Tom H. C. Anderson - Next Gen Market Research

Grant McCracken and Tom H. C. Anderson Discuss Chief Culture Officers

Today I’m glad to have Grant McCracken back on the blog again to discuss his new book Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living Breathing Corporation. For those of you not familiar with Grant, he is an anthropologist and what I would call a Culture Guru. He is also a fellow NGMR group member. To read more about Grant see our June blog discussion here.

Tom: “Grant, what is a CCO and why do you think corporate America needs one?”

Grant: ” A CCO is a Chief Culture Officer and corporate America needs one because many of the opportunities and dangers now come from culture. The book discusses several of these. The Quaker purchase of Snapple and subsequent loss of $1.4 billion is one. The corporation now manages culture with a collection of ad hoc responses (cool hunters, gurus, ad agencies). It needs to get more systematic about US culture and global culture. ”

Tom: ” I believe you suggest some prototypical CCOs in the book - Dan Widen, Mary Minnick, Geoffrey Frost, etc. If these already exist in the corporation, why create a formal position for them?”

Grant: ” Chief Culture Officer looks at many prototypical CCOs, the remarkable work Dan Wieden did helping Nike transform the way our culture thinks about fitness, the way Geoffrey Frost brought the Razr to market for Motorola, the way Mary Minnick helped The Coca-Cola Company investigate and monitize a post-CSD (carbonated soft drink) future.
These figures give us a glimpse of how a CCO would operate, but they also point out that as it stands, the corporation “lucks into” these people. As it stands, there is no systematic place for them in the corporation, no systematic way to recruit or empower them.

Tom: “But isn’t this what we have CMO’s for?

Grant: “Some will say ‘this is the CMOs job’ but it is clear to me that CMO’s have so much on their plate (and so little time in office) that to ask them also to be the masters of culture is not fair.”

Tom: ” What’s the difference between ‘fast culture’ and ’slow culture’ and why do they matter? For me, this seems to get to the heart of why CCO really is a hard job and why it may need to be a profession.”

Grant: “For a lot of people culture means trends, and I argue in the book that this is only a relatively small part of the proposition. Certainly, it’s important to know about the ‘latest thing’ the fads and fashions that create the churn of popular culture. Slow culture on the other hand is all the ideas and practices that have made up American culture, some of them for hundreds of years. Too often fast culture is the bright, shining object with which the cool hunter distracts us from the more fundamental things to which we should be paying attention. It is after all slow culture that will decide often with the latest fast culture will stick or keep moving.”

Tom: ” What are the tools the CCO is going to need?”

Grant: ” This is critical and I’m hoping you Tom and your readers could help with this.
In order to keep track of all the things happening out there in culture, we badly need culture metrics. This might mean taking ASCAP play data (ASCAP tracks who is playing music and where they are playing it) and using it as a measure of other things, esp. changes in consumer taste and preference, and the directionality of popular culture. People are listening to more country in the Northwest? Fascinating. There is lots of data we could use to listen to culture. The question is where to source it and how to manage it.

Tom: ” So what would make for actionable findings, can you give me an example?

Grant: “Could we build a device capable of picking up Alice Waters and Chez Panisse and the slow food movement as it emerged in Northern California in the early 70s and then tricked it as it began to become increasingly influential and mainstream, eventually installing it on the lawn of the White House when Michelle Obama created a vegetable garden there. ”

Tom: Thanks, Grant. I think many of us including Anderson Analytics are working hard in areas like this. I believe text mining and social media may be part of the answer. Perhaps in the future we will have both CCO’s and CSMO’s (Chief Social Media Officers). I very much look forward to reading your book.

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