Marketers used to have little choice. The only marketing was local. The local neighborhood, the local community.
Mass marketing changed that. Now, the goal was to flip the culture, all at once. Hit records, hit TV shows, products on the end cap at Target and national TV ads to support it all.
With few exceptions, that’s being replaced by a return to clusters.
The cluster might be geographic (they eat different potato chips in Tucson than they do in Milwaukee) but they’re much more likely to be psychographic instead. What a group of people believe, who they connect with, what they hope for…
The minimal viable audience concept requires that you find your cluster and overwhelm them with delight. Choose the right cluster, show up with the right permission and sufficient magic and generosity and the idea will spread.
In my most recent book, I helped people see how we’re always tracking status roles in the way we make decisions. Who’s up and who’s down? What does this interaction or this purchase do to maintain or change my role?
It comes down to “who eats lunch first” and the instinct has been around since the savannah.
One place we see this really clearly is in world politics. Some candidates personify affiliation (who is with me/how are we working together) while others depend on dominance to gain and exert power (who am I defeating).
Jimmy Carter was an affiliation president. It was important to him to be in sync and to build alliances while diminishing conflict. Winston Churchhill was primarily a dominator, and using that posture, he built alliances that saved the UK in World War II.
Likability isn’t always related to this choice of dominance vs affiliation, but it’s often more difficult for a dominator to be seen as likable at the same time.
In many settings, dominance can be seen as bluster (if it’s on the surface only) or bullying (when applied in settings of unequal power).
In a world of fast media cycles, we see again, again and again the easy optics of domination. Professional wrestling is a sport of nothing but dominance–it’s a theater of status. And as we strip away the long-term from discussions of politics, Twitter and the rest of the chattersphere has created a similar theatre for politics.
In the short run, this is satisfying, because people get to feel as though their avatar, the leader who represents them, is moving up, which of course means that they’re moving up as well.
Even without a pandemic, the game theory of this short-term measure is flawed. Because in sports, not every team makes it to the finals, and not every wrestler becomes the world champ. And in politics, the repercussions of non-cooperation can last for generations.
Bluster is hard to maintain in places where performance is easy to measure. And so it tends to move to places where it’s not as easy to measure output.
Almost no one who takes an intro to economics course becomes an economist. One reason might be that within a few days of starting the class, it becomes abstract, formula-based and dull.
The same ennui kicks in for having to memorize things in chemistry or world history.
We don’t have these fields because we need to employ professors. We have them because they give us a chance to understand and to figure things out. Once you are enrolled in the journey of discovery, decoding a formula or engaging with a taxonomy becomes urgent, not merely an assigned task.
Because a testing regime is in place, particularly now when so many other tropes in the education-industrial complex are disrupted, the textbook authors and administrators work together to skip the ‘fluff’ and go straight to the stuff that’s easy to test.
That’s not how passion is discovered or nurtured. No one becomes a baseball fan because they read the baseball textbook and did well on the baseball test. The same goes for people who devote their lives to cooking, leading or healthcare. These are journeys that require emotional enrollment, not a good test score. We need to stop holding the future hostage in exchange for an exam.
A friend writes, “it is so frustrating not being able to control people.”
Of course, there’s a flipside.
If you could control people, just imagine how heavy that responsibility would weigh on you.
Freedom of choice brings with it the realization that our choices belong to us. One is the choice to lead. The other is the choice to follow.
If we make the choice to lead, we need to be prepared to own the consequences of our leadership, even (or especially) if we can’t actually control what others do.
“Wake me when it’s over,” is a natural instinct during a short-term interruption in our usual pattern. A crisis is there to be managed or waited out. The goal of each day is to simply get through it. Until things are back to normal.
But sometimes we’re dealing with a slog. Where the number of days is not small enough to simply throw them away. In a slog, the pattern of only getting by undervalues our days and diminishes our ability to contribute.
During a slog, we have a chance to accept a new normal, even if it’s temporary, and to figure out how to make something of it. You don’t have to wish for it, but it’s here. There’s very little value in spending our time nostalgic for normal.
When we get to the other side of the slog and look back, what will we have contributed, learned and created?
Today, the new book from Jacqueline Novogratz arrives. Manifesto for a Moral Revolution is brave, personal and audacious. This is an important book, now more than ever. Please share this with people you care about.
Retail truth-speaker Steve Dennis debuts with a definitive book about the future of stores. Remarkable Retailis prescient and practical.
Eliot Peper has a new book this month. Veil is about collapse, redemption and heroes. As always, his near-future science fiction will stick with you.
Economics in Two Lessonsis a thoughtful rebuttal of most of what we think we know about how markets work.
I read The Quantum Thiefa few months ago, and it’s still resonating with me. Far-flung science fiction, much more relevant than the space opera cover gives it credit for. It’s a great audiobook if that’s your thing.
This is the 20th anniversary of The Art of Possibility, the book I recommend more than any other. The audiobook is terrific as well.
Maybe you work with an organization. They have systems and charts and boxes.
But the very nature of an organization is that someone developed it, figured it out and has to approve its changes. After all, it’s organized.
Perhaps you work with an organism instead. An organism constantly changes. The cells develop, die and are replaced. It adapts to the current environment or goes away.
If you engage with a culture, if you’re part of an organism, you’ll do better understanding the system that it lives in. The org chart is insufficient.
And of course, organisms tend to be more resilient than organizations.
Without a doubt, today’s average jazz producer has heard more jazz than any jazz producer working in 1960. And today’s VC has seen more business plans than her predecessor forty years ago. Today’s journalist has read more stories, as well. The same is true for doctors, editors and critics.
In any endeavor where there’s a reason to care about more information, more information is available. A lot more. It’s impossible to have read all the books, seen all the movies, heard all the songs.
Domain knowledge is required, but domain knowledge is no longer a sufficient competitive advantage, because it’s widespread.
After you do the reading, then what are you going to do? Good judgment and a thoughtful point of view are now scarce assets worth seeking out.
What have you done with what you’ve learned?
May 2, 2020
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