I’m indebted to Dr Anne-Marie McEwan for pointing me towards this video as a reminder that the capacity of human beings to create distinctive and compelling cultures and identities is limitless and as a powerful and beautiful illustration of what authentic expressions of identity at their source are about.
There’s a point in here for marketers I think, in that transactional marketing has dulled the senses and sliced many of the ties that bind people enduringly to cultures they can connect with.
Attention fatigue, the curse for marketeers today comes, to at least some degree, from the fact that much of the marketing output being generated by brands does very little to change the nature of the recipient or move them to want to belong to something as part of a story or a relationship. So the ennui has set in.
This is the dimension that art and the creativity of human expression provides, and that social media can communicate and curate.
Visceral connections like this, around the identity, culture and meaning of a connected community, show that points of difference have, and always will be, something it’s possible to create to infinity, in constantly compelling ways. At a very primal level it’s in all of our DNA to do it.
I think social media enables co-creation to produce imaginative ways of doing things that reinforce meaning, belonging and buy-in.
Isn’t it time to take a new leaf out of an old book? How about we go back to the source of what humans do best in groups by developing community identities and connections we can be moved by.
As a means of engendering human and social capital value in today’s world it still has mileage and now, maybe, more so than ever. Over and above product, it’s the cultures we create that get us remembered.
As a sidenote, the interruption ads at the bottom of the video are fairly hilarious. They make the same point, in their own way.
