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February 19, 2005
Saving Star Trek
Evangelists, activists or citizen marketers?
A well-organized group of volunteers is all of the above, and they have united to save the TV series "Star Trek: Enterprise," which UPN and Paramount announced earlier this month will be cancelled at the end of this season.
The Trek United activits are employing just about every strategy and tactic necessary for a grassroots organization to succeed:
* A well-defined cause and mission
* A forum for activists to share news, tips and how-to
* Rallies (in various cities, too)
* A fundraising campaign (more than $30,000 raised as of this writing)
* A letter-writing/fax campaign
* Plans for a big demonstration at Paramount studios
Love it.
The Trek activists might consider creating their own media, too: personal videos recorded at their computers on what the show, and the franchise, means to them. Post the videos front-and-center on the Trek United website. Provide the means for send-to-a-friend. The more interesting videos could spread virally and generate interest among the mainstream media. That should get the attention of parent company Viacom.
The activists could also create public task lists on what they'll do specifically to help Paramount improve ratings.
I can't possibly imagine the fishbowl pressure television executives endure, but a group like Trek United is a gift for any company. It does not seem like a huge risk for the marketing execs at Paramount to embrace the activists and convert them into citizen marketers with the authority and tools to make the show more popular.
The safer route is to follow the stereotypical script of keeping fan-evangelists well behind the gates of influence and decision-making and move on.
Stay tuned.
UPDATE: The Trek United group receives a $3 million donation. Details here.
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Ben: "Customer evangelism" is a fitting term. "Citizen marketer" is not! You are conflating several terms simultaneously. These people are not marketers in the first place, they are consumers. And where they get the 'citizen'-ship is quite beyond me. I posed the following question to your first blog about citizen marketers (maybe it was too late in the discussion to get your attention as you blogged other stuff in the meantime) and I need to repeat it here (in somewhat modified form).
Where exactly is the "citizenship" in this phenomenon to deserve the adjective "citizen"? If you are genuinely interested in closing the rift between consumerism and citizenship, wouldn't it be a good idea to unpack the "citizenship" concept first? The literature is full of criticisms about the decay of citizenship in US and elsewhere (see "Bowling Alone" from Robert Putnam at Harvard) because of rampant consumerism. And when people talk citizen-ship, they surely don't mean fandom or brand evangelism. I fear that critics will find one more reason to push their very credible point that consumerism defeats citizenship by this very operation of subversion and appropriation.
You are simply pushing the concept too far, so much so that it will hurt the efforts of other marketers who try to forge a more genuine coexistence between consumerism and citizenship.
There are multiple definitions of citizen, including one who "pledges allegiance" to a community, nation or state. Just a guess here, of course, but I don't think too many members of the The Trek United community would quibble with the idea of their "citizenship" in the Trekkie Nation.
With their activism, they are also marketing the show.
While we're on the subject, I think there's no more derogatory marketing term to describe someone as a "consumer." It denigrates the relationship between business and its customer and subsumes customers as a Soylent Green nation that will mindlessly consume whatever is fed to them.
If pledging allegiance is one side of the citizenship coin, the other side is the entitlement to rights. Duty and rights go hand in hand. Even in classical Greece, where the term was originally used, an essential component of citizenship was the right to participate in political debate, i.e. having a voice and a vote. Later socities added civil rights and social rights as well. They also developed matching institutions (parliament, courts, welfare state) to operationalize and guarantee those rights for every citizen.
I would be interested to hear in what ways these customer evangelists who pledge allegiance to a given brand are then also entitled to, and provided appropriate institutions for, some sort of civil, political, and social rights, in the limited context of corporate capitalist relationships, that didn't hitherto exist or wouldn't be available to 'non'-evangelists. Even if there is no such thing yet, though, maybe you can suggest some innovations and then we would be onto something really new here. I would be the first one to encourage and further such a thought experiment (incidentally I am working on an academic project looking at this very issue). Otherwise, I am very skeptical of this new usage and seriously concerned that it will only help to further devalue the 'citizenship' concept, and what is even worse, at the hands of marketers who are already blamed for most of the current malady.
Regarding your criticism about using the term 'consumer', you might prefer not to use the term for ethical or PC reasons, but the true state of the world overwhelmingly confirms the existence of consumers. Most people you'd question wouldn't have any problems with identifying themselves as consumers and many of those wouldn't agree with your characterization of consumption as mindlessly consuming whatever is fed to them. In fact, consumerism (or consumer society) refers to the condition in which individuals construct their identities and pursue the good life through the goods they consume. Having lived and/or visited North America, Europe, Asia, and Middle East, I haven't seen any strong crosscurrents to this dominant situation which is not to say I celebrate or approve it. I am all for effecting a peaceful revolution but I am still not very clear how...
Interesting points, Kerimcan, but some people delcare themselves "citizens of the world." Does that entitle them to anything (except a sense of worldly satisfaction, perhaps)?
I have yet to see an argument that "citizens of the world" and people with dual citizenships create citizen decay. Perhaps only to those with a hyperactive sense of nationalism.
A "citizen marketer" is a metaphorical equivalent for "everyman" (or "everyperson") whose non-professional status as an active creator of marketing on behalf of companies, products (or non-profit organizations) goes well beyond the well-compensated professionals in the agency world, or the originating organizations themselves.
While I appreciate the discussion, I am hard-pressed to rely on your argument that "citizen marketer" is corrosive to, well, whatever it is you think it's corroding inasmuch as the terms "citizen journalist" threatens freedom of the press.
Well, we are going to be running in circles if you don't really address my objections first.
I had asked what the difference between customer evangelism and citizen marketer was. Given your "everyperson" or Jackie's "ordinary person" criterion, customer evangelists would fit the bill perfectly fine. Isn't a customer an "everyperson" or an "ordinary person" too? Or seen differently, isn't your "citizen marketer" a "customer" anyway? Now, if you are to argue that evangelism and marketing are fundamentally different, then why don't you use 'customer marketer'?
I really don't understand why you insist on dropping 'customer' and inserting 'citizen' other than it sounds sexier and less capitalistic.
Your 'citizen journalist' parallel doesn't work here at all! Marketing and journalism are worlds apart in terms of the motivation and constituencies they serve. Maybe you should consult a journalist to find out whether, in relation to the publics they serve, there is any resemblance to marketing of what and why they do. Marketers serve private interests first and foremost, period. Journalists serve public interests first and foremost (check out any code of journalism ethics). In fact, journalism is oftentimes called the fourth power(estate) in democracies. Therefore, journalism and citizenship have something in common, public. Marketing does not. In that sense, you can put 'citizen' and 'journalism' together. One would think, you don't even have to but somehow people do. Why? Because journalism has been corrupted by private interests too and the citizens are taking matters in their own hands. Hence, 'citizen journalists'. You can't do the same thing with marketing, however, because marketing is not something that the citizens would have to or want to reclaim.
In short, you are proposing a new term in the most careless and ignorant manner. As I said to Jackie, as published authors, you must be a lot smarter than that. Your zeal in pushing this 'citizen marketer' term is just going to disgust and provoke all consumerism critics and consumer organizations so much so that all the rest of us, decent marketers, will have to clean after you. I fundamentally object to this self-destructive move.
Objection noted. To our "self-destruction," that is.
But we're confident the term describing this phenomenon is not destructive to ourselves, marketers, small animals, children or the state of the republic.
As for definitions:
A customer evangelist is someone who not only buys from you but believes in you so much they tell others.
A citizen marketer is someone actively engaged in promoting your organization by creating media for it. That media could include making a homemade ad, creating a fan site, coding a mod for an existing video game, embarking on a pilgrimage to visit every Starbucks in the world, or writing a book on how to hack TiVo.
A citizen marketer doesn't necessarily have to be an evangelist for a company. In his quest to visit every Starbucks in the world, Winter says he's not really a classic customer evangelist. It's just something he wants to do. But he has generated plenty of marketing publicity for Starbucks along the way, just not always in the manner Starbucks would like.
Which is precisely the point: citizen marketers promote things their way. The new paradigm (egads, did I really just use that word?) is for organizations to create new levels of openness and transparency that makes it easier for the citizen marketers to do their work.
Once again, you have not explained why you wouldn't want to call this new breed "customer marketer".
You said that "citizen" means "everyperson". Obviously, this is not a refinement of terms. It is a trivialization to the point of calling someone "human being". In that sense, every customer is an "everyperson" too. And yet, you refuse to use "customer" which suggests that you are really thinking in terms of stuff that customers won't or don't do. The burden is on you to justify how "customer" is not an appropriate term but "citizen" is.
Most importantly, this purported "citizen"-ship property you intend must be something shared by all "everyperson"s. However, your so-called 'citizen' demonstrates the following behaviors:
(1) "creating a fan site",
(2) "coding a mod for a video game" and "writing a book on how to hack TiVo", and
(3) "embarking on a pilgrimage to visit every Starbucks in the world"
FYI, (1) is called 'fandom', (2) is called 'hacking', and (3) is called a 'nutcase'.
I don't think any of these things are meant by 'citizenship' and most 'citizen's wouldn't fit these characterizations.
