NaN: people aren’t numbers

I waited the whole semester for a class — with one of the best in Brazil, they said — on consumer behaviour. The great day has come and the big disappointment. After all, the great treated their customers as numbers and metrics and assigned values. As I just hoped he spoke of PEOPLE with needs, desires and dreams. Since the class, I have reflected on the matter, as a communication’s professional and as a consumer, and the conclusion of both the visions: people do not want to be numbered, people want to belong.

Understanding consumer behaviour is more than knowing how many times he uses the coffee you serve, but why he consumes your coffee, it is because it is better than the competitor; if it is more than just a cafe; or if it serves as a tool for acceptance in a group. Even in an individualistic and hedonistic time, the consumer search unconsciously belongs. Belonging to different things that have distinguished the whole — thus forming an army of different equal.

Then, just to confirm my findings, I read in Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity:

A TV commercial shows a crowd of women with a variety of hairstyles and hair colours while the caption comment: ‘All unique; all individual; all choose X’ (X being the advertised brand of hair conditioner). The mass-produced appliance is the tool of individual variety. Identity — ‘unique’ and ‘individual’ — can be carved only in the substance everyone buys and can get hold of only through shopping. You gain independence by surrender.

Finally, I found the Exactitudes’ project, a photographic map showing people differently equal, portrayed since 1996 in different parts of the world, all being different… so that they become equal; all belonging to some kind of behaviour.

People are not numbers.

original in Portuguese: https://goo.gl/nnYbwZ