Negative Capability in marketing

So I was lucky enough to get to Grant McCracken's Chief Culture Officer bootcamp last week, which was a great opportunity to get under the skin of the research practice that informed the book, and to chat about it with lots of smart people. It also got me thinking about how 'culture', in the sense of the complex and slowly evolving system studied by cultural anthropologists, ties together a lot of separate strands that I've been thinking about for a while.

I've struggled with several econometric models over my career - media planners love econometric models, because they tell you line by line and TV rating by TV rating exactly what has got you to where you are today. So you can plan changes for the future based on very exact return on investment figures. As long as all the other conditions that contributed to the model remain exactly the same. And there was no inter-relation between the factors that you changed. And most importantly of all, that the big unquantifiable chunk of fat value labelled 'the long term brand effect' also remains constant. So the reason I've struggled with them is because this tells us a huge amount about a very small bit of something that we can't change.

There was a lot of discussion at Grant's event about the relationship between data, the known bit that makes up the econometric model - and culture, the unknown that can fundamentally alter the big brand chunk in the middle of the model for no reason that a statistician could predict. And it got me to thinking that if all data is by definition reactive, then maybe culture is defined by its opposition - culture is by definition proactive. This has real implications for anyone selling ideas based on gut feel in a world that is based on data (and if you are involved in doing so then I suggest you read Grant's book!), but it also starts to question why data is necessarily the right thing to do.I've written stuff on here before about the curse of demographics on the marketing world - to summarise the basic argument (inspired like many things on here by Henry Jenkins by way of Faris Yakob) demographics are by definition averages. When all media were mass demographics made sense as they meant brands minimised wastage. Media were scarce (part of why they were mass) so brand ideas in mass media were expensive, and therefore short. Brand ideas had to appeal to a wide range of people, so had to be simple. Wide ranges of people were summarised neatly by demographics.

And now media are no longer scarce, and so are free and niche. Brand ideas need to be rich and rewarding, and demographics undermine this. Someone at the event talked about the concept of the brand as "a bundle of conflicting but complementary ideas", which is not a new concept - it is at the heart of Negative Capability, Keats' belief that the best ideas come from an understanding that not everything can or should be resolved.

I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason
John Keats, 1817

The richness and depth of human nature is defined by difference, not similarity. In the Morality plays popular up to Elizabethan times, characters were stripped of all individuality and distinguishing characteristics in order not to distract the audience from the simplicity of the moral. The radical depth of Elizabethan dramatists like Shakespeare turned this on its head - unearthing deep emotional truths about humanity in the relationships between rich complex characters.

In an culture increasingly defined by the mass personal there is a huge hurdle for marketing departments to overcome in moving from being the home of sweeping industrial scale generalisation to the conduit through which businesses become human, with all the complexity and conflict that that entails. The move from big/simple/single to niche/many/rich is a big first step - not replacing big/simple/single, but understanding that it is only a step to get to niche/many/rich. Because I'd suggest that that's where the fat unquantifiable value is, and the one big idea I've taken out of the seminar is not to always 'reach after fact and reason', but to explore the tension in 'conflicting and complementary'.

Happiness and Demographics

Twelvety years ago, when I started working in media (well, ten if I have to count), attitudinal segmentation was very much the new thing. The idea that you could group people based on age and socio-demographics to inform a marketing strategy was understood to be too basic to be much use, while splitting the data held by TGI in too many segments was both counter-productive, and statistically unreliable as sample sizes quickly fell away to not enough to matter. So shared attitudes were seen as a cohesive centre around which target audiences could be compiled. Which is great, until you start building out a cluster group to make it statistically relevant, and find that the higher the numbers grow, the less interesting or defining that group is.

This seems to be really important in understanding the whole business of people and brands. For a lot of last century all media were mass, simply because media were expensive so there was no economic case other than mass production (ok there were punk, zines, comics, etc, but the Sex Pistols still had to sign to major labels to create a movement). Expensive media in the advertising world means that brand ideas have to be really simple, so that they can be communicated in 30". And really simple ideas make sense in mass demographics, because they have to be equally simple and appealing to lots of people. Thing is, grouping people by what makes them similar, by what is going to appeal to lots of them, means setting your sights on Average. Mean, median, whatever, demographics are all about average. And it's worth remembering that the average person has one breast and one testicle.

It is our personal interests, our hopes and emotions that really differentiate us, that really make us human. These are what no demographic survey can hope to understand; they wouln't make sense in demographics, as they would be averages again. But each of us has circles of friends who they share these interests and emotions with: who we hold data for. This hit me the other day in a meeting to work on a brief about happiness. Happiness is so incredibly personal, but also fundamentally linked to sharing experiences with other people, that it isn't a spreadable concept, but rather an inspirable one. A brand can't inspire happiness in large numbers of people (ok, of course it can, but by making better stuff or creating better experiences, not by advertising), but it can inspire happiness. It is the inspiration that is spread, not the emotion. This is fundamentally opposed to demographics, as it relies on each individual person joining in to mould, change or remix the idea into something unique to them that will make their friends, the people they know best, happy. And inspire them to change it again when they pass it on.

Can't tell you what we decided 'it' was, but at no point did the definition of 'it' include any reference to flashmobs. Or Facebook