As a man who was trained not in marketing, but in history and sociology, I often end up viewing paid search and online media through a somewhat different lens than my peers. I can’t help but look for the patterns and symbols embedded in user behavior, and like a good structuralist I believe that those currents reflect the same basic needs and feelings that all societies have had. After all, don’t the members of the internet using world make a society at this point? The very emergence of the “social space,” “social media,” and other such terms tell me that they do. Like-minded people band together online just as they do in the physical world, communicating and trading with one another, and linguistics and resource economics are two of the main pillars of any cultural study. Therefore, I don’t find it far-fetched to think that anthropological lessons can be applied to digital advertising, in the same way that art history majors were brought into print marketing in the last century to ensure that the correct symbols would be used to appeal to a consumer’s unconscious.
So it was that while I watched Scott Sorokin deliver a presentation on the rise of user generated content and what the engaged consumer meant to brands that I began to think about the relationship of the masses to content and information in the digital age. He made point that until very recently a company controlled the flow of information to the consumer, and that it was a one-way stream and extremely limited in scope. As the internet grows and we move more into a world where content and information are both limitless and accessible however, the connection between a brand and consumers has become reciprocal. What was once a monopoly on the part of the brand company is now an open platform, where user reviews, Facebook likes, YouTube videos and more not only respond to brand-created media, but augment (and in some cases stand in for) content that a company generates.
The importance of this shift in the fundamental relationship between consumer and brand cannot be overstated. The move from a monopolistic to a reciprocal distribution of power is extremely rare and nearly impossible to reverse. Generally you would expect the examples to be political, harkening back to the rise of totalitarian regimes in the 20th century, or the toppling of hereditary monarchies in the 18th century, but these sorts examples fall well short. Changes in political or technological control over information in a society do represent the movement of power, but the authority in such cases is always fleeting and illusory, because the society in question is not part of the loop. Submitting to authority is not the same as granting authority. A citizen of the Soviet Union who drove a Zaporozhet was not brand loyal, they simply weren’t allowed to buy a Ford.
The relationship that consumers have had with brands for the last 50 years has been voluntary though, if one-sided. The information that you knew about a product, and the associations you made with the product, were (for the most part) based solely on what the company spread through media. Now however, most savvy consumers can find all the information they need on a product without ever visiting the brand site. What’s more, they can produce media of their own, be it a tweet or a 20-minute video, which provides a personal, positive or negative impression of a brand. And with the accessibility of this content online, the difference is that now the brands need that content. In the old days you could write a letter about a poor experience with a product to the company, or mention to your neighbor that you liked a commercial, but companies didn’t need that feedback, and it didn’t change what flowed the other way to the consumer.
What all of this triggered in my brain was the shift from polytheism to monotheism in the western world two thousand years ago. When you study any society, one of the most important relationships that you will learn about is that between a people and their deity. In most early, polytheistic cultures there is a very direct and personal relationship with the gods. You generally don’t find a large hierarchical church structure serving as an intermediary, outside of a few priests or shamans. This is where you have a sacrificial system (not necessarily the type of sacrifice that the word conjures up), which is simply the mechanism by which a society expresses their end of a reciprocal relationship with the deities. In order to keep the god of fertility happy so that the crops will grow, you in turn provide the first and best results of the harvest, as a trade. In these belief systems the gods are very close to humanity, and they are a reflection of the society and its needs. These gods were petty, greedy, and humorous, and above all they wanted the same things that the people did, which provided the believers with something to contribute to the relationship. This is the sort of relationship we are coming to now between the consumers and brands. It is a close, two-way system in which both sides need something from the other, and where the connections between them are interwoven, the boundaries thin. It is no surprise that words like “organic” and “holistic” are used to describe the new direction of marketing strategy, the same words applied to naturalistic polytheisms.
We are moving in the opposite direction as religious beliefs, and that transition was based on the requirements of a more structured and hierarchical society. In a monotheistic culture God is remote, obscured behind layers of ritual and clergymen. One of the issues that early missionaries faced was getting non-Christians to understand that the sacrificial system didn’t work because God didn’t want anything they had to offer. The relationship was no longer reciprocal, because an all-powerful Lord can provide himself with anything he wants, and cannot be contacted directly. God passed his messages down through a chain, whether in book form or the words of his earthly representatives, in the same way that a brand would disseminate its media through its channels. Here is our product, here is what we want you to know about it, and how we want you to think about it. What you thought about a product as an individual wasn’t really important, because there were plenty of other people who were happy to buy it. In contrast with the druidic, diffuse nature of the polytheistic power exchange, monotheism was institutional and monolithic, a relationship that could be mirrored by centralized political authority, consolidating authority with the rise of “the state” as opposed to tribalism.
As consumers we have finally made the journey in the other direction. Apple users now form a tribe that is distinct from pc users, where once there were just people who did or did not own computers. There was once a segment of the market that was simply made up of car owners, but now the Ford Focus has a Facebook page and thousands of friends. As the pendulum swings, the importance of embracing this new paradigm should not be lost on those brands who wish to become successful. Users seek to engage with a brand because they have something to offer that is valuable, and in return they become an asset, a supporter, a (twitter) follower. In a tribal system, you really want to have the biggest tribe.
Edit: There is no intent here at blaspheme, nor am I attempting to elevate any belief system over any other. I find this topic to be an interesting one, and I plan to go a little further into the matter and flesh it out, so that it is more than just idle ramblings.
No comments:
Post a Comment