Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

Strategies for Surviving and Thriving in Challenging Times

Strategic Action #4 for Surviving and Thriving:

Connect With the Zeitgeist (Part 6)

Over the nearly four years I’ve maintained this blog I’ve talked about the psychological center of gravity hypothesis (PCG) several times. (Type “PCG” into the search box in the left column to get a listing of all references to the PCG in this blog.)

The PCG hypothesis holds that people within five years of the adult median age have a disproportionate influence on the zeitgeist. With today’s adult median age pegged at 47, the bookend years of the current PCG are 42 and 52.

For a very long time the American culture was described as a youth culture. Indeed, many in the marketing community continue projecting in their work a belief that youth still propels the wheels of consumer commerce.

To the degree that youth remains a factor in setting the trends and styles in the marketplace, it does so with a decidedly middle aged bent. It is as though members of so-called Generation Y - also often called “Millennials” - jumped into a midlife psychosocial milieu as they morphed from tweenage to teenage.

Millennials are generally regarded as those born between 1981 and 2000.

Though virtually always unconsciously so, consumer trend researchers and analysts widely describe Millennials in terms traditionally used by adult development psychologists to describe behavioral attributes of people in midlife.

Descriptions of Millennials in a 2006 USA article bear out that:

•61% of 13- to 25-year-olds feel personally responsible for making a difference in the world, suggests a survey of 1,800 young people to be released today. It says 81% have volunteered in the past year; 69% consider a company's social and environmental commitment when deciding where to shop, and 83% will trust a company more if it is socially/environmentally responsible. Two Boston-based companies, Cone Inc. and AMP Insights — suggests these millennials are "the most socially conscious consumers to date."

•Young people want to help their country by working for the government, suggests another study by the international consulting firm Universum Communications.

•Two-thirds of college freshmen (66%) believe it's essential or very important to help others in difficulty, suggests a survey of 263,710 students at 385 U.S. colleges and universities. The 2005 report, by the Higher Education Research Institute found feelings of social and civic responsibility among entering freshmen at the highest level in 25 years.

Those descriptions hardly conform to stereotypical images of youth as consumed by self-entered aspirations and behavior. “Giving back” has long been regarded as more characteristic of people in midlife and beyond. It seems that many Millennials project a disposition to “give back” before they have gotten.

According to the testimony of many researchers who study what is arguably the most coddled generation in history -  Millennials project in their jobs to an unusual degree for the young the confidence of seasoned career veterans that transcends the characteristic cockiness of youth. There, and in life in general, they have been reported as reflecting optimism that is grounded less in the fantasies of the young than in practical assessments of the world such as middle aged adults are more likely to have.

Millennials, researchers who study them tell us, have a strong disposition toward promoting the common good. They operate with perhaps the most inclusive worldview of any generation - young or old - in history. According to developmental theorists such Abraham Maslow and Erik Erikson, the worldviews of the young tend to be exclusionary and peer-focused. You are either IN or OUT when you are young. It is people who are at higher levels of personal development that are likelier to reflect a more inclusionary worldview. Except Millennials widely reflect such a disposition today.

Millennials also appear to generally reflect less antagonism toward their parents’ generation than seen among boomers and Generation X in their youth. This is in line with predictions by Millennials Rising authors Neil Howe and Bill Strauss. In 1997 they said that Millennial kids would “enter their teens looking and behaving better than any in decades....This generation will build a reputation for meeting and beating adult expectations.”

Howe, Strauss and others attribute Millennials’ worldviews and behavior to such events as an age of more attentive parents, the Internet and other technologies, and 9/11 among other obvious events. However, I believe that biggest single factor influencing Millennials' worldviews and behavior is the zeitgeist which has its roots in the worldviews of middle aged and older people.

The U.S. is no longer a youth-dominated society. With adults 40 and older outnumbering 16-39-year-olds by 137 million to 93 million, it could be no other way than that the zeitgeist is a bit hoary and reflects the seasoned outlook of the New Adult Majority.

The practical, take-away conclusion from this is that even marketers who work exclusively in youth and young adult markets should take time to understand the worldviews and behavior of people in the current PCG because they are the source of many of the influences shaping the behavior of Millennials.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Strategies for Surviving and Thriving in Challenging Times

Strategic Action #4 for Surviving and Thriving:
Connect With the Zeitgeist (Part 5)

It’s 1921 in London. Everyone is talking about the new strange behavior of blue tits. All of a sudden the azure blue crowned scourge of aphids has taken to prying off paper tops from milk bottles waiting to be taken in from stoops all across the city. They then sip the milk down as far as their short beaks permit before moving on to the next bottle.

Soon, blue tits across the entire country are doing the same. Within months,  all over Europe blue tits follow suit. The wave of behavioral change among blue tits has happened so quickly that ornithologists are flummoxed.  They say not enough time has passed to attribute this new blue tit behavior to imitation.

Years later, British biologist Rupert Sheldrake thinks he as the answer to the mystery: the blue tits were influenced by information emanating from the morphic field to which they are connected. According to Sheldrake, a morphic field is a reservoir of  memories collectively shared by a community of organisms that inform its members how to carry out various tasks.

A morphic field is somewhat equivalent to Carl Jung’s collective unconscious. In Jungian thought, some action that you take that you attribute to your “instincts” may actually be rooted in the reservoir of collective memories formed by the experiences of your fellow humans over many centuries or millennia reaching back to the most ancient times of life on earth.

A cousin idea of Jung’s collective unconscious is French social theorist Émile Durkheim’s collective conscious. He used the term in referring to the shared beliefs and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society. There is more intentional participation in the collective conscious than in the Jungian collective unconscious.

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell tried to reduce sudden shifts in mass behavior to the intentional behavior of Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen. However, Gladwell’s rationally grounded explanations socially pervasive behavior have not only been challenged by many scientists, they do not take into account the je ne sais quoi - a certain inexplicable something - that enables the Gladwellian triad of influencers to get the ball rolling toward a tipping point.

Based on frequent polling of my audiences The Tipping Point has been highly popular among marketers. However, as much as marketers might wish otherwise, it fails to acknowledge the uncertainties and discontinuities that are just as much present in human behavior as they are in the behavior of electrons and photons.

The truth that consumer researchers and marketers continue to ignore is that, some aspects of customer behavior are unlikely to ever be accounted for in a fashion that can satisfy the rigors demands of scientific analysis and lead to constant predictability.  This indeed must be the case; otherwise that which we call free is just an illusion.

Einstein famously observed, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”  What one of history’s greatest analytical, rational minds was saying is that some truths transcend rational explanation.

In the end, the zeitgeist of an era resists quantification. How can any of us know what unsensed forces  bear on our outlooks and behavior? But whatever their foundation, and how ever they resist rational explanation, the unconscious influences of zeitgeist are real -- unconscious being the key word here.

Neuroscientists tell us that 95 percent of the mental activity involved in forming our perceptions, thinking and ultimately our decisions occurs outside the realms of consciousness. In those consciously inaccessible zones, the zeitgeist subtly colors our worldview.

I have written quite a lot over time in this space about unconscious influences on marketplace. Some postings have dealt with what I call the psychological center of gravity hypothesis. You can read more about the PCG Hypothesis at here, here and here.

The point worthy of stressing here, is that companies most likely to thrive and survive in then challenging times we face will be those that either intuitively or intentionally connect the dots between the zeitgeist, Jung’s collective unconscious, Durkheim’s collective conscious or Sheldrake’s morphic fields.

Next: How Millennials reflect the influence of the zeitgeist 

Strategic Action #4 for Surviving and Thriving:
Connect With the Zeitgeist (Part 5)

Strategic Action #4 for Surviving and Thriving:
Connect With the Zeitgeist (Part 5)

Strategies for Surviving and Thriving in Challenging Times

Strategic Action #4 for Surviving and Thriving:
Connect With the Zeitgeist (Part 4)

The most influential idea in Western culture idea is that at the roots of our individual existence we are independent souls with vast powers of self-determination. This is so deeply engrained in our culture that most of us find it hard to embrace the idea that we are more completely defined by our relationships than by the properties of the person we see in the mirror each morning.

The idea of our individual separateness grew from the ancient Greek mind. But with it came was an existential conundrum: how is the three dimensional material world connected to the immaterial world of the mind and soul? Several millennia after Aristotle, French philosopher Rene Descartes tried to resolve this question. He said the material self and the immaterial self have separate existences. In so saying, Descartes launched the modern existential debates between the science and religion.

A little later, Isaac Newton developed his conception of the universe as a clockwork mechanism in which the motions of all of its parts are fully predictable. Social philosophers, attracted by this mechanistic view of the cosmos, extended its reach into the murky realms of human behavior. With enough information in hand, they thought, the behavior of people is as predictable as the behavior of planets.

Psychology - once called social physics - and economics - were offspring of Newtonian science. Chronically frustrated by failed predictions of human behavior, psychologists have been accused of physics envy. Economists have a dismal record for accuracy that would not be acceptable in any other field of study outside of psychology.

Nearly totally missing in deliberations among psychologists and economists (and let us add marketers) are reflections on the role of the zeitgeist in how we humans behave.

The closest that marketers usually come to considering the zeitgeist is turning testimonies from surveys, interviews and focus groups into “trend statements.”

Ignoring the zeitgeist’s influence on consumer behavior is like ignoring the weather’s influence on what people wear or do to amuse themselves in the outdoors.

Cognitive scientists tell us that 95 percent of the mental activity that underlies our perceptions, thoughts and decisions occurs outside the realm of consciousness. Thus when researchers probe the contents of consumers’ minds in surveys, interviews and focus groups they are focusing on the meager five percent of mental activity that shapes consumer behavior.

Interestingly, many of the great marketing stories have not unfolded from research. The uncanny intuitive competence of some bright light in a company or on a marketing team often lies behind the text book success of a campaign, product or even an entire company. Case in point: Nike founder Phil Knight made no secret of his contempt for consumer researchers as he built his leviathan company.

For a long time, Nike’s consumer research was conducted by one person in the company who went out in the field to talk to footwear customers at athletic events. Nothing formal: conversations instead of interrogations.

Scott Bedbury, who was the person most responsible for turning Nike into a major international brand did so by tapping into the zeitgeist, which during his tenure as Nike’s brand majordomo was largely shaped by the values of youth who were then the consumer majority. 

But as Nike was achieving world dominance in athletic footwear, another company was tuning its pitch to be in harmony with a zeitgeist that was soon to replace the youth-dominated zeitgeist that prevailed during Bedbury’s days at Nike.

Around 1990, New Balance head Jim Davis realized that sales to teens and young adults were declining because in the wake of the aging boomer generation was a smaller youth and young adult population. Davis then chose to stick with boomers as they rode into their middle years of life. To do so, he developed a strategy based on values and worldviews associated with people in their middle adult years. This strategy would soon prove to be effective in younger markets as well. The reason? After people over 40 became the adult majority, the zeitgeist underwent a transformation in which the values and worldviews of midlife became the dominant macro subliminal influence on consumer behavior.

Davis’s decision paid off handsomely. New Balance went from number 12 ranking in the athletic footwear business in 1990 to number three ranking by 2003 - just behind the newly merged Adidas and Reebok enterprise.

Next: A deeper dive into the concept of zeitgeist affirms its importance in marketing decisions

 

Economic Woes Reveal a Long-Felt Unease

In the last post, I promised that my nextt post would talk about companies that have productively connected with the contemporary zeitgeist. However, I came across an Associated Press article that I wanted to share with my readers because it does a good job of describing the zeitgeist from an economic perspective. (I’ll keep my promise in the next post barring some other development that sets it back once more.)

The article begins:

Even when experts were declaring the economy healthy, many Americans voiced a vague, but persistent dissatisfaction. True, jobs were relatively plentiful over the last few years. It was easy to borrow and very cheap. The sharp rise in the value of homes and plentiful credit cards encouraged a nation of consumers to get out and buy. But to many people, something didn't feel right, even if they couldn't quite explain why.

Far be it from me to wantonly depress this blog's devoted readers, but as each week has passed since the beginning of 2008, the volume of warnings about a sustained economic downturn has progressively grown. We can deny the seriousness of this downturn in a quest for insulation from worry. Or we can bite our lip, dig in and earnestly try to learn all we can about what is shaping the economic future so that whatever happens, we are better able to cope.

Housing is at the center of the storm that is battering that economy. Housing has traditionally led the nation into economic downturns and this time it is no different. What is different this time, however, is that demand will not materially increase during the current economic downturn as it has always been the case in past downturns. The reason is that the age cohort that accounts for most home buying (30 -44-year-olds) is shrinking in size. In other words, don't believe those who say that we're in just another cyclical downswing, and that soon housing prices will resume an upward spiraling that makes housing one of the best investments you can make.

For most people, nothing outside of losing a job and not finding a comparable replacement does more to depress their confidence in the economic future than to see the value of their homes steadily falling. For many people, home appreciation is their ticket to being able to afford retirement. If, as a recent Business Week story said was possible - that home prices could fall another 25% before bottoming out - millions of aging boomers will not be able to afford retirement. That will have a major influence on the zeitgeist.

 A long period of economic stagnation will inevitably turn the mind of the market toward a fiscally more conservative bent. The character of consumers’ aspirations and obviously their lifestyles will undergo significant change.

To keep in lockstep with consumers, companies will have to change how they market - in some cases in profound ways. This will be the case not only in marketing to people in circumstances that force them to cut back on spending, but in marketing to more affluent consumers as well because nearly everyone's behavior is influenced by the zeitgeist.

Companies traditionally spend huge sums trying to assess the mind of the market as it manifests itself in the present. Now, however, they need to be assessing the likely disposition of the mind of the market three, four, five six or more years into the future. Why?  Because we're not likely not see the mind of the market bounce back to its disposition when talk around then office water cooler often consisted of people bragging about how much their homes had increased in value over the past several months.

Strategies for Surviving and Thriving in Challenging Times

Strategic Action #4 for Surviving and Thriving:
Connect With the Zeitgeist (Part 2)

Discomfort in mind and body often triggers cravings for iconic palliatives. For a child, a soiled, battered but much loved cuddly may do the job. Around our house, such times are met with comfort food, such as chicken soup heavily laced with fresh garlic or Cousin Ruthie's hamburger, green bean and mashed potato casserole.

Today, many are looking for comfort food for their spirits. They seek relief for their unsettled souls everywhere - in politics, religion and commerce. Their need to be consoled shows up with numbing regularity in everyday conversation. Craving for comfort is ubiquitous. It suffuses the zeitgeist - the "spirit of the times.”

In yesterday's post I attributed Barack Obama's meteoric rise from a seat in the Illinois state senate just over three years ago to now having a good shot at becoming the world's most powerful leader to his uncanny connection with the zeitgeist. I noted that much of the electorate ironically seems less influenced by problem solutions offered by candidates than by their leadership styles.

Politicians aren't the only ones whose success is tied to how well they reflect the contemporary zeitgeist. People often look to brands, unconsciously or otherwise, for comfort when they feel besieged by a barrage of unsettling events and conditions.

I once met a corporate lawyer who would often sought relief from stress in a Sharper Image store near his office. The Sharper Image's offbeat products provided welcome distraction from his troubles of the moment.

Anthropologie, the women's apparel and home accessories store is a comfort brand. Its layout and inventory do for many women what the Sharper Image did for the hyperstressed lawyer.

Harley-Davidson is a quintessential comfort brand. It provides relief from discomfiture by allowing people to indulge a rebellious urge in socially acceptable ways. As Lee Lynch of Carmichael Lynch, Harley's ad agency of record says, "There's a little bit of Harley in each of us. Even nuns have the urge once in a while to break a rule. Breaking a small rule can help us feel healthy separateness from conventions that render us invisible as individuals.

The core paradigms of traditional marketing have undergone massive change. In fact, they have become obsolete. Throughout the 21^st century, an ethos of hucksterism was the dominant paradigm. Its practice reduced consumers to mere numbers and selling to fulfilling quotas. Companies claimed to be interested in consumers as human beings but everyone knew it was a lie.

The older, more experienced and wiser mind of the market today rejects hucksterism. It expects companies to establish empathetic connections with consumers and to regard them with true understanding and compassion.

The new marketing paradigm is based on marketers as healers, not as hucksters. Customers want to be rid of confusion, complexity and chaos in their lives. They want to be whole - to have lives marked by clarity, simplicity and order. They want their religious leaders to show the way, their political leaders to help make it happen and the companies whose products they buy to collaborate with them in becoming healthy and whole in mind, body and spirit.

Next: More examples of companies that have connected with the zeitgeist and adopted the healing paradigm in their marketing

 

Strategies for Surviving and Thriving in Challenging Times

Strategic Action #4 for Surviving and Thriving:
Connect With the Zeitgeist (Part 1)

Walter Mondale attacked Gary Hart in the 1984 presidential primaries with a question lifted from a famous Wendy’s commercial. “Where’s the beef?” Mondale queried when Hart talked about his “new ideas” with little specificity. It was an effective ploy on Mondale’s part.

Bill Clinton tried a similar gambit on behalf of his wife’s presidential aspirations earlier this week when he charged Barack Obama with campaigning with “smoke and mirrors.” But it was no more effective than his earlier charge about Obama living a fairy tale. Obama went on to win the next day’s so-called Potomac primaries with unexpectedly large margins.

Why did Mondale’s charge that Hart’s campaign delivery lacked substance gain traction while Bill Clinton struck out in accusing Obama of dealing in smoke and mirrors?

Clinton is out of touch with the zeitgeist – the spirit of the times.

People were feeling pretty good about things in 1984 after Ronald Reagan’s first term. Gary Hart’s vaguely framed promises about “new ideas” didn’t click with the electorate that had been saved by Ronald Reagan from the malaise his predecessor Jimmy Carter said had infected the American people. 

In 2008, people are unsettled about many things. President Bush is closing his last year in office at historic lows in public support. The Iraq war has worn people down. The economy has moved to the top of people’s concerns. Images of suffering around the world fill television screens 24/7. The issue of immigration roils many. Scientists’ predictions of dire consequences that many people alive today will suffer from climate change spell a troubling future.

Amid all these dark conditions many are ironically drawn less to political leaders with specific plans than to those who project the traits of strong leadership – in a word, charisma. Charisma is defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as “A rare personal quality attributed to leaders who arouse fervent popular devotion and enthusiasm.”

We tend to ascribe great powers for solving problems to people to whom we are strongly attracted. When we suffer deep angst, we don’t so much need the details of their thinking about how they will relieve us of our pain as confidence in their ability to bring together people with the talent, skills, experience and knowledge to solve the problems that deeply trouble us.

People appear less galvanized by politicos because of their labels than by intuitive sensing of their ability to lead in troubling times. Many in the electorate care less about whether a candidate is conservative or liberal, passes a litmus test on this or that social issue, or even has a long history of experience in public office. They simply want someone with the leadership ability to solve problems.

As this is a marketing blog, I feel the need to connect the dots between my observations on the current political scene and conditions in the marketplace. Doing that is really quite simple: the same zeitgeist that is shaping people’s political sensibilities shapes their marketplace sensibilities. Consumers of every stripe are looking toward companies that proactively strive to relieve their pain and give them soothing comfort. I’ll say more about this in my next post.

Japan's Incredible Shrinking Markets and the Wal-Mart Mission for a Better World

Two articles in today's Washington Post and the New York Times sttod out for me as worthy of readers' attention.

The Washington Post article, "For Japan, a Long, Slow Slide," begins, "As the United States fret noisily about a recession, Japan is quietly enduring a far more fundamental economic slide, one that seems irreversible." That, about the economy that observers were predicting as late as the ending years of the 1980s would overtake the U.S. economy by 2000.

In 1994, Japan' share of the world's economy was a staggering 18 percent. By 2006, it had fallen to less than 10 percent.

What happened to the Japanese Miracle and why should we care, anyhow? As the cited article points out, the combination of Japan's aging population (the world's oldest) and population shrinkage caused by five decades of annual births insufficient in number to replace the population  is translates into steadily declining consumer demand. We should be concerned about Japan's deteriorating economy because it presages a similar scenario for most of the world's developed nations that also are aging and facing population shrinkage.

While women in the U.S. like Japan and nearly all other developed nations are not having enough babies to replace the population and is also experiencing a boom in the aged population, immigration for all its current controversy in the 2008 elections will help keep the economy growing, even if at much less robust pace over the next decade than we've seen since the Great Depression.

In the weweks ahead, I will continue posting articles to the "Surviving and Thriving in Challenging Times" thread that I've been weaving. There will be companies that will do quite well in the years ahead despite the end of the salad days for the U.S. economy. Most of these companies will have leapt ahead of their competitors in developing specific nontraditional business models and strategies better suited to the lean times ahead.

The New York Times article, "Wal-Mart: The New Washington," describes how Wal-Mart has embarked on a huge turnaround away from its niggardly past when it used its buying power to mercilessly crush anything and everything in its take-no-prisoners economic imperialism that spun on for decades Now, Wal-Mart wants to use its unparalleled economic power to make the world a better place. And it is doing that by taking on big social issues as though it were a government, according to New York Times columnist Michael Barabaro

Importantly, Wal-Mart's new leaf is not just a PR gambit. It is a new strategic approach to doing business that Bill Gates urged companies to take up at the Davos World Economic Forum two weeks ago. All of a sudden, it seems, hard-nosed capitalists are learning that new wealth creation opportunities in doing good while doing well are virtually limitless.

(To access the cited articles you will need to register with respective papers, but the articles are available for no cost.)