The knew new: Innovation through familiarity
Nick Gadsby
Market Research Society
Annual Conference, 2015
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The knew new: Innovation through familiarity
Nick Gadsby
Market Research Society
Annual Conference, 2015
The knew new: Innovation through familiarity
Nick Gadsby
Lawes Gadsby Semiotics
Introduction
When we describe something as 'new' the meaning appears to be self-evident. Newness is a quality ascribed to something
that has come into being only recently as in a 'new-born baby' or a new product or brand, say a new model of car or a new
flavour of fruit juice. At the very least something is new if it has never been encountered before, in the same way the American
continent was described as the 'New World' when it was encountered by Europeans in the 15th century. It had been there for a
long time before and was well-known to the people who lived there, but to the European explorers who encountered it for the
first time it was experienced as new. In this way, while the thing in question is not new in and of itself it is experienced as new.
In this paper I want to put the question another way: just how new is new? The answer to this question is sufficiently less selfevident. Let's look at the examples above. A new-born baby may well be a new individual, but it's still a baby, babies are not a
new category of being, and the baby itself shares the DNA of its parents and its grandparents and so on. It will bear a likeness
to one or both of its parents and probably other blood relatives. It will share the surname of one or both of its parents and its
first name will likely be shared with numerous other people.
We might view new brands or products in a similar way. A new model of car will still possess the majority of recognisable
features from earlier models – four wheels, doors, a steering wheel, indicators etc. and a new flavour of fruit juice will still
share many of the qualities of earlier flavours – sweet, viscous, a bright colour such as orange or red, it will come in a bottle,
can or carton.
Even if we ignore the fact that the American continent was inhabited by a variety of indigenous peoples and civilizations, how
new was the 'New World'? There were trees and hills, rivers and streams, mountains and buildings. It was not the same as the
'Old World' of Europe, but neither was it completely different.
The questions: what does new mean, and; how new is new, are of interest to our industry because newness is something we
should be experts in – whether this is in the form of innovation, social and cultural change or our own research practices.
While there is lots of general literature on innovation and how technological and economic developments are changing society
this literature does not provide a framework or guide for how to do change successfully. This paper will rectify this by providing
an analysis of newness that gives equal space to familiarity and guidelines on how newness can be achieved successfully.
The short answer is that successful newness is not that new. To put it in numerical terms most new things should be no more
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2 than 25% new and, to express this qualitatively, new things should be mostly familiar. There is a simple reason for this - most
human beings like things to be the same and this means that they usually perceive new things through pre-existing
frameworks of meaning. This means that new things are likely to be more appealing if they're also very familiar.
Three important terms
Before we move into the discussion there are three terms that are used throughout the text that require some clarification:
1. Frameworks of Meaning:
This term describes the cultural lens through which human beings experience the world. Culture is a collective force that
shapes the way people make sense of the things they encounter. From a semiotic perspective culture produces meaning. This
means that the same thing can have different meaning to people from different cultural backgrounds. A simple example is the
way that in some countries dogs are 'man's best friend' and in others they are dangerous pests. All human experience is
mediated by culture to some extent.
Even what appear to be the most primitive emotions are shaped by culture. For example people don't just experience fear, they
are afraid of something and that something is a product of what a culture decides is worth fearing. So, for example the
greatest fear amongst people in contemporary Europe is a terrorist attack, whereas consumers in the 80s greatest fear was a
nuclear attack.
At a cognitive level human beings are pattern-identifying creatures, even where there isn't an evident pattern we seek
patterns, because patterns make sense. These patterns are woven by culture. This means people are quicker to see meaning
in things that fit patterns and are more likely to understand the purpose of a product (see Form & Function below).
2. The 25% Rule:
This is a useful rule of thumb for how new innovations should be – that is they should be no more than 25% new and 75%
familiar. Obviously it's not always possible to put a number on newness, but the 25% rule is there to encourage us to stop and
think about whether we've gone too far with an innovation.
The logic underlying the 25% rule arises from the fact that people require a certain level of familiarity to make sense of
something new – in other words it has to fit with the patterns shaped by their cultural framework.
3. Form & Function:
Form refers to the recognisable qualities of a product. This includes things such as shape, size, colour and other elements of
design such as logos and iconography. Function refers to the conventional ways that people use products. The emphasis is
on conventional uses because clearly an individual might find a novel use for something, but this use will not be widely known.
In any given culture people assume a fundamental link between form and function. A good example of this is the knife and fork.
For people in the western world the form of a knife and fork is directly linked to its function eating and other devices for eating
are deemed less efficient. By contrast people in Asia believe that the best form for the function of eating is chopsticks. The
optimum function of a form is usually culturally dictated.
What's new?
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3 In his study of newness, Michael North points out that there is a dearth of terms used to describe new in the English language
and from this draws the conclusion that English speakers don't really know what they mean when they use the word
'new' (2013). 'Newness' he says sounds awkward, which it does. 'Novelty' has pejorative overtones, which it does. The term
innovation is what we prefer in our industry and on this North claims that:
"innovation [is] almost the opposite of novelty, insofar as the importance of an innovation comes to depend on its acceptance
and durability and not on its difference" (2013:4)
With this he largely dismisses the term as "widely accepted change" and as being antithetical to the concept of newness and
although we might instinctively want to disagree with him, he's probably right. The purpose of innovation is, after all, to have
successful appeal. An innovation that fails to appeal to people and that nobody uses is a failure. The problem is that when it
comes to innovation we spend a lot of time talking about what makes an innovation new but not enough talking about what
makes it familiar. One of the reasons why so many innovations fail is because they are not familiar enough.
North concludes his study and overview of newness with a paradoxical outcome - "newness" he says "always remains
circumscribed within the limits of the old" (2013: 11). Ironically adherence to this paradox is precisely why innovations succeed.
New things emerge from the old, the familiar and the pre-existing: new things do not appear from out of nowhere. This might
sound like a frustrating paradox, in truth it is excellent news because it makes innovation and change easier to understand and
do.
Newness and familiarity: Parts of a whole
Regardless of how newness is defined one thing is certain: human beings do enjoy experiencing new things, if this was not the
case there would not be so many new things in the world. At the same time human beings like the stability of familiarity. Even
in an era such as our own that is characterised by change, on a day-to-day basis in many parts of the world, things tend to
remain relatively stable and even when they're not stability is what most people desire.
At first glance newness and familiarity might appear to be at odds with one another, but to grasp newness we need to
understand its relationship with familiarity. Anthropology can supply a lot of the answers to this. Early in the discipline's history
anthropology became the science of how things stayed the same – its focus was on social structure – but in the past 50 years
as it shifted from the study of 'traditional' societies to modern societies it has increasingly become the science of social
change.
One of the anthropologists who has been at the forefront of this approach is Marshall Sahlins. In his book Islands of History
(1985) he outlines a theory that accounts for both social structure and social change. At the top societies are characterised by
a 'cultural order' – frameworks of meaning that provide guidelines for and shape behaviour. Cultural order provides an
enduring system of beliefs, norms and values that holds a society together. It's the framework for stability and means day to
day experience is chiefly of the familiar kind.
The cultural order places limits on how people experience things by providing a pre-existing filter that shapes how they
interpret what they encounter. Human beings look for patterns in things and will often 'find' them even where empirical reality
challenges them to do so. The cultural order is the blueprint of the patters humans look for and finding patterns in experience
is a source of familiarity and familiarity encourages a more open-minded attitude in humans. For example on an empty tube
carriage the average British person would expect a boarding passenger to sit at least two seats away. This is a norm of British
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4 Tube use and reflects the British dimensions of personal space. If a boarding passenger were to sit right next to a British
person they would feel very uncomfortable because their behaviour did not conform to the expected patterns.
Actual, on the ground experience, however, always includes the prospect for producing experiences that go beyond the
limitations of the cultural order. In other words, the outcomes of what people do and encounter on a day-to-day basis cannot
always be encompassed by the framework of meaning. When this happens there is the possibility that it will feed back into the
framework and change it. When this occurs the opportunity for social change arises.
Importantly, the framework of meaning shapes how people perceive and experience things and their responses to things and
this affects how they react to new things. Another way of looking at this is that new things always have the prospect of going
beyond the limits of the framework. There are three possible outcomes of this:
1. The anomalies will be so slight as to be ignored and the experience will be incorporated into the existing framework.
2. The experience will be so anomalous – too new - that it is ignored as nonsensical.
3. The anomaly is experienced as newness but can be fitted back into the cultural order. The cultural order changes.
The implications of this process is that newness – i.e. things new to experience may be perceived as being too new, not new
enough or as the right balance of the new and the familiar. In the next section we're going to look at three examples of how this
works in action.
The voice writer
1877 was an important year in the history of modern technology it was the year that saw an invention that would herald the
beginning of the entertainment industry. The US newspaper, the St Louis Globe-Democrat ran the headline:
Another Telephone:
A New Invention which beats all predecessors
The British newspaper The Hull Packet carried the following headline on Friday 30th November, 1877:
A Wonderful Telephonic Invention:
Preserving Speeches
In the same article the following purpose of the machine was mooted:
"…if it is true that the telephone reproduces the inflexions and tones of the voice so exactly that a person familiar with them
can recognise the speech of his friend, then it is no less true that it will be possible to hear those tones and inflexions a
hundred years or more after the death of the speaker"
So what on earth was this new 'telephone'? It was the forerunner of what we now refer to as the record player. Looking back
long after the fact it's difficult to see what the telephone had in common with the record player. But the first thing we have to
accept is that at this point Thomas Edison's invention was not conceived as a device for playing back recorded music, in fact
at the point of its invention it wasn't entirely clear what it would be used for at all. Edison's concern at that point was not
immediately commercial, it was a technological attempt to record and reproduce the human voice and it was the role of the
human voice that linked it to the telephone.
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5 The telephone we know today had been successfully patented by Alexander Graham Bell the previous year, 1876, and the
telephone was used for transmitting sound, principally the human voice, over long distances and had become the technology
du jour. As such, the telephone had become the technological form through which other attempts to transmit the human voice
was understood. Such was the flux of technology at this time that the telephone itself was still sometimes referred to as the
'speaking telegraph', the term used as far back as 1844 by the Italian inventor Innocenzo Mazetti, who first developed the idea
of a device that, like a telegraph, could transmit messages over long distances.
What this demonstrates is the way that new technologies were perceived through the framework of pre-existing technological
formats. The telephone was comprehended as a telegraph that transmitted the human voice, the phonograph, as it would
come to be called, was comprehended as a way of capturing and transmitting the human voice not just over space but also
time. These radical new inventions of the 19th century were seen and made sense of through the lens of the familiar.
Despite his status as 'the wizard of Menlo Park' and one of the world's greatest inventors and businessmen, in the end Edison
failed to monopolise on the phonograph. After some deliberation he decided that the function of his invention was as a 'voice
writer' – the phonograph – alternatives he considered were the antiphone (back talker). Or the didasko phone (portable
teacher). Edison was uncertain about the commercial possibilities of the phonograph and saw its future as a tool for business
dictation and in 1878 he incorporated the business the Edison Speaking Phonograph company. Although others saw wider
possibilities for the phonograph, for example as a way to preserve the voices of the dead – the New York Times imagined "well
stocked oratorical cellars" – it was not widely perceived as a music playing device, and certainly not by Edison.
Edison became the historical figure we know today through his life-long work as a telegraph operator and was responsible for
some of the greatest innovations in that medium. It is evident however that his immersion in that technology shaped and limited
the horizons – his framework of meaning - of the potential of the phonogram. Even after he had spent a decade improving the
technology it still struggled to gain traction as a dictation device and was actually much better at playing music, yet Edison still
refused to see any merit in pursuing this avenue despite encouragement from his business backers.
So how did an office dictation device spawn the multi-billion dollar recording industry? One important player was Emil Berliner,
inventor of the gramophone. There were several differences between Berliner's gramophone and Edison's phonograph the
primary one being that the gramophone used flat discs a format with of lesser audio quality but much easier to use than
Edison's 'cylinders' and could store longer recordings – up to four minutes – and we know well what that four minutes came to
stand for.
Berliner's first company, the Berliner Gramophone Company did not have great success, but in the early years of the 20th
century he produced a new version of the gramophone at the same time as phonographs were moving from public spaces to
people's homes. The discs that played on this new gramophone were easier to mass produce and were therefore cheaper,
easier to use and as noted could hold more music.
Berliner's company the Victor Talking Machine Company produced another ace from its sleeve when it signed Enrico Caruso,
an Italian tenor who was to become the first 'pop star' of the 20th century. Despite this prescient moment in the history of
celebrity, Edison refused to change tack, believing that what the public wanted was better quality not popular music. He
reorganised all his companies under the rubric Thomas Alva Edison, implying that he was a corporation himself. His name
appeared on cylinders larger than that of the artists whose music they contained. Edison never quite learned the lesson that
the public didn't want to buy technology it wanted to buy music. Edison's quest for musical perfection continued to reach new
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6 heights. It was his view that the quality of the music played back should be better than that of the live music. His machines did
not reproduce music, he argued, they re-created it.
A more important question that few have attempted to answer is: why did the public want to buy recorded music at all? Unlike
the telegraph, the telephone or the light bulb, recorded music was of less obvious value. What is evident is that the history of
recorded music was something of an uphill battle. Edison's 'tone tests' public performances of the quality of his new Diamond
Disc format were as much spectacle and media phenomenon and, along with the increasing celebrity of performers, helped to
push recorded music into the sphere of a cultural phenomenon. Lacking any other function, devices that played recorded
sound, pushing music as a way the public could enjoy their new found leisure time seemed to be the best way forward.
What is clear from this story is that the phonograph was initially just too new, and not familiar enough, to appeal to the public.
One can imagine the average person thinking why they would want to listen to recorded music when they could go and hear
the real thing? Both the form and function of the phonograph was unfamiliar and did not fit into the pattern of people's existing
framework of meaning. It took many years of marketing and re-design before the record player to be accepted by the public.
Valuable lessons were learnt in this time – that something so new needs to be cheap and easy to use – its form and function
need to be accessible and that when it comes to music, sound quality is not that important.
The record player – one of the key formats of the music industry – nearly failed. If it had been invented today it would almost
definitely have failed, because it was too new.
The iPhone: From PDA, to phone to computer.
130 years after Edison introduced the 'voice-writer' to the world, unlike the record player, the telephone was still going strong.
The last decade of the 20th century had seen a new version of the phone achieve historical prominence – the mobile phone.
The first commercially available GSM mobile phone – the Nokia 101 – became available in 1992, the design of which provided
the basic form and proportions of virtually all subsequent mobile phones. SMS was introduced in 1994 and in 1998 more
mobile phones were sold than PCs and cars combined. Internet enabled phones were introduced in 1999, followed by camera
phones in 2002.
By 2007 the gradual evolution of the mobile phone into something more than a phone set the stage for the release of the
iPhone. In the 1980s Apple had been a cutting edge manufacturer of high end personal computers – producing the first
computer to have colour graphics, spreadsheets and other software packages and hardware peripherals - and after going
public in 1980 became the first PC manufacturer to reach $1 billion in sales. By the mid-90s however many had written Apple
off. A series of marketing mistakes and attempts to broaden its market share by adopting the strategies of its bigger
competitors such as Dell and HP failed commercially and impacted Apple's reputation critically.
Although Apple began to regain ground following the return of Steve Jobs as iCEO (interim Chief Executive Officer) in 1997, by
2001 Apple still only had 4.5% market share of its market. Further the crash of 2000 had caused a slump in sales of PCs and
82% of Apple's sales were PCs. From one perspective this was not a new state of affairs, Apple's success had originally been
driven by its niche market status and the high-end, highly profitable machines it produced, but given the shifting market place
evidently Jobs envisioned more than this for Apple. Another way of looking at the problem is: how could Apple increase its
market share in a shrinking market?
The release of the iPod in 2001, alongside the iTunes store would suggest that Apple had changed tack entirely by moving out
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7 of the market for computing and into the market for portable music players and music distribution. From 2001 to 2006 Apple's
sales grew from $5.3billion to $19.3billion with iPod and iTunes sales accounting for 50% of sales. While the focus of this
section is the iPhone, it's worth noting that the iPod's success was as much a product of its familiarity as it was its newness.
As we saw with the phonograph, when it comes to music consumers are more likely to purchase a music playing device if it's
cheap and convenient to use, they are less concerned with the quality of sound. The personal stereo, exemplified by Sony's
Walkman, was the obvious precursor to the iPod. Launched in 1979 within its first decade it had sold 50 million units
worldwide and by the 1990s the market for personal stereos was 20-30 million a year in the US alone (Millard 2005: 325). One
of the breakthrough moments attributed to the development of the Walkman was co-founder Masaru Ibuka's concern that the
initial headphones were too large and unwieldy, by chance another department at Sony had developed the now iconic
Walkman headphones (du Gay 1997: 131). The iPod went a step further introducing the subtle, yet distinctive white earbuds.
The iPod combined the latest technology with a product whose function and use was already largely familiar to consumers, but
was made even more convenient – it was smaller, lighter and could carry several albums worth of music precluding the need
to carry multiple CDs. Former Apple CEO, John Sculley claimed that during its development, Sony was the key reference point
for Jobs. The format of the iPod became the blueprint for the iPhone, which appears to have been Apple's more long-term
goal. Apparently a mobile phone had been a topic of conversation at Apple since the launch of the iPod with the view of
creating an all-in-one device – e-mail, phone-calls, music – but at this time bandwidth constraints posed a problem and the
Blackberry was clearing up in terms of e-mail enabled devices.
In 2003 Jobs revealed that Apple had been thinking about producing a tablet, a seemingly logical next step after the success
of the iPod, but at the time it was seen as too niche a market. As he put it "tablets appeal to rich guys with plenty of other PCs
and devices already"i. In the same interview, Jobs went on:
"I get a lot of pressure to do a PDA. What people really seem to want to do with these is get the data out. We believe cell
phones are going to carry this information. We didn't think we'd do well in the cell phone business. What we've done instead is
we've written what we think is some of the best software in the world to start syncing information between devices. We believe
that mode is what cell phones need to get to. We chose to do the iPod instead of a PDA."
Jobs seems to be implying that mobile phones would fulfil the same function as a tablet, even if at the time he felt that Apple
were not ready to get into the mobile phone market.
Jobs reason for taking an interest in developing a phone was his concern that mobile phones would eat into the portable music
player market. During the 2007 launch of the iPhone the presentation opened with an image of an iPod with an old-fashioned
telephone rotary wheel in place of the devices click-wheel. Although this was a joke, this is precisely what an earlier design
concept of the iPhone from 2004 had looked like. This idea was only jettisoned because it would be impractical to use – for
example, typing would not have been intuitive and given the obvious morphological relationship with the iPod was not deemed
'breakthrough' enough. It was the development of the touchscreen that Jobs felt had the necessary 'wow factor' and the
necessary accessibility to move forward with the iPhone:
"…it started on a tablet first. I had this idea about having a glass display, a multi-touch display you could type on. I asked our
people about it. And six months later they came back with this amazing display. And I gave it to one of our really brilliant UI
guys. He then got inertial scrolling working and some other things, and I thought, 'my god, we can build a phone with this' and
we put the tablet aside, and we went to work on the phone."
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8 In 2010 Apple's stock market value was greater than Microsoft's for the first time and by the end of the year Apple also
reported higher revenues than Microsoft for the first time in 20 years. Of course, the iPhone was more than just a phone, it
was a mini-computer and what Apple developed was a very roundabout way of taking control of a market they had always
been niche players in.
The logic of technology dictates that formats gradually become smaller. The expectation was that following the trajectory of the
PC and the laptop, the next step would be the tablet. Instead Apple opted to go down a route that made sense to consumers
by combining the familiarity of the iPod with the functionality of not just a phone but a small handheld computer that could
make phone calls. It was new, the touchscreen was something consumers had not seen before, but it was also very familiar in
terms of its form and function. It seemed to have evolved organically out of prior developments in the mobile phone market, it
just worked a lot better.
Google glass: Too Much, Too Soon.
The previous examples show the importance of fitting with consumers pre-existing experiences. Things that were too different
did not succeed and the onus was on presenting new technologies in ways that fit with pre-existing habits or did not force
consumers to depart too far from their existing behaviours.
Google Glass represents an extreme example of too much too soon for consumers. It simply was not familiar enough to fit with
consumer's frameworks of meaning and was a threat to some powerful social norms. Google Glass was made available to the
public in May last year but production ceased in January 2015. The biggest complaint about the device was its capacity to
infringe privacy. Taken at face value this claim make sense, but it makes less sense if the era of social media has supposedly
seen the end of privacy.
This is an important point and one that's worth investigating if we are to grasp exactly why Google Glass failed. The privacy
issue has been a hot topic since social media sites like Myspace and Facebook came to mainstream attention, with numerous
stories of people losing jobs or college positions because of publicly accessible photos posted showing them in compromising
positions. Privacy comes in lots of shapes and forms, however. For example, if you live in a semi-detached house, a detached
house or a flat you invariably hear the sounds of your neighbours coming through the walls, sometimes you might even listen
in. Either way, you wouldn't tell your neighbours that you had been listening in (unless they were very noisy) or comment on
the conversations you may have overheard. This is because privacy is normative – it's about what is considered socially
appropriate and inappropriate to talk about.
As Dana Boyd shows in her book about social media use by teens, It's Complicated (2015), it's not that young people have no
sense of privacy when they post things on social media, it's just that they don't expect adults to read them or comment on
them. In the same way that they don't want parents or teachers coming in to their rooms, listening to their phone calls or spying
on them when they're out, they don't expect them to invade their digital space. Adults are not the intended audience of their
online lives.
If the problem with privacy and social media is that the latter is a window on people's digital lives, Google Glass reversed this it was a hidden camera on people's physical lives. With social media people retained some control of what they posted with
Google Glass they felt they could lose any degree of control.
As an article from Scientific American, titled 'Why Google Glass is Creepy' put it: "This puts Glass wearers in a position of
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9 control. They can take pictures and videos, post things online and even possibly use face-recognition apps to identify
strangers in a crowd"ii. In this sense it has a questionable function. Of course there is plenty of other things Google Glass
could do, but then again these functions could also be done with smartphones. The problem then was that the form of Google
Glass offered nothing new so only its novel and questionable functions were salient.
There were also less, or perhaps more obvious problems with Google Glass. The first is that they don't look anything like
actual glasses and they have to be worn on the face, right where they are the most visible. The design may have been
intentional so as to alert observers to the fact that an individual was wearing the device, but it looked odd. Whether or not the
wearer was actually using the device is not the point, the point was because of its location there were few evident gestural
cues that indicated use either way. Unlike a smartphone that requires the user to look down or hold it up when it's being used
the same was not true for Google Glass - it was not always apparent to others when the wearer was using them, which is
actually less reassuring for everybody else.
Google Glass was just too new for the mass market, it contravened far too many norms. Instead of building gradually on the
familiar it leaped ahead of its time. Apple's iWatch stands a much greater chance of becoming the first piece of wearable tech
that succeeds as a mass market product because it is much more discreet and located nearer the hand which is a familiar
location for the use of a smartphone.
Theories of newness
The Familiarity of Evolution
When we think about theories of newness the theory of evolution stands out as an incredibly sophisticated example. While
dramatic evolutionary outcomes tend to receive the most attention – the emergence of life, humanity, the eye or mass
extinctions etc. – the incredibly slow pace with which change occurs is rarely the subject of attention. Evolution is a perfect
example of how newness is familiar because in the vast majority of cases a new organism is very similar to the older organism
from which it evolved, even if this isn't apparent on the surface.
For example, chimpanzees are the closest living ancestor to human beings. The last common ancestor of human beings and
chimpanzees is dated to some point between 5 and 7 million years ago. On the surface humans and chimps look very
different, but compared to most other animals – other mammals such as cats and dogs, and other classes such as amphibians,
reptiles, fish, molluscs etc. we are remarkably similar physiologically. But the similarity is even clearer if we put a number on it.
A recent study of human and chimp genomes found that there is 96% similarity.iii So even after 6 million years or so humans
and chimps remain similar so one can only imagine how similar the intermediary forms of humans and chimps were at various
points on the journey.
To be clear, what I'm not saying is that the social and cultural change in human society (or any society for that matter) is
exactly the same as evolution, but evolution does provide a very good example of how newness is based on the familiar. Part
of Darwin's genius lay in precisely how he bound the pre-existing and the new together. Change occurred through
reproduction and was gradual.
One of the important points to remember about evolution is that not everything new succeeds, i.e. survives or reproduces. The
simplified understanding of evolution as 'survival of the fittest' implicitly assume that the fittest is always the newest and the
oldest is doomed to extinction but this is a gross oversimplification. The misunderstanding in part stems from the word 'fit'. In
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10
the sense that Darwin used it fitness did not refer to a progressive state of health or survivability but how well an organism 'fit'
with its environment, including the other organisms alongside which it lived. It's obvious that older species and newer species
co-exist.
This explodes the other myth about evolution that successive species are inherently superior to prior ones. Survival was
dependent on the degree to which an organism could adapt to its environment and the environment continuously changed – it
could get hotter or colder, new predators might appear or prey disappear. Newness in evolution was tethered to descent from
previous generations of an organism and had to fit with pre-existing environmental conditions. As Darwin was at pains to
argue, this made sure that new organisms had to fit with their environment and would over time produce more radical
newness. In other words newness in evolution is shaped by the pre-existing in terms of both form (descent) and function
(environment). These are important lessons and we can draw clear analogy with the successes and struggles new
technologies such as the phonograph, iPhone and Google Glass faced.
Generational Consciousness: Radical Newness
The twentieth century, particularly the post-war years, is often described as a period of great social change. It saw universal
suffrage, the growth of equal rights for men and women, multiculturalism and globalisation to name but a few major changes.
One of the most oft-discussed and difficult to understand was the emergence of youth culture and the idea of the generation
gap. It wasn't the first time in history that such a gap between the young and the old had been posited, the post-World War I
generation of young men were often described this way – young moderns contrasted with the conservative ways of their
Edwardian fathers. Evelyn Waugh's novels of the late 1920s capture this sense of estrangement. But to a large extent this
generational divide was specific to the upper middle-classes and the aristocracy.
The 1950s and 60s are seen as the decades in which youth culture became a mass phenomenon. This was the first
generation in which young adults did not seek to follow in the footsteps of the previous generation. They did not dress in the
clothes of their parents but developed their own styles, tastes and habits that often appeared to embody values the very
opposite of their elders. It was called youth culture because it seemed to have no obvious similarities to what came before it
and was seen to reject the cultural framework of the previous generation enabling entirely new forms and functions of products
and experiences to emerge.
If anything could be described as completely new it was youth culture. New generations are always a potential source of and
audience for radical newness, much more so than older generations. Despite this enduring interest in generational difference
there is little serious analysis of generational change and its influence on culture.
In order to understand why generations are a source of newness we need to refer back to the concept of the framework of
meaning. As we've seen already people are born into pre-existing frameworks of meanings, norms and values and this shapes
how they experience the world. But this does not mean that everyone who exists in the same framework of meaning is shaped
by it in the same way. People of different class, gender or ethnic backgrounds invariably experience the culture they're born
into in sometimes starkly different ways. This is also true for different age groups. An 80 year old and an 8 year old don't just
look different, they see and experience the same things differently because the perspective on the framework of meaning they
share invariably differ.
The sociologist Karl Mannheim was one of the few academics to have explored what he terms 'generational consciousness' in
detail (1952). He argued that the early years of human life have a powerfully formative affect – in other words what young
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people experience comes to be seen as the natural order of things. This is supported by more recent scientific evidence and
has been attributed to the extended period of time it takes for humans to reach full physical maturity. What this means is that
what's 'new' and different to older generations is often normal and natural for the younger generation.
As Mannheim points out, it's not necessarily the case that generations differ radically, this is usually a consequence of major
social and cultural upheavals. For the youth culture of the 50s and 60s there were several factors – the increased wealth and
stability of the country, a new range of consumer goods targeting them specifically, radical ideas imported from countercultural
movements in the US and a general optimism about progress and change, to name but a few. Not all generations experience
this level of change, not even the 'digital native' generation. But every generation will experience some things that differ
substantially from the one that came before. And this is what we're going to look at next.
Superhero Movies: where old and new collide
One of the newest phenomena of recent years is the rise to dominance of the comic book superhero movie. In the last 10
years four superhero films have taken global box office receipts of over $1billion and the number of superhero films due for
release over the next five years suggests that this trend will not die soon.
Why is this the case? An argument proposed by Professor of English Literature Ben Saunders is that superheroes represent a
modern form of spiritualism (2011). While there is undoubtedly some truth to this, I would argue that superheroes represent
just one instance in a long-line of pop culture 'gods' – following on from detectives, cowboys, spies, Jedi Knights, Power
Rangers and Pokémon. The question is not what do superheroes represent, but why do they represent it at this moment in time?
The question becomes more complex because comic book superheroes are, of course, not an entirely new thing. The first
comic book superhero, Superman, first appeared in 1938, followed by Batman in 1939 and a subsequent tidal wave of copycat
superheroes throughout the 1940s. Superhero comics were themselves a hybrid form of two familiar media forms – newspaper
strip 'funnies' (hence the name 'comics') and the larger than life heroes of the pulps, such as The Shadow and Doc Savage.
Although comic book superheroes initially appealed to the same young grown-ups who read the pulps, the introduction of
chirpy sidekicks (see Robin, Superboy etc.) meant that by the beginning of WWII comics were seen primarily as children's
media.
This changed in the early 1960s with Marvel Comics' superheroes who had to deal with more mature issues and appeared
more vulnerable and human than the pre-War 'Golden Age' heroes. Of these Spider-man became the poster boy for not just
the modern comic book superhero, but the new youth generation. In a 1965 survey of university campuses by Esquire
magazine students identified most with Bob Dylan, then Che Guevara and in third place, Spider-man. However, since these
times sales of comic books have dropped enormously, Marvel Comics, facing bankruptcy in the 90s actually sold the film rights
to its most popular heroes for buttons. This makes the question of the success of the superhero film even more perplexing.
Why would an 80 year old genre, pejoratively associated with children and adolescents, featuring (primarily) men in ridiculous
outfits find itself topping the global box office in the forward-looking digital age? The answer is 'generational consciousness'.
If we look at the age of the directors of the most successful and critically received superhero films we see that they are roughly
of a similar generation. Bryan Singer whose first two X-men films (2000, 2002) lead the vanguard of superhero movies was 35
when he directed the first film in 2000, meaning he was born in 1965 three years after the invention of Spiderman and 2 years
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after the invention of the X-men. By the time he was old enough to read these superheroes were firmly established parts of
North American pop culture. Sam Raimi directed the first truly blockbuster superhero film, Spider-man in 2002 when he was
43. He would have been 3 years old when Spider-man was a brand new phenomenon and may well have watched the
animated Spider-man TV show that was shown on TV in 1967. Christopher Nolan was 35 when he directed Batman Returns,
he probably grew up watching the superhero shows of the late 1970s and re-runs of the 60s Batman TV series. Joss Whedon
was 46 when he directed the Avengers in 2012, so he was born in 1964 a year after the Avengers made their comic debut.
James Gunn, director of Guardians of the Galaxy was 44 when he directed it and was born a year after the spacefaring team
were introduced to the comics universe.
The ages of these directors is fairly average for Hollywood and while the specific formative experiences of each director no
doubt varied, importantly they all grew up in a period of time and a part of the world where comic book superheroes were just a
normal part of the cultural landscape for boys (note that so far no woman has directed a comic book superhero movie).
Superheroes are a natural part of their cultural framework unlike the generation before them and they simply adapted the
superhero form to the cinematic medium.
Of course a receptive audience is also necessary to sustain the phenomenon. Demographic statistics for UK and US
audiences are plagued by marketing segmentation issuesiv, but what is clear is that the largest number of cinema-goers are
under 45 (based on 2012 statistics) - that is people who were born after 1967. At the upper end then, this age range is
somewhat in line with the age of Hollywood directors of superhero films (late 30s to early 40s), but the audience remains large
through those in their twenties, teens and younger. Why is this the case?
One of the 'soft' shifts in generational consciousness that tends to receive less attention than it deserves occurred in 1977.
Star Wars was not just a successful film it was a cultural phenomenon that spawned targeted merchandising of unprecedented
scope. By the time of the release of the final film of the original trilogy in 1983 the box office take domestically was $870million,
but the value of the licensed products dwarfed this amount at $2billion (Cross 1997: 202). Star Wars, might have been the
biggest, but it was not an isolated phenomenon. Unsurprisingly it caught the attention of toy manufacturers in the US who saw
how a rich fantasy setting could be the basis for successful toys – this was where the real money could be made. The success
of Star Wars coincided with a major shift in US television advertising regulations. In the late 70s the attempts by reformers to
prohibit toy adverts on TV was defeated and by the early 80s the Reagan administration's free-market ethos opened up the
possibility for the PLC – the program-length commercial – better known to us as the plethora of cartoon series that dominated
80s kids TV accompanied by their very own toy-lines. He-man, Transformers, Thundercats, Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, My
Little Pony, Care Bears, She-Ra and so on.
As historians Gary Cross (1997) and Stephen Kline (1993) have argued the 20th century saw the growing move from children's
toys that reflected the values of adults to those that created a separate 'children's culture' through the production of fantasy
worlds that were largely opaque to their parents. This remains the case today – from Pokemon, to Uh-Gi-Oh to Ben Ten. What
this means is that mythos inspired fantasy worlds are normal to those that grew up with them and rather inaccessible to those
that did not i.e. anybody who was over 10 years old in 1977.
Comic book superheroes have appeared in the mainstream intermittently throughout this period – the Superman movies of the
late 70s and early 80s, the Batman movies of the late 80s and 90s, the cartoon series shown through the 80s and 90s to the
burst of formats they come in today that includes movies, TV shows, cartoons and the original format the comic book. The
strength of comic books has been their adaptation to new environments – first adopting the gung-ho style of the pulps in the
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late 30s, then the youth zeitgeist of the 60s, the style over substance of the 90s and the greater representation of the
globalised world of the 21st century.
What this means is that as part of the landscape of fantasy properties, superheroes easily fit into the frameworks of meaning
of those under 45 and what is new about them is the way they have borrowed the form of the polished blockbuster a medium
that for these generations remains one of the primary ways of serving the function of fantasy entertainment.
Guidelines for getting new right
What does this mean in practical terms? How should we go about developing and creating new products?
The good news is with the simple 25% rule that there are lots of ways to do new successfully, but in this final section of the
paper I want to focus on three ways of doing this successfully. Incremental, Oppositional and Archaic.
All three of these types of newness are based on frameworks of meaning that instinctively appeal at to the way consumers
make sense of the world, but do so in a creative way. Importantly, in order to do so creatively they require an understanding of
the cultural values that underlie the brands and categories in question.
Incremental Newness
Throughout the paper I have explained how change is almost always gradual – revolutions do happen, but they are not the
norm. The first type of newness we'll look at exemplifies this process – incremental newness. The increment is the smallest
perceptible unit of change and nowhere is it more evident than in technology brands.
I have already discussed the way the iPhone combined forms and functions very familiar to consumers with just the right
amount of newness. This is true for the changes between generations of the phone which are only very slight, apart from the
change between 1st generation and second generation which added distinctive new features such as 3G and the video
camera.
The eight generations of iPhone includes ten different model and are as follows: iPhone 1, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3Gs, iPhone 4,
iPhone 4s, iPhone 5, iPhone 5c, iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus.
Apart from the jump from first to second generation the way in which newness is conveyed is through progressive numerical
increase – the newer version bearing a numerical suffix on and increment of one on the previous model. Smaller increments of
newness are conveyed by the suffix 's' up until the iPhone 6 where the term 'plus' is applied. So far so obvious. Why is this
important? Let's think about numbers. We rather take numbers for granted: 2 follows 1, 3 follows 2 etc. Numbers appear highly
functional and irreducible. But we've forgotten that numbers are symbolic, they represent quantities and also qualities which
convey concepts to consumers. There are some common examples of this: the number '13' is seen to mean bad luck, '666' is
the number of the beast and so on.
The iPhone uses increasingly higher numbers to convey incremental improvements for each different model and this works
because of the way consumers understand technology as something that is constantly improving. The use of additional terms
such as 's' or 'plus' also convey improvement symbolically through the concept of addition.
The use of '3G' is more overtly symbolic – as it conveys not just a technical improvement over the first model of the iPhone – 3
is greater than 1 - but the use of 'third generation' mobile phone technology. Had 3G been introduced after the iPhone 4 for
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example the 3G suffix would most likely not have been used.
Importantly the simple system of numerical increases conveys improvement in a very clear way to consumers who might
otherwise struggle to identify obvious differences between subsequent models of the iPhone. As we've seen the differences
between models usually amounts to slight upgrades in hardware that to the non-techy consumer mean very little. In terms of
technical specifications it is the camera – the piece of hardware of the most relevance to most consumers – that also uses a
simple incremental increase way to differentiate hardware in terms of 'megapixels'.
Other hardware features use more complex systems of numbers and letters that are less intuitive and offer fewer clues about
what the specific function is or how it has been improved. For example CPUs (core processing unit) is the heart of the iPhone,
but its incremental increases are less apparent to consumers. For example the iPhone 4 contained a '800 MHz ARM CortexA8' and the iPhone 4s contained a '800 MHz dual-core ARM CortexA-9'. Because this piece of hardware begins with the
measurement of the clock-speed of the CPU and it has the same speed in both the 4 and 4s models it obscures other
differences such as the fact that the CPU is dual-core (it has two core processors) meaning that it will run faster and more
efficiently.
The CPU in the iPhone 5 and 5c although and improvement on the 4 and 4s but this would not necessarily be apparent to
most consumers based on the way the CPU is described – '1.3GHz dual-core Apple A6'. To begin with it uses different letters
to the previous because the clockspeed is measured in Gigahertz rather than Megahertz and the processor is now an Apple
product which comes with its own coding system that is numerically lower than that of the ARM Cortex manufactured CPUs.
Another technology product, Sony's Playstation uses a similar incremental system of newness: Playstation, Playstation 2,
Playtstation 3 and Playstation 4. We can expect the Playstation 5 in a few years.
Microsoft took a different tack with its Xbox brand. The first was called simply 'Xbox', the second Xbox 360' and the third 'Xbox
One'. These numbers are more symbolically loaded. Microsoft claimed that he '360' suffix referred to its multi-functionality, but
it is also a very high number, higher than its competitor's numerical suffix 'Playstation 3' – symbolically implying a great leap in
technology.
Microsoft also used some unorthodox naming conventions for its operating system, Windows. We have Windows 1.0,
Windows 2.0, Windows 3.0, then Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME (Millennium Edition), then Windows NT, Windows
XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10.
There are various technical reasons why Windows uses such an inconsistent numbering system, but let's focus on the more
recent developments where Windows had become a much more mainstream consumer product.
According to Microsoft's Mike Nash Windows 7 was given this name because it was the 7th version of the OSv. This of course
requires some fudging as there were clearly far more than 6 previous versions released, even when some were grouped
together (e.g. 9x).
A better reason why Microsoft opted for 7 probably has to do with the critical failure of the previous version Windows Vista. By
beginning the naming sequence afresh and moving from letters to numbers this signalled a sharp break from what had come
previously – not a revolution but certainly a bigger incremental leap. We can see Micrsosoft doing this again in response to the
critical failure of Windows 8. Its successor is Windows 10, which implies more than just a slight improvement over Windows 8.
Numbers are being used quantitatively and qualitatively to help Microsoft overcome a major problem with an earlier product.
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Incremental newness rarely breaks the 25% rule, the problem it has it that sometimes it doesn't use enough newness. So far
I've focussed almost exclusively on technology brands and products, but incremental newness is common in other categories.
For example it is present in FMCG and personal care through variants – the same basic product with new ingredients or with a
slightly different format. This is often successful because consumers are very comfortable with this degree of newness,
although the launch of these types of products often passes under the radar of consumers because they are not quite new
enough. In these instances these brands could play closer to the 25% mark.
Oppositional newness
Incremental newness is an example of often very small amounts of newness added to a very familiar product and as with
examples such as Windows 8 attempts to add too much newness can backfire. Oppositional newness requires a larger dose
of newness to be added to a familiar product.
One of the most apparent examples of this in recent times is Coke Life. Coca Cola is not only a global symbol, it is also
symbolic of the category of carbonated drinks, a category that is decreasing in popularity due to its perception as an unhealthy
choice. Coke Life is an attempt to keep all the familiar elements of the brand intact, while producing a product that does the
opposite for consumers.
The principle difference between traditional Coca Cola and Coke Life is the replacement of sugar with the sweetener Stevia –
a substance that Coke Life's comms highlight is a natural ingredient as well as being lower calorie than sugar. While the
calorie content of Coke Life (27/100ml) is lower than Coca Cola (42/100ml), it is higher than both Coke Zero and Diet Coke
(both less than 1/100ml). Coke Life addresses concerns about the possible negative health effects of the artificial sweeteners
and taste issues of Coke Zero and Diet Coke at the same time tapping into consumer beliefs about the inherent goodness of
natural ingredients.
The most visible aspect of Coke Life is or course its green packaging. The green replaces all the red a colour strongly
symbolically associated with the Coke brand and which is retained in the Coca Cola logos on both Zero and Diet, so compared
to previous innovations Coke Life is a larger leap in terms of newness. The 'greenwashing' is evidently an attempt to convey
Coke's commitment to naturalness, but there still remains a credibility gap in terms of how the brand is perceived. Still, Coke
has made a strong attempt to maintain familiarity through the recognisable form of the branding, packaging and product
experience while offering consumers the opposite of what to expect from the brand.
This is not a problem exclusive to Coke. Brands attempting to innovate products that are the opposite of what the brand or
category stands for face many challenges. A successful example is Green & Blacks chocolate. While few would explicitly claim
that Green & Blacks is a healthy brand, they would no doubt justify their reason for eating at is the closest thing to healthy
chocolate. Green & Blacks managed this by drawing on the semiotics of luxury chocolate, principally removing bright and
garish colours associated with children's chocolate and replacing them with darker and more naturalistic hues, adopting a bar
size of 'adult' proportions and using an elegant serif font and orderly logo. These are familiar to consumers as signs for 'posh'
chocolate – more sophisticated indulgence – and this gave the brand credibility to convey a subtle health message through the
concept of purity. Green & Blacks' products were differentiated from conventional chocolate because they had much higher
percentages of cocoa solids. As a consequence of this it tasted considerably bitterer than most chocolate did making it less
accessible. Consumers have long associated the idea of 'healthy food' with less sweet taste experiences so it didn't take much
for PR to seed stories about the health benefits of high cocoa solids/lower fats/sugar.
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In terms of form Green & Black's is simply premium chocolate, its newness is well-hidden behind concepts of purity that
consumers can get their head's round without too much difficulty. It very much conforms to the no more than 25% new rule by
cleverly fitting in with the preconceptions present in consumers frameworks of meaning.
Less successful at this is new brand of chocolate Ohso which as well as being lower calorie than conventional chocolate also
contains 'friendly bacteria'. Unlike Green & Black's its packaging uses semiotics that are closer to diet/low fat products. This is
a big leap for consumers to make. For consumers chocolate should always be about the taste – whether that's sweet and
artificial or a richer, bitter taste – consumers don't instinctively believe that they will get this from diet/low fat products. The
addition of 'friendly bacteria' although increasingly familiar to consumers, does not have an automatic fit with chocolate
because it adds something to the product that is not perceived to be a natural element of chocolate. Ohso breaks the no more
than 25% rule.
Archaic
The most paradoxical kind of newness is the 'old'. In recent years there has been a revival of interest in traditional ideas and
practices. From the Great British Bake-Off to the revival in sales of vinyl and cassettes. Sometimes this has been criticised as
the death of newness (e.g. Reynolds 2009), but the past as a golden age is, to deepen the paradox, not a new thing and has a
deeply powerful hold over consumers during different eras.
As we've seen with comic book superheroes this type of newness can work well for media properties. I also mentioned the
Great British Bake-Off which combines the Masterchef format with a more domestic and homely activity, a focus on traditional
styles of cooking with a set (and sense of humour) that has more in common with past decades. The reason why media
properties are so easily able to draw on the past to create new formats is because many of consumer's formative collective
experiences are of media properties. This is why as well as superheroes we have seen the successful revival of other
nostalgic franchises such as Transformers, Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings/Hobbit.
But this is not to say that other categories have not ventured into this territory. Guinness recently launched a range of three
'craft beer' products that use the same 'archaic' design style as many of the current craft beer producers out there. Although
Guinness have nailed the semiotic signs of craft beer, they have done so almost too faithfully leaving their new products
feeling rather me-too. In this case they're not new enough for a brand that is seen as a mainstream player and which, with its
heritage, might be expected to be a leader rather than a follower. It also faces the hurdle that it's competing against brands
who have a fresh sense of authenticity about them – consumers associate craft beers with the small-scale production of microbreweries, not global companies.
Cadbury's Wispa is a more successful example if food and drink. Relaunched in the early 2000s under the Dairy Milk umbrella,
the original Wispa returned in 2008. The reason for its success was that it was an authentic nostalgia brand rather than a
manufactured archaic brand.
Plenty also re-launched the brand from Bounty successfully by drawing on a design style associated with retro domesticity.
The reason this worked was because it was done with an obvious sense of humour (Juan Sheet) and also because the
ideology of mid-century domesticity was more forward looking than is the case today, at least as far as cleaning technologies
were concerned.
One category in which archaic newness is especially powerful is fashion. The eternal cycle of repetition and rebirth of old
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styles in fashion means that archaic newness lends itself well to fashion. A brand that has benefitted from this is Converse.
Converse's rebirth took off with the rock revival of the early 2000s (The White Stripes, The Strokes etc.) who used the brand
as part of their new-wave inspired look. By the mid-2000s the brand had become the matching whole alongside skinny jeans
and by the end of the noughties as part of the mainstreaming of indie fashion it became a household name again.
In conclusion
In this paper we've seen that newness is successful when it combines a healthy degree of familiarity. What this means in
practical terms is that when we do innovation we need to make sure we understand the cultural frameworks of meaning of
consumers and how the form and function of existing products fit into this framework. This means that we understand how a
new product will fit perfectly into the lives of consumers, what it needs to look like and what benefits and functions it should
provide.
Bibliography
Boyd, D. (2015) It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, Yale University Press.
Coleman, M. (2005) Playback: From the Victrola to MP3, 100 Years of Music, Machines and Money, Da Capo Press.
Cross, G. (1997) Kid's Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood, Harvard University Press.
Kline, S. (1993) Out of the Garden: Toys and Children's Culture in the Age of TV Marketing, Verso.
Mannheim, K. (1952) 'The Problem of Generations', in P. Kecskemeti (ed.) Karl Mannheim: Essays, Routledge, Pp 276-322.
Millard, A. (2005) America on Record: A History or Recorded Sound, Cambridge University Press.
North, M. (2013) Novelty: A History of the New, The University of Chicago Press.
Reynolds, S. (2009) Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past, Faber and Faber.
Sahlins, M. (1985) Islands in History, The University of Chicago Press.
Saunders, B. (2011) Do the Gods Wear Capes? Spirituality, Fantasy and Superheroes, Continuum.
Footnotes
i http://bgbg.blogspot.co.uk/2003_05_25_bgbg_archive.html
ii http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-google-glass-is-creepy/
iii http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/08/0831_050831_chimp_genes.html
iv http://www.mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2012-Theatrical-Market-Statistics-Report.pdf
http://www.cinemauk.org.uk/facts-and-figures/uk-cinema-audience-analysis/uk-cinema-audience-by-age-and-gender/
v http://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2009/oct/29/wny-named-windows7
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