Making Meaning of the Meanings We Make Online: An Interview with Robert Kozinets (Part Four)

We’ve had some very generative conversations through the years about the similarities and differences between fandom studies and consumer research (specifically in its cultural/qualitative forms). How would you characterize the relations between the two? 

I think people in marketing are fascinated by the work you do, they know it, and they know fandom studies mainly through you and your works. We’ve both been chipping away over the years in slightly different ways at the differences between consumer research and cultural studies. For instance, you put more pragmatic work and examples into material like Convergence Culture as you engaged more with people like Grant McCracken and me, and I started a career in marketing with cultural studies types investigations, in part thanks to your mentorship and works. I think you helped open up a part of media studies that was not reactively hostile to business and business school scholars. In my experience, surprising numbers of the business school academics (especially postmodern accountants) are as critical and even Marxist as any academic. 

Marketing has a drift towards economics and psychology. A part of cultural studies maybe hasn’t quite escaped critical theory and the Frankfurt School’s gravity field, I don’t know, I could be wrong about that. So, I’d say the two fields are sort of strange attractors in terms of topic matter like popular culture, but they also have philosophies at their cores that push them away from each other. Nonetheless, they get closer at times, such as when people publish work that crosses over, using brands or cultural studies ideas, like you sometimes see in consumer culture theory work, and more frequently see in journals like the Journal of Consumer Culture, or Consumption, Markets, and Culture. We don’t yet have much of a formal crossover. Words like brand fans get thrown around a bit, without rigor. A notable exception was the article by Matthew Guschwan (2013) that we used in our co-taught class, and there are a number of others. I like to think that, as the word “brand” and its study no longer carry quite the same stigma in the field of communication and media studies as they once may have, and that as marketing and consumer researchers continue to embrace critical, positional, and transformative perspectives, that we can see these fields meeting more, and maybe even a coherent subfield start to form. Wouldn’t that be a nice thing?

You end the book with a quote from William Gibson about the relationship between terrorism and the media. It’s a provocative end point. How do you see the relationship between netnography and terrorism? Whose interests does the netnographer serve? To what degree is the goal to be a “troublemaker,” to point towards another key word that crops up near the end of the book? 

This is the most important question, isn’t it? Whose interests does the netnographer serve? The netnographer, or the team of netnographers, should serve a moral interest, I think, and they should speak the truth to power, publicly, as best and as much as they can. I developed netnography first in order to understand fans, to be able to get closer to the worlds that they experience and to empathize with them. At the time I was doing my dissertation on Star Trek fans, there was a researcher who was getting a lot of press with a study showing that Star Trek fans were pathological, that they had some kind of social deficiencies. That research, which was terrible for so many reasons, including methodologically, infuriated me. With my netnography collecting data using email conversations, I was able to openly explore topics relating to stigma in the Star Trek and fan community in a way that would have been much more awkward to handle in person. In person, I was seeing things, like debates over the Star Trek uniform, that were very revealing. Online, I was able to get very detailed confessional type tales that unpacked what I had seen in person, many of which I found heart-breaking and inspirational at the same time. So, from the beginning, for me, netnography was, like ethnography, about serving the interests of social and individual betterment, in particular, about finding empathy with groups that might be treated by mainstream thinkers or groups from a distance as pathological or wrong. A recent netnography I did with Ulrike Gretzel and Anja Dinhopl looked at how art museum consumers used selfies of themselves with art in order to elevate and play with their identities. That work, which was published in a psychology journal, contradicted a raft of work on selfies that looked at as a narcissistic pursuit, a pathology. Again, the goal of much academic netnography is to humanize, to promote understanding and empathy, to enlarge our viewpoints. I think that’s why netnography has been used to study some difficult to reach groups like illegal drug users and  people on the dark web, teen drinkers, and challenging topics like sexting or online violence and extremism. 

            Of course, netnography is an effective tool. It works for building a deeper human understanding than you get with many other methods. So, it is employed and has been developing in relation to the needs of industry to understand its consumers and potential customers. A lot of my work in marketing has been to hone it and demonstrate its effective use as a deeper and more effective tool for uncovering business insights. My early work showed how valuable that could be in understanding what consumers wanted and how you could innovative new product and services by applying it.

            And yes, I think that the use of netnography can be and often should be to disrupt. This world we live in is in desperate need of the right kinds of trouble, as John Lewis liked to say. I think a lot of modes of understanding that we use in science and business, the quantification and modeling used for prediction, the manipulation and control are having terrible effects on our society and our ways of relating with each other and the wider world around us. We need empathy. We need more questioning of fundamental assumptions. We need more connection with each other and with our own raw, difficult to handle feelings of fear and anger. We need more critical thinking and reflectivity that cuts to the root of many of our social problems and helps to envision collective solutions we can live with. I like to think that netnography can help to bring some of this mentality into the act of research, that we can keep the rigor of computer science, communication, and marketing modes, but add the empathy, troublemaking, and humanizing of ethnography. That’s not always the goal, but it is definitely one important goal.

We’ve just co-taught a class together on fan communities and brand communities, where we spoke to key fan representatives from different media industries. What were some of your take-aways from this process? What do you see as some of the common mistakes brands and media industries make in dealing with their fans/enthusiasts?

Oh, that is a fun thing to revisit after these several months have passed. It was interesting to see presenters do their normal things in front of the class until Spring break, and then after March, we were seeing people Zoom into class from their homes. We got a different, more intimate conversation with them because they were in their homes, with their pets and kids and stuff around them. I thought Britt Shotts, who manages the He-Man brand for Mattel, and recently managed the Jurassic Park brand, was a terrific guest (we had many). Her pet actually attacked the camera during the presentation, which was one of those perfect moments I will remember from our COVID semester.

What I got from Britt’s presentation and discussion was a sense of how canny she is, and Mattel is, in the way they have been listening to consumers. I don’t think this is typical. I think that many brands still use more traditional ways of keeping customers and their voices at a controllable level. They use social monitoring devices to look at mass conversations in word clouds and pie chart, they use focus groups and surveys to direct, tabulate, and process information before they see it. But I think they usually come to customers and fans with the attitude that they, as the producers, are the authorities and the experts. But it actually turns out that fan-consumers understand the brand and they care about it and its products. A lot. That’s where Britt was really refreshing, because her presentation captured this idea that the fans are the experts, and that her learning is sort of learning at their knees. She might pitch them, and then they might school her on the brand, what it means, what has been done in the past. She was a big Jurassic Park fan, so her fandom translated very naturally into her fan relations activities managing that brand for Mattel. But she had to gear up a lot when she was assigned to the He-Man brand, a very masculine and Anglo brand, and that’s where she had to really assume an attitude of listen and learn. And what she found, when she really listened, was that the He-Man was meaningful because he conveyed a sense of moral certitude to people. The brand relationship turned out to be a complex exchange.  Not simply a one-way relationship, where consumers give their money and companies toss them new stuff. She emphasized working with positive voices in the fan communities online, empowering them. She was very conscious of influencing the public conversation on social media, building these champions and influencers and empowering them, but also listening to criticism very carefully, which she recognized as a fine line. Real relationships are hard. Enduring brand relationships? Those are also hard.

In most businesses, the brand managers come and go every year or two, so it’s a revolving door for any particular brand. But the fans and devotees—they stay. When someone has been using a brand like Pepsi or Nike for a lifetime, it is like it is a part of their family. It isn’t just a drink or detergent, an economic resource or a trademark—it means something special and the people who are devoted to it use it because of that meaning. I think that there’s a very different way of seeing a brand when you sit at this managerial distance, where idiosyncratic brand meaning is something a manager is extrinsically motivated to cope with. They have to listen and try very hard to get out of that instrumentalist mind frame, not just with the products and brand, but with customers, too. It’s about empathy, again. What Britt said was that she tried to take fans on the manager’s journey, to let them into the production process, and that this was something they wanted to experience. She saw social media as a huge gift that managers have only very lightly begun to touch upon—and remember, this is for Mattel, a pretty big outfit. One of the great things she noted was that now, as people who are stuck at home with their toy collections are creating huge amounts of content online today, during COVID, managers are mostly stuck at home and can’t do photoshoots. And that “user-generated content” becomes incredibly valuable to the company under those circumstances. But all of it, she emphasized, was about partaking, with respect and empathy, in a cultural conversation. Not dictating it.

You and others in the Strategic Communication program have recently turned your attention to young activists, a topic we discuss often here. What were some of your core findings? How do you see brands connecting with activists in meaningful ways at the moment? Or is such an alliance possible?

I think that there’s currently a fascination throughout the social sciences and in industry with young activists because this seems to be where the cultural momentum is. I turn to your research on this, Henry, and point to what you have been telling us for a while in your books like By Any Media Necessary, and your work on the Harry Potter Alliance goes back a number of years before that. 

In my research, I see technology as an integrated part of this process. The current activist moment and the role of hashtags and online organization only emphasizes the power of the platforms and their algorithms again. I think the challenge for society is going to be how we manage to balance the desires of people for social change with the desires of managers and executives, including the large technology platform companies and their advertising and data driven business models and executives, to keep the economic and social systems stable. They want them stable so that they can continue to profit from them. If we take as a founding principle that things like racial justice and social justice are tied to environmental justice, then companies which are extensively using plastics, rare metals, and fossil fuels, companies that are extensively involved in wasting energy, companies that are founded on cheap, desperate, fungible, precarious labor domestically and abroad, might be in trouble. And there are a lot of those companies--it is just about all of them. It’s all of us, too. We are consumers hooked on and into an unjust system that is killing everything around us. Almost 70% percent of the living things that were around in 1970 are gone today. That is unthinkable, and should be unbearable, but human beings have increased their numbers and their footprints massively. Today, wildfires are destroying the wilderness of the entire West Coast. Tomorrow, it will be some new devastation. Eventually, our species pays the piper.

We aren’t really having a conversation about actually addressing the system changes that are required, that have been required for fifty years now. Environmental justice is currently being sold in America as a way to promote jobs and more economic growth and that is not going to solve the underlying problem. This isn’t a job creation crisis. Consumers and companies are institutionally very far along a path with a dark and fiery end. And, for their part, corporations, brands, and their governments and regulatory bodies base their responses to protest on lessons developed in propaganda wars. They have crisis communications set up to handle things like the George Floyd protests or the challenges of COVID lockdowns. They greenwash and release statements, lobby and hire influencers, or engage in cynical and sinister corporate social responsibility initiatives. They scan, detect, message, virtue signal, tamp down, and then carry on with business as usual. 

If people are seeking real change, fundamental change that encompasses social and environmental justice, they are not going to find it with the business or government institutions of today. A lot of young people today, globally, whatever their political inclinations or interests, realize this, and that’s why we are seeing this uptick in activism. And in response, institutions are doing what institutions are built to do, which is that they do everything they can to keep things from changing in a substantial way. Companies and brands cast change in terms of new energy projects, new plastic product innovations, new clear cuts of old growth forest, or new mining projects. I think we are going to see a toughening and a hardening of business and government institutions against activism, probably worldwide, as they continue to try to keep things in human society from changing radically away from rampant consumerism. As they have in the past, over the next few decades they will keep steering people towards solutions that involve the exact same systems that got us into this mess and that are now accelerating it. Whether accompanied by political sideshows and clowning, or war, or new health crises, the solution we will be sold will be to buy more stuff, double down on the stock market, deregulate business further so that the magical mystery market can perform its miracles, but all of it will keep stoking the capitalist industrial machines, burning and tearing up the natural world, and making the ultra-rich a whole lot richer. It isn’t going to be a smooth ride and, so far, I unfortunately don’t see the big brands of today doing anything other than rapaciously protecting the interests of their wealthy owners. The people who make decisions in business and government are, for the most part, terrified of a change that might reverse the “progress” that is devastating the environment and leading to new massive wealth increases among the already abominably wealthy. And as for the activism we see, I think it only feeds into ideological narratives of political suppression and ever-increasing consumerism. The way companies and government are managing the current unrest is working well for them, and it’s likely that the same tools of distraction, diversion, fear, and outrage will help them manage future unrest and keep on profiting from it. That seems like a rather sour note to end on, but maybe it is the most appropriate one of all.