January 6th, 2010
Throughout history, innovative groups have formed an alliance with ‘The Man’. Bankers have done it forever. In fact, bankers don’t exist where they DON”T ally with ‘The Man’. Capitalists allied with ‘The Man’. They concentrated wealth, by borrowing from bankers to develop ships, machinery, manufacturing, and other increased forms of production. They became ‘The Man’. Entrepreneurs allied with bankers, capitalists and ‘the man’ to distribute goods to the common man, for the first time in history, at such low costs that almost everyone could afford to have more than one pair of clothes for the first time. They became ‘The Man’. Advertisers helped market these goods to consumers, and for 150 years, they helped convert society from religious and nationalistic, to a society of consumers, and urban and suburban tribes. With the advent of technology, Advertising agencies became ‘The Man’. Creatives, who were generally hired craftsmen serving the nobility in most of history, flocked to the movies and advertising, and and allied with ‘The man’. And the demand – the boom – in demand for creatives, allowed the entry of more and more people into the creative industry, albiet, with the acknowledgment that the number of really good creatives, as well as the number of really good academics, or really good high-art artists, seems to remain constant. Like the tech boom, that made room in technology for lots of people who were not that good at it, there was a creative boom. Creatives, allied with ‘The Man’ to take advantage of the increase in available capital that allowed them to experiment with other people’s money.
Now what’s important here is understanding what makes you ‘The Man’. Being ‘The Man’ means that you have control over resources. Kings, thugs, and brigands controlled passes, trade routes, and taxation. Bankers controlled access to money. Capitalists controlled access to production. Entrepreneurs controlled access to goods. Agencies controlled access to media.
The tech boom deflated in just over a year, because it was fueled by speculative capital. The agency boom deflated along with the population that concentrated capital. concentrated production. Concentrated distribution. concentrated media. It deflated at the same rate the demographics deflated, and at the rate the mythos deflated that was held by that population.
There is no concentrated population now. That’s the important message. It’s not a moral message. It’s simply a
There is no concentrated common-aspiration, like the american dream. Instead we have tribes with little status identities.
There is no concentrated access to media now. Instead we have more media than we have content that people desire. We have a shortage of mythic content to feed identities and tribes with to replace traditional, and postwar, and consumer, and american dream mythologies.
There isn’t any concentrated culture any longer. There isn’t any concentrated trade route any longer. There is no ‘Man’ to ally with. There is no general consumer mythos to exploit. And the disappearing boom
There isn’t the problem of getting attention for a product, using a frame of reference like a mythos, so much as the problem of understanding some tribe’s mythos and figuring out how to insert your frame of reference into their mythos.
A long time ago, there were castles on passes. Because the government was formed by brigands charging taxes, or protection racket fees, for people to take goods and services through a geography to reach markets. There are no media-channel protection rackets any longer. Just markets. There is no tax to levy on reaching those markets, that will fund ‘The Man’. The Agency Man.
We have no ‘The Man’ any longer. We have only these small tribes of consumers who have rejected The Man, in all his forms, because he doesn’t need him. He doesn’t need The Man. and he doesn’t need the stories that Creatives have written to serve The Man, to enter into, and he doesn’t want them either. He has his stories. He has his suite of tribal myths. He sees them as his property. He sees them as his identity. And he acts as if these myths are his identity and property. And by acting as if they are real, he makes these abstractions real things. He sees society through the lens of his identity and his myths, and judges his success at finding his place in society by using them – he has nothing else to go by. He obtains his status from using those myths, not from myths created by agencies and creatives on behalf of ‘The Man’.
The Man concentrated people for us. That’s what The Man has always done. We made popular messages for distribution on The Man’s distribution channels. We served ‘The Man’.
Our job is not to ally with The Man, and claim it’s our talent that made a difference rather than his control over passes and people because of it. Our job is to build relationships between brands and tribes. To find out who is passionate and motivate them to create status symbols from our products if possible. If that is not possible, then to create lower status reasons for social interactions. And if that is not possible the to create simple utility.
Advertising, is, and will always be, part of this process. But advertising is no longer the process of concentration people and their purchasing power using available myths and demographics. It is the process of separation and service of identities. Advertising can’t easily inspire any longer on it’s own. It isn’t intimate or meaningful enough. It can legitimize a message. It can tie messages together. It can create awareness, but not change consumer behavior, unless you apply an awful lot of money to the problem.
While vast consumer brands appealing to the low end of the market, will always need to create myths of consumer homogeneity, those myths are limited in their ability to compel consumers to aspiration rather than to the ideas of suffrage, or sarcasm or nihilism. These are negative identities. And a brand who crates homogenity is like a politician who advocates fear: it works in the short term, but it doesn’t make people love you and stick with you. And it doesn’t make them respect or trust you.
Aspirational brands must create niche appeal, with increasingly tribal identities, in order to seem sincere, and in order to make the consumer feel passionate enough to appeal to a brand whose marginal difference in utility is extremely limited if not entirely aesthetic.
Yes, those large retailers will control distribution, because of the capital that they concentrate with the use of debt – debt that they may have a hard time getting ahold of now. But brands must exist within those retail identity myths. And the retailer, like a government, will allow only so much difference between one brand and another – they don’t want intra class conflicts. So they are a resister to excellence.
But our clients, and our brands need to understand that there is no concentration of identity or mythos, or channel which we can exploit.
Creatives no longer can ally with the man. They have to ally with the consumer, and use the man for the consumer’s benefit.
In a world where there is no concentration, no homogeneity, we have succeeded in building the consumer society. There is no real scarcity. We are not afraid of running out of rice and beans, or laundry detergent for that matter. We are only afraid of being lost in society because we cannot judge our status in it – our success or failure in it, our mating ritual in it, without identities and myths that help us do so.
The consumer is The Man.
from: www.puretheoryofmarketing.com
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