Imagine if your visiting card said - Senior Producer. Or National Producer. Or Chief Producing Officer. Or Creative Producer. Or Art Producer. Or Market Research Producer.The very thought is appalling!! And yet in the marketing/communication game of us vs them,we call the people who buy stuff/ experiences/ grocery/ dreams from us - 'consumers'.
Consumers. Its so inhuman. So degrading. So wrong. So incomplete!
Then is an entire lexicon which we have created- consumer insight, consumer behaviour, consumer research, consumer loyalty...And the edifice of our thoughts, strategies and communication is built on it!
I feel nomenclatures shape our world/ worldview. Seemingly innocuous labelling affects perceptions, thoughts and behaviours...But stereotyping simplifies. And therefore as marketers and communicators, its easy to maintain the divide. Us and them. Producers( of products and communication) and consumers.
Implicit are the rules...
1. They are a target audience
2. We make the rules.
3. We are smarter than them
4. They are stationary targets
5. They are waiting for our products and communication
6. We learn about them. They do not learn about us.
7. They can be loyal to us, if only we tried harder.
8. They can always be grouped in clusters to suit our mass media weaponry.
9. We can change the packaging of our products. And they will fall for them.
10. They have an insatiable appetite for hype, half-truths and bull-shit.
11. If you pray hard. The remote will disappear! Or at least they won't use them that often
12. They love the sound of our voice...
But everyone knows...The rules have long changed/ are changing(depends on where you are on the marketing map).
1. We are the new target. Of disloyalty. Of cynicism. Of derision.
2. They are making most of the rules.
3. They are much smarter than us. They didn't even give us time to realise this:-)
4. They are moving fast. We are the targets
5. They are having fun with change and technology. And are saying to us - "Get a life".
6. They have learnt all our tricks. They can now even make a super bowl ad for $12!!
7. Hype and half-truths never gets loyalty. They are loyal to their families and communities and passions not to bars of soap and toilet paper! Not even to their companies(most of the time)
8. They are as fragmented as shards of broken glass
9. They are saying to us - "When will you change the packaging of your thoughts?"
10. They say to us - "Boy, when will you ever get it. Why are you guys so dumb?"
11. Who needs the remote to escape your ads...We don't watch TV. We watch TiVO.We get RSS feeds
12. They don't give a f*** to what we have to say(mostly)!!
In this open source bazaar of conversations, of people-generated-content, a world with zero tolerance for hype and falsehood, we must find a new word for 'Consumer'. They are exactly like us. They are Us. We are them. People who work during the day and surf at night:-) People with families and stress, kids and budgets.
They are not on this earth to consume. They want authenticity. They want trust. They want to protect the earth and keep it green. They want to laugh and joke. Their loyalties can never be bought with a card. Yes they want discounts;they want 'beautiful images' but that doesn't define them.
They read many of the articles on 'how to capture eye-balls', how to capture a share of the target audience. And then they trust us even less. They shrug their shoulders. Because we don't get it! Even now.
So if they are us. Should we call this bazaar conversation P2P(people-to-people), Friemily(Friend and Family), UnI(You and I)...They aren't the best nomenclature. But at least they are better than 'Consumers'!
2007 resolution. As far as possible, avoid the use of this word/ mind-set:-)
Picture courtesy: Gettyimages
11 comments:
u get tivo in bby??
There is a certain 'objectivity' in the term consumer, no? We need to get away from ourselves, often, to understand ourselves better. So what should we call them/us? 'Emoticons'?
will get soon...hopefully
i feel if we don't change the lens(the language, the attitude, the conversational lens), our understandig will be blurred no matter how much we distance in the guise of objectivity!
You might be right. We need to find an interesting, evocative, creative new term for, the lack of a better word, 'emoticons'.
sorry, forgot to tell - i like emoticon:-)
i feel words create rigid territories, regimes in the mind! and then its bloody difficult to think outside of them...
like suits( defined uninspiring territory), creatives(defined role, skills), planners( which often sets them as non-doers)...okay but thats the other debate which we just entered and am done for the moment:-)
emoticons - why not?
Why not emoticons? Because the meaning oif emoticon has already been usurped by something else, no? Besides, can you imagine anyone saying 'who is our emoticon?', 'the emoticon we are talking to is...', 'the emoticon is looking to buy security', uh-uh! Sounds very odd. Very. Not speaking of consumers, do we even use the word 'consumer' that often? Does it matter? Or are we just jerking off over something that's really not of any consequence? I wonder what blaiq has to say about this? Blaiq?
Manish - I don't think we'll have PVRs or TIVO in the immediate future here in India, well at least in New Delhi while we're just starting to deal with CAS
okay uber...lemme clarify...i liked the space of emoticon.not the word. agree. its been taken/ usurped...
i dont think we/i are jerking off...systemmic changes are the most ignored and most times the most important. and the nomenclature architecture is important. i think so...
fink- maybe you are right. India will lag on the marketing/ technology map. but the point wasn't about technology. it is about the psychology behind our marketing! there is a generational gap there...
I don't think it's a pointless debate. I also think some situations merit the changing of terminology (A successful example is the deliberate changing of the word homosexual to gay - an ongoing example is the attempted rebranding along similar lines of atheists in the US as brights.)
I am not sure consumer is a terminology that needs to be changed - or even if it does, I wonder if we will make headway. What needs change, in my opinion, is the stance that they are consumers, and we are on the other side. My biggest grouse about what we do is this. And in working with creatives in my teams the only point I made was that 'they' are us - write an ad as if you might be the one waking tomorrow morning and reading it.
Honestly I think that's the only change required. I don't think the consumer word is ridden with so much baggage that it cannot accomodate that.
blaiq...you are right ...i just repackeged the post into an article for agencyfaqs!
and talked about the needless us vs theminess...in case anyone is interested, can mail the pre-print edition:-)
cheers
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