The Tanning of America

by Steve Stoute

  2. Where does our urban consumer live? “Urban” evokes the images of New York City, Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, all cities or places where people live in close proximity to one another. In the ’00s, “urban” is no longer confined to a literal definition or location. Urban consumers are movers who span urban/suburban /global. Urban consumers are confident and proud of their backgrounds and distinct cultural histories but would not be considered ethnocentric. Urban consumers are truly cross-cultural. They are exposed to, they understand, and they embody this mixing innately. The urban audience, millennially speaking, cannot be entreated in a superficial manner with style cues or compelled by inauthentic, prepackaged, or homogenized messaging. “What to have” and other status definers are all intertwined within the media they consume. The urban consumer is, in essence, the most exacting, precise consumer on the planet—influential not just individually or as a segment but as a megamovement. Their time is now.

  3. What kind of needs and wants define the savvy consumer? With the ongoing debate as to who exactly comprises the hip-hop generation—whether it’s late boomer adults who connected to the music and culture in the seventies and eighties or Gen X and Gen Y youth and adults who came of age in the late eighties and nineties, or the Now and Next teens coming of age—these savvy consumer millennials are marketing veterans. They have been marketed to—directly and indirectly—since birth and through their parents, giving rise to an extraordinarily aware and often cynical audience. Belief, therefore, is granted only by experience. They want attention and need a certain level of scarcity. Authenticity and aspiration remain critical for the savvy consumer, in both the need and want categories. They are fickle and can spot brands that feign understanding ; they spot and shun brands that pretend to know them. The savvy millennial consumer wants to align with brands as badges of identity—as indicators of status. The need is for a much more meaningful relationship than simple utility. The savvy consumer wants to believe in brand properties that confer both instant and perpetual cool.

  4. What characteristics describe our consumer in control? Above all, the consumer in control seeks out, takes pride in, and celebrates the unique expressions that define one’s self. Consumers in control drive tastemaking forces behind consumption in a range of areas including fashion, technology, media, and entertainment. They are highly connected, infinitely mobile, literate, and empowered by technology. In the ’00s, especially, the consumer in control goes beyond the mere functional use of technology to a self-motivated adoption, utilization, and creative expression.

  What else? You’ll have noticed by now that in describing the consumer target as a mind-set, as urban in their point of view, as savvy and in control, we haven’t pinpointed age. Truthfully, the more we honor the psychographics, the less we can assert that there is an age range. Because we know that youth is a state of mind, not an age, we have identified a youth mind-set that complements the tan mental complexion—both of which are aspects of youth culture. While we already knew that those with a youth mind-set have a more profound relationship to technology than other consumers, we wanted to provide an overview of passion points for youth culture that were going to be valuable in our strategies. By no means comprehensive, the list includes: music, sports, entertainment, gaming, fashion/beauty, style/ design, creativity and self-expression, social connections (real and virtual), the Internet, and, again, technology.

  There was something else that we made sure to recognize going in and that is the fact that the remix of culture—which is exactly what hip-hop did from the start and continues to do—is the happy domain of the millennials. They know the history of what’s been perpetually cool and they know absolutely what is over. This may explain why Betty White, Tony Bennett, and Jack Nicholson, each seen as having perpetual cool, have a youth following. Millennials like to identify cool and school other consumers. The millennials, raised on hip-hop as a fact of life, believe fundamentally in the power of authenticity. They keep demonstrating that the cool of technology isn’t about the technology. It’s about what we get to experience as a result of the technology.

  Geeks, Gadgets, and Gangstas

  To say that Silicon Valley produced more technology that changed America and the rest of the world than anywhere else is really just stating the obvious. But what we don’t point out often enough is that it was those very brainy Silicon Valley guys like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who made it cool to be a geek. And they started a movement of fellow cool geeks too—founders of search engines with funky names, social networking sites, and little garage tech start-ups that went on to sell for billions. Does it make them cool ’cause they got rich? Yes, being resourceful with whatever you’ve got definitely makes you cool. As far as I’m concerned, the boldness to be real and be different and even proclaim your geekdom is crazy cool. The first time I heard that the tech support team for Best Buy had started as a company that branded themselves the “Geek Squad”—those guys and gals that you invite into your home to solve technology problems—I wished that I’d thought of it!

  Not surprisingly, brands that make and market technology live or die depending on their fluency with youth culture and on their proximity to cool. Let me provide some famous examples that may or may not be familiar. It’s hard to remember that there was a point in time, not too long ago, when there was actually a wide-open race for what company would deliver the successor to the Sony Walkman when portable audio devices began their transition to digital. Why Sony didn’t ultimately figure that out and failed at beating everyone else to the punch was not a competency problem. This was, after all, a corporation that owned music and film companies and technology companies—all the ingredients to make such a device.

  Unfortunately, they were caught in the haywire of future shock remix and had a fluency breakdown. First of all, because of compartmentalization, executives in different divisions didn’t talk to one another about integration of all these assets. Second, when they did research and development, they forgot about delivering to consumer needs—listening to younger-generation consumers before deciding what to build. Instead, they went forward and designed technology that was developed without regard for what the consumer wanted. Right here at the paradigm shift when marketing needed to depart from the approach of shoving products in front of consumers’ faces, Sony missed the step.

  The technology for Sony’s Walkman MP3 player was actually excellent, even though the branding was confusing and emotionless—using model numbers, for example, instead of names to build on their former successes. Over at Apple, in contrast, when Macs were first vying for attention and being made in bright colors, the brand referred to the red computer by its color, “Ruby.” What was more inviting—a Mac that went by the appealing name of a color like Ruby or Sage or Snow or a computer by whatever brand made it with a model number of X1256 that you had to remember, as a consumer, in order to get the one that was right for you? The disconnect that many technology brands had from the marketing aspects of delivering consumer needs was flagrant.

  Reading some of these signs—around the same time that Apple was tinkering with its portable audio device and the online music delivery system it would develop, as Napster and its ilk ran roughshod—Sony developed a concept that would be an online platform for selling music called Sony Connect. I envisioned this would be the ultimate digital store as Sony already owned all the content—music/film/gaming/technology—and I had lined up a dream-come-true partner: McDonald’s. Despite the initial enthusiasm from pretty much all the top Sony executives, at the last minute the divisions couldn’t come together to embrace a new paradigm and take advantage of their own resources. This was terrain that Sony ought to have conquered that was rightfully theirs, but they were not even on the field. It dawned on me then that the main reason many larger corporations miss the boat when it’s time to innovate is that executives are too busy protecting their jobs and not listening to the consumer. At that point, I understood the rule that say
s you can get anything done in most organizations as long as you’re willing not to take credit for it.

  I was disappointed that the company couldn’t get their older, more vertical ways of doing business to be in sync with the new mode of horizontal alignment. Besides fear of taking a risk, executives who had been doing just fine up until that time were complacent. And complacency, time and again, is what ultimately leaves the consumer out of the conversation.

  This was a cautionary tale that was being witnessed at a lot of companies in the ’00s. Another portable audio device, the Dell DJ, the brand’s cool-as-hell MP3 player, suffered from complacency when the company decided it would provide only a minimal budget for its launch. Their thinking was that if they put most of those resources into initiating a viral strategy to generate “cool” word of mouth, consumers would know a great thing when they learned of it. That was the problem. The whole power of viral is that it is spontaneous, authentic, and consumer driven. Dell’s intended contact with the target consumer didn’t happen. Then, after four weeks, all marketing support (traditional and online) for the Dell DJ stopped. Within days, blogs and community sites were up in arms over the contrived viral effort. Sales never took off and eventually the Dell DJ was discontinued, furthering overall negative brand repercussions. It was and remains a classic example of how cool cannot be concocted without dialogue that becomes megalogue, nor achieved by using strategies that don’t involve a deep understanding of target consumers. The episode was also a reminder that without the ongoing consistent support of the brand at large, a new offering can’t live long on a wing and a prayer.

  Of course, Dell wasn’t alone in being caught in the tangled web of future shock remix—in which reading trends without the correct cipher could sometimes be fatal. And they weren’t the first or last brand to nail the technology but blow the marketing.

  So who got it right? Who really understood where the music business was headed and what the delivery system of the near future turning rapidly into the now was going to look like? Well, it wasn’t a brand with any experience, per se, in music. Why then did it turn out to be Apple, of all brands, that came seemingly out of nowhere and gave birth to a personal portable audio device that could well be declared the eighth wonder of the world? Unlikely though it appeared at the time, Apple was just doing what it always had done—finding a way to change the conversation.

  The first tech company that had ever ventured into the realm of culture, the Apple team had long been paying attention to consumer cues. When they launched colored iMac desktops and named them with rich-sounding colors, they also showed the understanding that a home computer was décor—as much as they later understood that a laptop’s color and design were aspects of personal fashion. Instead of talking about technology, Apple learned early in its history to shift the conversation and have it be about lifestyle, fun, individual expression, and ease of use. Those seductive elements that were woven into every aspect of design and marketing made for a very intimate relationship between consumers and the brand’s products. To outsiders, loyal Apple customers appeared to border on being religious fanatics.

  While this is what we know today, there is another story many have forgotten, about the October 2001 iPod launch that was, as they say, more fizzle than sizzle. No, the mixed reactions had nothing to do with the product. God no. Weighing in at a featherlight 6.5 ounces, the size of a deck of cards, its smooth eggshell-white plastic exterior looked futuristic. Besides the fact that it could store a thousand songs and fit in your pocket, plain and simple, it was sexy. The iPod responded to the touch—even the most subtle or suggestive. Seriously, the geeks in tech and design were hitting the bull’s-eye of cool so far. And the other genius piece of the puzzle was that in a mere ten seconds, the contents of an entire CD could be downloaded. Paying attention to culture, the conversation wasn’t about the mechanics of doing this but about how personal music collections could be portable, malleable, and preserved. Steve Jobs declared with certainty, “With the iPod, listening to music will never be the same again.”

  Glorious though it was, after nine months, Apple had sold only 150,000 iPods. How could that be? Though it’s debatable, I don’t think the issue holding the iPod back from its grand destiny was really its higher price. Asking $399 for a superior product was smart—even if other brands were selling for less. There were two stumbling blocks that prevented the launch from making history. First, there were compatibility concerns—or, at least, there was the perception by consumers who were PC-born-and-bred that they would have to convert to another operating system. Almost like changing their religion. As the visionary that he is, Steve Jobs took a peek into the future and came up with a way to solve the problem with the announcement that “hell froze over.” By that he was referring to a former statement that not unless hell froze over would Apple’s software be compatible with that of Microsoft’s. So now that they had already released the iPod and were about to change their creed, the only way they could credibly assure the market that it could work on PCs was to blur the line in the sand and tell the public that hell freezing over wasn’t going to be the end of the world. The message just took time to get out there.

  The second, bigger problem was that there was no music industry infrastructure to market and promote the devices. That’s why market analysts were so sure that Sony, with its music division, would eventually win this contest.

  But as Alvin Toffler had warned in Future Shock about the lack of fluidity that would impair larger organizations, the rigidity of the corporate compartments at Sony got in the way. Aside from not maximizing the possibilities of Sony Connect, the marketing people never saw a way to take advantage of the richness of their music library or their stable of recording and movie superstars or their vast network of retail partners selling all their other world-class electronic products. The marketing divisions were not culturally attuned enough to see the big picture. Apple, meanwhile, was culturally attuned enough to realize that though they didn’t have any of those assets, they had something in the shop that nobody else had.

  It was called iTunes, an online music store with the potential to ultimately compete not only with Napster and the other music-downloading sites but also with actual music retail stores. In 1999, when it was in development, Steve Jobs had contacted Jimmy Iovine at Interscope/Geffen/A&M to tell him where they were with it and to get input, possibly to talk about collaboration. In those days—as we covered earlier—album sales, thanks to hip-hop and country music, were at their high-water mark. So the idea that there would come a time when record stores would be close to obsolete wasn’t so pressing. The concept of iTunes as a way to charge for downloaded content and be able to pay record companies and artists was also a promising way to combat the scourge of illegal downloading. Still, for a record company to collaborate on such an endeavor—at that time—would have been a slippery slope.

  But in 2003 that slope was starting to look a lot more appealing. The record business was in a dire slump, with one of the main culprits being the proliferation of Napster-type sites that allowed users to illegally share digital copies of recorded music. On top of that, those in-control, discerning, highly mobile urban youth consumers were buying fewer CDs in general—with popular trends rising and falling too fast for purchase consideration to get them into record stores. As we would point out at Translation, the influence of the savvy consumer was ratcheting up, not down, with increased exposure to media, brands, and diverse consumption choices—creating new, sophisticated sensitivities for timeliness and relevance.

  Future shock remix had altered the shelf life of cultural viability. As fast as a trendy phenomenon or a new artist, for example, could heat up, they could be gone. And what used to be durable was fleeting. Previously, it was known in the music business that if an artist was waning in popularity in the United States, he or she could still tour and sell CDs like hotcakes in Europe, the Far East, South America, you name it—because information about the artist’s supposed lack
of coolness hadn’t hit yet and there was no way to fact-check the situation. Not anymore. The new consumers have so much connectivity that there was suddenly no delay in the export of culture. Same thing with consumers buying products. The new savvy consumer knew when a brand wasn’t working or wasn’t cool anymore because of instant access to cultural barometers from multiple media streams. Everything was becoming instantaneous—for better and for worse.

  Leading up to this point, Jimmy Iovine had been looking to find a technology company to help stop the scourge of illegal music downloading that was killing the business. When he was explaining the dire straits to the chairman of Intel and underscoring what a spiritual wasteland the world would be without music and art, Jimmy was told, in essence, well, not all industries are meant to be forever. It was then that he began to discuss with Steve Jobs what a partnership between Interscope and Apple’s iTunes would look like.

  Even as the iPod was getting a slow start, Apple had adapted and had found a way—with this online music store—to change the conversation, again, away from technology toward a welcoming shopping experience. It was accessible even for consumers formerly intimidated or alienated by the impersonal aspects of making purchases without another human being there. The hardware and the software, or in this case the iPod and the iTunes content supply, were interconnected, each enhancing the other. The thrust had originally been that if consumers loved the iPod, since iTunes was designed to speak the same language and made downloading so easy, the online music store would be a hit too. Now the possibility existed that if consumers loved iTunes, they would naturally want to play their music on an iPod. Two paths to glory!

  The partnership with Interscope supplied the marketing piece of the puzzle. In return for Apple underwriting video production for new releases, Interscope would provide product placement for Apple—boosting the business of both brands and eliminating costs to both corporations. A win-win. Plus, at that moment when the music industry was clinging to a cliff, Apple was offering everyone the means to fight digital piracy without spending resources on endless lawsuits.