CHAPTER 5
Rehumanisation: words define our future
I hear a man’s words, and I see into his soul.
The words we use shape the values we have. They shape the values and belief systems of the societies we live in. It’s also true that the people around us (correctly or otherwise) judge where we fit into their world based on our words. Think of a job interview, for example. It’s nothing more than a truncated language test used to determine how capable or smart a candidate is for a particular function.
This could possibly be the worst way to assess a potential employee’s suitability for any role other than a direct sales or public speaking post. Yet we use this method as the default because we define almost everything we do and believe through what we tell ourselves and each other. Language permeates our entire commercial ecosystem and is also a significant arbiter of brand success.
Aiming for mindless consumers
The language used in corporate environments tells us much about the true value systems and culture of an organisation. When Facebook says it wants a more open and connected society, it’s really talking about its desire to peek into your underwear drawer because that may just be a profitable move. Turns out it is — for now.
We hear a lot of double-barrelled language so that the organisations in question can’t be accused of lying or misleading. They like, and even love, words that leave things open to interpretation. There is, however, some language that’s been used in corporate environments, and especially within marketing circles, that’s downright ugly and has nothing to hide behind. During the transition from a corporate-driven economy to a human-driven one, there are some words we should leave behind as redundant relics. Two words that need to be at the top of the pile are ‘target’ and ‘consumer’.
Targets
A target is something to aim for, shoot at, maybe even kill. It’s something someone wants because it suits their needs. I much prefer the terms ‘audience’ and ‘community’. An audience is something or someone we try to impress. It gives us a chance to prove our worth, it invests its time in us and we must respect it by trying to over-deliver to its expectations. An audience isn’t passive; it provides feedback and input that’s part of the show. Really great performers even know how to get an audience onto the stage to become participants, something we’ve seen smarter brands do in recent times. With an audience, the onus is on us. We hope they throw flowers on the stage, cheer and ask for an encore. We want the show to live beyond the showing time. We want it to have a before (people anticipating and looking forward to the engagement) and an after (people raving and sharing the story with their friends). If we do well with an audience who gave us our attention, then we have a chance at building a community. With an audience, we enter the stage knowing we may get rotten tomatoes thrown at us, if that’s what we deserve. We need to think of the flow of interaction for doing business in more human terms. We garner some attention and gather an audience. The audience participates in our show. From this, a community may emerge. Within our community will be customers who pay us money for providing value to them as people. (Note that they are not called ‘consumers’.)
Consumers
Consumer. What a terrible way to refer to a person or group of people. Even pond scum can be defined using the word ‘consumer’. It’s such a detached way to refer to people, it’s as if all that can be seen is a mouth, a set of teeth and a gut. And it’s a classic example of large corporations forgetting they’re doing business with real people who have emotions, dreams and aspirations by defining them as a kind of parasite of commerce. If it sounds ugly, we need look no further than the definitions of the word ‘consume’ as a reminder.
Here are my ‘top-5’ definitions, taken from various dictionaries.
Markets follow conversation
The words we use are of vital strategic importance. It’s not just a matter of simple semantics. It has an important strategic impact on the way we approach the marketplace. As soon as any brand or company defines the people it sells its wares to as ‘consumers’ it impacts the overriding corporate culture. The rot sets in. It creates a cadre of behaviours that lead to poor business decisions. It’s a volumetric, non-human measure by nature, so it leads brands down a path where they want that faceless mass to buy and use more. It entices companies to build an infrastructure around serving masses and reducing input costs. This invariably leads to a corporate factory mindset where brands must sell more, prices must be reduced and market share must grow in volume terms. This leads to the inevitable death spiral of commoditisation and price focus.
Defining people in this way stymies innovation. It creates an illusion of what a company should be doing in the first instance. It shifts the company focus onto the products they sell instead of the solutions they create. By defining people as the ‘absorbers’ of what is made, they’re hardly likely to find a better way to serve the needs of people. How can anyone possibly connect to and understand who they serve when those they serve are objectified into a product-usage behaviour?
Dead-end products
In some ways, it’s not surprising the words ‘target’ and ‘consumer’ appeared as key marketing parlance. Most things from the industrial age were dead-end products. Dead-end products are those that arrive to the end purchaser in their final format. A price is paid and the benefit of the product is that it can be used as it is. Sure, we may be able to re-sell it, or even use it for an extended period of time, but it’s designed in a way that its primary purpose is to finish its lifecycle at that point.
But more than that, dead-end products are not intended to be reinterpreted, mashed up and released back into the market with our input. The time-saving devices of the industrialised world fit very much into this space. Time is saved because someone else did the hard work to prepare something for you. If you think about life pre-internet, it was filled with dead-end products — packaged goods, fridges, cars, washing machines, sneakers, ducted heating, instant coffee, glossy magazines, sitcom television programs — all sit-back-and-receive scenarios.
A future of unfinished products
The world we live in now is about handing the brand back over to its rightful owners: the audience. Companies believe they own their brands, but in reality they don’t. A brand depends on those who purchase it for sustenance. If we stop feeding a brand, then the brand dies. The same is true for so-called ‘free’ products that advertise our attention as a revenue source. The price we pay in that situation is the price of our valued time and limited attention. Our attention is very valuable commercially when we have an unlimited number of places to direct it. If a brand depends on those who use it for its survival, they must have a form of ownership claim on it; a kind of dual dependency. And what people are telling us is that they want to help create the things they use. There is a clear shift towards people preferring products that are not finished. They want products where they get involved in the making process. Everything from slow food to high-end technology is transitioning to the malleable marketplace.
The malleable marketplace
It’s worth reminding ourselves what software does. Software allows us to interpret its capabilities to create an output specific to our needs. At first software was for corporations, where the end user would create a different output. The tiny insight that the end user should be able to change functionality on demand, way back in the late 1970s, was the bellwether for an impending age of end-user control.
Today the best technology devices arrive with the need for our input. Even better, they arrive with an open door for tinkerers and garage heroes to show us what they’re capable of. They’re designed to be reconfigured by the end user, to be customised. Our phones are a canvas for our own creation and the imagination of others in the market. No two smartphones end up with the same configuration once they’re active in the market.
Software to soft-retail
If green-screen, corporate-born software can become more human, surely any product can. Now we can design our own shoes and clothes and pay a premium for the experience, remembering, of course, that the design decisions when it comes to fashion items are where a large part of the product value is created. In fact, it’s now the anomaly for a shoe brand to not have a custom creation option. And the malleable marketplace doesn’t need to be limited to products that are designed online and then shipped. Brands have to remember that people don’t see the online world as anything separate. We want the same visceral experiences everywhere that we do commerce. We’re agnostic in that sense. Even boring old retail can participate in the malleable marketplace.
Component retail
Component retail is where brands ship product components and raw materials to stores to be assembled on site, all as part of the retail experience. It’s a model where customers will become the theatre at store level and are happy to provide labour because they’ve been given the very personal gift of creating something for themselves. We’ll see this sign a lot more on shop windows:
Build it yourself instore.
This retail model is far less about a price point and product and far more about the experience and the story it invents.
The album with no sound
The most extreme and inspiring example of the malleable product comes from the musician, Beck. A recent album, if you can call it that, was released without any sound. Yes, there was no music with the album. Known as the Song Reader project and released at the end of 2012, it consists of 20 songs of sheet music. Beck presented the skeleton of the album for other musicians and fans to use to create their own version of the ‘songs’. So the first version of the album users would hear is the one they created themselves. After the launch of the album, Beck embarked on a number of live Song Reader performances, with other musicians playing as guests. But more importantly, fans embraced the idea, posting their versions online and on YouTube, some achieving many thousands of views. With this counter-intuitive move, Beck managed to give birth to infinite iterations of his music. By handing over his so-called intellectual property, instead of fighting piracy, he gave others the blueprints for his songs: ‘How should this sound? Go make some music!’ It gave me some reborn faith in humanity. It made me believe again that money follows imagination. Why don’t companies release blueprints for their products in a similar way? Maybe the audience can take it somewhere miraculous. Individuals may just see something that companies never did, in much the same way as social media was taken to places the media conglomerate could never quite imagine.
But we make cars
It’s difficult to imagine a car coming to market unfinished and being co-designed or even co-created by the market. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. While we may have heard of the glass cockpit, surely there’s no reason why cars couldn’t have glass dashboards — dashboards designed by the people who actually drive them. Imagine the front half of the dashboard — or cockpit of the car — as being a large, rendered screen. All we’d need is a screen-enabled or head-up display interface that connects to the cloud or a smartphone. Most cars already connect with smartphones via bluetooth and other forms of connectivity. It would be an app store for cars and extra revenue for stuff people actually want, rather than ripping customers off with aftermarket products. There’s no reason why any major car company couldn’t create an app store or tap into the existing application ecosystems and platforms to provide apps built either by the car company or opened up to the audience to re-imagine the dashboard. Malleable driving experiences could be made possible by software (smartphones) that already lives in our pockets. Apps could enable the driver to change dashboard visuals, designs and colours, as well as controlling music, tracking devices, voice-activated enhancements, and general driving efficiency and enjoyment hacks. Who knows, the crowd may come up with significant safety enhancements that use sensors to wake sleepy drivers.
glass cockpit: an aircraft cockpit that features electronic (digital) instrument displays, typically large LCD screens (Wikipedia)
Moreover, cars are very soon going to evolve into lounge rooms once self-driving cars become the norm. The technology for safe self-driving cars already exists. Millions of kilometres have been driven without incident. The cost of the technology that makes it possible is in rapid freefall. It’s hard to predict when autonomous driving cars will be available to the public, and estimates range from a few years to up to 20 years.1 Google, a leading developer of the technology, claims its technology will be ready to commercialise with major auto manufacturers by the year 2018. When this happens, the possibilities of dashboard technology will no longer be restricted by safe driving practices. Given we’re talking about years, rather than decades, car companies should probably prepare for the inevitable now. A world of entirely new revenue streams awaits the auto industry if they follow the playbook already evidenced in both media evolution and personal computing technology. All they need is to have the courage to let other people get involved.
From products to platforms
Being able to thrive going forward is about removing the finality that comes with the launch mentality: not assuming that a product is finished when we deliver it to the market. Brands that survive the current reconfiguration of economics will understand that a product or service is a continuum of development, a continuum that people take from the company and invent the next stages of. Brands are evolving into platforms for audiences to perform with and upon. This is the human input that the industrial system didn’t allow or even want. What’s interesting is that what the brand evolves into with the creativity of outsiders is usually better than what the corporate committee would have decided on. It’s certainly more varied because instead of one-size-fits-all, it’s one-size-fits-one.
Corporate skulduggery?
In some ways corporate skulduggery sounds like something we’ve already seen in the classic corporate playbook: large corporations taking advantage of an unsuspecting public to get free labour and fatten the bottom line. The serendipity with which it arrived is evidence it was beyond the thinking of most organisations. While it may sound like an evil corporate trick, it’s actually a humanising process of letting people do what they do best. And that’s to be part of the creative process, add their spin and potentially be rewarded, both emotionally and financially, as the product extends beyond when they touched it and had an input into it.
Companies didn’t ask people to mess with their products. They resisted, and they still do. But when digital tools first arrived, people started mashing up everything they could get their hands on. The compulsion was deeply seeded into what people do. They wouldn’t stop, and companies — doing what companies do (the smart ones at least) — decided to get onboard to make a profit. That said, the very large majority still dismiss this shift as a niche, a nuance, a cute little sideshow to the real corporate play. And they are very, very wrong.
Outsourcing logic
‘Computer’ used to be a job title. The word first entered parlance to describe the job of people who had to spend all day calculating stuff, adding things up, quantifying and providing the numbers that went into our modern world. It actually comes from the word ‘compute’, which has French origins and was borrowed from the Latin word computare, meaning ‘to count, sum up; reckon’. It was only from 1946 that it began being used as the word for an electric machine that could undertake these computing tasks. The machines that were developed to replace human computers (at first they were mechanical adding machines) came along for a very good reason: that people should be doing more important tasks than calculating and adding. Not only are we not very accurate at doing it, it’s an inane, boring process that has little human spirit and enjoyment associated with it. For a while there though, we couldn’t kick the habit of trying to turn people into machines or organic beings that served the machines. I like to call it the ‘spreadsheet era’.
The end of bison hunting
If we were to ask a seven-year-old how to find the answer to 13 × 7, there’s a chance the answer would be, ‘Put it into the calculator on your phone’. That’s a correct answer. It’s one of the methods that can validly be used to find the answer. Increasingly, this will become the way it’s done. There’s a chance kids of tomorrow won’t know how to do their times tables. So the real question is, do they really need to know how to do them? It may seem like an extreme example and something that’s too important in modern life to let slip. You’re probably thinking they won’t be life ready, and that this would be a travesty to human education. But there are so many things I never learned to do that would have been life ending pre–modern civilisation. I can’t ride a horse. I can’t catch a fish, let alone scale it. I wouldn’t know how to grow a crop, build a shelter or kill a beast to feed my family. I’m pretty much useless when it comes to life-saving skills of the pre-modern era. Put me in the Savannah to forage and hunt for my own food and I won’t last very long at all. So, is it worth being able to calculate anything in the post-industrial era? Maybe. Is that what we get paid for these days? Is it where anyone adds value? With the advent of ubiquitous computing, is it worth memorising anything? In a world where everything the world knows is available on demand any time with perfect accuracy, I’d argue that we’re better off outsourcing logic so we can get back to the more human and creative tasks of doing this:
Making connections with the seemingly disparate elements in our world.
That’s where the value lies today.
Here are some thoughts:
- We can’t split test our way to a better world. If we test two bad ideas against each other, a bad idea still results as the winner.
- An algorithm can’t intuitively predict something outside of its ecosystem parameters.
The point is, we’re slowly outsourcing left-brain logic to the CPU (central processing unit), not because knowing stuff isn’t important, but because putting things together in creative ways is more rewarding emotionally and increasingly more rewarding economically. Technology is creating the asset of human connection. The industrial age removed the necessity of lifting heavy objects; the technology age is removing our need to calculate stuff. It’s time we all embraced the human side of the revolution and stopped worrying about which skills may evaporate.
The tastemakers
The major success factor for the pre-web modern marketing era was mass: mass manufacturing, mass consumption, mass machines, mass media, mass merchants. When you bundle all of these together in an organised fashion you end up with a mass pop culture. The system itself required pop-culture hits to be self-sustaining. The system needed and supported a macro pop culture. It didn’t support niche. What this means is that we had a set of tastemakers who decided what we liked: the television program managers, the magazine editors, the news curators, the retail buyers and the marketing managers. They would decide which alternatives we’d be given to choose from. They decided this by virtue of the fact that we had no way of knowing what else was available. If it wasn’t in our personal geography, we wouldn’t know about it. All the things we did know about were hokey and local, or the same thing our entire nation knew about because the tastemakers decided to make it, advertise it and pay the price to put it on the retailers’ shelves. Only the tastemakers could afford the reach that goes with mass. We got to choose one of the options available on the shelf. We got to choose one of the few shows on free-to-air television. The system didn’t support niche like it does now. The cultural phenomena that resulted from the system were powerful indeed. The Rubik’s cube, breakdancing, BMX bikes, cabbage patch dolls, sitcoms, teenage mutant ninja turtles, video cassette recorders, the walkman, aerobics, legwarmers, Coke vs Pepsi, Band Aid, hair metal, Beverly Hills Cop, Nintendo, PAC-MAN and glow worms were all picked by someone else, someone who decided we needed them to enhance our human existence. And they were right. Of course we wanted them. We wanted to express our human emotions and this was what was available at the time. We had to have the latest widget of desire, see the show and participate in the fad. Fads were rad. They formed part of the lore that made our so-called community, a community that was a substitute for natural human inclinations.
The selfish era
Mass marketing was a selfish modality of marketing designed by and for the owners of capital, and not only financial capital, but mind capital. The average suburban dweller became everyone and no one. We had all loved and believed in average products with the edges rounded off.
There are a lot of examples of selfish marketing occurring on a repetitive and formulaic level beyond that of the fads mentioned above. Some selfish industries are still getting away with it — for now. Here’s my all-time favourite example of selfish marketing, entirely designed to inconvenience people and trick them into spending more money than they set out to.
Milking customers in retail
In traditional bricks-and-mortar retail there’s something called the ‘retail cold spot’. It’s the far-away-in-the-back-corner-of-the-store places that not many customers would typically walk to or past. The bigger the store, the more likely it is to have them. So, in their infinite wisdom, retailers decided to put the most important items (the traffic generators) in their retail cold spots. This is why, whenever you go to buy milk at a large supermarket, or even the local corner store or 7-Eleven, the milk is always in the back corner, even to this day. The truth is that it works financially. People walk past the other aisles and see things they didn’t know they needed, the impulse-purchase items such as chocolate bars and corn chips. The net result is more revenue for the retailer. Who cares about the stupid customer. Very selfish stuff indeed.
Let’s imagine for a moment that an online retailer behaved the same way. Seriously, what if someone who sells widgets online decided to hide what people really wanted behind all the things people didn’t have any intention of buying when they entered a website. You came to buy a certain book and they made you click through 23 separate web pages just to get to the page with the book you were searching for. You simply wouldn’t bother. They wouldn’t have the chance to lure you in before you clicked out of the website thinking, ‘This is the worst user experience in history!’ And you’d find another place to spend your money.
It sounds totally ridiculous when we overlay certain physical retail strategies into the virtual world. The reality, though, is that if it doesn’t happen online then it shouldn’t happen offline. Plain and simple. Strategies that work over the long haul are human, not selfish. Business should be about value creation, not value extractions.
So how do we survive?
Sure, companies need valid business models. And there’s an art to making more money through execution tactics. But deep down in any retailer’s heart, they know their job is to make people happy to spend their money with them without any retail chicanery where the environment tricks people into subconscious behaviour. It’s not cool, and I think the new tools will continue to expose it and hurt businesses that use these tricks.
Marketing mantra
Rant warning …
Here comes a truth bomb. It may sound a bit ranty, but it’s totally true. I lived the first 15 years of my employed life working for the world’s biggest packaged goods companies, listening daily to the marketing language I’m about to detail for you. I know most people are aware of this language, but I really feel it needs to be expunged from the business tactics of tomorrow, so much so that I feel the need to rant about it.
Marketing-specific language also had its fair share of self-language. These were terms that companies would never use directly with their customers, but that form a large part of their conversations with agencies and in boardroom discussions. But the gig is up, and just in case you don’t know which terms you should banish from the boardroom, here they are with my own personal definitions in some real, human language:
- The planned obsolescence. We’re going to make this thing in a way that it breaks on purpose. We’re going to leave out features we’ve already made so that our customers have to buy it again and/or upgrade.
- The roadblock. We’re going to buy media on every single channel all at the same time when we launch this product. If you watch television, or any form of traditional media, we’re going to block every input so that you have to listen to us shouting at you even if you don’t want to.
- The AWOP (average weight of purchase). We’re going to get people to buy more of what we sell, even if they don’t need it. Every year we want people to have more of this product because it makes our system work more efficiently. We’ll trick them by giving two-for-one offers and discounts that their rational minds can’t refuse, even though we know they can’t use or eat what we sell and it will probably end up in the trash.
- Brand loyalty. We’ll make sure our customers only ever do business with us. They must be loyal to us (not we to our customers). We’ll make loyalty a one-way street that serves the brand and we won’t return the favour.
- Household penetration. We need to bust our way into people’s homes — and as many homes as possible. We’re not going to knock on the door, be nice or build a relationship of trust and service. We’re going to do whatever we can to bust our way in. We don’t care whether they want our products or not.
- Cannibalisation. We’ll only ever launch a new product if the new version won’t eat into our existing sales too much, even if a new one would serve our customers better. We’d rather make money than serve people. But if the new replacement product makes more profit than what it substitutes, we’ll delete the old one from our range and force people into the new one.
There are more of these marketing terms. You can probably buy a book that espouses the virtues of them strategically. But I think they’re ugly and they’re for amateurs who don’t see or want to play the long-term game.
Creative types
We were tricked during the industrial era of television into thinking that producers and marketers had some kind of magical talent when all they had was access to the tools that we didn’t. The proof is everywhere around us in the digital world. There’s an internet full of bloggers who write as well as — and with as much thought as — The New York Times journalists. There are viral video makers on YouTube who are every bit as creative as the directors who work in the world’s best advertising agencies. There are designers on Etsy who have the flair and sensibility of the famous Eames office.
Give me that hammer
When the necessary tools entered our hands we realised that we’re at least as creative as all of them. We can do whatever they can do given half the chance, and with even fewer resources. In fact, when people are given tools and opportunity, it changes things. Access is everything. There’s often something very special that happens to creative output when it’s a gift to an audience, rather than a sell job. A person hacking away at a blog post on an issue late on Saturday night because it matters to them and their community … this has every chance of being the article we should read on that topic because of the purity that comes with it. It’s this approach that brings out the human side of endeavour. And what we all want are things that are more human.
Collaboration, creative orientation and counter intuition
The key difference we see online and with newer businesses today is that they give first. The ethic is to collaborate first (thus providing resources) and then transact. The flow of the user experience is to give the end user something of value, build trust in the relationship and then engage in commerce once we’re comfortable with each other. The industrial ethic had the opposite approach. Its approach was to say, ‘Here’s this item and this is the price. So let’s transact. You buy something and if you buy it often enough I might reward you for your loyalty later on’. Airline frequency flyer programs operate in this way.
In contrast, the burgeoning co-working-space approach, is very much to trust and interact first and then transact much later. Most co-working spaces around the world have an attitude of, ‘Come in; hang out; do some work; have a coffee on us (the espresso machine’s over there) and here’s the wi-fi password. If you like it after a few weeks we’ll work out an agreement to rent a desk’. It’s collaborative in nature: human first, commercial second.
Sometimes we have to remind ourselves of how dramatic these changes really are. So many of the things we’re seeing are counter intuitive to what we’d expect from large corporations. Let’s take the simple example of the two biggest global social-media competitors, Facebook and Twitter. Both of them have cross-platform sharing. The entire social web has this. This means that users can choose to publish on one platform and have it automatically posted on the other platform. It’s very hard to imagine a six-pack of cola coming with three cans of Pepsi and three cans of Coca-Cola. But in the new world, there tends to be more focus on coopetition than there is on competition. Not only does it put the user’s needs first, it also populates the social-media ecosystem to benefit both brands.
coopetition: cooperation between competing organisations to build a stronger ecosystem
Now that we’ve been set free creatively, marketers are starting to realise that our statistical profiles are a very poor predictor of behaviour indeed.