Consumers are too “Woke” for this superficial branding thing, what now?
Brands competing for attention
This new age marketing phase is where brands need to compete with consumers for relevance and attention.
Marketing is now a professional skill amongst non-marketing professionals.
I believe that man has entered a fourth cultural phase: the Age of Marketing, where everyone and everything communicates with a marketing filter, mimicking brands and jumping up on their stages.
Where once, marketing was a skill reserved for a few professionals
Consumers now tailor their identities in a way they never could, changing themselves with a filter, baking fiction into their timelines the ego (Facebook), the id (Twitter), and the superego (Instagram), the reflections of things and not the things themselves. On LinkedIn, they become the person everyone wants to employ.
They create brand names, logos, photos, language, all giving off their own social semiotic code. They hire third parties to reputation manage and mini-teams of PR entrepreneurs to brand their identities online.
“The maker generation”, there is a whole generation of entrepreneurial talent who market to make a living with readily accessible stories and products for all to see online.
As marketing experts, these Marketing Age consumers understand the game brands play and are willing participants in the fiction.
Technology is relentless
Technology is hosting and, arguably, creating a hyperconscious state of self.
Once confined to the living room, on the bookshelf was where people were judged by how interesting they were, where they had travelled, what they had read.
Now the living room is “on screen” to millions of people who can see and judge what people stand for and what they think about the world.
The UK takes 35 million selfies a month, “creating an image of you for the world”.
Consumers are Woke (Super Conscious State)
As marketing experts, these Marketing Age consumers understand the game brands play and are willing participants in the fiction.
As David Ogilvy quite rightly said, “the consumer is not a moron. She is your wife. Don’t insult her intelligence”
I believe that while people are sophisticated and get the game, they are also willing participants in it, accepting the copy world; comfortable with this permeable fourth wall, willing to adopt, to suspend reality. In the same way, people get that reality TV is not real but still enjoy the entertainment, the same is true in marketing.
