In conversations in my professional and personal life, I am always seeking ways to explain the importance of design. I’ve had the idea lately that the design and branding fields should enlist Grant McCracken as spokesperson. Grant comprehends the complexity of what designers do even when designers don’t understand it themselves. There are few people on this planet who match his eloquence on this topic, and he is an impassioned champion for the role that design and branding play in business and in culture. He’s a oneman band of design advocacy.
In McCracken’s view, designers are invaluable to corporations because, simply stated, designers create and interpret culture. That is their essential function, and the corporation desperately needs them for this purpose. Because, in general, corporate leaders are clueless about culture. And designers are masters of it—of how to give it voice.
But there is a problem. Designers and brand thinkers haven’t explained this well enough, and they don’t realize their own cultural significance. The boss is using them in a way that doesn’t acknowledge or recognize their full potential. And if they are to fulfill their role as culture creators, then they have to comprehend the responsibilities of the task—which Grant describes in our conversation.
What I particularly savor about our discussion is the specificity that Grant brings to his understanding of design, branding, and culture. Having been present when businesses start to conjure a new product or service offering, he has an appreciation for the possibility that is tangible when the corporation is at its most nascent. I’ve witnessed these moments myself, and they are magical. Secondly, he gives essential guidance to designers about the requirements of their responsibility. Not only should they better articulate their role to their colleagues, but they have to improve their own vocabulary and their understanding about the process of design and branding. “What we want to do is specify this process and give it a rigorous grammar or mechanism that can solve the problems at hand,” Grant says.
Grant is the go-to guy for cultural analysis and criticism relating to the bustling world of commerce and cultural creation. He provides unparalleled incisiveness, and he is essential reading. Whether you’re looking for a better understanding of the bewildering ridiculousness of forced sincerity by store salespeople, why comfort food has become more popular, the dynamics of celebrity endorsement, the skill of “noticing,” or the underpinnings of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, Grant is your man. In his 2008 book Chief Culture Officer—a manifesto on the importance of culture to business strategy and success—Grant outlines his view of why businesses need to be more attuned to the zeitgeist, explains how to do it, and examines who’s good at it. This isn’t just pie-in-the-sky theorizing—in his consulting work, Grant gives the download to companies such as IBM, Coca-Cola, and Kimberly-Clark.
Grant is that rare breed of person who has the theoretical and historical breadth you can gain with an academic background—he has a PhD in anthropology, and has taught at MIT and Harvard. He’s certainly not one to shy away from an academic treatise, but he can also talk and write about these issues with down-to-earth clarity.
McCracken believes that the objects and products we select from the ceaseless conveyor of newness are precisely the tools we use to find new relevance and understanding of our world: “This fascination with objects—yes—it certainly has its problems, and yes, we are obsessive and overhopeful when we care about design,” he explains, “but it’s critical to the way in which we manage to live in the world we live in.”
Let’s start by discussing the writing about design you’ve done on your blog. In one post, you wrote, “Designers are very good at thinking about provocations. After all, they are in the imagination business. They are trained to look at existing systems, spot where stasis lives, and think of ways to make things new. What designers are not so good at, in my humble opinion, is figuring out what happens next, what comes after the provocation.” Why do you feel that way?
This is a general problem not only confined to designers. We’re a culture that’s always been committed to transforming itself. Claude Lévi-Strauss has a great quote in the book The Savage Mind. In essence, he says, “we’re a culture that is always looking for that other message, always looking for that new arrangement.” That’s us, that’s Western culture. In the last twenty or thirty years, this deep cultural inclination has become a professional fascination for many of us. It’s become a professional obligation as well, for business purposes. People have concluded, “Innovation is the name of the game here, and we need people who are good at innovation.” And that task has fallen increasingly to designers. That’s the business side. On the social side, we’ve had people who say, “If we live in a culture that’s responsive to change, let’s see if we can come up with innovations that will change the world.”
Do you think that designers have an obligation to figure out what happens next?
I think they do. Otherwise, we’re looking at the risk of design work that is merely a gesture of goodwill. These gestures fill our hearts with gladness. But if we do a sober anthropological assessment of these gestures, we see that the good inevitably dissipates and is gone within a month or so. And worse than that, no structural change is achieved. On the social side, I’m not sure this provocation that is so dear to our hearts and engaged in by so many people has a very good return on investment. I would argue that this is true on the business side as well. Designers are engaging in acts of aesthetic, visual, and cultural provocation that don’t always result in the kinds of change that their clients are eager to generate.
Do you feel that anybody who is in the business of provoking should also be in the business of solving?
Yes, but solving is never easy. I think there should always be a follow-up to the moment of provocation. And that provocation depends upon a deeper knowledge of culture and of the social world than designers sometimes exhibit.
That is somewhat ironic, given how many people talk about designers being problem solvers.
Right.
Several years ago, the brand strategist Brian Collins stated that rather than being problem solvers, designers should be “problem makers,” and they should be provoking people to think about how to do things in a new or a better way. This idea has created some uncertainty in my own mind about what the ideal role of the designer should be.
Here’s my feeling: Designers—or indeed anybody who’s interested in business change or social change—need to make a knowledge of the culture and the social world in which they work the first condition of their provocation. Designers and brand consultants assume that they know about culture, when in point of fact—at least from my anthropological perspective—they don’t. You and I have had this discussion for several years, and at the risk of being a bore about it, this is a topic I bring up with tedious frequency.
My feeling is that there is an architecture of cultural meanings and social rules in place that governs whether our actions will be effective in any way. The more completely you understand those cultural meanings and social rules, the better you can craft a provocation, and the more likely that provocation is to have some kind of structural effect. I’ve spent my professional life trying to get “the corporation” to take culture seriously. I have great admiration for designers for many reasons, but when called upon to defend how they create value for the corporation, they could have said, “without us, you don’t have access to culture.” But they haven’t.
Do you think that designers just assume that people know that they’re bringing culture to the conversation?
If so, I think it’s a rash assumption. The corporation uses the assumptions of economics, and Adam Smith, the forefather of our current system, is quite happy to proceed as if culture is not an important piece of the proposition—he feels we can just ignore it. I would be nervous if I were creating and designing brands, and I had to say to my team, “Listen, there’s a good chance that the corporation doesn’t get that this is part of the way designers create value for the corporation. So we have to tell them.”
I would wear this on my sleeve if I were a designer.
Honestly, this is one of the reasons I’m so high on designers: I see them as vehicles for the corporation to take culture seriously.
But once designers identify themselves in this way, and once the corporation defines and engages them in this way, then we have to make good on the promise! The design journalist Bruce Nussbaum has talked about why design matters, and he says, “Design gives people the ability to be one with the consumer culture—to be anthropologists and sociologists and deeply understand the myriad of cultures around them. It has a set of tools and methods that can guide us towards a much better way of doing things.”
So, here we have Bruce Nussbaum, who is one of the people responsible for the rise of design and design thinking, emphasizing this point of view. This is something the corporation now takes seriously and has embraced in a big way. He’s saying design matters because it’s a way of giving the corporation access to anthropology, and sociology, and knowledge of culture. But this feels like more of a promissory note than an accurate description of where we stand.
Do you think that this might have anything to do with the semantics of the design field? Let’s face it, the word “culture” doesn’t feel as scientific as economics, anthropology, sociology, or neuroscience.
It’s certainly a term with a checkered past. It has simultaneously stood for X and not X. But in many ways, this is appropriate. We now have a multiplicity of meanings in our culture, whereas everything used to be much more monolithic. So it’s appropriate—or maybe merely tragic—that the term “culture” itself should have this multiplicity of meanings. To speak from my own provincial background, anthropologists have been working on the term for the past one hundred years. On the anthropological side, you’ve got the postmodernists who have hijacked the notion and damaged it badly. In certain academic situations, it’s hard to even talk about culture. This is a willfully destructive behavior on the part of the academy, for which there is no good explanation. So you’re quite right to say the term’s surrounded by confusion, ambivalence, and difficulty. But I do think we can—and must—use it in a disciplined way.
What fascinates you about our culture?
I guess it’s that old line about the weather in Ireland. If you don’t like it, wait a few moments and it will change.
It’s the endless creative power. Some years ago, I wrote a book called Plenitude, which was an attempt to understand how and why our culture produces so much innovation. Most cultures are pretty good at preventing change, and they’re pretty good at papering over change when it occurs. What makes our culture so interesting from an anthropological perspective is how good we are at creating change, and how good we are at living with that change.
Where many cultures would say, “That will do, thank you very much, just quit it with that technology stuff,” or “Stop that religious reform,” or “No, this youth culture will not reshape how we think about the world,” we say, “If you can make a compelling argument, and win enough minds, and if you can transform various parts of our world sufficiently, then the moment belongs to you.” Culture is just so fantastically conducive to innovation. I think we were very badly misled by the Frankfurt School and intellectuals who identified materialism as the source of difficulty in Western societies.
We care about an ongoing narrative of design in objects, in ideas, and in experiences because they provide opportunities for us to participate in a new understanding of an incredibly turbulent world. Design serves us for both cultural purposes and adaptational purposes. When we embrace a new experience, object, or concept, we bring ourselves into the ambit of the new, and we can begin to understand what the new is. I think this stream of objects gives us a way we deal with a world that courses with novelty and change. I know that I’m swimming against the current here and that, with the encouragement of the Frankfurt School, intellectuals argue against this, as do people like Naomi Klein. There’s a very long list of people who are prepared to say, “It’s exactly the fascination with objects that is what’s wrong with Western cultures.”
There is only a very small academic voice that says, “Actually, this fascination with objects—yes—it certainly has its problems, and yes, we are obsessive and overhopeful when we care about design, but it’s critical to the way in which we manage to live in the world we live in.” And one of the very few voices providing a counterpoint here is the French historian Fernand Braudel, who, in his seminal book, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, asked, “Can it have been merely by coincidence that the future was to belong to societies fickle enough to care about changing the colors, materials, and shapes of costume, as well as the social order and the map of the world—societies, that is, which were ready to break with their traditions? There is a connection.”He looks at world cultures, and he notices that the ones that are productive—like Western European cultures—are subject to fantastic change. He notices that they care about fashion. He suggests, “Either there’s no connection here, or this might be the secret of their fantastic ability to change, and to adapt, and to survive that change.” He urged us to listen.
You’ve talked about small signs of trouble in the design and branding community, and you’ve argued that we might not have it right at the moment because the concept of brand is so changeable that it will always exceed our grasp—and this problem isn’t often acknowledged by designers and brand consultants.
I think when we create brands, we’re engaged in a process of “manufacturing” and “managing” meaning. We’re saying to ourselves, “In order for this brand to work effectively in the world, we must create a combination of exquisitely chosen, crafted, combined, and then managed cultural meanings.” There are different levels of meaning associated with any given brand, some of which are absolutely new to a moment, and others that are continuously there over time. A brand is composed of these meanings. These meanings are being carefully chosen and crafted. And then they’re managed, because we’re swapping meanings in and out to make the brand adapt as the world makes new demands of us. This model suggests we need a systematic accounting of these cultural meanings.
Sometimes I hear designers speaking in generalities such as, “We had to freshen the brand,” or, “We had to make it more dynamic,” and so forth. What I don’t hear designers say is, “We chose this brand, this particular meaning and that particular meaning, and we got rid of that meaning.” We can be much more particular—we must be much more particular—about the meanings that we think matter. What I’d rather hear from designers is, “These are the twelve cultural meanings at issue here, and this is where the world is—this is what the world wants. This is how we’ve crafted the brand out of these twelve meanings. This is how we’ve combined them, and this is how we’ll manage them over the next six or twelve months.”
Instead, a lot of creative people are using the old model that says, “Just trust me.” And I think the corporation is ferociously unhappy with the notion of “just trust me.”
And if that’s the way we respond to the sneer on the face of the CEO, we’re asking for trouble. If nothing more, a shift from the old model will further the aim of surviving in the world of the corporation. But we should want to do better than that for our own scholarly and intellectual purposes.
Look, there’s no question that all of us do our best work when letting our unconscious creative powers speak through us, right? you wake up in the morning, and the elves have clearly been working through the night creating a solution to the problem you were working on. And bang, there it is. And so what we want to do is specify this process and give it a rigorous grammar or mechanism that can solve the problems at hand. We want to take inspiration wherever we can find it. And it’s not like we have a choice in the matter, right? It just visits us and there it is.
On the other hand, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with examining inspiration and figuring out why it’s so compelling. Everyone looks at the fruits of this process and thinks, “Damn, that is compelling.” But we can do an analysis that says, “Here’s what the moment of inspiration did. It assembled these cultural meanings in this particular package for this particular group at this particular cultural moment.”
I’d like to read you a quote from an article that you wrote: “Branding is a process of meaning manufacture that begins with the biggest, boldest gestures of the corporation and works its way down to the tiniest gestures. This is one of the reasons that design matters. The look and the feel, the fit and the finish, the beautiful, the sensual, the tactile, design is an essential medium of the brand message. Good design captures, commandeers, takes control of every interface and interaction between the consumer and the brand, right down to the little sound that packages make when we close them. Click. This is a brand message.” Why do you think that branding begins with the biggest, boldest gesture of the corporation?
I was recently doing some work for Coca-Cola. One of their big ideas is optimism. This is a huge idea. It’s what we might call “a Macy’s parade float” of an idea. It’s vast. Most corporations control big ideas to the same degree as a Macy’s parade float is controlled. People with ropes try to handle it, and it’s difficult to do. But Coca-Cola knows what they’re doing, and they know that manifesting their vision from large gestures down to the tiniest gestures is a very potent idea. They know how to make it substantial, actual, and both present and compelling in the world. They know how to translate it from its absolute generality into very particular engagements with, for instance, the vending machine. Our notion of America is, to some extent, crafted by the Coca-Cola Company. Certainly, our notion of Christmas, or at least of Santa Claus, is crafted by the Coca-Cola Company.
In what way?
Before Coca-Cola began using Santa Claus in their commercials, Santa was a variety of physical shapes, and he dressed in any number of colors, primarily green. The succession of Coke ads over many decades has fixed his image as that of a large, jolly man in red and white. He’s dressed in red and white because those are the colors of the Coca-Cola Company. What’s most interesting about this is that, in fact, Coca-Cola has actually invented part of Western culture. That’s the good news. The bad news is . . . they’ve invented some part of Western culture. I’ve been in the room when people at the company said to themselves, “well, the fact that we invented Santa should be good for something—for marketing purposes. Surely, we can leverage that.” Everybody thinks about it for a moment, and then they say, “Actually, no.” The moment the Coca-Cola Company takes credit for or tries to leverage this contribution to Western culture is the moment that they suffer cataclysmic damage to the brand.
This is a perfect example of the corporation acting as a cultural actor and creating cultural meanings. They can release these ideas into the world, but they don’t get to own them anymore afterwards. This flies in the face of the Frankfurt School and Klein-ian notions that dictate that corporations are guilty of the manipulation of taste and thought and are the creators of “false consciousness”—the notion relating to how consumers are supposedly controlled by corporations. If only it were so simple. It clearly isn’t. Sometimes, a corporation makes powerful meanings, and when it does, those meanings are taken away from its control. And the rest of the time, the corporation is desperately trying to catch up to a culture that’s moving very fast.
The opportunity for control and manipulation may have existed in the 1950s, but it certainly doesn’t exist now. Designers nowadays get to sit in a room when the corporation is at its most conceptual, and they get to try to identify the biggest proposition a brand can make. In that moment, they’re focused on identifying a cultural meaning that’s going to make a brand more tangible in the world. That’s thrilling. That’s the corporation at its most intellectual, most conceptual, most freethinking. As you and I both know so well, those are some of the really exciting moments in branding.
Let’s go back to the Frankfurt School for a minute. You’ve said that goods help us make choices. They help us make our culture concrete and public. How do they do that?
I wrote an essay about this in my book Culture and Consumption II. In the essay titled “when Cars Could Fly,” I describe how midcentury modernism penetrated popular culture after world war II. At that time, people investigating these early notions of modernism that had been kicking around since the 19th and the early 20th century were suddenly in the mainstream. People were thinking about themselves as creatures who are moving out of the present into the future. They attained extraordinary speed in transportation and culture, and they evidenced a kind of recklessness. You can see how the whole notion of mobility became alive and well and began dominating American culture. Science also created new possibilities, which cascaded into technology, which then cascaded into personal gadgets, which then get expressed in the push button, most of all—a kind of iconic apotheosis of technological development.
All these transformations helped us play with the very notion of what time is. Time, and how we experience time, is always a cultural creation. Most cultures are taught—to put this very simply—that time is circular. Subsequently, you can see the world being played out in a circular way. What’s interesting about Western cultures is, at some point, we said, “you know what? we’re not circular. We’re an arrow. We’re not looking for a return. We’re not looking for circularity. We’re looking for a crazy, relentless projecting of ourselves into an unknown future.
If time is a cultural creation, wouldn’t that mean that the future is a cultural creation?
Yes. It feels like we’re in a moment of repudiating the modernist impulse that says we’re happily abandoning the present as we rocket into the future. I think the whole return of retro design—the artisanal movement, and the coveting of everything handmade—is evidence of this. It’s as if we’re struggling to create a new notion of time, and this movement is a way of saying, “We want more continuity than we had in the middle of the 20th century. The future comes plenty fast enough. Our world is quite reckless enough, thank you very much. We want continuities, and we want a world with manageable proportions.” In a manner of speaking, we’re recovering modernists. I think a lot of design that works today has a beautifully handcrafted, delicate, and historically rooted quality. Designers are able to help us craft a new notion of what time missed.
Do you think this return to the handcrafted will end, and we’ll swing in a different direction? Can you predict what might be fashionable in another ten or fifteen years?
I think we’re learning to live with dynamism. There is a certain amount of clutching to the present and familiar that’s going on right now. The world is coming toward us with speed and fury, and, as you always do in situations when you’re drowning, you grasp at anything. I think there’s a certain point at which you go, “Okay—we just need a new modality here. We need to be fluid in our response to a fluid world.” I think when we learn the arts of fluidity, and the instincts of fluidity, and then those of historical continuity, we will be able to understand and create these new modalities.
That’s pretty optimistic.
If you look at the history of Western culture, it is the triumph of a certain kind of optimism over a certain kind of pessimism. The pessimism mostly comes from people who think of themselves as elites. They proclaim that this new innovation—whatever it is—is really going to screw things up. Think of the suffrage movement. At the turn of the 20th century, people were pontificating to oppose it and saying all sorts of nonsense. We can read the letters to the editor that say, “Give the vote to women, and all hell will break loose. Western civilization cannot survive this.” Then women get to vote, and it turns out nothing happens. Actually, things get more interesting.
The same things are being said by the opponents of gay marriage and the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
Perfect example. Cultural transformation is not easy. The cost is high, and sometimes there is a whole generation that pays for the moment of cultural change.
We pay dearly if we don’t respond to culture, and we pay dearly when we don’t respond to change.
But generally speaking, I think we’re more adaptable than we think.
You’ve written about the inalterable rules of culture. Do you think there are still things that are inalterable?
Yes. I think that responsiveness is inalterable, and the fact is that we’ll find a way to reconceptualize culture. Look at the 20th century: It’s all about democratizing every kind of thing. One of the questions here is whether the designer’s genius for seeing the existing pattern and imagining new and more interesting patterns won’t at some point disseminate from the design community into the world. And that is already happening. All of us are getting better at the kinds of problem solving and pattern recognition that designers are so good at.