Just before we get going a new episode of my YouTube series Design Heaven Design Hell is out now, talking about taking startup brands from good to great. If you enjoy watching as well as reading, please check it out.
I think I’ve been feeling the diminishing returns of “more” in marketing for some time now.
Perhaps because I worked in the mainstream of digital marketing and advertising from 2001 until 2015, until I’d become desensitised to the joy of yet another website build, or campaign rollout, or video production. The decline of social media (reflecting the post-2008 decline in western society) has also weighed upon me. Oh and I just got older!
I can’t rationalise everything that happened into a perfect explanation, all I can say is that the discontented feelings many now have about the digital world… I’m very sensitive to them and, due to long exposure, I’ve been feeling them acutely for a long time. Guess I was one of the canaries in that particular coal mine.
The betrayal of “more”
This week three entirely disparate pieces of content crossed my radar and created the reason for this article.
The first was an April 2024 Gary Stevenson video called “How to Get Rich” that I hadn’t seen before. It’s a pretty damning indictment of why “more money” is a fool’s errand these days for the majority of young people.
The second was a tremendous article on Substack, Catherine Shannon’s “It is seldom wise to tell all…” which got to the nub of why the modern digital culture of “share everything” has done us enormous amounts of harm. The premise that social media is “not intimate enough for a friend, but too much for everyone else” captures the problem perfectly.
Thirdly I stumbled across a recent 60 Minutes interview with Hermès artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas, which contained some interestingly contrarian business views. There are two aspects of what he said that I’d like to pick up on in terms of the rejection of “more” and their ability to persuade.
On the difference between costly and expensive:
“Hermès is costly, not expensive…. cost is the actual price of making an object properly with the required level of attention so that you have an object of quality. Expensive is a product which is not delivering what is supposed to deliver but you've paid quite a large amount of money for it and then it betrays you. That's expensive ”
This is not a defence of ultra-luxury brands, I am not a consumer of them.
But this notion of betrayal struck me as interesting because, although we sell things to ourselves, through the human brain’s proclivity for making rapid associations, we don’t approach the processing of blame and disappointment in the same way.
I won’t get too boringly scientific here but this is related to self-serving bias, the notion of locus of control, and in the modern era, the state of learned helplessness that is a consequence of “the era of more” overwhelming us.
As more and more people feel their existence is precarious, it feels to me as though we are building up a cultural map of our bad investments, both of time and money. We’re realising that the thrill of cheap products is a bad investment of our money, and the endorphine shots of social media are a bad investment of our time. Hence grievance, directed at each other, has become ever more of our expression.
A repeat of history or another way?
This leads on to Dumas’ second point in the interview, our relationship to time. He’s asked whether processes can be sped up and replies:
“Speed is the structuring value of the 20th century… are we going to be so obsessed with speed and immediate satisfaction (in the future)? Maybe not.”
Two fundamentals of human nature collide. Our desire for immediacy versus our desire for safety. If our experience is that the only thing which arrives swiftly is betrayal, how might humans change their values?
I could see two avenues from there. One is that learned helplessness wins and we willingly surrender to artificial intelligence. The other is that enough people resist and create a form of “luddite movement”. The conditions today are very similar to those of 1811, but are global not local. Greater conflict, even revolution, seem quite possible.
Human history and psychological theory suggest we need these ‘peak events’ in order to deliver persuasion at the required scale to do the thing most people had already agreed was beneficial. In the UK, the NHS had been theorised since the early 1900s, but only the shattering effect of World War II brought the motivation for it to actually happen.
One thing is different from the past. The internet. The ability to communicate at scale, like never before. But its social and commercial aspects, the persuasive bits, are in the hands of Bezos, Zuckerberg and Musk. Their victory can only come if they keep a majority of the rest of us at odds with each other via the ‘overwhelm of more’.
Hence the modern obsession with digital productivity. The orthodoxy is that you become more productive by doing more and adding more automation. More social posts, more emails, more follow-ups, more meetings. But with technology creating some marginal gains. So each time you think a little less about doing each part, and that’s progress.
But what if we stopped and thought:
“If I was just more persuasive with that first email, or that first social post, or in that first meeting… how productive would I be then?”
I hope we chart a middle path. Where we don’t feel we have to reject technology, because that’s not ultimately possible. But influence each other via an internet in which we have a stake and a community.
To wrap up with some other quotes from the content pieces I mentioned:
“How do you get rich? You get rich by working together” - Gary Stevenson
“Reckless disclosure devalues the self; discretion respects it.” - Catherine Shannon
“Maybe there is another form of relation to the world which is linked to patience - Pierre-Alexis Dumas
Patience, discretion, togetherness. I know it’s a great simplification but these things engender craft, slow the unhelpful excesses of our system 1 thinking and give us the ability to have nice things and a better world.
If we can’t slow down in our desire for more, our betrayal of ourselves and each other will mean we’re going to hit a wall, at speed.