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06.04.2004

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HARTBEAT
July 29, 2003"The Magic of the Cultural Brand" - an interview with Harvey Hartman

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Harnessing The Power Of Organization

from the current issue of [N]sight magazine

The current infatuation with community and experience in retailing circles continues unabated. Prompted by a confluence of well-received books in the business press (e.g., The Deviant's Advantage, The Tipping Point), along with the initial marketplace success of numerous retailers who've championed these strategies (e.g., Trader Joe's and, most recently, England's venerable Marks & Spencer), we find more and more marketers, branders and retailers turning to experience and community as a foundation for their "next big brand."

Subsequently, for me, one frustration with commonplace attempts at staging experiences and fostering of community also continues. Branders and marketers often take much of the important work of community and experience building out of the hands of those to whom it matters most - the consumers - placing it instead under the auspices of architects and designers.

This makes sense. Architects and designers are, after all, experts in the practiced art of weaving human interaction into the built form. So what's the problem you say?

The problem arises from a certain narrow - but all-too-common - perspective that values production efficiency over consumer interest. Infatuated as they are in traditional business attributes such as scalability, predictability, reliability and control, many marketers and brand managers seek out architects and designers to script the brand blueprint - often some combination of retail architecture, store design, package design, product sets or messaging - and then attempt to replicate that blueprint on a grand scale. It is as if meaningful human experience can somehow be reduced to a set of blueprints and packaging attributes awaiting implementation by a skilled management team.

If only things were that simple.

One glaring problem, of course, is that community and experience are, by their very definition at odds with notions of predictability, reliability and control. As we all know - and the data confirm - our communities and experiences are living, breathing expressions of indigenous spirit that consistently resist plan and design. More fundamentally, though, the design-scale-implement approach rests on a more dangerous premise.

By placing control of the experience in the hands of designers and architects, one is taking an objectivist position - assuming that there are good designs and bad designs that most people will be able to discern and that you've had the wise fortune of hiring a firm that produces the right ones. This approach fails to recognize the arbitrary, unpredictable nature of authentic indigenous communities. At press time, the hottest new community on the Internet is called Neopet - an ever-expanding group (estimated at 60 million) who log on daily to "care" for their electronic pets by performing tedious exercises on a Java-based GUI. Who needs the carefully scripted, well-designed logic of Drkoop.com when we can idle away the day caring for our electronic, "imaginary" friend?

While designers and architects remain crucially important, their relevance is dwarfed by a more fundamental need to understand the role of organization in brokering the relationship between consumer and brand, community and design. Specifically, by sculpting the organization to remain flexibly open to evolving experiences and communities, the organization - and not the designer - becomes the ultimate broker of community and experiential aesthetics. Pragmatically speaking, this means it is as important that consumers have a say in the evolving design and services offered by a specific retailer as the brand manager, architect or designer. And those interested in staging the most compelling experiences and indigenous brand communities will devote as much - if not more - attention to fine-tuning and customizing organizational dynamics as they will searching out a cutting-edge designer.

Ironically, the single most successful example of this approach won't be found in the case studies littering the conventional business literature. Instead we turn to, of all people, the most successful commercial artist of the 20th century, Andy Warhol.

While surely a talented designer and sketch artist - Warhol's earliest renditions of women's shoes are considered by many experts to be among his most skilled achievements - Warhol was most known for his ability to serve as a "broker" of aesthetic and practice for the entire art community. Long abandoning any sense of self found in objectivist views of the art world (the idea that talented people such as I produce great art), Warhol was content to serve as the organizational conduit through which the expression of the larger art community flowed freely. Whether it was opening up the doors of his venerable Factory to the mass-production of lithographs and silk screens by trained interns, the creation of Interview (for many years the art world's leading fashion magazine), Warhol's involvement and oversight of an independent film production company, or playing the ringleader to the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (a traveling psychedelic pop-art circus that frightened many sensibilities and launched Lou Reed's musical career), Warhol was forever obsessed with seeing what he could accomplish by existing as nothing more than an organizational conduit. In fact, this obsession followed him to his death, wherein collective opinion bemoaned the fact that as famous as he was, nobody really knew who Andy Warhol was as much as they did what he promoted.

The moral: A true designer understands how to "stand back" and let the organization channel the will of the participant (art fans, lifestyle consumers, etc.) to shape experience as she or he sees fit.

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