If a company truly wishes to satisfy its customers’ needs and does its due diligence in market research, social and cultural factors will emerge as critical. To say that a company’s success is tethered to its ability to detect and adapt to changes in broader culture may seem redundant. Yet that’s part of the argument in Chief Culture Officer: we
“need to see that supply and demand always play themselves out in a social world shaped by cultural meanings.”
True enough and it can’t be said enough. The second part of the argument is the biggie: companies need a separate C-level function, that of the Chief Culture Officer, to watch for and make sense of that social world and its cultural meanings.
File this book under “Why you need someone who does what I do” – Grant McCracken argues companies need a cultural anthropologist to deal with culture. To a marketer like myself, observation and interpretation of culture are an indispensable part of the job (though the anthropologist’s ethnographic method would certainly enrich a marketer’s toolkit). Perhaps the definition of marketing needs further refinement. In fact, as McCracken builds a CCO’s toolkit, he argues it needs to be a part of everyone’s job in the corporation.
Another must included in a CCO’s toolkit — following cultural artifacts like magazines, TV, blogs, events, or books (make sure you read this one) — seems like a no-brainer. The CCO’s main job is to interpret culture to benefit the corporation.
Reading this book felt like ice skating. You push off, you glide, you enjoy the smooth movement, you do a mohawk here and a pirouette there, you revel in your own skill, your ability to skate fast, and how the cold air on your face makes you feel alive… Until you find yourself at the end of the rink, wondering how you got there so quickly and why. But then you think about it and realize the enjoyment came from the act of skating itself, not from the physics or purpose of it.
McCracken gives a quick overview of culture today, peppering his analysis with personal experiences, wisecracks, and sharp observations about culture today, some of which seem unrelated at first. It provides for enjoyable, insightful, and stimulating reading.
In the end, I came away unconvinced. Perhaps huge corporations accustomed to pushing their products on us by the truckload should know what goes on around them to serve our needs better. But it’s unclear why that may be – if they want to be clueless, let them, and let’s buy from those who care and understand to begin with. Cultural attunement seems akin to sustainability: you can’t inject in from without, it must originate within.
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Grant McCracken, Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation, New York: Basic Books, 2009.
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