Culture and Consumption II
Author
Grant McCracken (b. 1951), Canadian anthropologist of consumption. The volume is the sequel to Culture and Consumption (1988), written after fifteen years of consulting work with corporations.
Publication Details
Culture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning, and Brand Management. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. 240 pp. ISBN 978-0-253-21835-7.
Description
Where the first volume built a theory of how meaning moves between the culturally constituted world, goods and consumers, the second asks what follows for the people whose job is managing that movement. Its addressee is explicitly the marketer, the brand manager and the corporation, and its argument is that they are systematically bad at their own work because they lack a model of culture.
McCracken's diagnosis is that firms treat culture as a background condition — weather to be forecast — rather than as a system with a structure that can be learned. The consequence is that they are repeatedly surprised by shifts that were legible in advance, and that they respond by hiring for intuition rather than building capability.
Key Ideas
- The chief culture officer. McCracken's proposal, developed at length in his later book of that name (2009): that an organisation needs someone whose full-time responsibility is understanding the culture it operates in, with the standing and resources of a chief financial officer. His argument is that firms measure and staff everything they take seriously, and culture is the significant variable they do neither for.
- Fast culture and slow culture. The distinction between rapid, surface-level shifts — trends, memes, styles — and the slower movement of underlying categories and principles. Firms chase the first and are undone by the second. Recognising which is which is the core analytic skill he argues for.
- Brands as meaning management. A brand, in this account, is not a mark or a promise but an accumulation of transferred meaning, and it must be maintained by the same ritual and communicative work that put the meaning there. Brands decay when the culture supplying their meaning moves and the brand does not.
- Transformation and the limits of control. McCracken is direct about the asymmetry: a firm can propose meanings, and only consumers can complete the transfer. Attempts to control the outcome fail, and the failure is structural rather than a matter of execution.
- Anthropology as a business capability. The methodological argument running through the book, that ethnographic observation of actual use is a source of information that surveys and focus groups cannot produce.
Criticism
The book's position — anthropology in the service of brand management — is exactly the position that critical accounts of consumer culture object to. Read alongside Robert Goldman on sign wars or Guy Debord on the spectacle, McCracken is describing the same machinery from inside and asking how to run it better. Whether the analytical gain is worth the alignment is a judgement each reader has to make, and the book does not pretend otherwise.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
This volume is useful here for two reasons. First, it is a working demonstration that anthropological method is applicable to technology products, and it explains how commercial ethnography actually operates. Second, and more valuably, it is a primary source: an account by a practitioner of how firms attempt to attach meaning to objects. Anyone analysing a product launch, a brand or a device's cultural positioning is looking at the output of the process this book describes from the other side.
