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iEverything

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

Have you noticed how many products have come around over the last few years sporting a tiny “i” before their names? Well, if you know not what I speak of, think iPod, iPhone, iPad, iGoogle, iMAX, etc. And these are only a few of the best known. A quick Google search returns over a thousand product names that follow the pattern of a noun preceded by an “i” that is almost isolated in its stately lower-caseness.

iEverything

Internet! Yes. That seems to be the obvious word that justifies the fame of our little “i”. That seems to be the expression the letter seeks to contract, to simplify. And the trend just goes beyond: iWater, iFood, iHouse, iCity, iTaxes, iGlasses… It’s as if, in this abstract universe that is the internet, all human creation needed to be reborn, rethought, reconsidered, to become lighter, to become iMmaterial.

The “i” initiates and hides behind its challenging and friendly humility. It wants us not to notice it and so it stands humbly ahead of what we already know — while surreptitiously changing the entire genetics of the object. This is the new life of post-internet objects. A new life, its sins washed away by the “i” — the insignia that identifies objects that have been converted to the cult of the ultimate god of objects: the World Wide Web. The object unobjectified.

Objects which operate under different laws of physics. Free of weight, free of volume, free of time. That is to say, ticking to a different time.  And all this is identified by our dearest little “i” — which is but the center of our vowels. The anthropomorphic letter that rises up to the global network heavens. But what does it want to tell us, other than "internet”?

Well… the “i” is a lonely letter. As lonely as I. The self-effacing I, that positions itself as an individual, that acknowledges its individuality, its independence. It is isolated, but adds itself to the object in order to become.

Perhaps the letter “i” has been the greatest gift the digital age has offered us: a way to restate, in a subtly stark manner, that we stand small, internet and all.

© João Cavalcanti 2010

Posted in Americas, Categories, Clients & Brands, Global Vectors, Making Sense, Technology | 6 Comments »

Tom Ford

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

A major international male icon at the turn of the 2010s Tom Ford represents unparalleled design and fashion flair combined with great business acumen. His personal glamour (a focus for both the male and female gaze) and critically acclaimed breakthrough from fashion and branded commercial communication into mainstream film directing with A Single Man (2010) makes him one of the most powerful and intriguing male symbols of his time.

Tom Ford Grey Vetiver

All the more because Tom Ford a) pioneers for gay men the discrete privilege long enjoyed by heterosexual males that one’s sexuality need not necessarily be core to the definition of one’s character & identity and b) stands aside, in terms of critical intelligence and comments on public record, from an unthinking commercialism and love of consumption proverbially associated not only with his chosen métier in the fashion/luxury industry but also with the Sex And the City era’s unholy alliance of postfeminism with camp male culture (‘you go, girl’, ‘shop, shop. shop’). A 2010 US public radio interview in the link below, for example, critiques variously the vacuity of a culture in which everything has to be regarded a ‘brand’ and the excesses of a beauty industry whose ‘posthuman’ norms attempts to nurture in young women, among many other altered perceptions, a belief that breasts which are traditionally breast-shaped, rather than resembling the shape of a blown up half-grapefruit, are defective and therefore in need of being ‘fixed’ by cosmetic surgery.

As an icon of contemporary masculinity Tom Ford also signals a cultural shift from the dominance to the Alpha male image to that of a more evolved leader who incorporates positive Omega male characteristics (independence, resourcefulness, depth, a pride which can manifest itself in ways other than conventional ego gratification).

© Malcolm Evans  2010

Notes: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121405891

Posted in Americas, Categories, Consumer Culture, Emergence, Making Sense | 1 Comment »

Jungle Adventure

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

 

When I was a child I wanted to marry God. As a young woman, to be a nun and a missionary, fighting misery. I went to the jungle. There in the tropical rainforest together with progressive priests, interpreted God’s word. With a mixture of catholic fervor and political naivety we learned more than we could teach. 

Some years after, I was enlightened once more. This happened on the Aztecs’ land, at university in Mexico. I was searching for a methodology that could explain why some advertisements caught my attention immediately and why some others passed by completely unnoticed. I found the answers in semiotics.

The zigzag of my life brought me to Sweden. I changed sunny México for the Swedish darkness. My world was turned around in all senses, but a girl’s dream to do something meaningful still followed me.

The message here was of course different. It was about semiotics. Being inspired by the British pioneers, I decided to follow my vocation. To introduce semiotics to market research, I spread the word through seminars.

I clearly remember my first lecture. I wanted to appear credible, so I tried to adapt myself to Swedish cultural codes. There I was, a Colombian semiotician trying hard not to gesticulate, talking in a measured way and looking calm. Not very successful – boring in fact. I decided instead to be myself and keep on going.  

I managed to introduce semiotics despite my Latin-ness (or maybe thanks to that) and the high suspicion that the methodology aroused. It was perceived to be subjective, not being based on talking to consumers. I tested different ways to break through for a period of time until, finally, the opportunity came and I took it.

An ordinary day.  A colleague who was searching for ways to interpret collages from focus groups asked me if I could see further and deeper than her own interpretations. The answer was affirmative, and the META-COLLAGE WAS BORN. Today it is one of the most popular terms connected with semiotics in Swedish market research, for better or worse.

The consumer’s pictures were transformed into visual stories. I saw an endless source of information within the images. A visual chaos lying there, waiting to take form through strong story-telling. The credibility problem was solved. The clients believed in what they saw.  The pictures were of course, chosen by consumers. They represented the emotional values of the brand, not only with words but with concepts, symbols and images. Adjustments were made on the journey. An additional collage was needed: the one that represented the optimal brand, to capture the relevant emergent tendencies.  

In some ways I’m back on the jungle, trying to convert the heathens of research.  I have already managed to saved some, but the mission is not complete yet. I carry on saying that even without the consumer’s answers a semiotician can really see beyond – into the territory of culture. I already see the signs, that the day is coming …

© Martha Arango 2010

Posted in Americas, Clients & Brands, Europe, Experts & Agencies, Global Vectors, Semiotics, Sequencing, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

The Peace Symbol

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Anti-Nuclear or Peace Sign.  Designed in 1958 and based on the semaphore signals for letters N & D.  Created by Harvard Physics and History of Science professor Gerald Holton it first appeared at the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) march from Aldermaston to London in February 1958.  It then spread to the U.S. when an American student who was on the March took a bag of the badges back home.  Blogspot from 2008 celebrating 50th birthday.

Posted in Americas, Art & Design, Culture, Europe, Global Vectors, Making Sense | 2 Comments »

Double Exposure

Saturday, June 26th, 2010

Middlebrow Enlightenment. Analysis of a Sun Chips print ad from U.S. showing how the ideal American woman is in search of a contemporary middlebrow version of enlightenment characterised by a clear un-anxious head, healthy heart, toned legs, tight abs and pretty toes.  How to "live brightly" according to a media version (Oprah, Eckhart Tolle) characterised here by cultural commentator Joshua Glenn. 2009 Hilobrow blogspot.

Posted in Americas, Categories, Consumer Culture, Culture, Emergence | 1 Comment »

Chinese Encyclopaedia

Saturday, June 26th, 2010

If you gave someone a paragraph to complete, starting with the words “Animals are divided into…” various types of creature might immediately leap to mind – cats, dogs, elephants, male, female, tame, wild, edible, inedible, cold blooded, warm blooded, etc. A further refinement to this exercise might be to specify the number of divisions your contestant has to play with: just 2 (likely answers might include male/female perhaps or wild/domesticated, or vertebrate/invertebrate), 6 (mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, amphibians, insects). And so on. This is an interesting one to try out with young children. Human beings and cultures are always dividing things – animals, objects, people – into groups and sub-groups. The need to segment your market (“Consumers are divided into…”, or product/service offers, occasions, distribution channels) and target your offer to the appropriate segment(s) is a fundamental rule of marketing – just as understanding the time, place and kind of people you were talking to was the basis of classical rhetoric.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote of a Chinese encyclopaedia, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which animals are divided into:

a.    belonging to the Emperor,
b.    embalmed,
c.    tame,
d.    suckling pigs,
e.    sirens,
f.     fabulous,
g.    stray dogs,
h.    included in the present classification,
i.      frenzied,
j.     innumerable,
k.    drawn with a fine camelhair brush,
l.      etc.,
m.   having just broken the water pitcher,
n.    that from a long way off look like flies.

This is an excellent text for flipping us out of the familiar daze in which the cut on reality our cultures and ideologies present us with seem simply given, natural, true. A great moment of defamiliarisation which gives us a glimpse into culture’s constructedness and relativity. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault describes the effect this passage can have – of shattering “all the familiar landmarks of thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography”, “breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old definitions”, while evoking “the exotic charm of another system of thought” and “the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

The passage on animal types comes from Borges’s “Essay on the Analytical Language of John Wilkins”. Wilkins was the author of Essay Towards a Real Character and Philosophical Language (1688), an attempt to impose a mathematical certainty and objective scientific transparency on language and writing systems – in effect abolishing the distance and (often) cultural arbitariness in the divides between ‘things’, ‘thoughts’, ‘words’, and ‘characters’ or writing systems. Something akin to the Wilkins view of representation as strictly secondary to a world of concepts, reason and empirical reality became a Western cultural norm lasting well into the Twentieth Century. Borges’s response graphically summarises the turn from this to acknowledging the role of language and culture in producing meaning – and signals the re-emergence of semiotics in academic and cultural life from the 1950s and 60s on.   With the application of semiotics to understanding and guiding the development of brands, the master methodology emerging from this “turn to language” engages with some of its most characteristic cultural expressions – in the new emotional, metaphorical and totemic meanings of contemporary consumer culture.

© Malcolm Evans 2010

NOTES
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, Tavistock, 1970, p.xv
J.L. Borges, Selected Nonfictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger, Penguin, 1999

Posted in Americas, Asia, Culture, Fuzzy Sets | No Comments »