Social business design and management

This is an update of a post first written 18th April 2010, stimulated by Google’s #zeitgeist event 17th-18th May.

When Theodore Levitt wrote The Globalization of Markets in 1983, he couldn’t have imagined what globalization would have become 27 years later.

His take on a joined-up world spawned some eager initiatives in commercial ambition and how brands communicated. The Saatchi brothers, whom I worked for in my tender years, were keen exponents of Ted Levitt’s ideas and they were all onto something, up to a point.

Theodore Levitt’s definition of corporate purpose was ‘to create and keep a customer’ and as Wikipedia says, this went ‘far beyond the hackneyed belief that business exist only to make money.’

I’ve been reminded of this in the context of reviewing Chris Houchens’ book ‘Brand Zeitgeist, Embedding Brand Relationships into the Collective Consciousness’.

Brand Zeitgeist’s a well-written, concise and convenient ready reckoner about the basics of branding. However, for me, one that questions the very idea of zeitgeist and whether it’s now an outmoded concept.

The idea that brands can embed themselves into the collective psyche by becoming masters of a zeitgeist’s is in many ways an arrogant one. It shows a certain amount of contempt for an audience and makes assumptions that fails to recognize the tectonic underpinning of plates between business and the people who are now formerly known as the audience, has shifted.

The world has turned since 1983. What a book like ‘Brand Zeitgeist’  suggests to me is whether the very notion of there being a zeitgeist isn’t, actually, a bit of a marketers’ conceit. (A conceit, as Helen Gardner observed, is ‘a comparison whose ingenuity is more striking than its justness’.)

The introduction of promoted tweets seems to suggest this is the  case. It implies there’s a cost for attempting to control share of mind and assumes there’s still a joined-up, mass market that a brand can connect to in that kind of a controlled way.

One of the most profound characteristics of the internet age and the semantic web is that there’s no single truth. The more joined up we are, the more that’s the case because there’s so much out there. No-one and nothing can possibly see it all, much less make sense of it.

Society’s undergone a step change in its complexity and sophistication and this step change means that even though a dominant narrative may prevail, it cannot fully represent the full gamut of opinion, that paradox and nuance are subtle but can be highly significant, that the ‘black swan’ is an ever-present phenomenon, and the unpredictable’s becoming increasingly embedded as a part of the fabric of the life we’re now living.

The first Leader’s Debate in the General Election in the UK created a bit of a stir on Twitter, and while all the parties’ masters of spin were arguing for prominence, what actually caught public imagination was a hashtag born out of an unscripted moment that resonated, #iagreewithnick. That hashtag was the UK’s response to Shepherd Fairey’s Obama poster and it coloured the campaign from a completely unpredicted angle.

So, we might ask the question, what’s that worth? And it’s a question that’s even more interesting in the light of the findings by Fresh Networks, who’ve been doing a comparison of Social Media Monitoring tools and come to the conclusion that different monitoring tools are delivering very different results. It seems on that front at least there’s really not much of a zeitgeist after all.

When discussing how to assess with the promotional tweet factor accurately in perceptual mapping and social sentiment monitoring, some people have suggested simply stripping promoted tweets out of the equation. And yet genuine connection, shared truth and the opportunity for zeitgeist comes from brands and consumers alike all knowing how much of a conversation is thrust and how much is traction. This is a pre-requisite for sharing a meme in anything like a meaningful way.

And what about the insights of those who’s insight and point of view is silent and sitting below the waterline? A conversation’s worth should be measured by what’s not said, and the spaces in between the content, just as much as the content itself.

The reality is one person’s zeitgeist is another person’s snoozebutton, and without recognition of that brands are not much more than commercial prozac. By obliterating potency and eliminating nuance they stand to offer and engage with very little.

We think that sticky, memorable experiences and loyalties form through visceral relationships, that include a sense of challenge and adversity overcome as much as the sharing of good news. This is mixture which is realistic, authentic, trustworthy and how shared memes are moulded and formed in conjunction with others.

To fill the void of a disappearing zeitgeist social brands stay healthy by being able to balance being recognised at a surface level with resonance at a deeper one. They must reconciling the desire for saturation of the mass market immediacy with the selectivity and a long term niche following, and be that spread because they encourage ease and inspiration more than imposition. That’s a tough one for many businesses to pull off.

Implicit in the idea of zeitgeist is that we have ‘nature’ on the one hand, and ‘law’, ‘custom’, or ‘convention’ on the other.

Coke has spread its message socially with some success by adapting to other environments.

In comparison, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has been busy building buttresses of its own, and both represent a form of world order. But as Lao-Tzu put it, ‘The highest type of ruler is one of whose existence the people are barely aware. Next comes one whom they love and praise. Next comes one whom they fear. Next comes one whom they despise and defy’.

A major narrative of the last ten years has been the one from the reality shows, the message that life’s about trying hard,the stakes are high and only there’s only room for a few lucky winners, classic scarcity marketing.

Now a new model is emerging, one that’s championing the collective mind. Businesses are getting more comfortable with co-creativity and crowdsourcing. Exciting initiatives like junto are developing new means of co-operation. Social connectivity via the web’s enabling emotional intelligence and literacy and encouraging a collective ‘aha’. Organic self-determination is developing via community networks in ways that are moving things on from a ‘top down’ kind of zeitgeist. Dynamic combined efforts are happening because there’s a ‘why’, a ‘why’ from which everyone develops and which people freely contribute to because they want to. Such is the nature of free will on the internet.

Zeitgeist is a kind of precognition, the collection of hope and intent that comes about through a suspension of disbelief. As technology speeds up every iterative cycle, that changes all the time. As Apple constricts who’s in on its zeitgeist for example, others open up, and the same is happening with Facebook; Diaspora and Openbook are there, waiting and ready to take its place.

The Director of Zeitgeist the movie said that, in his opinion, ‘the failure of our world to resolve the issues of war, poverty, and corruption, rests within a gross ignorance about what guides human behavior to begin with… oppressive laws, social stratification, irrelevant superstitions, environmental destruction, and a despotic, socially indifferent, profit oriented, ruling class’ and that this is a collective ignorance of ‘the emergent and symbiotic aspects of natural law.’

The call of the film was to ‘eliminate the divisionary, materialistic noise, we have been conditioned to think is true … while discovering, amplifying and aligning with the signal coming from our true, empirical oneness.’

If a brand isn’t able to inspire at that level, it may be time to start thinking about the price of trying to manufacture zeitgeist and how to reduce it. In the globalized world of 2010 there are many zeitgeists, and the challenge is to matter to at least some of them. As we go through a semantic revolution and exit the industrial Age, the marketing challenge is to recognise the autonomy, mastery and purpose of individuals connected are today’s new motivators. Brands are going to be ever-reliant on their integrity to build sustainable business and there are big risks – and a price attached – to trying to second-guess a zeitgeist.

Here’s the brilliant Dan Pink detailing what our motivations are made of.

{ 4 comments }