Marketing in an era of phatic comminications
Topic: Online marketing
MIT anthropologist Grant McCracken gave a decidedly non-linier talk during the opening evening session at the Institute of Communications Agencies Future Flash 2.0 at Niagara-On-The-Lake last Wednesday. Of all the presentations I’ve heard in the past week –and believe me, between our own In:fluencia Digital Interactive Marketing Conference featuring Chris Anderson and Paul Gillin and the Canadian Marketing Association ’s annual convention, I’ve got an overload of good presentations percolating in my brain right now- this one was perhaps the most salient. That’s as much because of the plethora of intellectually challenging ideas McCracken unleashed in his hour or so, as to the polar reactions to it I encountered during the social that followed at the Jackson-Triggs Estate.
The Canadian-born McCracken spoke to 80 or so senior Canadian ad agency executives and a few guests about “marketing for the new media and the new consumer.” His style and content seemed to channel Marshall McLuhan –with a bit of Dustin Hoffman’s Rainman in the mix- in that there were a lot of accessible probes and observations that, added up, seemed a bit chaotic and confusing. Some people find that stimulating. Some find it off-putting.
Some typical take aways, culled from my rather disjointed notes nearly a week later (did I mention the venue was a very nice winery):
• McCracken talked about how a lot of the IT-focused people at MIT are bugged by Twitter and how’s it used for seeming trivia, or “exhaust data.” All this brain power and technology, their reasoning goes, and people use it to tell each other they’re going to the store or the bathroom now. But McCracken noted that in anthropological terms the efforts by people, especially by teens and young twentysomethings, to stay in constant contact with their social networks through things like SMS, instant messaging, Facebook and Twitter, are akin to the gruntings and mutterings of primates (or the tweets and twitters of birds). It’s called phatic communications, and it’s all about saying “I’m here, you’re here, we’re all fine.”
• In a sense, McCracken said, we’re “all Korean now” in that we in North America are now “always on” via cell phones and other PDAs –something that not long ago was unique to South Korean culture. And our contacts never die; indeed, they multiply. With things like Facebook and Linked In we’re now able to stay in touch with everyone we’ve ever known with as much energy and efficiently we might have used to keep in touch with our dozen or so closest friends and associates in the recent past.
• McCracken observed that the new consumer see themselves as producers, as well as consumers, of content. They’re collaborative and experimental. And in that context, the old “stand and deliver” model of marketing is obsolete, he said. In fact, the day of the finely crafted in stone USP (unique selling proposition) is done. The new consumer is looking for dialogue and exchange, not a heavily-scripted one-way monologue shouted at them.
What should marketers specifically be doing in this new world?:
• Reward the “editors” and “curators,” for one thing. These self appointed connectors can be your allies in spreading your message if they are motivated and enabled.
• Enable “distributors,” or as McCracken put it more bluntly: “shoot the lawyers.” It’s now an open source world, and anything that impedes passing on content that in the past we’d try to control through things like ridged intellectual property rights rules will cause messages to be ignored. You have to “release control” and “give to get,” he said.
• Enable social networks, especially using mobile devices. The IT guys may not like it, but “tiny bursts” of content (whether “exhaust data” or not) makes the social networks hum. Make lots of them, and design them to be adaptable.
McCracken had much, much more to say, but I long ago passed the point where this post constituted a “tiny burst” and you get the drift.
But, as I said up top, for me the most interesting thing was the reactions of people at the ICA event. Almost to a person the ad agency executives I encountered got a starry-eyed look and were effusive in their praise of McCracken’s presentation. Not so much the reaction from Association of Canadian Advertisers president Ron Lund.
Lund’s gut response when the presentation was over was “and… so what.” Yes, Lund said, what McCracken had to say was pretty cool and interesting… but what can you actually do about it? How do we act on this stuff?
I’ve always found Ron’s down to earth approach refreshing. There is something to be said for remembering that when someone is dazzling you with their brilliance, the fact that they’re saying things you don’t quite understand might not be because you are the one who doesn’t “get it.” And remember, as ACA head he is the voice in Canada of the C-suits in the traditional marketer sector, which is populated with people who have –and by their job functions are required to have- a similar skeptical “show me” attitude toward all things new, including the emerging new interactive marketing paradigm.
That said, new technologies are enabling consumers –and the rules for engaging them – to change at an accelerating pace. No, the jury’s not in yet on what to do about and with a lot of this stuff. But even if we haven’t figured out how to –or even if we can- use these new mediums and trends for marketing purposes yet, we do need to learn about them. It’s not Grant McCracken’s fault the new world is a complex place.
Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.
Posted by sutter or mckenzie
at 12:37 PM EDT
Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 12:56 PM EDT
Canadian agency Taxi, at the end of September. The voice-over of the video featured a mom who said she carried her baby in a sling in part because she sees it as “a fashion statement” and made her feel like an “official mom.” It garnered reasonable traffic at