(via juliasegal)
Me and a Tree
If you create (or market) should you be chasing the people who click and leave? Or is it like trying to turn a cheetah into a house pet? Is manipulating the high-voltage attention stream of millions of caffeinated web surfers a viable long-term strategy?
Seth’s Blog: Driveby culture and the endless search for wow (via fred-wilson)
NO. IT IS NOT. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.
I feel like there’s this tension that goes on in business and especially in marketing, this conceit that we can take humans—you know, messy, irrational, organic—and somehow cut them open and figure out the binary, rational, predictable, money-making algorithms that determine what they do. You see all this harnessing of science, you know, whether it’s neuro-this or lie detector-that or psychotherapy-this that gets used in the service of, not helping people, but helping marketers crack the nut of what people want, where is the desire center in the brain. You know, that we can learn things about people in a way that is “true”—that is predictable and true, and will determine consumption patterns. I find the idea that we should be able to do that just fascinating, because that’s not the world of people that we live in as people, so why as marketers or designers or producers do we think that we should turn people into things that they really aren’t?
Steve Portigal, from a fascinating discussion transposed here. (via chrbutler) (via slantback)
left, without comment, while i - quite frankly - think about it.
Psychological Operations of the Consumer Culture
The social sciences have been and still are more about the surveillance and control of individuals rather than the disinterested gathering of “objective” knowledge. They are an important component in the creation of strategies to integrate workers, citizens, and consumers into existing corporate, governmental and consumerist institutions and ideologies. It is the institutional (managerial, commercial, governmental) use of the social sciences that transforms them into surveillance: marketing research, opinion polling, audience measurement to name a few. Within this context any innovation in the social sciences is destined to be recuperated by marketing research for the use of consumer surveillance. Just as Taylorism and other applications of social research to industrial work discipline served to formulate the role of the industrial worker within the strict disciplinary hierarchy of the factory, so the disciplining of the American consumer demanded the marshalling of social scientists to survey and map the desires and behavior of consumers in order to engineer a consumer more appropriate to the needs of the emerging economy of mass consumption. The general movement from a society of production to a society of consumption entails the movement from forms of social control based on the factory hierarchy of command to forms based on the social surveillance of the question and the interview. The surveillance of the consumer and the subsequent production of an informational commodity has always been at the heart of the “marketing concept” and indispensable to the smooth functioning of a society of consumption.
(via jhnbrssndn)
In short, Sutherland argues that we need to start to value intangible, emotional experiences and that marketing, communications and, yes, even advertising can help bring that about. By starting to place importance on experiences and appreciation instead of objects and consumption, we become more sustainable as a society while also becoming more creative as a culture.
“Very aggressive marketers make fashion,” he told The New York Times in 1973. “They don’t wait for the groundswell. They build a consumer desire.”
Word of mouth is a byproduct of a remarkable culture.
this is the beginning and the end. it has to start somewhere. if you don’t have it - find it, create it, foster it. there is no shortcut here. if you can’t take the heat, get out of the fucking kitchen.
Secondly, the thing everyone wants to know: who thought up the chicken? Everyone makes a big mystery out of it, but if you ask me, the mystery is more about why everyone wishes it was a single person in an ah-ha moment. We get that a lot still. People want it to be dramatic. As if doing things methodically until you get a great idea is disappointing. As if coming up with a good idea should be easy.
The purist may not tell you want you want to hear, but the good PR folks — digital or otherwise — have the stones to give that “there ain’t no Santa Claus” kind of bad news.
The best ones develop a compelling solution.
looking ahead, i talk a bit about the role of the brand and how it can change the current engagement breakdown of the web.
The Q&A regarding personal branding.
this was a surprisingly good event. i was on-time and everything until i hopped out of the cab i took down there and promptly realized that it sped away with my phone. called 311 right away and filed a report. with things looking grim, i actually was in-line at the 92Y to check-in when kate told me to do the obvious (call my phone - i had my company Blackberry w/ me as well).
with that simple solution, i probably used up all my karma points for the month. the cabbie answered and told me to meet him a few blocks away.
about 15 minutes late, i slid-in during julia’s talk. straight-forward tactical branding advice. while mary watched julia’s dog next to me, loren then made some great points about a brand vs. one’s reputation and persona. he differentiated himself and his brand. one is scalable, the other is not. gary continued a similar trend. emphatic and expounding some points loren made as well as including some of his own. very similar to his popular Web2.0 keynote.
afterwards, did an interview for mediabistro on-demand then introduced myself to loren & michelle. would’ve loved to speak with the ladies but they bolted while julia was doing her on-demand stuff. also asked gary about a good wine for the woman who doesn’t like wine.
an evening well spent.
