Question
What is the most important trend that will impact the marketing industry in the next few years?
Answer
Increasing numbers of customers starting to think for themselves.
The technology is a sideshow that will help both those who want to stick to traditional ideas and those who want to challenge them.
The real story is that traditional marketing has turned human beings into blithering idiots, to the point where their capacity as economic producers is being diminished sharply. I call this the "Gollum Effect."
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/0...
The house of cards is about to collapse, and the road to this particular Idiocracy style hell is paved with consumer-debt IOUs. When marketing reduces people to such stupidity that they can't even create the wealth needed to buy the things being sold, you've got a system ready to collapse on itself. We're in a death spiral of increasingly stupid people producing, as producers, increasingly useless and dehumanizing products that only they are stupid enough to buy, thereby increasing their stupidity further.
The first battle was the subprime crisis, and while you might blame the bankers for the evil, you cannot deny that the borrowers made stupid decisions. They were made stupid by traditional marketing. Including overall, collusive marketing and PR of the entirely stupid idea that is the standard American Dream: a script that revolves around owning a home. It is the selling of this baseline script to everybody that sustains sales of everything else. The 30-year old mortgage is the big step into indentured servitude that traps consumers inside the great marketing prison.
The road to recovery begins with the reclamation of full humanity. And no, this has nothing to do with bullshit rhetoric about "authenticity" from the Marketing 2.0 crowd.
It has to do with wresting true power over consumption. Not declawed lip-service "empowerment" by marketers that has no capacity to maim or kill products/services, but the sort of power that can only be won by consumers starting to think for themselves and disagreeing with marketers in ways that the marketers may not be able to spin their way out of.
So I don't mean disagreeing in bubblegum ways in "communities" sponsored by the marketers, from which "troublemakers" can be shut out for "bad behavior." Can you imagine McDonald's allowing Morgan "Supersize Me" Spurlock to win enough points to become the top opinion leader on an online community sponsored by McDonald's?
No, I mean independent platforms for consumer rebellion and dissent, where the consumers rule and the marketers must participate as supplicants. The marketer-sponsored forums can at best serve as a customer-service first-response forum. They can serve as true communities only when the market has judged that the product/service is a fundamentally good one rather than a Gollumizing one.
I also don't mean BBB 2.0, Consumer Reports 2.0 and other such mostly ineffectual and vaguely socialist/communist ideas. Those might at best help police marketer behavior at the level of legality, not morality. And they're too reactive and uncreative: they leave control of the production agenda to the marketers and their comrades-in-arms, over-friendly media types.
I mean consumers who think for themselves and invent patterns of intentional consumption that marketers must either satisfy or be shut out of. Consumers who start by making demands concerning the very patterns of production. It isn't the communist idea of fighting over the means of production (history has proved that every possible owner is equally bad), but a fight over the right to question what is being produced.
The locavore/organic/cruelty-free food movements are early and weak examples. The food industry is trying hard to subvert their agendas, but it's at least an actual fight based on recognition of bigger conflicting intentions. Music and news media are other domains where this takeover is happening. Education will be next.
There is an emerging hi-tech battleground that will enable this war: the Web of Intent.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/0...
But make no mistake, this will amplify the conflict, not resolve it. Because the fundamental argument is not about whether the technology is good enough to satisfy intentions in deeply personalized and customized ways (that will soon happen), but whose intentions are being satisfied.
That's a human question, not a technology question. Both sides will deploy the Weapons of Mass Intention in their favor.
Marketers will fight to build the ultimate personalized, customized gilded cage for each individual, and consumers will fight to take back control of their very humanity, and resist being Gollumized into citizens of a true Idiocracy.
And no, this is not a left vs. right battle or a left+right vs. libertarian battle. This is not some dull echo of class struggles or the tired old individuals vs. groups debate that libertarians love. This is a more primal kind of basic power struggle over the right to free thought.
This is going to end up as a fight between those who want to think for themselves, and those who want to take over the thinking of others with some mass-marketed ideology or the other. Remember, the one thing that the left, right and libertarian ideologies have in common is that each rose to power through traditional marketing, that amplified their reach to take over minds with far too little resistance.
That era of marketing-driven intellectual hegemonies is now over.
Even this answer, which in a different era, might have grown strong in safety and traveled far too far and wide without effective challenge, now sits in a forum where it can be torn apart at birth if it is a bad one, before it can spread too much and do damage.
If Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and Karl Marx had started their movements on Quora instead of in the age of mass media, they might have each received 1000 upvotes, but they'd have been beaten to death and resurrected in a more useful form in infancy. That's what wars of ideas will look like in the future. Because everybody gets automatic distribution to half of humanity, nobody has privileged access to mass influence. There are no printing-press-ownership chokepoints in the idea economy anymore.
It is a fight that will determine whether what Clay Shirky calls the "cognitive surplus" of the world will actually be unleashed, or whether humans will remain trapped as sub-humans in prisons constructed by others, out of ideas that are guarded in vaults beyond the reach of debate.
I should probably rewrite this answer as a blog post.
The technology is a sideshow that will help both those who want to stick to traditional ideas and those who want to challenge them.
The real story is that traditional marketing has turned human beings into blithering idiots, to the point where their capacity as economic producers is being diminished sharply. I call this the "Gollum Effect."
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/0...
The house of cards is about to collapse, and the road to this particular Idiocracy style hell is paved with consumer-debt IOUs. When marketing reduces people to such stupidity that they can't even create the wealth needed to buy the things being sold, you've got a system ready to collapse on itself. We're in a death spiral of increasingly stupid people producing, as producers, increasingly useless and dehumanizing products that only they are stupid enough to buy, thereby increasing their stupidity further.
The first battle was the subprime crisis, and while you might blame the bankers for the evil, you cannot deny that the borrowers made stupid decisions. They were made stupid by traditional marketing. Including overall, collusive marketing and PR of the entirely stupid idea that is the standard American Dream: a script that revolves around owning a home. It is the selling of this baseline script to everybody that sustains sales of everything else. The 30-year old mortgage is the big step into indentured servitude that traps consumers inside the great marketing prison.
The road to recovery begins with the reclamation of full humanity. And no, this has nothing to do with bullshit rhetoric about "authenticity" from the Marketing 2.0 crowd.
It has to do with wresting true power over consumption. Not declawed lip-service "empowerment" by marketers that has no capacity to maim or kill products/services, but the sort of power that can only be won by consumers starting to think for themselves and disagreeing with marketers in ways that the marketers may not be able to spin their way out of.
So I don't mean disagreeing in bubblegum ways in "communities" sponsored by the marketers, from which "troublemakers" can be shut out for "bad behavior." Can you imagine McDonald's allowing Morgan "Supersize Me" Spurlock to win enough points to become the top opinion leader on an online community sponsored by McDonald's?
No, I mean independent platforms for consumer rebellion and dissent, where the consumers rule and the marketers must participate as supplicants. The marketer-sponsored forums can at best serve as a customer-service first-response forum. They can serve as true communities only when the market has judged that the product/service is a fundamentally good one rather than a Gollumizing one.
I also don't mean BBB 2.0, Consumer Reports 2.0 and other such mostly ineffectual and vaguely socialist/communist ideas. Those might at best help police marketer behavior at the level of legality, not morality. And they're too reactive and uncreative: they leave control of the production agenda to the marketers and their comrades-in-arms, over-friendly media types.
I mean consumers who think for themselves and invent patterns of intentional consumption that marketers must either satisfy or be shut out of. Consumers who start by making demands concerning the very patterns of production. It isn't the communist idea of fighting over the means of production (history has proved that every possible owner is equally bad), but a fight over the right to question what is being produced.
The locavore/organic/cruelty-free food movements are early and weak examples. The food industry is trying hard to subvert their agendas, but it's at least an actual fight based on recognition of bigger conflicting intentions. Music and news media are other domains where this takeover is happening. Education will be next.
There is an emerging hi-tech battleground that will enable this war: the Web of Intent.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/0...
But make no mistake, this will amplify the conflict, not resolve it. Because the fundamental argument is not about whether the technology is good enough to satisfy intentions in deeply personalized and customized ways (that will soon happen), but whose intentions are being satisfied.
That's a human question, not a technology question. Both sides will deploy the Weapons of Mass Intention in their favor.
Marketers will fight to build the ultimate personalized, customized gilded cage for each individual, and consumers will fight to take back control of their very humanity, and resist being Gollumized into citizens of a true Idiocracy.
And no, this is not a left vs. right battle or a left+right vs. libertarian battle. This is not some dull echo of class struggles or the tired old individuals vs. groups debate that libertarians love. This is a more primal kind of basic power struggle over the right to free thought.
This is going to end up as a fight between those who want to think for themselves, and those who want to take over the thinking of others with some mass-marketed ideology or the other. Remember, the one thing that the left, right and libertarian ideologies have in common is that each rose to power through traditional marketing, that amplified their reach to take over minds with far too little resistance.
That era of marketing-driven intellectual hegemonies is now over.
Even this answer, which in a different era, might have grown strong in safety and traveled far too far and wide without effective challenge, now sits in a forum where it can be torn apart at birth if it is a bad one, before it can spread too much and do damage.
If Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and Karl Marx had started their movements on Quora instead of in the age of mass media, they might have each received 1000 upvotes, but they'd have been beaten to death and resurrected in a more useful form in infancy. That's what wars of ideas will look like in the future. Because everybody gets automatic distribution to half of humanity, nobody has privileged access to mass influence. There are no printing-press-ownership chokepoints in the idea economy anymore.
It is a fight that will determine whether what Clay Shirky calls the "cognitive surplus" of the world will actually be unleashed, or whether humans will remain trapped as sub-humans in prisons constructed by others, out of ideas that are guarded in vaults beyond the reach of debate.
I should probably rewrite this answer as a blog post.