This autumn, I have been involved with something that is rather brilliant. ( I am allowed to say this without it being bragging, actually, since said brilliance is more other people’s than mine.) My company, business magazine Veckans Affärer, has joined forces with Resumé, the largest Swedish communication industry mag, and B2B agency Hilanders, to start a conversation. A conversation about where the industries that define Sweden (hard and heavy stuff like steel and paper) are heading, and what actually drives their growth in the 21th century.

This discussion, between the communication industry, top management in B2B coorporations, and the odd publicist, has been played out on – yes, yes, yes – all our platforms, of which the site b2bconversations.se might be the quickest one to access. (Or, if you’re one of those Facebook-is-the-new-Internet kind of people, well, here then.) It is in Swedish, so it’s not for everybody, but for Swedes, there is some quite interesting stuff in there.

And on the 7th December, the next step on this journey will be the B2B Conversations seminar, at the lovely Berns Salonger in central Stockholm. Big name speakers, a panel with a couple of communication people with very good resumés who will occasionally ring a funny bell of some sort (Yes, buying a funny bell is my responsibility. I haven’t yet gotten around to getting one, but whatever I choose, it will be spectacular.), oh yes, and wine. Stockholmers, I hope to see you there on the 7th. Do get in touch for discounted tickets, I’m sure I can get you some, but you have to act quickly – we close registration this week.

It was never quite like this, but I wish it would have been.

… sometime in the future … but this month, Crédit Lyonnais finally decided that enough was enough. After five years of non-activity – save the odd deposition to cover fees – their bloody-impossible-no-hope-customer algoritms have, correctly, identified me. They’re closing my account for me.

With some types of products and services, consumers are thought to be profoundly boring. Like with bank accounts. Either hyperrational assessors of offers or safety junkies, clinging to a brand because it feels like an institution stuffy enough to lack the imagination needed to do anything remotely risky.

Well, I had a bank account for five years after moving from France, because I liked to toy with the idea that I was back in Stockholm temporarily.

Also, I thought 1 euro per month plus the additional sporadic 27 euro fee (I could never figure out what that one was for, actually), was quite cheap for this pleasurable sensation of faux cosmopolitanism.

I’m not suggesting that this is the most common rationale for keeping a Crédit Lyonnais account. I’m not even suggesting that I’m not an utterly, utterly silly girl. But I think that there’s some kind of poetry in the power of humans to take the most prosaic of services, and just go crazy romanticizing it. And it should be taken into account when trying to figure out the intricacies of ‘consumer behaviour’. That is all.

(image flow from northia.tumblr.com)

1. A man explains how he put all his possessions online and sold basically everything, in order to live a “minimalist, digitally-centered life”. (Watch »)

Also, he seems terribly smug about it, probably in part due to the “Oooh! You are CRAZY!” tone of the presenter, who apparently came straight from year 2000 (“You’ve digitized ALL your music…?”). What this man’s done, obviously, is to take his bachelor’s pad to its extreme consequence, where he erases everything in it that can signify anything about him. Women (and gay men, see Queer Eye for the Straight Guy) are traditionally thought to be the family specialists in the symbolic language of consumer goods – knowing and appreciating what a pair of shoes or yellow walls say about you, compared to the traditional male stereotype who “don’t know what they want”, or “don’t care about how it/he looks”. Everytime someone gets attention in media for leading an ascetic, digital life, it’s a man – usually of the badly dressed, geeky internet start-up entrepreneur variety.

I’d say that escape from this difficulty is a part of the temptation to sell all your shirts (including, yes, the “Unidentified Robot t-shirt”).

But don’t think this is an easy way out, oh you worn-out ironic t-shirt wearers who roam the internet. Because if my research isn’t completely wrong, girls and better dressed men than you are quickly moving symbolic value online too, and you’ll be lost again. Look at this, for example:

2. An NYT article about Polyvore (read »)

It’s a year old, but it’s a good read. Polyvore, the site where you can appropriate designer clothes and other items by putting them together in image sets, has two million users, by the way, did you know? (In related news, Polyvore wants to make fashion more data-driven, which is yet another opportunity to ponder if one should do an Apple 1984-style uprising against the tyranny of the crowd, or try to find another level of creativity on top of the giant pile of user data. Let’s go with the latter, shall we.)

3. Janice Denegri-Knott on how we act on Ebay, among other things (read »)

I couldn’t find an original article that didn’t require uni access, but this second-hand account will do fine as an introduction to Denegri-Knott’s research on digital virtual consumption.

Any item seen and desired, but not yet decided on or affordable can be “placed” in this personalized area (the wishlist), achieving a liminal status where they are not yet owned by the would-be buyer, but neither are they not owned. Their digital virtual image remains in the “possession” of the individual providing pleasure as an item that when acquired will fulfill his/her wishes of the consumer. Although much focus has been on the economics of the “long tail” that such functions promote (where consumers consider goods well outside the most popular that physical retailers stock and display), the implications of such practices are that consumers are invited to seek out and want more and more obscure commodities and to promote these to each other as objects of desire.

From Janice Denegri-Knott & Mike Molesworth’s 2010 article “Concepts and practices of digital virtual consumption”.

OK, so I’m trying to make some kind of order in my mind, the first little step in writing my Master’s thesis. I just feel the need to get everything one can do online to engage with a brand down on one place, in a neat table. Just a fraction of these interest me right now, but it’s still good to see it all together. What glaringly obvious actions have I forgotten? (I will fill in more examples where possible, when I get around to it.)

(Yes, two examples from the world of Barbie. There could be more. I got a bit sucked in to the Barbie universe the other day, although it was all in the name of research so it wasn’t wasting time really, and discovered that both Barb and Ken are on Foursquare, too. He’s apparently rambling about all over America reminiscing (a little bit creepily) about when they were dating. Get over it, Ken.)

But YOU, my darlings, I’ve got some grand plans for you. You’ll spend your holidays reading clever stuff on communication, digital culture and futurology, going back to work enlightened and inspired. Someone has to do it. Why not start here:

1. A classic article
Grant McCracken: Culture and Consumption. A Theoretical Account of the Structure and Movement of the Cultural Meaning of Consumer Goods
Grant McCracken’s 1986 article on how cultural meaning moves in a consumer society. One of the best accounts I’ve ever read on how products, signs and style get their meaning, and why and how that meaning changes.

Read (PDF)

2. An interesting blog
Top Trends
Slightly silly name for a good blog by futurist Richard Watson, a man who advises organisations such as IBM, Coca-Cola, Nestlé and McDonald’s on the future. Which means that what he says is probably good enough for you, as well. Judging from his blog, mr W also seem to have the advantage of being a consultant on the future who’s actually reflective and, yes, rather nice. Instead of a raving mad technophile dressed like some horrible little man from your technical support department.

Read

3. Heavy stuff in a small book
Adam Arvidsson: Brands. Meaning and Value in Media Culture
I’m not a great fan of critical theory in general, but frankly often find its self-righteous accusations a bit of a detour. But if you as an advertising professional can stand a bit of Capitalist Conspiracy and a galloping sense of being Part of the Problem while reading, don’t miss out on Arvidsson’s clear and sharp history of adland trends and rhetoric, and his analysis of how brand value is created in the digital age. Very clever.

Buy from Amazon

So the campaign for Hurts which runs now is quite interesting. Hurts are, if you didn’t know it already, a Mancunian electro pop duo who (1) look good (2) dress up and shave, (3) are, or are styled as (in pop music, who cares?), hopeless romantics and (4) duet with Kylie. Alas, they would be perfect pop group, if they didn’t insist on sounding like Talk Talk.

Anyway, they’ve collaborated with Manchester novelist Joe Stretch, making an interactive story of sorts, called ‘Don’t Let Go’. Narrated by Anna Friel, the actress, each chapter is a track, and you’ll find the code for the next one at the end of each. Or actually codes, because it offers you alternative actions for your hero. And if you’ve chosen wisely and get through the whole experience (‘to stop arch villain Guy Lockhart from distributing his heartbreak cocktail and condemning humankind forever to a loveless, empty existence’, no less) without getting killed, you’re rewarded with the perhaps not so grand price of a preview track. It starts here, by the way.

Now, there’s something about this … Besides its obvious video game flirtations, it reminds me of, yes, hypertext fiction! The last time I was buried in Communication Studies literature, mid-2000s, the fascinating but elusive hypertext novels could still be described in old editions’ discussions on digital media. For some, inexplicable, reason, hypertext fiction – in which you could, yes, choose a path in the story with the help of hyperlinks – was thought to be an important element of entertainment in the future. Oh well.

The retro-hypertext idea aside, plus points for innovative media use, quality and execution. Some minus points though, for turning it into a promotional contest (with a price that requires real fandom for it to be desirable). It sort of puts the story in brackets, doesn’t it, transforming it from literature to copy. Why not trust the short story, let it be just that (hyperfiction or not). Soundtracked by the Hurts’ music, it would add more layers of the right kind of connotations to the band without the comp element. All in all, though, nice work. In other Hurts promotion media news, an equally nice promo box in line with their lovely Drones Club aesthetics, complete with comb and sheet music (images from Popjustice).