Dimbulb Blog - September 28, 2007

Tribes, the Last Trend
Pt. 1

By Jonathan Salem Baskin

attended Brand ManageCamp 2007 this week in Chicago, which was chocked full of the latest thinking (and implementation ideas) on marketing strategy, psychology, technology, ROI measurement, politics, and trends. I heartily recommend that you consider checking it out next year in Vegas (Oct 6 & 7).

The trend presentations got me thinking, though, not so much about what was in them, but about the concept and utility of trend spotting itself.

Trend spotters attempt to identify the exceptional things that people are doing, in hopes that those things are on their way to becoming norms. Trends can arise anywhere, from technical development (using Compuserve to send emails, or the W.E.L.L. to talk to friends at the same time, would have fit the bill), cultural or social development (going to spontaneous rave parties, casual Fridays back when the rest of the week was still coat-and-tie), to consumer products (energy drinks emerging first in an always-exhausted Japan).

Spotting trends is an attempt to preempt asking the question "if only we’d seen it coming," the it being some inescapable quality of life now that sometime in the past was nothing more than a hint. So it's actually a lot easier to point to trends in the past-tense than it is to predict them. Even better, the saving grace for the spotting racket is that future-prediction can never be wrong: since every trend is inter-related with every other one, they all tend to occur...and not occur...as Tomorrow unfolds.

The utility of such efforts to marketers, however, is that trends should help us make our branding and selling efforts more effective, as knowing even imprecisely about them might have associative value (being part of something cool) and a distributional value (putting an ad someplace that it'll be seen by people we want to reach).

In practice, however, it's a lot more vague.

What constitutes a trend? Is there an equation that says that something is a trend if X people are doing something Y times a month in at least Z locations during period A which is a B increase over period C? What isn't a trend (one person doing one thing one time could be a proto-trend, couldn't it)? Are individual consumer choices a different category of trend than, say, technical developments by a research department? Do we measure impacts differently, and by what units (% of choices made, a delta of transactions year-over-year)? Is a trend of behaviors different from a trend of opinions or expressed intentions? If we could identify when trends start, is there math that lets us pinpoint when they stop?

More intriguing, does trend spotting spot the ways that new interests and habits change the very nature or way people make decisions? Even if we notice that trends are interrelated, is there math to study and calculate the behavioral changes across them?

Nope.

A trend could be just about anything. No two people necessarily have to agree on it, no two spotters concur on its dimensions or implications. A trend could inspire marketers to develop ad creative, buy space somewhere, invent a web site, even create or label a new product. Then it could then change, depending on the who, when, and how of the spotter saying so, which would prompt changes in marketing tactics. We see this illustrated by the daily reports of new web sites that purport to brush your teeth better than yesterday's sites.

A trend is a lot like a brand. A cool idea, mostly.

As a marketer, I certainly want to know this stuff, and some very smart and wonderful people go about finding and presenting it. But I suspect that the real value is less about noting the individual, latest-and-greatest instances of what we subsequent label trends, and more in building sustainable strategies for making and selling stuff because of how and why these behaviors fit together.

So here's a radical proposition:

What if the most important or relevant instances we report as trends are really the hints of something else?

Maybe they're outcomes of group behavior that can be modeled and cast as a set of behavioral dynamics. I'm not talking just income or geophysical attributes, but modeling these groups as all-encompassing world-views, or mini-cultures, that define the what, how, and when of behaviors that include product purchase and use.

Think less trends, and more tribes.

Maybe the drivers of trends are the behaviors that result from the social constructs of groups of people who self-identify on a topic, issue, nationality, lifestyle, whatever. These groups don't relate to brands, or converse with them: they fit brand names into their world-views, and then discard them when they no longer serve a purpose.

So the questions relevant to marketers would be about finding such tribes and understanding how they coalesce, what they dictate and do, and then how long they last.

This isn't a new concept: Joel Kotkin wrote about it in 1994, basing his analysis of world history and current events in terms of tribes based on nationalities. He also predicted groupings based on religion, which did anticipate one of the largest, most active tribes today (Evangelicals).

And a recent book called Consumer Tribes has expanded Kotkin's model to include groups of consumers, yet it tends to generalize the concept to be synonymous with trendy events and, well, trends.

Tribes have organizing principles, rules, means of communication, rituals, news outlets, fashion options, and all of these criteria can be measured and compared. They become routine for members, defining their lives so substantively that they do so subtly: the tribe affects what its members care about, how they care about things, and what they do about them.

Tribes are ultimately based upon ideas, just like brands, but they exist to operationalize them. So there's a math possible here.

The premise I'll explore in Part 2 of this essay is that studying this phenomenon can elevate our understanding of trends, and better extend it to the approaches and tools we need to develop.

I'm going to use the steampunk phenomenon as the case history. If you don't already know about it, you can get a taste here, and some, and some glorious steampunk invention here.

Tribes, the Last Trend
Pt. 2

We currently look at trends are the same things as crazes, fads, interests, issues, pursuits, diversions, and obsessions. All are words that reference the types of things people choose to think about or do when they're free to choose what they want to think about or do.

So there'll always be a latest party concept, music hit, favorite drink, popular toy, incarcerated starlet, technical widget, conspiracy theory, lipstick color, and any of a zillion other products, events, and topics. It's the stuff that populates Now and, as such, it's always changing, as Now transitions into Then.

Looking back in time, things appear comfortably clear. Patterns emerge. So do explanations, which lead us to try to see the same in what's going around us this year, week, day, or even this very moment. A new music download service will change the way we shop. Experiments in nanotechnology will help cure diseases in 2050. Long check-in lines at airports may prompt new forms of dating. The new cut in men's jackets seen on the streets of Mumbai will be very popular in Des Moines sometime soon.

We want the world around us to possess such emergent meaning, not only would it be useful to marketers if it did, but it would serve as a way of making sense of the apparently random experiences that seem to incessantly fall on us from the When.

Only that sense of order is imaginary. It doesn't exist.

As marketers, we are forever stuck in a process of chasing the Now, hoping to identify some instance of experience or attitude that can be extrapolated into something we call a trend/fad/craze/whatever, and then throw creative and money at it. And we usually squish it -- or at least burn it out rather quickly -- when we try to exploit it. If we're able to truly recognize trends, we tend to ensure that they are limited, short-lived, and disconnected from what might follow.

I wonder whether there's a different, or at least complementary, way of looking at ideas and events in our Now, and pressing them into a more sustainable service of brands and marketing. Could there be a way to invest instead of simply spend? To decide instead of only guess, and anticipate rather than follow?

Maybe we shouldn't look at the Now and try to work back from it to explain why, but rather look at the dynamics of groups --- the what and how they do things -- that may prompt the When.

I think the predictability we seek might be found in the behavior of such groups -- loose confederations of individuals who use user-generated content, social media, and real-time events -- who not only evidence a shared interest, but build and reinforce unique decision-making processes that affect purchasing decisions across their lives.

Perhaps once we see these groups, we've seen our last trend.

Consider the Steampunk phenomenon as an example.

Steampunk is a creative conceit that posits a forever-Victorian take on technological, economic, and cultural development. So imagine guys in high-collared shirts working by flickering arc-lamps powered by giant steam-boilers, punching patterns into wax cards to run giant metal computational machines. That's what writers William Gibson and Bruce Sterling did in 1991 with their novel The Difference Engine.

Now think of it as something more...a broad, thematic organizing point for a loose confederation of people. Not a trend arising from their interests, but the focal point for a variety of interests and behaviors. And a driver of their user-created content, use of social media, etc.

People blog about it. They create art. Write stories. Shoot video and animate cartoons. Design and sell clothing. Build objects. Organize get-togethers. Share information and recommend things to one another. Possess some semblance of self-identification as steampunks, or at least steampunk-aware. All of us are somewhat steampunk-influenced, whether via fashion or art.

So it's not a trend. Not particularly a fad, and certainly not a club, as there's no membership. And it's not all-encompassing or defining, like a tribe, cult, or avocation might be. Few people are total steampunks; they likely have interests that overlap their own individual takes on the steampunk canon. Their identification with the topic will likely extend into the future in a much more predictable way than the specific instances of that involvement might alone suggest.

It's the group -- emergent via all the new media devices available to them -- that is behind the cursory observations of trend. Think clan : an extended, informal grouping, founded upon some shared quality or interest in a creative conceit.

There are many such groupings, based on art (goth, punk), history (Renaissance Faire, civil war reenactors), entertainment content (Trekkies), issues (anti-branders, pro-family). Maybe parenting is a clan. Or small-stock investors. Each a grouping by varying degrees, depending on how many sites they use to interact, how often they communicate, about what, etc.

Are we mistaking the instances of experience we note, report, and try to market against as experiences, when they're just the result of deeper purpose or intent? So when we see an action or idea in the Now, and try to extrapolate from it to the future of When, are we really seeing the outcomes of the activities of various groupings?

Perhaps it is from the context of clans that we see conversation about (and interaction with) brands? Not all groups are created equal, and have the same velocity of involvement or relevance to your business. But if we could map and track such groupings, maybe we could create math that substantiated, ranked, and forecasted future behavior.

I'm still working on this idea, so I don't know if it's particularly bright or dim. Care to add a thought?

 

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