In his presentation Grant McCracken discusses his theories of Transformation. A revolution was created in the world of marketing by the idea of market segmentation where for the first time marketers were encouraged to see that markets are not homogeneous.
Grant takes this segmentation revolution one step further, arguing that the individual consumer is also not homogeneous, rather in every individual consumer there are a number of selves each requiring a different voice.
He believes it is time to move beyond segmenting markets to segmenting individuals. In his presentation he discusses the several selves, how these selves differ, where they come from in our culture, how they are typically “bundled” in any given consumer, and the best strategies for talking to them.
The Transformative approach to marketing allows us to build our message with a new sense of nuance, accuracy and power. He demonstrates how it works using Amazon.com, Netflix, carbonated soft drinks, the financial services industry, television programming, and packaged consumer goods.
Consider this talk your ticket to the revolution.
Grant McCracken is an anthropologist, blogger and author whose work has been covered in The New York Times and on Oprah.
As a cultural anthropologist, McCracken looks at the places where culture and commerce, anthropology and economics most often meet, such as – marketing in general, branding in particular, popular culture, Hollywood, advertising, television, magazines, and new media.
Through his highly-customized ethnographic and anthropological research, he provides clients with a comprehensive but incisive review of contemporary culture, its foundations, current state and future trends – and strategies for managing it.
He is the author of several books including Culture and Consumption, Plenitude, and Transformation, and Culture and Consumption II: Markets, meaning and brand management. In his latest book, Flock and Flow: Predicting and Managing Change in a Dynamic Marketplace McCracken deploys “complex adaptive theory” to track the movement of trends and new groupings of consumers. He shows how to monitor new trends, whether and when to introduce new brands and brand extensions, how to speak to niche markets, and how to avoid costly mistakes.
McCracken has done ethnographic and anthropological work for corporations such as Chrysler, Coca-Cola, Diageo, General Mills, HP, IKEA, Subway, Unilever, Microsoft and Kodak among others.
Born and raised in Vancouver, BC, he holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago. He has been the Director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, has taught at the Harvard Business School and is currently a member of the branding cultures laboratory at MIT. McCracken is a visiting scholar at McGill University.
