this is introducing the think different campaign, but that doesn’t really start until the last two minutes. what comes before is an extremely succinct argument on how to be successful - not just in marketing and branding but, really, in general. hold on to the people you find in your life who understand and operate like this.
“we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us…”
If you have the choice to invest more time/money into your user experience or some branding campaign, choose the user experience every time.
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.
