Illustrated Movie Companion and a whole universe of fan-made merchandise.

In contrast, Charlaine Harris’ The Southern Vampire Mysteries series presents less of a case study in the runaway hit. Its TV adaptation, True Blood, is, nonetheless, one of HBO’s bigger successes and, for those into season 2, it’s not hard to see why: script, blood, the South, Anna Paquin and sex.

It’s in the sex – or, more accurately, between the sex, the romance and the social implications of it – that’s the essence of where, why and how this new brand exists. Historically, its been there in trace elements for nearly a century. In Bram Stoker’s positivist approach to the cultural and technological shifts scaring people at the time in Dracula it was there. But it was Hollywood over the years, not Bram, which flushed out the vampire’s raw sexuality and the sexual power of the woman willing to be bitten by him.

That’s where Bella and Sookie come in. And it’s where millions of women around the world and from ages 11 to 40 join them. Thanks to Stephanie Meyer and Charlaine Harris, Bella and Sookie have transformed the mythologies of vampires and female sexuality. Given the canon of patriarchal Euro culture within (and against) which both women are written, that’s no small feat. In fact, it’s very innovative; and that’s why this brand is catching on. How?

First, in the process of seeing, meeting, pursuing and consummating their attractions to Edward and Bill, Bella and Sookie are doing what Carol Thurston in The Romance Revolution and Janice Radway in Reading The Romance have told us women have been doing through racy reading for years: breaking rules, forming rules, and exploring the boundaries of sexuality. By jumping back and forth across those boundaries via alternate identifications with masculine characters and narratives or feminine characters and narratives, these women are redefining – or better yet, de-defining – what the rules of experience (sexual and otherwise) and fantasy are or should be.

Second, through relationships with Edward and Bill, Bella and Sookie are legitimizing the presence of the vampire in public, human space. With a few exceptions – such as Buffy The Vampire Slayer (not George Hamilton in Love At First Bite – co-existence and coming out have never been explored to this extent. That’s powerful, if only because Twilight and True Blood are changing the rules of the “horror” genre by confronting the struggles – in high school and the South, two of the more socially competitive arenas in popular film and fiction – of the marginalized Other. Like Bram’s positivist leanings, this coming out (or in to) society has its own contemporary correlations that critics might locate between Gitmo, the beginning of the second quarter century of AIDS, accepting new Friends into your network, and the change/transformation theme at the root of Obama-ism, 2012, design culture and this whole innovation thingy.

Third, in allowing their vampire boyfriends to bite them (I haven’t read Harris’ series so I can’t speak on whether Sookie is turned) Bella and Sookie take their transformation to heart. Their experience is the ultimate phenomenological commitment to exploring and becoming the other.

And that’s where adding 36 pounds of muscle to your brand comes in. For those of you unfamiliar with the reference, ’36 pounds of muscle’ refers to where the fan focus on the Twilight franchise has turned: to an 18-year old teen heartthrob actor named Taylor Lautner. Between passion and obsession, tween girls and adult women, Taylor is the shit in hot boy business right now.

What’s hot about him? Well for the girls and women – and gay men, too – Taylor has, between the first Twilight film and shooting of the second, New Moon, managed to pack an extra 36 pounds of muscle onto his smooth, 18-year old body. From a branding perspective, the fan mythology surrounding the story of the film’s producers saying “Put on the muscle or we’ll find another actor” has been pure genius. True or not (because when it comes to mythology ‘truth’ doesn’t really matter), one brand message has been successfully transmitted: hard work, determination and focus pay off. In the process, Rob Pattinson has had to cede a little of his celebrity space to the gangly kid who warned Bella about Edward in the first movie.

As an interesting side note, it wasn’t until the hard work paid off that Lautner’s history as an accomplished young martial artist came to light – a major media talking point directed towards him and another perk for the brand’s authenticity. Furthermore, when the movie finally drops in November there will, I predict, be another major talking point, one that is, arguably, more of a radical shift in the real world than anything so far pushed by the franchise: Hollywood has it’s first First Nations teen hearth throb.

This is huge. Sure, people will talk about his French, Dutch and German background – but those of us who recognize the phenotype deficit in Hollywood will see that having a young superstar with Ottawa and Potawatomi heritage on the big screen marks a shift in American popular culture that is close to if not equally as monumental as the American political shift that brought us a black president.

But Lautner’s 36 pounds of muscle are more than that and do more than that. Wrapped in his character – a First Nations teen living on a reserve who is also in love with Bella and just happens to be a werewolf whose clan has been the traditional enemies of the vampires for ages – they speak to how and why the Twilight brand is so successful. And, if you’ll set aside your snob critic leanings for just a minute, you might discover how appreciating, understanding and empathizing with the Twilight consumer can help your brand add 36 pounds of muscle. Because judging from some of the cluelessness that’s registering on my smart chart these days, some of brand managers and others could desperately use it.

To make it simple – and I apologize for those of you who have struggled to read this far without the assistance of PowerPoint or an Executive Summary – I’ll break each tip into 6 pounds of muscle. Add what you can…..

Romance: Passion, lust, heartbreak, loss, discovery, exploration, and crossing new thresholds: these are all hallmarks of the romance. Are any of them hallmarks of your brand? I teased Google, Apple and Nike at the beginning of this post, but those three brands understand and help facilitate 5 of those features. Does yours?

Transformation: Liminality, change, metamorphosis and rites of passage drive much of the narrative structure of Twilight (and True Blood). Do they drive your brand? Creating a story around your brand that is real – it’s embedded in the very DNA of your product or service offering – and that helps consumers take baby or big steps towards personal growth is going to more and more going to define who leads and who follows in the business and culture worlds of Obama-Lautner-and-beyond.

Risk: Potentially dodgy situation are at the heart of romance and transformation. It’s what makes them exciting, engaging and, when the story is told well, makes us identify with and live through those taking them. Even without vampires and werewolves, we live in a world where risks – and identifying/empathizing with those who take them – are valued for their potentially romantic and transformative powers. How is your brand a heroine brand? Do your customers see you as safe and conservative, or willing to strike out into the unknown and take a chance that could pay off in ways your focus groups could never tell you?

Context: Yes, there is some vestigal value to the micro-manufacturing of consumer segments in the market research your brand does. It is true that customer needs do vary across ages, gender, geographies, ethnicities and such. But Twilight should stand as a model for what smart and skilled ethnographers have been trying to tell you for ages: context rules in conducting research. Tween girls love Twilight. Adult women love Twilight. There are boys and men who love it, too. Some narrative bits and pieces might be applied a little differently across these segments, but the insights you’re searching for to step up your brand’s game are to be found in the imagination of readers, not how you imagine the readers in your boardroom. Next time you want to create opportunity space around energy drinks, consider skipping research on 20-somethings in bars and explore other scenarios where focus, stamina, power and longevity live like mixed martial arts, Asian cram schools, meditation or yoga, extreme travel.

Tweens: Start young. That’s all I can say. You can look at the numbers for the family finances they influence. You can look at their intense levels of engagement with new and emerging media. Or you can look at how their expectations for healthier, faster, better, more personalize and more honest are going to determine whether your brand lives or dies in about 10 years. Whatever you look at, don’t fight the power – recognize it!

Society: Maybe you cast different faces in your cheese commercials. Maybe you don’t even shoot commercials for your territory but, instead, throw subtitles on your brand’s latest spot running in India. Or maybe you finally recognize what the first word in the phrase ‘social media’ really means when it comes to designing your platform. Whatever small transformation you decide to engage in, take a lesson from making friends and boyfriends of vampires and werewolves: there is a huge disconnect in how consumers are conceiving the world of people in and around them and the dusty old approach some brands continue to take to who is in (and who is not) their circle of business.

An innovative idea is innovative only if it fits into existing or emerging cultural patterns and performances. Otherwise it’s just another idea – good or bad – that sits on a shelf gathering dust. And a successful boost to a brand requires the kind of innovation raw materials that can only come from plunging your hearts and minds head first into the lives and stories of consumers. Given the popularity of Twilight and True Blood, there are a number of innovations-in-narrative have already caught on en masse. Both are ongoing sagas that will continue to reinforce and explore the power new and emerging cultural patterns and performances that, unless you add 36 pounds of muscle to your brand, will leave you eating sand that the skinny guy in the back of the comics those of us with tween girls remember when we lived our romances and transformations through Peter Parker.

Creativity needs imagination. Creative economies value innovation and entrepreneurial imagination. Invention and innovation are what progress is made of; they are not the life-blood of creation. Progress stumbles on ideals, suggestions that there is a program or a way that moves society forward; creativity hunts a vision. Progress is pedantic; creativity, on the other hand, owns imagination. It commands the allegiance and love of the creative person as a way of being, living and thinking. The imagination that comes of that allegiance is powerful, self-renewing and tireless in delight. It permeates all aspects of civic life. It is the only limitless resource. But creativity is not enough for innovation.

Any powerful new idea can kick around unused in a company for years, not because its merits are not recognized but because nobody has assumed responsibility constructing the case that will convert the idea into a business opportunity.  Ideas are useless unless they are executed. The proof of their value is only in their implementation and adoption. Innovation is essentially the application of high creativity. It needs not be restricted to products; it applies to services and employee attitude, and across all levels of an organization. Innovation is a fundamental mindset pursued seriously by an organization. It is imperative to imbibe the culture of innovation.

The curse of the focus group is in part to blame for a lack of innovation. The focus group is the last place on earth where you can expect an innovative idea to be expressed. When Toyota was planning to launch the Prius, people in focus groups were asked what they thought of it. Everyone said the same thing: “It’s a niche product.” In focus groups, people are often asked how much they would pay for a 10% improvement in fuel efficiency. Funny that it’s always a small number. But you’re never going to learn about latent demands in focus groups. Toyota didn’t introduce the Prius because of findings in a focus group. It was convinced that the auto industry needed to change.  In fact, most of the innovation ideas that come from focus groups are incremental at best.

Organizations that rely on focus groups do so for a number of reasons. Some are good(ish): when your product is a hidden one or you have legal restrictions surrounding research, there aren’t too many other ways you can concept test. Your best bet here is to bring in a “facilitator” who offers an alternative way of processing what focus group respondents say. The conversation might be similar, but the song does not remain the same. Hiring an erudite listener or someone with experience in socio-linguistics can give you a real edge on delving into an understanding of what talk means to your product, service, business or brand. Before you go that route, however, know one thing: a focus group is not a test, it is a focus group. People looking at sexy pictures of your next big product offering and telling you they love the idea is not the same as people spending their hard earned money on that product when it comes to market only to find out that it is, in fact, a total piece of rubbish that they would never buy again. Some reasons for using focus groups are bad: when you decide to ‘test’ your advertising or marketing campaigns through focus groups you are living in La La Land.

There are a host of other reasons why innovative businesses are shying away from the focus groups these days, including:

Focus groups are safe. Organizations have been using them for decades and, as a result, their research departments have become lazy. When the big boss isn’t familiar with the methodology or value of another research approach, why suggest another? It’s easy to ship another Executive Summary report up to the wood-paneled office when you know the suit occupying it has already bought into the process.

Focus groups are quick and dirty. Some organizations are unwilling to make a real investment in research, so the prospect of throwing together a bunch of people in a room to provide some basic learning appeals to those that just want to get feedback on the cheap.  But you get what you pay for,right?

Focus groups are often lab-rattish. While an odd thing often happens in the presence of a camera – many people tend to ignore it after 20 minutes or so – the suggestion that feedback of any real value can be generated in front of a two-way mirror is a hop, skip and a jump away from ludicrous. It’s like being in the principal’s office: suspicious and nervous, participants often get their backs up against the wall.

Focus groups are ammunition for egos. Often, when one or two subjects tell you how great a product concept is there’s one young stud in an organization quick to use those reports to convince his boss that his idea is a runaway hit. Next thing you know you’ve invested a million dollars in grape flavored soap. Mmmmmm, grape flavored soap.

Focus groups are socio-generative. That is, when you put a group of people into a room for an hour or so, feed them, offer them drinks and then engage them in a conversation or an exercise, you’re temporarily birthing a transient micro community. As is the case in all communities, people take on particular social roles: the non-participator (just there for the sandwiches and $100); the exaggerator (who offers the equivalent of the consumer fishing story); the conversation dominator (who, if you can’t control him, makes you wonder why you spent $600 for $100 worth of feedback); the roll-over (who agrees to agree with everyone else); the challenger (the one who reports on how everything sucks and advertising or marketing doesn’t influence him); and, perhaps most confounding of  all, the focus group junkie (who tours the consumer feedback tour circuit like a rock star because your recruiting agency isn’t getting paid enough to find new people not well versed in what to say for $100). If the focus group was  a representation of society as a whole, a trained anthropologist might be able to make sense of these social roles and how their feedback can inform the client. But it’s not, so the data that emerges is often better suited to a white paper on the social dynamics of focus groups that an Executive Summary on whether or not to put almonds or peanuts into your chocolate bar.

Just because a company is spending tons of money on research and asking customers what they think or what they’d do doesn’t mean it will get innovation. As is the case with marketing, organizational development and other investments, innovation depends on the quality of the investment as much as the amount of resources put into it. New innovations create needs and performance gaps only once customers start using them and get turned on to the possibilities.

Businesses need to bring their customers into the innovation process as early as possible. They need to know that there is a large enough market to proceed. They need to have the mechanisms to capture value. They need to speak and listen in both the technology voice and the business voice. And they need to make sure that the features and performativity of new products or services are properly prioritized. Creativity and imagination are not enough. Balance is the key to successful innovation. This is where B-school meets D-school.

A partnership between Design Within Reach and Wine.com, Vertical Vines is a series of monthly social mixers that help luxury condo dwellers transform themselves from simply being neighbors to living together as a community.

Drawing on their skill for conjuring intimate, living spaces by guiding customers through exploring and experiencing new and classic products, DWR hosts the evening and Wine.com brings the vintages. For condo dwellers, Vertical Vines presents an exclusive, but accessible, social setting to connect, interact and learn about the best in wine, furniture, lighting and other Tools for Living.

In addition to informal talks, tasting and testing that help them to differentiate Chilewich from Citterio or a carmenere from a cabernet, every guest is given an access card leading to a personalized online portal where they can track wines they’ve purchased or tried, use tools to plan their condo design and receive future invitations and special offers from DWR and Wine.com. For the partners, the access cards and personalized online portals provide a CRM platform to drive online and offline sales, create stronger brand affinity and allow for more granular segmenting and individualized messaging. Vertical Vines is held once a month at select luxury condos. DWR designs and furnishes each room, allowing guests to explore and experience their new and classic products. Wine.com curates a thematic wine menu for each event (paired with hors d’œuvres) that can be voted on in advance.

Guests can also pre-order their favourite wines and furniture for pick-up on site. Guests receive a card attached to their email address to be swiped each time they receive a glass of wine. The card forms the foundation of a CRM program allowing guests to redeem currency earned through product reviews, referrals and on-site purchases. In combination with the online experience, it is also used to deliver frictionless market research. For guests, it provides guests access to Wine.com mixers nationally.

For the partners, the access cards and personalized online portals provide a CRM platform to drive online and offline sales, create stronger brand affinity and allow for more granular segmenting and individualized messaging.

Case Study: Whine and Wine
Getting to know your neighbors is great, and what better way then over a glass of wine? But lets talk new mom’s. Who better to appreciate a nice glass of wine and a chat with, lets face it, an adult? Vertical Vines could provide a supervised play area for children, and the moms could sit, relax and enjoy some delicious wine and cheese while getting to connect with other moms. Considering we’re currently feeling a bit of another baby boom, the new-moms-market is definitely where its at.