What’s Wrong With Marketing?
The suicide rate in the United States has risen to the 10th leading cause of death, and it is still climbing. In North Dakota, it has gone up something like 57% in the past decade. You might be expected to ask me, what does this have to do with marketing? Unfortunately everything, because theorists think suicide is a disease of civilization, of people whose other needs on Maslow’s hierarchy have already been met. In earlier times, people struggled to stay alive. Hunters and herdsmen didn’t commit suicide. Doctors and engineers do.
Often when someone does commit suicide, those closest to them say “we had no idea he/she was depressed.” Not to claim any special expertise in this realm, I’d venture a guess that the reason for most suicides resides in a lack of human connection, a feeling of isolation.
Here’s where marketing may have a responsibility. Not only does marketing often present images of a glorified, unattainable life, especially through advertising and social media, but through the last decade of big data and the approach of AI robots, it has succeeded in atomizing people further and further into individual data points rather than connecting them into communities.
On some level, perhaps even unconsciously, people know this and are beginning to resist, using everything from ad blockers to cord cutting, to forming communities around niche-y direct to consumer brands like Warby Parker and TV shows like Game of Thrones, to joining Facebook groups and showing up at 12-Step meetings.
The more we atomize and dehumanize customers, the more we isolate them. And that’s not what human beings want and need. I’ve been doing a bit of research into anti-aging and longevity (for obvious reasons), and I’ve learned that what human beings need most is a sense of connectedness and community. That’s present in all the Blue Zones, places where high percentages of the population live to be centenarians. Apparently, that need is so deep that even people who don’t actually commit suicide can commit a kind of para-suicide, which means they can eat poorly, drink too much, become addicted to drugs, or live recklessly as if they wouldn’t be missed if they died.
In marketing, we used to know that brand loyalty came from a sense of connectedness to something (Starbucks’ “3rd Place” campaign and Apple’s tight communities), but when we rely purely on data and perceive individuals only as atomized units to be targeted through artificial intelligence, we are overlooking important customer insights. It will be a long time before AI can correctly predict which of your prospects would be yours forever in response to community-based marketing outreach.
In the mean time, I’d like to recommend that we temper our enthusiasm for or fear of AI and data, and remember that in marketing we are dealing with human beings, and that even if you are selling to the CEO, changes are (s)he still puts her pants on one leg at a time.
