From an interesting Wall Street Journal story about locating “call centers” in other countries, but making sure the workers there are up on U.S. pop culture:
With more U.S. businesses opening call centers overseas, executives want reassurance that foreign employees will thrive under U.S. managers — and more importantly, get along with demanding U.S. customers. For these companies, cultural compatibility has become as important as labor availability and tax incentives….
A decade ago, big U.S. companies started hiring staff in low-wage countries like India to perform back-office work and clerical tasks. While India, with its highly educated, English-speaking work force, still attracts most of the call-center business, countries like the Philippines, Mexico, Canada and Ireland increasingly are destinations of choice for jobs that require customer contact, such as product support, hotel reservations and bill collection. For executives, matching a country with certain jobs has become a crucial task.
For some call-center companies, the perfect match means an in-depth knowledge of American popular culture. “I’m looking for people who already know that Barbie’s boyfriend is Ken,” [a call-center company exec] says….
From this article, written for the Detroit Free Press and reprinted in the Seattle Times, I learned of Church Marketing Sucks. That site turns out to be a project of a bunch of church marketers, who I guess are trying to shake things up. “We’ve got the greatest story ever told, but no one’s listening,” one of these people is quoted saying. “We think the church has a communications problem. In general, the church has been resistant to the idea of church marketing.” The article says: “Some marketing-savvy Christians believe higher powers need help getting good word-of-mouth.”
This isn’t quite so new as the article implies. There’s a good book called Selling God that lays out the rather long history of the way church culture and pop culture have interacted since the 1800s. Maybe I’ll say more about that some other time, but here’s a relevant quote from that book: “If religion is to be culturally central, it must learn to work with other things that are also central. Previously that might have been feudalism, kings, or Platonic philosophy. More recently it has been market capitalism responsive to consumers with spare time and a bit of money to spend.”
Still, there’s something jarring about religious marketers playing the ‘tude card with a “your strategy sucks” approach. More interesting is that this comes at a time when quasi-religious metaphors (brand “cults,” brand “evangalists,” etc) have become incredibly commonplace is marketing-talk. The book Pyro Marketing baldly suggests that the same tactics that made Purpose-Driven Life and Passion of the Christ into hits can work for any old brand at all.
This article from the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture (Volume XII: Spring 2006) reports on the results of a survey designed to explore similarities and differences among types of secular fans, different groups of religious believers, and, finally, between secular fans and the religiously devout in general. The secular fan categories were music, media, and sports. I don’t think this should be surprising, but maybe it is: The study concluded that there are differences between the religious and secular devotion. (It also found that the answers of the secular fans were similar across different categories of fandom.)
For example, in discussing how they came to their specific devotion (“the indoctrinating medium”), the religious respondents cited parents or other family members, while the secular respondents point to media. Also: “Religious respondents stated that they believed other people viewed their interest in religion to be positive, while the secular group thought others viewed their interest as either neutral or negative.” Religious devotees said “they would pray [for] or love” critics of their devotion. Secular fans said they would “ignore” critics of theirs.
Finally, religious people apparently described the degree of their devotion by how much they would give up for their beliefs — right up to giving their lives, for instance. The secular fans described their degree of devotion by “the amount of time they have spent on their given interest.”
Presumably this is one of the things that makes secular fandom so appealing: You get feelings of community and being part of something bigger than yourself and so on, but you don’t have to sacrifice anything, really. And the more time you spend enjoying whatever it is you’re a fan of — well, that just proves the depth of your commitment.
I’ve been wondering why there has not been been, to my knowledge, any particular backlash from religious believers about the ways in which the commercial, secular-fandom world hijacks their language. But maybe the answer is that religious marketers are too busy hijacking right back.
An image from the Adbusters pool.
A quick follow-up about my adventures with phone service. You may recall I complained about (or rather to) Vonage, but then later admitted that I decided to stick with them anyway. (I’ll still waiting, by the way, for some hard evidence of bad customer service resulting in negative word of mouth that a serious material impact on a company or brand. Anybody?)
Anyway, here’s the end of my relationship with Verizon:
Dear Verizon, I thought someone there might be interested in knowing why I recently terminated my account.
Read more
Today in Consumed: My Paper Crane: A wave of indie entrepreneurs who see DIYism as an ethic, not an aesthetic.
Heidi Kenney is a married mother of two, and she likes to sew and make things. The fact that these things include dolls in the shape of giant tampons is perhaps the first clue that she is not exactly a housewife in the 1950’s-sitcom mold. Kenney, who is 28 and lives outside Baltimore, makes and sells a variety of stuffed, anthropomorphized objects — the tampon dolls are among her best sellers — like doughnuts, toast and toilet-paper rolls. She does this under the auspices of her one-woman brand, My Paper Crane, making her part of a wave of independent businesses selling handmade toys, clothing, soap, jewelry, housewares and other items.
Do-it-yourself products are now at the center of everything from the DIY Network on cable television to Craft magazine, due out in the fall. All of this raises the question of what D.I.Y.-ism is really all about — is it an ethic or just an aesthetic? While the phenomenon may be on the brink of producing a few craft-world celebrities — the stars of “Stylelicious” on DIY, for example — stories like Kenney’s open a window on a sprawling community of small entrepreneurs and consumers, which seems to have a completely different set of goals. . . . Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site via this no-registration-required link.
A Few Related Links: My Paper Crane; Indie Craft Documentary; Craftster; Craftivism; Craft Revolution; Craft stuff on Make blog; Craft Mag Flickr group; Etsy online craft store; Fred Flare online store. There are many, many craft-related sites directly tied in to this scene or movement or whatever you care to call it, so I’m sure I’m leaving out important things, but this is a start…
One way to look at getting made fun of on television is that you’ve really made it. Nobody parodies a politician or a celebrity or a brand unless the parody victim is a big enough deal for the audience to get the joke. So I guess it makes sense, in a sad way, that companies are now paying to be mocked.
Brandweek (June 26) says Toyota paid MADtv to make fun of a new car it has out called the Yaris. Boost Mobile paid to be made fun of on Aqua Teen Hunger Force. “There’s no better way to say ‘you’re it’ than to have people parody you,” a Boost marketer explains.
I guess that’s true even if you’re not actually “it,” but have just written someone a check to do something that makes you seem as though you’re “it.” In this case the something just happens to be trashing your product, in a humorous and edgy manner.
Edgy is important of course because the target here is the youth audience. Another marketer delivers the quote that I’ve read a million times and that’s mandatory in all stories about youth-focused marketing: “You need to be authentic with this demographic. They have a savvy that wasn’t there before, and they know when they’re being sold to.”
Sure, paying to be a punchline, that’s a really authentic thing to do.
The irony of MADtv being part of all this is that, of course, the original Mad Magazine routinely offered wicked parodies of advertising to its youthful audience, which was apparently savvy enough to laugh. Those may have been more innocent times — but it certainly wasn’t because marketers were more phony back then than they are today.
From a Flickr pool called “Converse World Domination!” The explanation: “all stars, one stars–it doesn’t matter! c’mon, honey! show us your chucks! Note: Members can post 50 photos to the pool each month.” So far, 1,733 photos from 631 members. Also in the Flickr pools “An IPOD World,” with 120 members contributing 334 photos, and “Converse All Star,” with 138 members, 458 photos.
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This post was written by Rob Walker on July 1, 2006
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