Grant McCracken

Grant McCracken’s work has been covered in The New York Times and on Oprah. As a cultural anthropologist, McCracken looks at the places where culture and commerce, anthropology and economics meet most often: marketing in general, branding in particular, popular culture, Hollywood, advertising, television, magazines, and new media. Through his highly-customized ethnographic and anthropological research, he provides clients with a comprehensive but incisive review of contemporary culture, its foundations, current state and future trends – and strategies for managing it.

He is the author of several books including Culture and Consumption, Culture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning and Brand Management, Plenitude, Flock and Flow: Predicting and Managing Change in a Dynamic Marketplace, and Transformations. His latest book, Chief Culture Officer, demonstrates why the American corporation needs a new profession and a new professional, the Chief Culture Officer. It needs someone in the C-suite who reads culture for its opportunities and its dangers.  His new book, Culturematic, will be published March of 2012 by Harvard Business Review Press.

McCracken has done ethnographic and anthropological work for corporations such as Chrysler, Coca-Cola, Diageo, General Mills, HP, IKEA, Subway, Unilever, Microsoft and Kodak. In the last year, he has spoken at Microsoft, Philips, Coca-Cola, Bertelsmann, and Intel.

Born and raised in Vancouver, BC, McCracken holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago. He has been the director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, has taught at the Harvard Business School and is currently a research affiliate at MIT.

• The New Tourism

• The New Marketing

• The New Branding

• The New Social Networks and Our Changing Sense of Self and Community

• Personal Transformation

  How people reinvent themselves in our culture.

• I Almost Lost Control of my Bladder on the Oprah Winfrey Show

  This combines thoughts on celebrity, the anthropology and changing character of our culture.

• Pattern Cognition: How to Use Anthropology to Do Better Marketing

  This presentation is about 10 ideas that teach us to see the forest for the trees. Marketers live in an unbelievably complicated and dynamic airspace, with new data, new trends, new problems flying in all directions. Pattern cognition teaches us how we can spot things more quickly. It identifies the ideas that help us think our way through to better insight and innovation.

• Financial Marketing: Climbing the Value Hierarchy

  This presentation looks at the big problems that interfere with marketing for capital markets. Specially, it looks at three generations of this marketing: 1) the early days, 2) best practice right now, and 3) what the future holds. In the second section, McCracken looks at the work of Schwab, American Century, and the Bank of America with a nod to exemplary work from P&G and Volvo. In section three, he shows how financial services can speak to consumers at the top of the "value hierarchy," about the issues that matter to them most.

• 10 Tools: How to Speak to the Consumer in a Digital World

  This presentation looks at how new media (the internet, cell phones, email, chat, movies and TV on line, blogs, etc.) are changing the nature of consumer expectation and their participation in the brand. It is a practical look at what has changed in our culture and our markets, and how brands can reach out and make a connection especially to consumers under 35.

• On the record: I've now asked Grant McCracken to give keynote addresses at two of our iMedia Summits-- the first was the Financial Marketing Summit in Fall of 2007 and the second was our Automotive Marketing Summit. Very few speakers get a second chance at the podium at my events, but Grant brings a uniquely insightful, engaged and brilliant perspective to where culture, media, advertising and the internet all slam into each other. He is also hugely charming and funny onstage, which is always a plus. Pacing like a tiger up and down th stage, Grant's eyes sparkle as he makes his audience both think and laugh. The best historians are storytellers, and Grant's ability to pull a compelling tale from a series of images means that his audiences return home with clear memories and new intellectual tools at their disposal. I enjoy him as both an author and a speaker, and recommend him without reservation.
  iMedia Communications, Inc.

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  December 2009

  Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation

  Grant McCracken, an anthropologist who now trains some of the world’s biggest companies and consulting firms, argues that the Chief Culture Officer would keep a finger on the pulse of contemporary cultural trends—from sneakers to slow food to preppies—while developing a systematic understanding of the deep waves of culture in America and the world. The CCO’s professionalism would allow the corporation to see coming changes, even when they only exist as the weakest of signals.

  
  
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  May 2008

  Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture

  Self reinvention has become a preoccupation of contemporary culture. In the last decade, Hollywood made a 500-million-dollar bet on this idea with movies such as Multiplicity, Fight Club, eXistenZ, and Catch Me If You Can. Self reinvention marks the careers of Madonna, Ani DiFranco, Martha Stewart, and Robin Williams. The Nike ads of LeBron James, the experiments of New Age spirituality, the mores of contemporary teen culture, and the obsession with "extreme makeovers" are all examples of our culture's fixation with change. In a time marked by plenitude, transformation is one of the few things these parties have in common.

  
  
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  July 2006

  Flock and Flow: Predicting and Managing Change in a Dynamic Marketplace

  In this exciting new book, McCracken deploys "complex adaptive theory" to track the movement of trends and new groupings of consumers. He shows how to monitor new trends, whether and when to introduce new brands and brand extensions, how to speak to niche markets, and how to avoid costly mistakes. McCracken's sage and witty advice could not come at a better time. His book will be a valuable aid for anyone trying to keep up with marketplace changes in our rapidly evolving world.

  
  
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  July 2005

  Culture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning and Brand Management

  A follow-up to Grant McCracken''s groundbreaking Culture and Consumption, this new book trades the usual platitudes about the consumer society for a more detailed, exacting anthropological treatment. Each section of the book pairs a brief essay with an academic article. The essay is designed for a quick, provocative glimpse of the topic; the article provides a deeper anthropological treatment. The book opens with a broadside against the now thoroughly conventionalized attack on the consumer cultur