Brand meaning - Use it or lose it
Adding value or submitting to devaluation
This week’s article is a companion piece to one I wrote a couple of months ago about slowing our desire for “more”. The notion of “adding friction where the rubber meets the road” is one I keep coming back to in my work.
The trigger for this article was a short section of an interview between two people I’m fond of, Rick Rubin and Rick Beato. In the section below Rick B was giving his thoughts on music streaming and why the lack of scarcity and friction have changed how we value music and artists.
Despite my love for music, the hundreds of gigs I’ve attended and the thousands of records I’ve listened to, I mistrust myself to judge it these days. I know I’ve reached the point where new music rarely impacts me in the way it once did. Our inner cultural sponge has a saturation point as we age.
But I saw a comparison with how prospects and customers value brands in the late stages of the attention economy.
Anticipation and appreciation
The current trend is for efficiency and frictionless process. This is rooted in a marketing culture of ‘more’. We HAVE to be more efficient, because there are only ever going to MORE touchpoints on the prospect journey. No one is questioning that assumption.
I do question it. I question it because it seems to be propagated by people who are interested in selling you efficiency products and services. It’s in their interests to make things so complex that the relatively marginal gains they can deliver seem the only advantage.
I sense the cognitive strain on humans to consume this tidal wave of marketing communication. I see people increasingly talking about tuning more of it out. Some are even actually doing it! I’m one of the early adopters, but I’ve always been interested in curation as a skill. Because of which I haven’t had my cognitive and emotional senses dulled by an endless diet of slop content.
There is still time to save the cognitive senses of people in western society. But we have to want to do it and make that a viable commercial mission, not just congratulate ourselves for recognising the existence of the problem.
I don’t believe people have lost their desire for meaning, quite the opposite. They’ve just learned, via experience, to not expect to see it very often, when 9 out of 10 posts in whatever feed they consume offer none.
I think any brand who focusses on offering something meaningful will find a tribe of hungry folk keen to consume it. It might seem risky and counter-intuitive, but we either change society or submit to letting society change us.
Once we have understandable meaning. meaning that gives shape and direction to out lives, we can appreciate it, and once again feel an anticipation for it.
What anticipation do any of us feel for anything, when convenient repetition is all that’s on offer? The great global forces that gave western society a vision for the last 80 years have run out traction, and in fact been turned against us by the very people we once used that force upon. I can’t really blame them.
That’s both frightening and incapacitating. But we still have agency. The kind that JRR Tolkien so beautifully described in The Lord of the Rings:
“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times.
But that is not for them to decide.
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
As the people who invented the ruleset of a democratic world underpinned by the rule of law, and the rules of effective modern digital collaboration, we really should be able to examine their flaws and reinvent them.
What does that mean for brand marketing?
The attention economy has been around for long enough, and we have experienced its superficiality for long enough, that we have acquired the taste to discern what is meaningless. Sometimes we accept that and say “OK, just give me the dopamine hit”. Sometimes not. We’re all different in terms of what dopamine does to us and how much of it we can consume before it makes us feel sick.
But I wonder if there is a significant bifurcation here. The dopamine addicts will become subservient to AI and go one way, and the rest of us will go another. Within the portion of society that rejects it, I wouldn’t be surprised if success, growth, wealth and happiness follow.
In which case: Create the conditions for your brand to be where the money is going to flow. Add value, add pleasant non-dopamine friction, add appropriate scarcity. Be part of a new solution, or just scavenge off the worsening of the problem. But it’ll take us all down if we let it.
I’m ready to do that work, as it pertains to brands, when you are.
Reach me via LinkedIn, or the Exodus 25 website.