Making social objects

Nice post by Mark Earls, that links to a recent talk by Hugh McLeod. Boy is this interesting.

Plan of attack in good marketing is: rather than yell at people, get under what really matters to users/ the audience, and surprise them with it.

Trad marketing is very good at segregating markets, and targetting/hitting/wooing atomized individuals. There is a discipline to this; smart people are good at it.

But we also have to contend with an empowered audience. An audience with a clicker if you like. Markets that don't stay and wait to be conquered. What is more, these audiences are just that - not atomized, and taking their cues form each other.

"We do what we do because of other people" This is the insight that Mark Earls' brilliant book builds on. People buzz, independent of marketing. Social marketing is about acknowledging that marketers aren't the ringleaders they might have hoped to be: the market is more social, and more sophisticated than simply succumbing to MY messages.

So now I finally get to the point of understanding how social objects fit in. Making social objects is about gestures. I can't control the conversation; I can't attack you and make you buy. But if I try, I might be able to throw something into the ring - a performance, an advertisement, a new insight, a powerpoint, or a physical object - that people can cluster around.

Making something worthy of clustering around. interacting around. Most of our language forgets this; we talk about hitting people with our message.

Making social objects may ostensibly be about making waves, but really it's about introducing objects that have ripplability.

Awkward Truths

from British green marketing site, Green Normal. A list of 'Awkward truths':

"- one root of the problem is population growth
- a person's environmental impact is roughly proportional to their income
- if we criticize big cars, what about big houses?
- recycling is too little too late
- consumerism got us into this mess, is it likely it will get us out of it?"

All of these things can cause confusion and indifference among an audience. In an economy of oversupply, why should I buy from you?
A strong ethical core means something in green business. Not Sunday school morality, but actual engagement.

New rules

I'm nearing the end of Mark Earl's book, Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour...which persuades the reader that we are social animals that develop interdependently. That is, I change as the herd (i.e. mass) interacts and changes.

This observation has far reaching consequences. For the marketer, the concept of "audience" is more valid than (atomized) "consumers." Trying to affect change by transmitting to segregated individuals, on a mass scale, is futile.

After coffee

Big deal, I'm jacked up on coffee. There have always been popular drugs, and caffeine seems to at least support productivity. And I am jacked up on my favorite coffee brand as well ( in my case, local fave JJ Bean). And, as a green aspirant, when the Prius drives by, maybe I want in on that action too. It may be pseudo belonging, but it is better than no belonging at all.

Notions of forests, notions of global warming are preceded by my personal quest for cool.

It's disheartening when marketing exploits 'green' by taking the quest for cool and supports the idea that the green aspirant can have both luxury and ethical consumption. More than disheartening, this Marketing speak probably undermines both environmentalism and the integrity and long term viability of the "eco" brand.

My coffee

My coffee comes at 11am outside a name brand coffee house, set on the morning-traffic side of the street. Look, I'm co-creating what this cafe is right now: I share with it my self with my laptop and it imparts to me its hot drinks and superior business model. I mention the business model because, although this Americano is unremarkable, it doesn't matter: I'm consuming something bigger anyway.

Could be that my coffee's unremarkableness makes it work even more here. It is the equivalent of the Dreamgirls character played by Bionce Knowles: a beautiful cipher containing a reliable, and successful formula. Desirable for its confidence, its wealth, its attraction, my coffee is a suitably bland, stable formula that supports but does not distract from the higher brand value.

This commercial moment is enhancing me, right now. The caffeine and the brand experience both lift and separate me from the bike commuters, the car traffic, from the other strugglers. This is better than a moment of pedestrian lucidity: it is an enhanced I-am moment, where I rise above my environment. My coffee gives me a whiff of excitement, a sense of bigness, an experience of myself as Image.

A brand new Prius drives by.

The pros and cons of green cachet.

Green products are theoretically designed to reduce net footprint caused by over consumption; green marketers try to attract people who have money to spend. The two aims are not always in sync.

Tom Conrad writes in Alt Energy Stocks, "People want to be seen to be green a lot more than they want to save a few dollars on gas."

So far, so 'good' . But Tom adds, " The Japanese who buy fake solar panels don't ask about the payback period." Hmm.

It may be that adopting externalized notions of what is green and good ( e.g. solar power = no global warming = good) doesn't help after all. Anyway, as mentioned in an earlier post, Green marketing is often just derivative nonsense, and lacks real freshness. Which is a problem if what you are selling is freshness.

Conrad's entire article, "Why Energy Efficiency is a Hard Sell.

Green and mass transformation

Marketing green products & services is often referred to as "green marketing."

You could compare it to convenience food marketing or education services marketing: green marketing is a kind of category and is something we can characterize. We see in convenience food marketing certain patterns and rules on such things as pricing, advertising and reach. In green products marketing we see familiar patterns and rules as well: premium pricing, ethical stance, the recycled packaging, the appeal to the future, the "let's all pull together" attitude.

These are ways that green marketing can be typified, and the marketing of green can easily be typified - bordering on pure caricature.

We do know that under green there is a strong sense of necessary transformation. Good. The drive to change is natural, and is built into our DNA. This is something marketing can sink its teeth into. But how?

We seek transformation, in Herds we call churches, or fads, or clubs. Mark Earls, whose book I'm reading right now:

"The biggest problem is that ours is a social brain not an individual self-determining brain: it's the brain of a creature whose life consists largely of other people and interaction with them. Looking at it as if it were otherwise and the creature that owns it as an isolated agent is a pointless abstraction."


People aren't isolated, they change together. Compare the spurious improvements brought by well meaning "fads" to the lasting change brought by quiet contemplation by a group of semi autonomous individuals...

There is a case to be made here - that there is a qualitatively different form of marketing that is suitable for marketing green products and services.