Naked without our stuff

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NAKED WITHOUT OUR STUFF Christophe Fauconnier, July 6th, 2010

Setting the scene As psychologists and cultural decoders what fascinates us is how people give meaning to their lives as fathers, as friends, as professionals and as consumers. What we learn, working daily with people ‘as potential consumers’ across cultures, and also empathise with, is the fact that our stuff is meaningful to us beyond reason.

Brands and the propositions they bring to the market, serve us to relate to ourselves and the world we live in. These propositions get meaning way beyond the category in which they position themselves. Products serve us as tools to perform in key ‘arenas of human functioning’ and we give meaning to our stuff way beyond the features that they can practically claim.

More and more brands are entering into the existential/spiritual dimensions of consumer’s lives, NAKED WITHOUT OUR STUFF

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and people are loading them with more emotionality, expecting more from them in terms of values and engagement, and demanding brands to join them in their search for purpose and direction. Clear is that people are relating to businesses and brands on a human meaning level and in doing so they expect more from the relationship. This is a new ball game for marketing and the greatest brands have already embraced this wellspring of passion, inspiration and purpose. They have accepted the belief that greater meaning brings greater rewards[i].

Before business and brand cultivators however embark unto this journey to find the best of themselves, to take on a broader role in society, to capture the consumers’ imagination and to infuse people with beliefs of possibility, it is recommendable to apply a new toolkit and a new set of spectacles to uncover the potential emotional connection and meaningfulness between propositions, organizations and people. The tools and lenses of psychotherapy, of storytellers, of cultural decoders are finding their way to the boardroom enabling business leaders and brand cultivators to create ‘businesses and brands’ that matter, to themselves and all the people they touch.

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SOME KEY FACTS • Human kind has the innate ability to relate to the world and create constructs of meaning around objects and concepts.

• Not all ideas and concepts which surround propositions are equally ‘potent’, equally ‘meaningful’ and equally ‘emotionally loaded’.

• We relate to the propositions offered to us every day and place them within ‘frames of relevance’ to comprehend how they can fit into our lives and add to our lives.

• Brand cultivators can cue us to perceive a proposition in a certain way so that we can relate to it in a way that is humanly relevant and culturally meaningful.

• As market and brand cultivators it is our job to place brands and their propositions into ‘frames of reference’ that add value to all the parties and people that surround them.

WHY DO WE GIVE SO MUCH MEANING TO OUR STUFF? Being a consumer allows us to be masters for a while and gives a passport to prove we are somebody (Zeldin, The intimate history of humanity)[ii].

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Innate abilities As human beings, our curse and blessing is to be aware of ourselves, to be able to relate to ourselves, others and the world out there. We realize we exist, and have the deep need to feel that our existence is worth something: we need to feel we live a life worth living.

In reality, the question of what makes our life worth living pops up whenever we enter significant ‘human arenas of performance’ – timeless human spaces that are fundamental to our being, and part of the core story of our species. Those arenas – the need to accept oneself, the desire to be unique and creative, the urge to compete, the striving for independence, and many more, transcend time and place, and will capture the minds of those a 1000 years from now as it captured people’s mind a 1000 years ago. We enter these arenas of significance everyday, at the office or in the bathroom – without consciously knowing. They are the places where we ‘humans’ need to apply our higher thinking abilities to play, compose, compete, and invent solutions to perform.

But this is also where we feel endangered, confronted with the dilemmas and challenges of our existence.

And therefore look for props and tools to help us.

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Dressing up our lives For virtually all of us, our possessions add meaning to our lives. We assimilate them, guard them, exchange them and treasure them.

As existential beings, we are vulnerable and mostly feel naked without our stuff. This is because, if as biological beings we need no story, as human (ie. : existential) beings we cannot live without one. Our stuff tells the story that we want for ourselves, allows us to be somebody. Our stuff enables us to connect to others, our stuff offers us comfort – I could go on.

As Dennis Morris[iii], the biologist, claims it, “philosophy and engineering have not added much to our humanity, but they have allowed our humanity to more clearly manifest itself”. With our imagination, brands and the products they bring to the market help us dress up our lives.

Reality is therefore that consumers are people striving to perform in key domains of human functioning, that in doing so they often feel vulnerable, and that they use their possessions as props to help them be the person they want to be.

Most marketers do not question this existential dimension of consumption, in fact they ignore it.

They seem to forget that as human beings we can conceptualize, categorize, and construct meaning NAKED WITHOUT OUR STUFF

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around ourselves and our stuff, giving them deepseated meaning beyond reason.

More than a soda pop Coca-Cola is a soft drink that wanted to change its taste to a taste that people claimed they preferred and people protested, forcing the Coca- Cola Company to bring back the Classic Coke. The management of the Coca-Cola Company listened.

Reality is ‘a Coke’ is more than a soft drink. It is a human tool to feel positive about the world, a brand that believes a better world is out there even in the worst of times. It is a common tool with extraordinary meaning. A tool that makes people feel connected to others expressing the belief that there is more that unites us than divides us. The brand’s ability to offer uplifting refreshment in a stubbornly optimist manner has made it an icon for positive living. Sometimes this might seem naïve but it is meaningful, consistent and expected from the Coca-Cola brand. Andy Warhol, the popular NY based artist, said : ”The president drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke and just think, you can drink a Coke too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke. All the Cokes are the same and all Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the president knows it, and you know it”.

This popular artist is recognizing something that most marketers fail to see, brands can have meaning and NAKED WITHOUT OUR STUFF

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points of view that matter to people. He realizes that people need and want to believe because it allows them to deal with their vulnerabilities.

More than blank slates In most marketing departments I’ve visited across the world, little time is spent understanding human nature, human emotion and human strivings for meaning and cultural mentalities . The mind, as a blank slate, gets all the focus. The purpose is not to understand and empathize with the mind states of those consumers who are mostly referred to as ‘targets’, these marketers want to own the mind space or at least have a unique position in these passive receiving minds of the consumer. Mainstream marketing and research practices spend little time on deep diving into people’s lives, have difficulty to grasp human dilemmas, and have little knowledge of our innate human nature that steers so much of what we do, and aspire to, today. Leading companies and brand teams are however broadening their scope and applying new lenses to look at their propositions and brands with new toolkits to cultivate their offerings with more human meaningfulness.

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CULTIVATING BRAND MEANINGFULNESS More and more brands are entering into the existential/spiritual dimensions of consumer’s lives, and people are loading them with emotionality, expecting more from them in terms of values and engagement, and demanding brands to join them in their search for purpose and direction. People on the inside of organizations that nurture these brands and the people on the outside of these organizations that use them, are seeking more meaning from the brands they invite into their lives and the ‘best- in-class’ brands are embracing this opportunity. They are broadening their brand scope and increasing their abilities to more meaningfulness.

Brands metaphorically spark and fuel our imaginations in offering imaginative worlds in which certain beliefs are expressed, certain emotions are shared, certain points of view are voiced, and passports to others worlds which are sometimes more meaningful to the user than the reality he or she must face. But no brand, like no man, can be meaningful all the time, to all people and in all arenas of human functioning.

Meaningfulness requires a frame of reference, a need, a tension or an anxiety to be resolved and an emotional loading. All these elements or concepts are not familiar to marketers and therefore need some explaining.

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Human arenas vs. Categories The ‘frame of reference’ for most marketers, when exploring the potential meaningfulness of a proposition or exploring stretches for their brand, is product categories. Although this is an important starting point, it is limiting. It is product driven and drives strongly towards differentiation but often away from relevance. The broader human meaning context is missing. Propositions can get meaning way beyond the category in which they position themselves when we depart from the view that products serve us as tools to perform in key ‘arenas of human functioning’.

What “brand” would Apple be without humankind striving to be creative and unique? What “brand” would Dove be without the desire of humankind for self acceptance and care? What “brand” would Nike be without humankind striving to compete and perform? Coke without our need to connect and share what is common between us?

Each of these brands has understood the arena of human relevance in which they can cultivate a meaningful relation with propositions that have a “symbolic truth”. In each case the brand did not position itself solely within a category, but found the greater role in people’s lives by tapping into human arenas that matter.

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To cultivate brands for more meaningfulness, a first step is discovering (intuitively or analytically) the match between the brand and the “human arena” in which both brand and people can perform. In the study field of ‘leadership’ it is suggested that for every would-be leader, there is an optimal leadership context, for every leadership challenge, there is a perfect candidate. We suggest the same for brands.

For every would-be leadership brand there is a relevant “human arena” in which it can be meaningful and allow people to deal with the complexities of performing in certain arenas of human functioning.

Not all human arenas and human concepts are innately equally ‘potent’ and equally ‘meaningful’. For brands the choice of human arena in which to cultivate can be essential. Chocolate and flowers for example have chosen to compete in the human arena of gifting and regulating relationships between people, and they have shaped their propositions well to serve these human arenas of relevance. Diamonds chose to cultivate themselves around the promise of ‘never ending love’ and they have cultivated great meaning around these stones.

Another client of ours Bet and Win, today called BWin, came to us via their design agency to better understand how it could cultivate a more meaningful proposition. They wanted to know if they should be an internet based betting company or a betting company which has an internet platform. What we did NAKED WITHOUT OUR STUFF

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was to help them understand why people had this deep seated desire to bet and how it served them. It became clear to the client that the subject of gambling combines man’s natural play instinct with his desire to know about his fate and his future and Bwin business really took off when they realized they were competing with the stars. Where previously Bwin was trying to add as many features to their internet gambling platform as possible, they realized that they made the most difference by allowing people to join and be active in the game. Here Bwin’s offering had a truth in the arena of ‘playing with your odds’ and the result was that Bwin allied with the key football clubs in Europe becoming the biggest and fastest growing internet sports betting company in the world.

The fertile human grounds to these and other propositions are deep seated in our minds and point to strivings, thoughts, anxieties that operate and get meaning beyond our awareness, beyond our single lives. The problem to access these latent innate human arenas have been many, but the main reason we believe for not finding the ’human arena of relevance’ for brands and propositions has been the unwillingness to explore beyond the category and the lack of knowledge of our intimate history of our humanity.

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Dilemma vs. Problem An idea whose time has come (Victor Hugo) The biggest difference between a dilemma and a problem is that a “problem” can easily be identified and verbalized, while a dilemma is by nature ambiguous, vague, contextually cued and difficult to express. Organizations or brands do sometimes find their high ground, but then speak about it in a detached manner, intellectualizing and conceptualizing these high grounds loose from context and without self recognition or personal involvement. Human kind might have a common psychology, but people have different lives, different beliefs, values and different strategies to deal with these human or environmental demands. Most of the time these beliefs, values and anxieties function from the shadows of our minds.

Great brands do not only recognize in which human domains they want to help people perform, but also when these domains in our lives matter more. History has shown that we tend to amplify what we think we lack, but we act upon what we assume to be essential to our way of life.[iv] Here culture plays a key role.

Coca-Cola is to my mind the brand that best connects to people’s living conditions across the world, responding to people’s actual dilemmas, in more ways than people can imagine. Even the Coca-Cola NAKED WITHOUT OUR STUFF

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people themselves mostly can’t imagine it. With its message of ‘perfect harmony’ and striving to ‘teach the world to sing’ the brand expressed a message and a belief that mattered at the time when America grew tired of the Vietnam War. It helped shape a mindset which was already present and responded with a view people could relate to. A view that mattered at the time.

This same Coca-Cola message of ‘better possibilities, better us, better moments’ has been repeated during the Argentinean economic crisis when the way of life of Argentineans was in doubt and their society was falling apart, via the campaign ‘for everyone’; in Spain after the recent bombing of the trains in Madrid, Coke responded with the same message. In Thailand society was destabilized due to a military coup and Coke responded with the campaign ‘do it for your king, do it for you country’. In Turkey when the national football team qualified for the first time in the F.I.F.A world cup event, Coke responded by infusing pride and unity into all Turks, standing as one behind their country letting them enjoy their success.

What better time to express your vision of unity and human connection in a stubbornly optimistic manner.

A message that mattered at the time, and a message which was true to the brand.

Great brands don’t just express strong beliefs, they don’t just elicit powerful emotions, they respond to NAKED WITHOUT OUR STUFF

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people’s lives, they recognize when their core beliefs and purpose matters most. These brands don’t just express understanding, they emotionally connect. A good part of culture has been the process by which artists, people with a strong voice, or brands of great influence in today’s world, have been recognised as expressing the feelings of people they have never met, and expressing them in such a manner that it mattered, that it gave people a renewed sense of direction, pride, self worth or belonging. These brands also do not focus their message to argue about their ability to solve a category problem, they focus on dealing with a core anxiety or identity desire for a group of people they want to relate to.

Position vs. engagement platform Know thyself (Aristotle) Key to any marketer or brand owner is a positioning within a category which they can own. The question tends to be ‘how are we different or better than others in the category?” But to function in the bigger world of people, brands will not only need to understand their position, they will need to know how to relate in a relevant and meaningful manner. This will require self reflection on ‘who’ you are as brands, organizations and the people behind the brand. The best way to be meaningful is to bring meaning to what you do and this also applies to brands and organizations. To have the ability to empathize with NAKED WITHOUT OUR STUFF

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others, you first need to empathize with yourself and understand what moves you as a person, professional, organization and as a brand team. This is not easy because most of the time people do not take time to know where they are coming from, they focus on where they are going. Brands need to understand their source of power, their source of identification and the ideas they can represent. The answers to these questions mostly lie in the past and here expectations are mostly set.

Do you expect the same from your banker as from you hairdresser? On some level yes, but for the rest?

The human domain in which brands can cultivate meaningfulness should be known to everyone, the conditions under which these human arenas become more relevant will differ, but the brand still needs to engage in all cases in a way which is familiar and expected, be it with some surprise. Great brands, like great people, embody an archetypal identity which allows people to relate to them in a more intuitive and easy way. I would not limit a brand to engage in only one manner, we don’t do it as people in our daily lives, but there are certain beliefs and values which are best expressed via specific archetypal identity structures. Meaningful relationships have a sense of stability. When people know what to expect from a relationship, trust grows.

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Recently we’ve been working with MTV networks to help give a sense of purpose to their Comedy Channel. To position the channel was easy, ‘we’ve got comedy’, but when they realised they were in the ability to unleash the power of humour’, offer ‘relief through laughter’ and create a sense of ‘camaraderie between friends and foe’, people working on the brand, the organization as a whole, and the clients they were speaking to, got much more engaged with the brand. Important was to establish a platform of engagement for the brand by which it could relate to all its stakeholders. The ‘common jester’ served these purposes well. As a TV channel, they offer people a window to the world by which people can relate to the world and to themselves with more relativity and ease. The jester as an archetype has been useful throughout history to open our eyes to our own foolishness and offering us a new perspective via humour. Comedy is the tool, humour is the source of meaning.

Certain archetypes serve well to express certain values and sharing values are key to deeper engagements. Therefore values and points of view should be consistently expressed, but in a way that people can relate to them. Let me give you an example of Dove, the Unilever personal care brand.

Dove has been campaigning ‘real beauty’ to empathize with women who are constantly pressurized to live up to the high standards of the NAKED WITHOUT OUR STUFF

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beauty industry. Although looking ‘good and vital’ is a deep-seated innate desire of especially women, this campaign managed to truly empathize with women across the world. However in Indonesia, the brand message initially did not resonate. The images of rather round women in the Dove campaign ads we off code for Indonesian women. These Dove women were perceived to be fat and this elicited the emotion of disgust, lack of self respect and antipathy. Instead of Dove changing its values to reach these women Dove found the right context and codes to express the values it stands for in a way these Indonesian women could relate to the Dove invitation. Hair, which is very personal and socially valued in Asia, was a much more relevant carrier to tell the Dove story.

The same message of self acceptance was voiced to Indonesian women via the ‘for them’ more relevant topic of hair.

The Unique selling argument vs. the symbolic product truth Traditional marketing thinking tries to teach and win arguments with ‘boasts’ like “whiter, brighter, cleaner, stronger, fitter etc”. Watch any commercial on American TV and you’ll see these words come up in the first three seconds, hammered remorselessly into your brain. But what’s happened now is everybody’s doing it[v]. In their battle to win the debate, they very often land up losing themselves in the process.

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Products can serve us as tools to perform in key ‘arenas of human functioning’ and we give meaning to our stuff way beyond the features that they can practically claim. We love to be explicit about features or benefits but to be more meaningful, propositions need a truth which can only be metaphorically expressed in a symbolic manner.

Arguments or promises which are comprehensible in terms of peoples existing knowledge and emotional preoccupations carry more conviction for they are tools for creative people, a drink that gives you wings, the ultimate driving machine, happiness in a bottle, a third home etc.

Meaningful branding takes something which can be common and improve upon it in ways that make it more valuable and meaningful. Scott Bedbury[vi], the ex-Chief marketing officer of Nike and Starbucks, writes , “the sneaker was just a sneaker, in every way pedestrian, until Phil Knight and Nike came along and connected the aspirational and inspirational rewards of sports and fitness with world-class innovative product performance like that of the Nike Air Shoe.

Nike could have spent millions preaching the value of encapsulated gas trapped within a thin, pliable membrane in the midsole of a shoe, encased by a molded foot frame and attached to a dynamic fit system. Instead, it not only simply showed the product but also communicated on a deeper, more NAKED WITHOUT OUR STUFF

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inspirational level what the product meant within the wider world of sports and fitness”. Products are no more than artifacts around which people have meaningful experiences and their meaning must be found in people’s lives. We give meaning because we need to give them meaning hence little “products truths” are amplified and exaggerated because we need to believe that more is possible. These metaphoric little truths help us express the way we feel about or view a particular aspect of our lives and add to our story as people, a social group or a nation.

Brands with meaningfulness are living concepts that we hold in our minds.

When, like the great philosophers-, people as consumers are unknowingly searching for the solutions to the first and last questions: “Who do I belong to?”, “who am I?”, “who can I be”,etc., they do so on the basis of animistic thinking[vii]. As adults we have the ability to both rational and animistic thinking, also referred to as pre-literate, emotional or even child-like thinking. As consumers we are still allowed to apply both ways of thinking. Animistic thinking does not require abstract understanding, it requires personal understanding. In this mode of thinking people only take up what personally speaks to them, their deep seated anxieties, emotions and desires. There is no sharp line drawn between the living and dead things, and the latter too, like the Coca Cola happiness factory, can come to life.

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Animistic thinking is self –centered, me in relation to the world. So consumers, in this mode of thinking want to talk and hear about the things which are unknowingly significant to them. They take up what is meaningful for them and what supports their vulnerabilities. Yes, consumers can parrot easily what authorities, brands or media, tell them, but that does not mean they own it or embrace it. Factual knowledge profits the total personality only then it is turned into “personal” knowledge. Without the belief in some magic in our lives, it is difficult to meet the rigors it demands from us. Most unique selling arguments speak to our rational faculties, but when an idea doesn’t have emotional significance for us which is personal, we’re are less likely to store it.

MEANINGFULNESS IS A HOT AFFAIR A new set of questions and a broader frame of reference cannot do the job alone to cultivate more meaningful brands. Merely imagining someone else’s situation, describing it and objectifying it can give you insight, but it is not meaningful. We need also a new set of tools and practices, which allow us to get to those more deep seated meanings. We will have to embrace human nature and its innate relating motions, we will have to understand identity desire and cultural anxieties which load human domains with intensity, we will need to dig deep to understand archetypal structures for relating to the world and we with need to embrace the language of our fore NAKED WITHOUT OUR STUFF

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fathers, which was more holistic and intuitive. In a next article we will spend more time on these topics.

Most of all, to be meaningful requires relevance and emotional significance. Understanding and imagining can be a cold affair, not unlike understanding how airplanes fly. We however carry the firm belief that meaningfulness starts with empathy and empathy requires emotional connection. When we react to seeing someone display emotion and construct an advanced understanding of the other’s situation, this process indeed involves a great deal of cognition. But the emotional connection comes first; understanding and imagination follow.

Without emotional connection sincerity and authentic beliefs are difficult. It is hard to make others feel for your brand if the brand is not first fed with feeling. Brands become meaningful when others can feel the emotions the cultivators put into them and they can experience this emotion in a ‘for them’ relevant manner. To tap into the deep-seated desires, anxieties and needs of others, marketers will have to become more aware of themselves, their own set of unconscious assumptions which are well hidden from them.

Reality is that people working on brands are mostly not aware of the emotional connection they have with their brand, how they relate to it, what meaning it brings to their lives. They are focused on the product, NAKED WITHOUT OUR STUFF

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the category in which the product has to perform, the argument the brand must own and the problem the product must solve. These are not unimportant concerns, but they require no emotional connection, no empathy and cultivate no relationship.

Marketers are educated to detach. They like to decompose, objectify, plot and gather facts. They confuse describing the consumer with understanding him or empathizing with him. When recognizing emotions, they speak about it in a detached manner intellectualizing and conceptualizing these emotions loose from context and without self recognition. I for one have been part of many such sessions and I very often find myself doing the same. This is because as most human beings marketing managers spend too little time diving into the depth of what matters in their own lives. Creating empathy with consumers starts with accepting to engage into empathy with the self. Which, from a certain viewpoint, makes the journey more difficult, but even more interesting.

As market and brand cultivators it is our job to place brands and their propositions into ‘frames of reference’ that add value to all the parties and people that surround them. The tools and lenses of psychotherapy, of storytellers, of cultural decoders are finding their way to the boardroom enabling business leaders and brand cultivators to create

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‘businesses and brands’ that matter, to themselves and all the people they touch.

Notes [i] Abigail Posner (2007), Brand management and its greater purpose, (Admap 25-11-2007 p.21) [ii] Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity, Vintage 1998 [iii] Dennis is….Morr [iv] How art made the world, BBC 2005 documentary [v] Love marks article see Web [vi] ScottBedburry, a new brand world, Pengiun Books2002, page 14 [vii] Bruno Bettelheim; The uses of enchantment, Vintage books, 1989, p.53

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