Culture, Consumption and Marketing: Integrative Paper

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The class for which this blog was originally created culminated in an integrative exam. The object was to draw from class readings and personal observation in order to synthesize our view of marketplace behaviour.

Marketplace Behaviour: My View

To begin this thesis, I want to define the intellectual lens through which I interpret my environment. This will be especially helpful later on, when I will recapitulate the integrative themes that were brought about in my observations and contrast them with what I think should be the complete set of analytical tools that a market analyst should bring to bear on his/her environment. But mostly, I want to document my experience of the marketplace, using borrowed ideas and frameworks from our course materials and assorted readings to lend structure to thought, in a way that is personally revealing.

Everyone comes to their own understanding of the world, and knowing what drives and shapes my perceptions should be useful in order to understand how I can best compensate for those aspects that come less naturally to me. I like to think that my understanding of the world is predominantly rational or pragmatic, but in reality I am guided by intuition—albeit an informed type of intuition. Depending on when I take the test, I suppose, I fall between an ENTP and an ENTJ on the Myers-Briggs, the difference being owed to this duality between reason and intuition. So how does this translate into an appraisal of marketplace behaviour? As the documented experiences in my blog can attest, I tend to interpret behaviour through a theoretical lens: I want to try to understand the underlying patterns of behaviour that are more revealing than surface manifestations. In preparing for this thesis, I combed through the blogged experiences of my classmates, mostly out of pure interest, but also because I wanted to see if this theoretical approach had other proponents. To a great extent, most of my peers' experiences were related in a visceral, conversational style, while mine—at least to me—seemed more restrained, laboured and, well, pedantic. As such, my view of marketplace behaviour is much more heavily weighted towards the qualitative and focused on root causes of behaviour.

The fundamental problem of qualitative observation that I have noticed and of which I'm becoming increasingly aware is that people do and say very different things, and of what they do, not much is seemingly guided by conscious impulses. This is a point that is made repeatedly in David Brooks' On Paradise Drive, and when he settles on the notion that Americans are guided by a "noble and salvific force pushing history toward a glorious material and spiritual fulfillment," (p. 124) he indirectly admits that whatever people's motivations are, they are unexpressed either through word or act, but rather through collectivist conformity: If everyone's going there, so should I.

By way of example, there are a few entries in my blog which establish my perception that consumers are seldom as sentient in the marketplace as they would deem themselves to be. The entries for January 31st and February 1st ("The Issue of 'Flow'" and "Coming up for air") speak directly to this, as do the February 12th entries ("Fences" and "Knowledge of self? In this world?"). The former pair express the idea that consumers—and I obviously include myself in this group—are awash in a world of manufactured images, such that it is hard to tell which impulses are motivated by need and which are due to "going along with what everyone else is doing". The latter are mainly about the powerful forces (the "fences") that exist to narrow our focus and dull our senses.

To a large extent, my experience of this world comes with a caveat (poetry by Shakespeare): "To thine own self be true." One is never better served than by taking the time to understand what really matters, and hopefully getting to the root of what guides one's actions. The January 30th entry ("Some new thoughts") speaks to the difficulty of doing this. Thomas Friedman's breathless optimism about a flattened world points to a future where we won't be served well by the Blonde's consumerist surfeit; we'll have to get smart about what we need, and about how to get it.

A lot of the experience is rooted in layers that go beyond the experiential to the symbological. And it is here that I will reveal the reason for my fixation with language. The study of language is fundamentally the ethnographic study of a culture. Words carry cultural and historical dimensions beyond their mere definition. I tried to illustrate the deep ties that exist between language and culture ("Language: An example" on January 29th), but the most pertinent example was in the analysis of McDonald's simple yet meaning-laden new tagline ("Language and metaphors" also on January 29th). All of these illustrate my perception that language is at least as powerfully evocative as images or symbols can be, and this is an important aspect of my understanding of consumerist behaviour. Humans are gregarious animals, and above all else we seek to belong. Echoing through the ages is a unifying force that still has the power to unite us: the story. The potency and ubiquity of the narrative goes far beyond mere imagery, metaphors and semantics. Stories are the vehicles of culture. Brands are stories, ongoing dialogs that we engender and sustain with commercial entities. If Twitchell gave us the reason we incessantly anthropomorphize our belongings (so they can "speak" back to us), Brooks showed why it pays for marketers: A narrative engenders a conversation between the consumer and the consumable. And not just any conversation; a conversation about how life can be better, cleaner, faster—ideal. The cash register as a "gateway to paradise" (p.212). As Brooks states,

Once an item ceases to fire the imagination—when it no longer inspires a story about some brighter future—then [consumers] lose interest in it. (p.210)

And ultimately, this is where all these observations lead me. The marketplace is substantially more than just where stuff is before I buy it. It is a vast and complicated system of narratives onto which consumers overlay their hopes, ambitions and desires. As I state in "How much of me is truly mine?" (January 25th):

By and large, the most compelling thing I've learned throughout all of this is that beliefs, ideas and worldviews are more a means than an end: the majority of people adopt mindsets that are consistent with the place they wish to occupy in the world, rather than with what they deem to be rationally defensible.

And though the worldview is but one element of the prism through which products acquire meaning, it is by far the most common element to which I can retrace marketplace behaviour. This isn't to say that I take the consumer's environment for granted, but, as above, it's been my observation that people make choices consistent with that which they would rather believe. Which leads to the next section, in which I will compare this view of marketplace behaviour with that of a Millenial college student.

The Millenials' Perspective

To what extent the perspective described thus far is emblematic of the Thirteener generation is up for grabs. Much like a great many of my peers, I don't see myself as falling into either the Thirteener or, obviously, the Millenial category. I am quite an idealist, perhaps naively so, and the romantic fascination I have for storytelling and the power of language is maybe an indication that my focus should be on the extent to which narratives resonate with Millenials. Therefore, in order to properly compare and contrast the perspective of a Millenial with my own, I will first need to paint a picture of how the world of Millenials will be influenced by the ever-increasing scope of the world they inhabit, and how, in turn, this will be reflected in their use and familiarity with narratives. One of the more interesting insights from Howe and Strauss' Millenials Rising: The Next Great Generation book, in my sense, is the chart on page 244 where the musical starts of every era since the 1920s contrasts the stars created for the next generation and those created by the next generation. The more recent examples show the stark difference between the narratives that resonate with each generation, and the disconnect that exists between each generation's perception of what will appeal to the next. Madonna was the Boomers' gift to Thirteeners. Thirteeners, in turn, poured their collective ethos into their own creation, Nirvana. It is interesting to note that the authors use the very same example that I used in my entry for February 19th ("Genuine of contrived?"). In that entry, I had explained how certain moments achieve a level of cathartic realism which galvanizes an entire generation. That this is an instance of Thirteeners speaking for themselves is no accident: rather than being presented with a mirror by an outsider, this was a generation holding a mirror to itself.

Thirteeners, perhaps guided by the exuberant vivacity of the next crop, produced sugary pop like the Backstreet Boys, the Spice Girls and Hanson as their impression of the voice of this forward-looking and optimistic bunch. One wonders, when the Millenials speak for themselves, what will they say? Whereas Thirteeners sought solace in extensive fantasies, and devised ever more ingenious ways to put a voice to their inadequacy, will Millenials be guided by a hunger for increased realism?

The reason these themes are important is that, in keeping with my focus on narratives, music is a uniquely powerful form of narrative. But what about the broader marketplace? How will Millenials form associations with their world, and how will they converse with it? Howe and Strauss paint the portrait of an empowered, educated and perpetually striving Millenial youth. They depict individuals moved by forces greater than them, but rather than being subsumed by these forces, as Thirteeners were, they are meeting them head on, challenging them on their own turf. Millenials are reversing decades-old trends, and doing so with their heads up, leveraging all the tools of a world that has always been flat—at least so far as they know. How will they converse in the greater marketplace? I had an incomplete thought in class about Millenials and brands, and I think I can finally complete it: brands will be under even greater scrutiny from Millenials. Ever loyal and forthright themselves, Millenials will scarcely tolerate incongruities from their chosen brands. The discourse, in short, will be more direct, honest and stripped bare of the nonsense that Thirteeners—myself included—sought out in order to fashion a world we deemed more tolerable than the real one we inhabited.

Integrative/Interpretive Themes

As I write these lines and review the entries to my commonplace book, I have a very clear image of the quality and nature of the experiences I have had with the marketplace. And in parallel, some themes have emerged that I think can be instructive as I move forward. I began this essay by describing my personality style, and the lens through which I interpret the world. As I read through the various entries, I can see clear evidence that this lens is prominent in the types of observations I have made. Entries dealing with language, stories and the opposition of the genuine and the contrived speak to an awareness of the sometimes plastic nature of our relationship with the marketplace. This is a fairly basic reading; this is, after all, a game in which we all play a part. The willful suspension of disbelief. First theme: We let marketers tell us stories because we need to believe them. Humans are what Carl Sagan calls "significance junkies", and storylines emerge naturally in spite of ourselves. Stories communicate ideology and social order—the "prism" through which the characteristics of the marketplace are focused.

All of which begs the second insight: Narratives develop because, as a course tenet states, "insight is immanent in action". It is through the act of "conversing" with our possessions that we come to insights about ourselves and that we construct our worldview. Our possessions are the means through we consumers achieve self-discovery, or, at the very least, discovery of our desired selves. And this distinction brings about the third theme: The condition of "flow" exists because we have come to accept man's natural state as being one of perpetual anxiety. The solution—balance—can only be sold if an imbalance is perceived to exist. We entertain complex narratives because we need them, these narratives serve to help us construct an image of our desired selves, and this future-minded vision (what Brooks calls "anticipatory hedonism") exists because mankind exists in a state of disequilibrium.

With these insights in mind, we can seek out the narratives of this rising generation. The world is indeed flattening, and there is now a generation to whom this has always been the case. How will they use this latent capacity? While Friedman worries that they will be inadequately prepared for this high-speed connected world, Howe and Strauss confidently assert that they will rise to meet the challenges by running counter to the Blonde vapidity of Brooks' observations. The astute marketing analyst will learn from the patterns of history, and will closely track the progress of the Millenials. The marketplace is rife with the narratives of each generation. All one must do, then, is pay attention when the Millenials start speaking for themselves.