Bodytorque.Technique: The Australian Ballet

After spending A Year With The Australian Ballet we now catch up with The Australian Ballet as they embark on a new movement in ballet, one that focuses less on storytelling and instead puts the spotlight on the athleticism and technique of the dancers. 

The End of Brand Loyalty

James Surowiecki for The New Yorker's Financial Page:

It’s a truism of business-book thinking that a company’s brand is its “most important asset,” more valuable than technology or patents or manufacturing prowess. But brands have never been more fragile. The reason is simple: consumers are supremely well informed and far more likely to investigate the real value of products than to rely on logos. “Absolute Value,” a new book by Itamar Simonson, a marketing professor at Stanford, and Emanuel Rosen, a former software executive, shows that, historically, the rise of brands was a response to an information-poor environment. When consumers had to rely on advertisements and their past experience with a company, brands served as proxies for quality; if a car was made by G.M., or a ketchup by Heinz, you assumed that it was pretty good. It was hard to figure out if a new product from an unfamiliar company was reliable or not, so brand loyalty was a way of reducing risk. As recently as the nineteen-eighties, nearly four-fifths of American car buyers stayed loyal to a brand.

Today, consumers can read reams of research about whatever they want to buy. This started back with Consumer Reports, which did objective studies of products, and with J. D. Power’s quality rankings, which revealed what ordinary customers thought of the cars they’d bought. But what’s really weakened the power of brands is the Internet, which has given ordinary consumers easy access to expert reviews, user reviews, and detailed product data, in an array of categories. A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that eighty per cent of consumers look at online reviews before making major purchases, and a host of studies have logged the strong influence those reviews have on the decisions people make. The rise of social media has accelerated the trend to an astonishing degree: a dud product can become a laughingstock in a matter of hours. In the old days, you might buy a Sony television set because you’d owned one before, or because you trusted the brand. Today, such considerations matter much less than reviews on Amazon and Engadget and CNET. As Simonson told me, “each product now has to prove itself on its own.”

Cupid Brand Guidelines

First there was The Santa Brand and of course now we get Cupid Brand Guidelines.  

Is Classical Music Culturally Relevant?

Alex Temple in the NewMusicBox blog: 

Whenever I hear words like “relevant” or “important,” I always want to ask, “relevant or important to whom?” When that detail is left out, these words become codes or shorthands: “important” means “important to Serious Art People,” and “relevant” means “relevant to Real-World Audiences.” But “Real-World Audiences” is a code too, because the people who use the phrase seem to have a pretty narrow idea of who counts as real. Other musicians? Not real. Artists in other media? Not real. College students and faculty? Not real. People over 40? Not real. You can sell out a huge concert hall, but if everyone there falls into one or more of the above categories, you’ll still have people citing your show as evidence of classical music’s imminent demise. Because when people say “culturally relevant,” what they really mean is “relevant to young people with mainstream tastes.” And “mainstream tastes,” unfortunately, doesn’t include classical music.

In the past several months I've begun to obsess about the idea of "what it is that we are selling?" Not only for music, and classical music in particular (I'm on the boards of a chamber orchestra and a classical music concert series) but technology, culture, advertising, and all the things this site covers. We are all selling something. The words "relevant" and "important" are frequently heard in all those circles. So and so is an important designer, this is or that is a relevant technological innovation.

And yes, I too keep coming back to "to whom?" realizing that today those words in particular are mostly marketing tools to sell to niche markets. To deem something important is a way to sell to people knowledgeable in the field the item is a part of, it is a shorthand, a cheat that today has less to do with the actual work and more to do with how it is sold. To deem something relevant is just a way to try to convince the demo of "24-35, tech savvy, mobile connected, with expendable income (or at least income they are willing to spend)" that there is something out there they should not miss for missing it would render them uncool. 

Which is why I obsess, about what it is that people buy when they consume classical music (especially live), how can we re-boot and improve on the ticketing system when in reality what people are buying is access to an experience they themselves are probably incapable of creating themselves. 

In meetings, about websites, apps, advertising campaigns, orchestra concerts, music series, I am sometimes asked why am I so persistent about looking at what we are making, how we are selling it, how it is remembered. I always answer, because I want it to be art, not important or relevant art, but art made with respect for the past and a profound curiosity for the future. Art that brings wonderment, satisfies, art so compelling and human that its very existance can not be ignored. 

One last thought: if classical music is not culturally relevant to "young people with mainstream tastes," then why is it so frequently used on ads, on tv shows, on film, and everywhere as a shortcut to expressing emotion in the process of selling them something?

Royal Shakespeare Company: Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2

Breath-taking trailer for the Royal Shakespeare Theater's production of Hamlet. Actor Jonathan Slinger performs Act 1, Scene 2, directed David Farr.