Push-Pull Strategies in Symbiotic Relationships

In symbiotic relationships in nature, one party provides an instrumental service to another that benefits both. The great Canadian anthropologist Anthony Wallace (1960, pp 31-8) analyzed instrumental and consummatory acts to model symbiotic relationships between groups or even individuals. His work applies really well to push/pull strategies.

By using an immersive mix of both push and pull strategies, you can revitalize your intermediary channel from a disorganized gang of the living dead, zombies clothed in rotted medical bandages to a crisp and professional new face for your company, one that ultimate customers hold dear. This, however, requires you to perform an instrumental act of training the channel intermediaries on the advantageous differences of your offering: Symbiotic on your part.

You may also need to create awareness of these advantageous differences with the ultimate consumer, another instrumental act. This will motivate the channel to become a better partner. Both intermediary and end consumers will also perform the consummatory act of buying your offering. Voila!

The alternative is to die a horrible death at the hands of the zombies and let them turn you into one of them when they eat your tissue or worse, turn your offering into a commodity that competes on price. Our assigned comment captures with attractive eloquence the purposes of push and pull strategies.

Spiller and Baier (2005, p271) give a more academic explanation of the concepts. In a push strategy, our sales efforts are directed at the channel to encourage intermediaries to buy our products. This is the “how [our] offering satisfies existing business customers’ desires….” A push strategy is part of supply management, making sure the channel provides our offering to the end users.

Vanides (2009, p 7) says that a serious barrier in reaching the “right prospects” is time deficit disorder. Proper preparation and understanding is a must for all would be Oxpeckers. In our readings, Omniture (2007, p 3) tells how to establish understanding through profiles or personas of our various intermediaries. So does Wallace but in 1960 personas were called modal personalities.

To continue with Spiller and Baier, a pull strategy is marketing activities directed at the ultimate consumer with the purpose of creating destination demand that pulls our offering through the intermediate channel. This is the “Sometimes demand patterns must be modified for the business customer…” in our comment. A pull strategy is demand management, making sure the end consumer demands the unique characteristics of our offering from our channel.

Two pull campaigns come to mind. “Intel Inside” and DuPont’s “Miracles of Science.” Or in a prior age, before having a chemical halo was unsightly, DuPont’s “Better living through chemistry.” Vanides (2009, p 2) lists general DM campaign objectives including money but also responsibility to community. DuPont has something to say about this.

According to Butler (2001, p 2), DuPont’s objective in this pull strategy is to inform the buying public “what products we make and how they are used, to demonstrate that these do improve the quality of life, and therefore that DuPont is a good and useful institution that deserves political consent and business patronage.” It is an umbrella for numerous product campaigns also.

The goal of these push/pull strategies is to make it easier for our intermediaries to sell their products by accepting our support from both ends, a symbiotic relationship. Here we are now with a few of our channel intermediaries trying to keep them healthy and presentable for the viewing pleasure of our ultimate consumers.

References
Butler, Steve (10/08/2001). DuPont. Chemical Market Reporter. Retrieved on August 28, 2009 from EBSCOHOST.

Omniture (February 2007). Online Marketer‘s Segmentation Guide. Retrieved Retrieved from WVU IMC 626 Week Two Readings on August 29, 2009

Spiller, L and M Baier, (2005). Contemporary Direct Marketing. Pearson/Prentice-Hall

Vanides, Alexia (2009). Developing OST for B-to-B DM Campaigns, About Lead Generation Management. Retrieved from WVU IMC 626 Week Two Lesson on August 29, 2009.

Wallace, AFC (1960). Culture and Personality. Random House

Creativity: A Visitation of Sorcerers or a Process?

Should Creativity Follow a Process?
It should follow a process. The complexity in Marketing Communications with the advent of interactive, addressable Internet media now requires technical deftness. It is no longer art, or copy in isolation. It now integrates art and copy and also technology: cross cutting skill sets. The goal is not just art but a meaningful product. As Jaffe (2008, p 1) says:

"Creativity is just way too important to be left to a single person, a dynamic duo or a department anymore."

He warns us to know ourselves (p 2):

• "how much time is wasted by slowing down the process”
• “how little time is actually spent collaborating with insiders and outsiders”
• “how many different platforms or approaches [technologies] were taken into account”

Koslow, Sasser and Riordan (2003, p 6) imply that creativity is already subject to an implicit process “imposed by strategic considerations.” They go on to say that the strategy brief provides a framework that “gives [creatives] latitude to define the opportunity, like a canvas for a painting. “

An expressly defined process from Graham Wallas (see Stultz, 2009, p 1), or James Webb Young (see Drewniany, 2008, pp 129-30) gives us the framework to focus and orchestrate work from various contributors to meet the needs of the client. Creativity becomes less arcane so well heeled account professionals can fit it into their business routine. Koslow, Sasser and Riordan (2003, p 5) observe that creatives are most likely to step back and let account execs control the creative dialog. With a well known creative process, the competitive account team knows when to take a back seat and let the less aggressive right brainers have a say.

Kracauer (1926/1963/2005, p 78) takes the opposite viewpoint. Kracauer was a cultural analyst and member of the applied social sciences group at Columbia University. His work laid the foundation for modern film criticism. He argues that an artist is too big and will appear out of place in a “mechanistic” process. His analogy was for Weimar Germany but an equivalent modern American example is that the exquisite Suzanne Farrell could never be just a line dancer for the Rockettes, not that there is anything wrong with them. She is too creative and their routine too mechanical.

However, Stultz (2009, p 2) points out, the purpose of creative advertising is not patrician art but sales so we need to produce what is appropriate for the target market. Koslow, Sasser and Riordan (2003, p 6) are more harsh and note that even if creatives think of themselves as artists they haven’t left their day jobs. They may want to be artists but are not big enough. So they apply their less certain creativity to further the aims of their patrons, and those banal brands.

Koslow, Sasser and Riordan (2003, p 2) provide a working definition of creativity as a combination of originality and appropriateness. Originality is easy to spot but conversely, appropriateness is difficult to assay (ibid, pp 2-3). Appropriateness is the basis of our paycheck from the client. The creative strategy is the roadmap to appropriateness. A well known creative process helps to ensure that everyone is singing from the same page so we avoid a mismatch between creative team and the account exec: one providing artistry and originality while the other is expecting strategy fulfillment and originality (see Koslow, Sasser, and Riordan, 2003, p 9).

Can Creativity Follow a Process?
Yes, creativity can be made into a process and the proof is that successful agencies like J. Walter Thompson (see Drewniany and Jewler, 2008, p 129) have defined and incorporated a creative model into their work. Yes, it can because certain techniques create an atmosphere of creativity so we can hot up the copy or visuals (for example see Stultz, 2009, p 3). Finally, yes because if a definitive process like the mind-numbing tedium of American public schools took our creativity from us (see Stultz, 2009, p 3), it is safe to assume a reverse process can help us to regain at least some of it.

Karl Weick, the noted psychologist believes that creativity follows a process and says (1979, pp 252-4) that “creativity is putting old things into new combinations or new things into old combinations. “ He describes techniques to cut through the overpowering tangle of words and images to arrive at a salient idea. Crovitz's Relational Algorithm is one of them.

To generate creative ideas, Crovitz uses a basic sentence structure: "Take one thing in relation to another thing." For us, the things are the key brand values, customer characteristics or market conditions. They can also be symbols or colors. The [in relation to] is a set of 42 relational English words. A substitution is iteratively applied: brand values into [one thing], customer attributes or market conditions into [another thing], and for each pair a rotation of the 42 relational English words into [in relation to]. Each sentence is then evaluated. For more information see Crovitz Relational Algorithm.

Weick also advises (1979, p 44) that creativity requires think "ing." By this he means that we should attempt to use verbs rather than nouns. Verbs anticipate objects and events, and apply meaning to them more so than nouns. Also, studies show that future perfect tense rather than simple future tense is more conducive to creativity (p 199).

Simple Future thinking is starting in the present and working to the future. Future perfect tense starts in the future, assuming the event occurred and works backwards to the present. Simple future is difficult because any possible outcome is considered in our thinking, including those not on the path to the desired result. One creative technique he suggests is to write yourself a congratulatory letter from the future that explains in detail how well your creative strategy worked.

The Risk of Bounding Creativity with a Process.
A fundamental risk is that we use yesterday’s vocabulary to understand today’s problem and to generate tomorrow’s solution. Furthermore, we risk reapplying a comfortable but characteristic design and so become predictable. What’s more, keeping in a “comfort zone” may be dangerous because we may lose the exuberant intensity that comes from being in an uncomfortable spot.

Another concern is that it is questionable how well a mechanical process understands meaning and so incorporates it into the solution. Hope is another part of the creative process. Again, it’s uncertain how well a mechanical process understands hope. Hope cushions the shock of setback so it may be that a non-process creativity is more persistent, especially after mechanical tricks don’t give a desirable solution.

Finally, in Kracauer’s view (1926, p 70), bounding creativity with a process is simple minded.

References
Drewniany, B and J Jewler (2008). Creative Strategy in Advertising. Wadsworth

Duncan, T (2005). Principles of Advertising & IMC. McGrawHill/Irwin.

Jaffe, Joseph (April 14, 2008 ). “Is it time to phase out the creative function?” AdWeek. Retrieved on January 27, 2009 from http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/community/columns/other-columns/e3i8302b5a754f42f182d4e5721245d5619

Koslow, S, Sasser, S and E Riordan (March 2003). What Is Creative to Whom and Why? Perceptions in Advertising Agencies. Journal of Advertising Research.

Kracauer, S and T. Levin (2005) The Mass Ornament. Harvard.

Stultz, L (2009). In Search of the Big Idea. Retrieved on January 27, 2009 from WVU.

Weick, Karl (1979). The Social Psychology of Organizing, 2nd Edition. McGraw-Hill.

Kracauer on Photography

Siegfried Kracauer was a cultural analyst and member of the applied social sciences group at Columbia University. His work laid the foundation for modern film criticism and he is the author of several works including Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. One of his first essays on photography appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung in the 1920’s and was latter published in The Mass Ornament.

Underlying Kracauer’s analysis was his tenet that the inconspicuous, quotidian expressions of a culture reveal more about it than its own self-pronouncements. Everyday phenomena such as photos or the nature of popular literature and film are unmediated representations of a culture. Drewniany and Jewler (2008, p 185) remind us that in creative design, a picture is worth a thousand words. Kracauer extended his analysis beyond film into advertising, tourism, city layout, and dance.

Regarding the photograph, he observes that if we enlarge its resolution, we can make out the dots in it, which are matrixed together into recognizable shapes. However, Kracauer observes that the photo attempts to be more than just a reference to the dot matrix shape. It tries to represent the subject matter of an event, which it can not. Without a supporting history or a memory that is associated with the subject matter, the shapes on a photo are not adequate to recreate an understanding of the event.

He believes that photos are a history lacking context or meaning. They are particularly unlike memories, which are retained because of some personal significance. Someone organizes memories according to the personal significance of those memories, while a photograph is an inventory of every spatial detail of a place at a moment. Memories are never only spatial and the significant information in a memory is usually not spatial but in any case cannot be fully condensed to the simplicity of a spatial representation.

There is a variance between photos and memory. Memories are only incomplete fragments to the photographer and often without a spatial representation. They appear as fragments, though, only because a mechanical process like photography does not understand meaning and so cannot incorporate it. However, when memory fragments are associated with a common meaning they become a relational whole.

Memory in turn has reason to doubt a photo. Photo’s usually contain irrelevant litter, and are a jumble of relevant and irrelevant detail. Often the irrelevance is spatial in nature and not just a lack of meaning. [The need for photographic editing software attests to this.] A photo by itself is a suspect truth. It ignores the history of the subjects before the scene. Here there is a partial correspondence between memory and a photo. A person’s memory likewise omits characteristics and determinations of a history, but only those which are not related to the reality the person perceives in their activated consciousness.

A photo is the attempt to reduce the entire circumstance into one graphic image from one viewpoint. An artist using a camera can surmount the abovementioned shortcomings of photography by adding meaning or theme to the elements in a photograph. An artistic composition fashions the elements of a photograph “to a higher purpose. “

The artist uses different rules than the photographer, whose main concern is with the technical details of the process. The Art rules use associations to penetrate the surface cohesion of the photograph to give it a meaning. The photographer, in contrast to the artist, generally does not explore the elements or create a composition to highlight their associations. The result from a photographer is a stockpiling of unconnected elements. Without a substantive understanding of the elements in the composition, photographers are dilettantes who ape an artistic manner.

Can a photograph become timeless? Kracauer quotes E.A. DuPont, “the essence of film is the essence of time.” Because photography is a function of time, then its implications may change depending on the timeframe applied to it. In a new time period, the understanding of the scene in an old photograph is difficult to reconstruct, or as Menander put it “You can never step into the same river twice.” The subjects have moved on or the associations have changed so the image no longer recreates the desired effect. An old photo is then a diminution of its previous essence.

Kracauer argues there is a correspondence with how time affects photography and how it affects fashion. Both a photograph and a fashion are transparent when modern and empty when old. It is only the very old that obtain attention as having the beauty of an antique. Antique is beautiful because it is different in a world where there is a constant selling of newness that is the same. There is a risk with the recent past that the meaning of the composition has changed because the associations or the elements themselves are now outdated. While such is just as outdated as the very old, it still claims to be alive but Kracauer concludes it is merely ludicrous instead. It painfully tries to hold ground that is already lost. In contrast, the antique has surrendered that ground.

References
Drewniany, B and J Jewler (2008). Creative Stratgey in Advertising. Wadsworth.

Kracauer, S and T. Levin (2005) The Mass Ornament. Harvard.

Kracauer on Weimar Literature

Siegfried Kracauer used analysis of widely read literature to investigate the structure and dynamics of social strata. He argued that this form of analysis avoided the inevitable pretense aroused by a more direct approach. In his essay On Best Sellers and Their Audience, he reviews the structural transformation of the Weimar economy after World War I that reordered the German middle class, and how that reordering was reflected in the period literature.

The weakening of Weimar Germany effectively turned many in the middle class into the working poor who still carried the middle class label. That middle class lacked the crucial features of the middle class before the war. They no longer had the limited independence enjoyed by the former middle class, through its modest financial security. Because of its size and interests, this middle class had been the financial mainstay for the publishing industry.

Kracauer noted the economic trends leading up to the social quagmire in Weimar: the concentration of capital, impoverishment of small stockholders, and the inflationary crisis that “led to the destruction of essential resources.” The new middle class was dependent. The deterioration of their fortunes slowly dismantled the foundation of their old middle class consciousness. The old tenets could no longer survive, stripped of their economic and social foundations in the new social reality.

Along with the declining fortunes and independence of the middle class, actual individualism declined. Administrative law increasingly invaded individual affairs and governmental planning began to transcend individual interest. Collectivization increased. Kracauer observed that people became less conscious of old social status. These trends in Weimar appeared incognito. The prevailing consciousness was still adjusting to the new realities, still reaching for the old concepts.

In addition to declining individualism in Weimar society, economic authorities lost their ability to cast the previous illusions and spells. In Weimar, strong disenchantment had taken hold. Ideas that used to drive the economy became mere rhetorical bric-a-brac. Kracauer’s brilliant quip was “You can’t live on bread alone, particularly when you don’t have any.” A manifestation of this heightened cynicism was the cinematic unmasking of the rigged game, in Weimar films such as The Joyless Streets with Greta Garbo.

In popular literary works, tragedy walked hand in hand with individualism. The fictional individuals triumph, however, even in the potential catastrophe constructed for them by their author. Kracauer quotes a best selling author in Weimar, “The worried, fearful person of today and particularly the person from the upper classes, almost always has to keep his feelings under wraps in the often futile struggle to maintain his standard of living. Such a person grasps … eagerly for such stories.”

Kracauer believed the middle class in Germany understood that a tragic intermediate fate awaited them. Yet they still attempted to maintain the old and comfortable arrangement. As a result of this tension, they raised “all calamities into tragic events. “

Idealists who tragically sacrifice themselves for an ideal was another popular theme in Weimar. The upper class doggedly struggled to maintain a faded idealism, which gave them style and distance from the mass. Faded idealism, according to Kracauer “resonated among the more cultivated circles, which [were] haunted by taste, culture, and education. “

In contrast, the middle and working class taste in literature had an emphasis on spirit or perseverance, and feeling became a pervasive motif. Feeling provided an optimistic hope to steady oneself during tragedy. It buttressed the outmoded concepts that were a comfortable part of better days. This “touching quality” signified an intermediate position between acceptance and rebellion. This was the middle class stance in the Weimar crisis.

Many story lines preserved the middle class concepts through escape into other worlds. These excursions avoided the challenging issues people would encounter with a reasoned analysis of their situation. A popular such distant world was the sensual, and erotic enchantment increased during the Weimar years. Another world was distant geographies. Nature yet another. Nature proved to be a popular backdrop in bestsellers because of its cathartic expanse. In the silence of nature, complex troubles sink into a mute void.

Kracauer’s conclusion, drawn from his study of popular literature, is that the middle class in Weimar would not acknowledge their change in fortune. They invested their beliefs in the false hopes of maintaining a life style ideal that had already perished. Their literature allowed them to renounce language and reason, and through its feeling to retain hope in the old concepts.

Thomas Y. Levin has translated a series of Kracuaer's essays into English. They originally appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung and are now available in the book The Mass Ornament.