Slowly, The Change

"For a hundred years, marketers have been at war with their customers. But at last, there is peace. And it is coming in the form of simple conversations.

Battle is built into the heart of marketing. After all, if consumers do what the marketers want, the latter wouldn’t have to do any work! Marketing aims at changing buyers’ behaviour in ways that they resist."

Found that in a piece by Dave Weinberger that was published here. What struck me about it was the simplicity with which it describes the adversarial relationship we all know exists between marketers (and, by extension, companies) and their customers.

Marketing today is hustling. The point of it is to get customers to associate your product/service/experience with something that will make them more like an idealized image of themselves. Smarter selves. Younger selves. Sexier selves. You know the drill.

Companies don't ask us if we want to feel smarter, younger and/or sexier. They just assume we do. Given the culture, it's pretty easy to watch the ads and figure out who they think I want to be.

But, whether I do or not, selling their product to me on the basis of the transformation it will bring about is a trick. Sleight of hand. A hustle. And from about age 5 on, we're "on" to it. We may not "know" we're on to it, but we are. We get suspicious; wary. (Hey, how many times can you fool kids with dolls that sparkle and transformers that roar?)

So, we start playing hide and seek with these folks. We watch, listen to, see about 700,000 ads a year, dodging and weaving most of the time. They keep peeking around corners, jabbing, looking for weak spots. A battle.

But something's gonna change. Some are starting to get wise. It's slow going, and still a little rough. But it's gonna change. This is no way to operate in a world in which authenticity has become the standard of all relationships. Somebody's gonna understand that the battle is no longer sustainable. That the customer will respond to a voice that sounds like what she's used to hearing elsewhere. A voice that she recognizes, trusts, and respects.

A voice that is concerned about her life, and the problems she faces daily. That genuinely wants to help her navigate the complexity. That genuniely wants to fit her world, rather than getting her to fit theirs.

We've taken a lovely word, "aspirational," and made it the center of a manipulative project.

But slowly, the change is coming.

Comments

[Jon Husband]

yeah, the word aspirational started getting overworked and ioverused a couple of years ago.

What i think is going on is that we're just really now entering the part of the paradigm shift that the Joel Barkers and Tofflers of this world identified 20 + years ago and ascribed to "the Information Age" ... and everybody nodded knowingly because it made intellectual sense.

Well, now our behaviours are really starting to change, and the models for transactions, exchanges of value, knowing what "value" actually is, and many more variables / factors are not yet created and widely accepted (much early experimentation going on), and those who are still ostensibly in charge are becoming more and nmore captives of their thought processes, mental models, ways of behaving and reacting. This has been coming for quite a while now, and "it takes a long time for change to happen quickly".

And so, when surrounded by som uch fast-flowing infromation, ambiguity and uncertauinty, people seem to tend to look for answers and certitude ... so we have people seize on, and market the heck out of words ... aspirational, execution, alignment, competency, and so on ... without taking the time attention, care and love to make them truly effective in a human social system. this is my main beef ... while paying lip service, my sense is that it is forgotten, time and time again, that the fundamental unit of most organizations is a human being, and that these organizations are a social system function in an eco-system of other social systems. Capital, technology and flow charts are easier for most managers and execs to deal with ... those things don't have emotions and aren't "messy", like people are.

The next 50 years will be all about the sociology of living and working in an interconnected and interlinked world ... and it may be magnificent and fruitful, or it may be very dark and unpleasant (and probably more accurately, some of both).