PCA, Part Two: Cultural Creatives, Looking Nice and Reaching Beyond

Practically every Acupuncturist is a Cultural Creative by definition. But what is the definition? You had to ask. You see what I am talking about here is a large group of people in the country (and abroad too) that various researchers, sociologists, urban planners, and all around eggheads have a hard time defining. I tend to like Richard Florida's definition of the group:

[quote]Creative Professionals: "Knowledge workers" and expanding to include lawyers and physicians.
Super-Creative Core: This comprises about twelve percent of all U.S. jobs. This group is deemed to contain a huge range of occupations (e.g. architecture, education, computer programming) with arts, design, and media workers making a small subset.[/quote]

... but unlike Florida I strongly disagree that CC's are a Class. Here is the link to that definition:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_class

Here is Florida's website:

http://creativeclass.com/

The reasons why I don't think that CC's are a Class is that the whole framework of what a Class is precludes adding new Classes. In other words these CC's existed in Marx's time and actually you can see that at least back through ancient Greece and no doubt further.

But I do like Florida's definitions of who is in the group better than Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson's definition of Cultural Creatives which is... well its hard to pin them down even though they wrote a book on it:

http://www.culturalcreatives.org/home.html

I won't go into details here but lets just leave it that Ray & Anderson and Florida are trying to grasp a vital part of society, the part that does a couple huge things:

- Creates most new jobs. You may know that most new jobs are created by small companies. Those companies are founded run by CC's.

- Define new values. Societies are always evolving. These are the people who drive that evolution.

So what we are talking about here is a very large (tens of millions) part of the population in the US and a similar proportion in Canada and western Europe. the range of people extends from, Steve Jobs to (potentially) the barista at your local coffee house. Most of these people are middle class but CC's can be working class (like Lisa and Lupine) or upper class. In that sense CC's form the glue that keeps a country from tearing itself apart by allowing people to move into different Classes. In fact in the US the two times that we came closest to revolution-1876 and 1932- were times of severe economic depression that had eliminated most of the CC's and the rest of the middle class as well.

-----------

Okay; enough going off on tangents. As I said Acupunks are CC's. That includes Korben and Ellen of Philadelphia Community Acupuncture. The downside of this is that the act of creating something new can be tarnished by looking just at yourself and your peers. In other words, even though CC's make up to a quarter of the adult population in the US (Ray & Anderson) or 30% (Florida) that's not enough of the population to be able to ignore the rest of it. To be successful in a new business venture one has to reach out beyond one's peer group. But that can be hard to do.

For example, take Apple Computer. They were initially very successful because they redesigned the PC that large segments of the population could use. Then they stumbled in the midst of some truly revolutionary products, specifically the Macintosh. Why did they stumble? Because the initial market for PC's was limited to fellow CC's like themselves but by the time the Macintosh came along the market had begun to expand beyond them. The Macintosh was certainly well designed- a hallmark of CC products- but it was too expensive and since it operated on its own OS (unlike its competitors) it became a cult item and the company began to fail.

It wasn't until Steve Jobs came back to the company and Apple rolled out first the iMac and then the iPod that the company began to have relevance beyond the CC world. Again, great design was the biggest thing, but also (with the iPod) it could be used with all OS's (in other words Windows). The company isn't bigger still because the computer branch is much slower in opening up to outside OS's.

So, yes, this has relevance to PCA and to the acu-world as well. Like the computer/electronics industries, like the um coffee industry or the environmental movement, the acceptance of acupuncture has two stages:

1) Initial acceptance by people interested in new things/new ways of thinking. This means rich people with disposable income and CC's.

2) Secondary acceptance by the rest of society.

Now the problem for us acupunks is that part two is not happening. One reason is that acupuncture is priced too damn high for most people to afford it. We've gone over this many times but can you see the additional light that knowledge of CC's sheds on this problem? CC's are people who will use up more of their disposable income on new things. CC's are people who will use more of their disposable income on their health. For CC's the line, "If you stop coming to acupuncture appointments must mean that you don't care for your health," actually has relevance. It means something. That's because CC's are more focused on themselves and their creations than the rest of the population.

So the idea of Community Acupuncture (CA) is that we can lower the prices so more people will come. Great.

But there's a second problem that can stop patients from using acupuncture more and that problem can happen to CA practitioners as well as their high-priced colleagues. Its the same thing that happened to Apple: Too much emphasis on what pleases themselves and not enough consideration of their target audience. This is the big CC trap. You want to make what you create special. You want it to look good, to reflect "you". But if you go too far in that direction then you loose your audience.

Korben and Ellen almost fell into that trap. CAN members can follow their ordeal in the forums. Just search for threads started by "ellengrover" or "korbenp". There are also several blog posts that they wrote after they avoided the trap:

http://www.communityacupuncturenetwork.org/forum/read.php?31,3457

http://www.communityacupuncturenetwork.org/forum/read.php?32,4114

http://www.communityacupuncturenetwork.org/forum/read.php?34,4779

http://www.communityacupuncturenetwork.org/forum/read.php?34,5068

http://www.communityacupuncturenetwork.org/forum/read.php?35,5557

http://www.communityacupuncturenetwork.org/forum/read.php?36,6005

I'll summarize: When they started looking for a space, Korben and Ellen got involved with some yoga people. They tried to make it work but in the end differences in intention cause them to break the partnership. It was a good thing too. The yoga folks still haven't opened their space. Meanwhile Korben and Ellen opened a fine space (see Part one for pictures:

http://www.communityacupuncturenetwork.org/forum/read.php?22,6866#commen...

without going into much debt because they were most interested in being open and accessible. I'll stop here in describing their odyssey; I hope that they could write the story of what happened. But until that happens I think its fair to say that they realized that they needed to pay more attention on their potential clientele than on their space and IMO that made a huge difference.

So if you are going to be successful in this business you have to take into account your clients' needs first. That means taking into consideration values that you don't necessarily share. It also means that your patients won't necessarily care much about what you most love. They'll have a different priority list. If you do this than you should make a thriving Community Acupuncture clinic.