Transforming Pixels to Gold

Post what?

I read a research paper by Douglas Holt about advertising and Postmodernism.  Holt's takes us through how Postmodern brands by appearing not to care if people bought their products, influenced a whole lot of people to spend. 

A good visual example is the 90s Kate Moss ads - there's a clear disinterest for whatever brand she might be wearing. You can sense her apathy, even after the possible three way interlude (with two equally apathetic looking lads). 

So, with a skepticism of  the "hard sell" rampantly high, brands appearing disinterested were by default seen as more authentic. This is call the "anti-branding" branding and is still very much used today. 

Gladly we can thank Kate (not God - he's dead) and the overuse of "anti-branding" for making this technique cliche. So instead of pointing to a brand's authenticity - it makes them look fake.

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Why a new strategy?

Apparently we're in the post-postmodern paradigm so advertisers really need a new set of tools. We're also in the era of social media, allowing just about anyone that hits the right social nerve to be heard by a very large uncontrollable audience. This has created a forced transparency on organizations.

The good news for business is there are options: 

• Embrace and potentially capitalize on it
• Curl up, shut the door and wait for it all to go away (although it could be a very long wait)

Choose to embrace?

Holt points to the "citizen brand"  - that finds social authenticity by actively contributing to society. This is not just about our brands being accountable, but about how much they contribute on a social, cultural or even creative level - becoming a new measure of a brand's authenticity.

The interesting thing is it's actually a very powerful way to create attention, brand advocacy and a lot of sales. There's a couple of recent inspiring TED talks that illustrate this point well.

The power of uplifting stage-change

This is explained well by David Logan's ideas on tribal leadership. He spends a lot of time figuring out how key decisions are being made in corporate environments. Things get done based on the belief systems of groups that Logan calls "tribes". He breaks these belief systems into 5 stages from a "life sucks" angst to a free minded value-orientated "life is great" enthusiasm.

When a tribe moves closer to "life is great" this inspires direct action and an abundance of creativity, innovation and results such as exponential sales. When tribes move towards "life sucks", stagnation and fear-based environments persist. Tribal leaders direct the tribe and are agents of stage change. Here uplifting is not about overdosing on positivity, but expanding beliefs systems that inspire action, energy and produce prosperity.

The economy of experience

I'm typing on a computer and you're probably looking at one now. This couch I'm sitting on and this TV in front of me - all manufactured with a particular human intent in mind - to provide entertainment, comfort, shelter etc. etc. The fact that the majority of things that make up our modern lives are so manufactured, it's no wonder there's a market for authentic experiences. 

So, in an over-saturated market, our experience differentiates one brand's offering from countless others. Joseph Pine talks about this in terms of company's achieving the  "real real"  - true to themselves and are what they say they are. This is how a company creates experiences of authenticity for consumers. Put in another way, when a brand's offering takes our mundane, everyday experiences and transforms it to something else, something renewing or inspiring - not only does it stand out but we're more than willing to pay top dollar for. 

Uplifting experiences

What if a company created highly differentiated brand experiences that brings people to a "life is great" mentality? Brand advocacy would shoot through the roof and so would profits. 

Say this brand's offering is authentic (true to itself) wouldn't it's marketing need to reflect this (are what they say they are)? So the "real real" marketing practice would also need to be creating transformative (stage-changing) experiences.

Free transformative experiences

From the consumers side, marketing is free (it comes out of the company's pocket) and if that company's marketing is creating transformative experiences, an interesting thing happens - people start seeking marketing. There's no push with this style of marketing - it's all pull and that makes a lot of sense because it's uplifting, transforming and free!

What about the bottom line?

I subscribe to a lot of "internet guru" emails who seem to love talking about "the law of reciprocity". It's basic premise is this: when you give something of value, you'll receive not only equal value but a lot more. Others call it "positive guilt"  - I get  a lot of cool stuff from you for free, so I'll soon feel obliged to give back and even show my appreciation for your kindness by giving more.

So if the advertising and marketing becomes about creating highly differentiated stage-changing experiences for consumers, we might even see the situation where brand advocates "fund" such marketing experiences by buying the product/s.

Who's already moving in this direction?

I'm just going to pull a few from my very short term memory but there's a lot brands putting "experience" at the forefront of  their marketing. Stage-changing might not be at the forefront of these campaigns, but uplifting generally would be.

• Volkswagen, Fun theory - replaced every day items fun versions of the same in a cityscape - to test the idea that fun changes the way we do things
• McDonald's, Inner child - created a large scale McDonald's children's playground for adults in a cityscape
• Coke, Open happiness - Non branded music video celebrating happiness - connection to Coke only found after an internet search
• TED, Ideas that spread - the whole uplifting experience is what TED is all about: bringing together multidiciplinary thought leadership in one forum. It's "free" marketing is really the free content available online.

Some more WHAT IFs?

Potential ideas that came to mind while writing this.

What if...

• An international brand creates a social media run competition inviting budding documentary film-makers to mark-out a virtual (global-reaching) logo and share doco-stories about people and places on the way (could be a Guinness Book of Records contender - biggest logo).
• Some sort of telecommunications brand creates a tree style (3D) browsing connection application  - see who is near you that likes the same thing - combines mobile phone positioning technology with social media connections and your various interests / associations
• A software brand creates user nurtured virtual tree ("The Self Tree") as an mobile app that grows in relation to a user's daily goals and intentions. Users can interact and see their trees in a virtual forest of others
• An information brand  creates a social media voting space that enables people to tweet-vote on a policy by policy basis - about understanding the pulse of the people to affect change
• A youth brand via a Facebook application enables users to build virtual artworks that identify themselves / groups - like a virtual graffiti tagging that could appear through online spaces or in virtual worlds like Second Life
• A charity brand donates $1 for every 10 tweets that uses the brand name and a unique uplifting tagline
• A major global brand social crowd sources everyone needed to produce a full-blown movie around an uplifting theme
• A digital brand creates a dedicated online space for an impoverished person (i.e. homeless), so rather than begging for change that person gives printed flyers with a web address where people can hear his / her story - hopes / dreams / struggles and donate via Paypal (changing lives through digital!)

That paper by Douglas B Holt can be found here: http://www.lombard-media.lu/pdf/0308_brands.pdf

Images courtesy of Photolibrary - Get creative with stock photos, stock footage & production music from photolibrary.com

It’s been a few months since I got through Martin Lindstrom’s book, Buyology. It came to my mind again recently in a conversation with a friend about movie product placement and subliminal advertising. What struck me was the idea a lot of common, even logical notions about marketing are often just way off the mark.

Take the example of the rotting cancerous body parts decorating cigarette boxes - you’d expect these images would make people think twice about buying cigarettes, right? A group of smokers selected by a market research company also had the same conclusion. They all ticked the right boxes that determined this to be a major deterrent but the results from fMRI scans showed something entirely different.

Anti smoking tactics trigger cravings

These images where shown to actually activate the brain’s reward / pleasure pathways strengthening a smoker’s compulsion to smoke. It makes for a win-win situation for the tobacco companies - having anti tobacco lobbies funding advertising that triggers your desire to smoke!

So if the anti-smoking tactic is doing the reverse of what it sets out to do, would pictures of obese people on Big Mac wrappings help sell more burgers? It’s likely they wouldn’t, but I think that’s the point Lindstrom makes - even with all the raw data from market research, we’re still faced with a lot of assumptions about why certain marketing ideas work and others just don’t and it’s often those ‘common sense’ propositions that tend to get in the way of the truth locked inside our gray matter!

Don’t know, ask a Neuroscientist (in the making)…

The smoker's reward highway

I couldn’t find much explanation as to why those particular anti-tobacco images trigger cigarette cravings, so I spoke to a budding Neuroscientist about it. Her take was it was not so much the images’ disturbing content that’s important, but that those images trigger significant neural activity. It’s likely the parts of the brain responsible for addictive tendencies is already highly developed in heavy smokers, so to give an analogy - their neural pathways are more like open highways to the pleasure / reward centers than the normal suburban roads for other people.

Another idea is the pleasure / reward centers of the brain being closely linked to the pain centers, work like a balance. A disturbing image that creates a level of pain (in this case emotional) would automatically trigger a pleasure seeking response to retain equilibrium.

Although whatever reasoning holds, the fact remains that all this stuff is happening before we’re even aware of it…

So if I’m not consciously making the buying decisions, then who is?

unconscious buying decisions?

Lindstrom points out how our buying decisions are far from conscious or even logical. Interestingly too, Neuroscience tells us that consciousness is but a fragment of the huge amount of information that our brains process at any given moment - evolved with efficiency in mind (ignore the pun), we can only focus on what our brains have already deemed 'necessary' for our awareness. And that little awareness we do have (from all the available sensory information) is further filtered through expectations. The human eye for example, has a very small focal point that perceives color and detail. Whereas the receptors responsible for peripheral vision are monochromatic and can't register the detail required, so one's memory and expectations fills in the blanks.

It’s a little disconcerting knowing the very small drop in an ocean of our available sensory input is filtered by a whole host of automatic assumptions - and it’s all happening without our awareness involved. So the idea we’re making sound, objective decisions is at best flawed when our brains are only ever giving us part of the story!

If consciousness plays only a minor role, why not market to the unconscious?

With so much of the decision process happening under the surface, it’s a wonder why any marketing strategy bothers appealing to common logic such as with vendor comparisons or price busting etc. Though a lot of us will justify our buying decisions after the event with a whole host of logical arguments - probe a little deeper we’re likely hear: “I don’t know, it just felt right”, “I went with my gut feeling…” etc. and this all points to our logic’s dead end.

The problem is, the use of fMRIs or even EEGs (trade tools of Neuromarketing) is far from cheap, so if we’ve no other method to ‘hear’ the unconscious how do we communicate to it?

Dreams, myths and brands?

Consciousness only the tip of the iceberg?

It may help recognizing the language of the unconscious is basically symbolic. A symbol is metaphor loaded with individual (personal) and often universal (archetypal) meaning. An attention to our dreams will likely verse us well in this regard or at at least help us gain further insight into how symbols communicate meaning.

The interesting thing about symbols is that they’re not static, you can’t pin them down to one meaning with the “101 Dream Symbols” book in hand. They’re relevant to time, place and person and in that regard they’re transitional. On the other hand, when a symbol resonates with something archetypal, for example found within our age-old stories and myths, it becomes a source of cultural significance. By understanding how relevant (transitional) symbols such as brands can strongly resonate with archetypal or universal symbols, we may begin to learn how some brands trigger strong emotional connections and have the type of mass appeal that turn them into cultural icons.

Article by David Wall originally on Photolibrary News

Images courtesy of Photolibrary - Get creative with stock photos, stock footage & production music from photolibrary.com

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I like Bourdieu. First he's got a very French sounding name that gives him instant philosophy street cred (first name is also Pierre) but that's not a good reason to like someone. A better reason is that he's said long ago that the purpose of a lot of what we do or say is to distinguish ourselves from others. We develop strange languages to isolate ourselves from other groups, while hardening the glue within our own group. We create 'secret' codes as a way to know if we're 'in' or 'out'. 

True, he talked about the privileged class trying to keep out the plebs who just don't get things like "high" art  (why wouldn't they get that when you put a urinal in a gallery, it becomes art?) but why not apply this to other tribes like kid's SMS language - what does "stsooys tbh cya wknd wb" mean and if you don't know you were probably born before Netscape was the choice browser.

So people are always going to create new spaces and new languages to distinguish themselves from everybody else and before this space reaches critical mass there's a bunch there already figuring out clever ways to get in and sell a lot of something. This is like adding more oil to the water and bound to disperse the congenial gathering fast - look at what happened to MySpace: more people on it, more marketing budget spent on it = less 'cool' / less the choice online communication platform.