I first applied the term Culture vultures to those who look at markets through the culture end of the telescope: semioticians, anthropologists, discourse analysts culture analysts all. The market researcher works at the sharp end - understanding an individual's motivation and extending this out to segments and market populations. Until yesterday I had not become so aware of the fundamental difference not just between the one and the many but the difference between scavengers and raptors. Not to be rude to my culture vulture brethren - they don't need real people to study them. They can use magazines. TV programmes, social contexts, transcriptions, movies, blogs and websites as quite proper human artefacts to study. Researchers on the other hand always want to ask someone What do you think? Why do you think that? Which makes them raptors - not the Jurassic Park variety but birds of prey who always eat a fresh kill.  

It is a crucial distinction because the world is filling up with human artefacts which has made decision support activity quicker and cheaper - and research is under threat. I would say though that research abandons the principle of live prey at its peril. There are many ways of analysing artefacts many of them mechanical. Research will continue to be time consuming and more expensive than the alternatives. But it will also continue to have a role. There is only so much you can do with artefacts - without a deep understanding of motivation - you just don't know why that blogger chose to express themselves in that particular way.  

Elsewhere I have described offline traditional research as cultivation when online research techniques are closer to hunter gathering. I still think that but would add this corrollary - that researchers will not go out and collect just anything. What they collect needs to be subject to theory and method.  The culture vultures have their theories too but these don't require a living subject. Research does and long may it continue to do so. 

Having just made a myspace page for me old band 'o brothers  this seemed a good opportunity to promote the page - if you wanted some light relief  and to talk about what happened when we started the band back in the 1980s because although no one then talked about collaboration and co-creation what happened was so extraordinary that it got me thinking - and now what is accepted as a normal part of web 2.0 activity I recognise as something that happened then and can happen just as easily offline.

We went to a festival to busk around the site. One thing led to another (it was quite a weekend). Friday night we busked in the rain. Saturday we busked all over the site. Saturday night we were asked to play one song on a variety show with 1000 people in the audience. Sunday night we got asked to fill in as warm up act in a venue with a capacity of 2000. Monday we got our own gig in an acoustic venue with an audience of perhaps 200 which was interupted when we were asked to move to the 2000 seater venue to do an entire set. Its nice remembering what an adrenaline high the weekend was - just unbelievable. This for a band who had never performed. My younger brother was 17 and I don't think had stood up in front of any audience before.

Now we come to it. Since we were so woefully unprepared we had of course no idea of merchandise. 

Within a week of the gig the fans had sent up 3 bootleg tapes of busking sessions - plus photos

After a month the photos had mutated into badges - which the fans also sent us and then posters of te band

And after 3 months one enterprising fan had made a band Tshirt and sent it to us.

 By which time we had gone into the studio and recorded an album as fast as we could - 3 days including the mixing down! Which went onto sell some 3000 copies. 

What I've never forgotten is that in the following 2 years we never produced anything which our fans hadn't made first. So here's the moral. When a product gets a tribal following people buy to join in. And if they can't buy they make it themselves.  I mention this because so often the selling process is trying to persuade one person to buy. Once. When group participation is much stronger as an incentive - it is being part of something - the purchase is just a way of joining in. Our prices were modest but price really wasn't the issue - we could have doubled our prices.  I have filed this under culture vultures because completely accidentally it turned into a group buy in - and the fans were well ahead of the band. Think about how you could trigger a similar effect. Remember its not about selling but about giving people ways to participate.   And you're welcome to participate in the Woebegone Brothers rather long in the tooth reformation. There's 3 tracks from the albums and a video from a gig last summer - there will be more video to follow!

Virtually all marketing driven decision making is driven by what the individual consumer thinks. A whole market research industry has grown up around finding the right people, asking them questions, trying to ensure their answers are representative of larger numbers of people. Then aggregating them until you have a level of confidence in the answers. This is not the only form of decision making support. This is only the bottom up kind.

You can also start from the top with those things which everyone agrees on: language, culture, social norms - these are the object of study for the social sciences and they don't all use research to validate. This is the culture end of the market and my nickname for practitioners in this area are the culture vultures. They included semoticians, anthropologists, discourse analysts, archetypists and narrative theorists. And that's just for starters.

To give you a flavour here's a presentation from Greg Rowland with whom I have collaborated in the past. Greg is a semiotician. At a Unilever conference last month I heard a research client raving about what Greg and his team bring to the business - better than research any day he said.

Here's the link - what can we learn about the election of Barack Obama and the refocussing of the American Dream? Greg's website is here.

Let me know what you think of life seen from the top down perspective of a culture vulture - if we get enough interest perhaps we could organise a whole day on the subject.