Citizen Sector

The first few years of the 21st century has brought a deluge of information into the public and with it, a deluge of opinion, truncated analysis, and a veritable flotsam and jetsam of smut, garbage, and things we seem utterly unable to live without. Are we consumers or participants in one of the most radical marketing shifts in history?

I am reminded of a short story by Flannery O'Connor titled "The Peeler," in which bedraggled, sweating masses crowd a salesman hawking a new device for peeling potatoes. In O'Connor's time, the masses were considered ripe pickings for the charlatans and snake-oil salesman. From Steinbeck to Miller, the average American consumer was portrayed as the industrious, honest, naive, dupe. Some voices cried out against the very label of consumer, Ayn Rand and her Objectivists, yet the idea of a population of valueless masses to be sold to held fast, and was rewarded in the early days of industrialization with profits that one is hard pressed to argue with. Eventually, the leisure created by industrialization caught up with the profiteers, and consumers awoke and realized they were strong, some of them.

Are the "crowds" of the 21st Century the same teaming masses who were mesmerized by the pealer in the southern sun? Has the consumer gone through a radical re-alignment in values? I believe that for some the answer is a resounding "yes" while for others, a probable "no." Online platforms are providing ways for people to engage with and shape society in ways never before possible. Yet only a few produce original content, while the majority seem happy to re-arrange the content produced.

For the consumer market, retail, social networking, the greatest advances on the web will be search, aggregation, and open personalization (the ability to tell my friends and the world what I like). The tools that allow us to project images of ourselves as we would like to be will become the keys to the marketing kingdom. Marketing can make the purchasing life of the consumer fundamentally easier. The majority of the marketing that we despise is because it is off target and irrelevant. This should only diminish as the web matures, while on target, relevant marketing begins to rise. The marketing we love is inspirational, and reinforces the idea of ourselves we want to inform everyone of. The end of the peeler's "shot in the dark" marketing is upon us and marketing must change to accommodate it.

One of the leading examples of new marketing is Polyvore. The application creates user generated adds, though they call them "sets" that directly delivers on telling "the world what I like," at the same time providing value to the consumer in the form of a "story board." While other advertising strategies try to match what people like through complex searches, Polyvore makes creating advertising user centered, fun, and can provide a wealth of rich, relevant "marketing" data, should one care to look.

What does this mean for marketing? Provide a valuable service and your users will tell you everything you need to know. Give them easy tools to articulate their values and they will aggregate content for you. Marketing is not about pushing a reluctant purchaser over the edge to a sale, its about providing value. If you don't believe that your product really does that for anyone, rethink the product, not the marketing strategy.

“At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily." -Flannery O'Connor