The Fall Of Mass Culture, The Rise Of Meaning

Ariana Huffington has a good sense of the turning of the tide in marketing, as a reflection of a fundamental shift going on below the hood in our society:

[…] the most important trend in marketing: the recognition by businesses that there’s much to be said for appealing to consumers’ better instincts, and engaging them with something other than materialism, sex, money, and self-interest. And it’s not a coincidence that this trend is escalating at the same time social media have risen to the forefront in the worlds of both marketing and activism. It’s all part of the changing zeitgeist and it’s only natural that forward-thinking companies would want to tap into it.

Right now, we’re in the transition phase — the marketing world still looks like a split-screen, with most companies going about things in the traditional way, but with many pioneering ones breaking new ground by building their brands while trying to help make the world a better place.

Marketing is often a leading indicator of where a culture is at and, even more, of where it’s heading. Marketing has always been most effective when it takes ideas that are in the air and crystallizes them, so that they resonate with us in ways often beyond our conscious understanding. This is what is so powerful about the combination of social media, marketing, and doing good.

I don’t mean to disparage the value of her observation, but because she is looking at this cultural shift based on what’s what in advertising, she is seeing the tip of the iceberg and analyzing its movements without factoring in the iceberg below.

The decline of mass culture that is going on in the Western world is the direct consequence of the splintering of media and our defection from the communities that mass media defines.

The other day I saw Pew numbers showing that almost nobody below 25 watches local TV news anymore, for example. Which doesn’t mean that these folks are uninformed about what’s going on, but that the ‘imagined community’ that local TV broadcasting tries to conjure into being simply doesn’t exist for them.

The ‘message’ of mass media is not about Iraq, American Idol, or the NY Yankees: it’s mass identity. And when people turn away from mass media — and mass advertising — they aren’t just becoming unaware of the goings-on on some reality show, they are walking away from belonging to a collection of cultural aspirations and obsessions.

And what fills the void for those that operate outside the limits of mass media, which are market-facing, and market-oriented? What happens when you aren’t bombarded with car ads, when you stop listening to music about bling and champagne, or you stop subscribing to fashion magazines telling you what to buy and wear?

One thing is clear: people’s extra-market motivations start to come to the surface. People begin to care more about connection in communities, the state of the world, and, at the most fundamental level, a meaning for existence.

This is being called social marketing. It’s a good term, for perhaps conflicting reasons. First, people associate ‘social’ with ‘social causes’, meaning ‘societal causes’ in a philanthropic sense. But more importantly, this marketing will take root in social media, where our connections to each other — the social context — is as important as the content.

This need for meaning often is trivialized as becoming cause-oriented, but our involvement in causes is the outgrowth of our desire to live meaningful lives, instead of as consumers.

I don’t mean this is some fuzzy spiritual way, some obsession with enlightenment or finding a path to heaven, but on a very practical day-to-day level. It comes down to this: How are we to spend our time, and what is worth being involved in?

Returning to Ariana’s points: yes, some marketers are hoping that they can affiliate with these aspirations for meaning. And in this transitional era, where both mass and social media are prevalent, we will see very different Super Bowl ads in the coming years.

Ariana cites Derrick Daye, who is new to me, for coining the term ‘ethosnomics’:

Brands increasingly must stand for something beyond just rational items. Brands can’t, however, just ‘stand for’ the cause du jour. Doing what others do, just because they’re doing it, won’t work very long or very effectively. Corporate social responsibility efforts will need to be believable, sustained, and engaging. Some of the strongest will come from those brands that connect the public and the personal in today’s financially-strained world.

Yes, we will judge them by their works, but a soda company won’t buy our allegiance by talking about clean water in Africa. They will have to recast their business so as to not be doing harm, open up transparently, and to actually be viewed as being motivated by extra-market motivations.

In a time when things is so bad, businesses can only hold us by dedicating themselves to a better world, even if they have to totally transform themselves — even if they have to invest everything they have — to do it.