Descartes' Stranglehold on Marketing is Crumbling

At the 1990 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Jonathan Grudin remarked:

“The history of interaction is the story of the ‘computer reaching out,” in which interaction moves from being directly focused on the physical machine to incorporating more and more of the users world and the social setting in which the user is embedded.”

In other words, computers have evolved from beige boxes sitting on desks into TiVos, smart phones, in-dash car navigation systems, computerized pace-makers, ASIMOs, car seats that adjust as we drive (Mercedes SLK) and shoes that adjust as we run (Adidas 1). Instead of people changing their lives to fit computers, computers are adjusting to the way we think, communicate and behave. They are reaching into our lives intertwining themselves with our activities.

Interestingly, the same could be said of marketing. Marketing began reaching out when it began aligning itself with how people saw products. The buying public didn’t see a drill; they saw a completed porch for family BBQs. They didn’t see a great dress; they saw the stunned looks on the other party goers’ faces. They didn’t see a luxury car; they saw the good life. But as its practices become increasingly interactive, marketing is “reaching out” further into our lives. It is further adjusting itself to the way we think, communicate and behave to intertwine itself not only to our aspirations but to our everyday activities as well. This adaptation can be seen in two marketing trends: Tangible Marketing and Social Marketing.

1. Tangible Marketing: Breaks marketing out of the confines of the medium. Marketers of this trend believe there is no separation between ad and person – the two can and should interact with each other in direct, tangible ways. Tangible marketing turns “targets” into “users” encouraging them to explore, adapt and adopt into their everyday lives the marketing artifacts they encounter. Examples include:
   - Audi’s Art of the H3ist
   - Nike ID billboard
   - Any sort of experience marketing: Fruitstock, Nike’s Run London and Run Hit Wonder
   - Widgets like Southwest’s Ding!
   - Tate Museum print ads which also served as museum tour-guides offering different perspectives on who to view/experience the museum.
   - iTunes – high-grade freeware that is essentially a form viral marketing.
   - Dancing Bulls Guys Guide to Wine
   - Burger King’s videogames
   - Target’s wake up call site
   - Almost every piece of marketing P&G does outside of ads
   - MTVs Darfur video game
   - Crispin’s interactive print work for Mini – yes, I said “interactive print.”
   - Verizon’s Beatbox ringtone mixer
   - Coldwell Banker establishing a retail office in Second Life
   - All of Google’s freeware
   - “I Love Bees”
   - Penguin allowing people to design their own covers to classic books
   - Dove’s “Real Beauty” photo exhibit
   - J&J’s Mom Blogger project
   - Nine Inch Nail’s Year Zero project
   - M&Ms dark chocolate painting
   - Mountain Dew’s Dewmocracy
   
2. Social Marketing: This trend recognizes how social context can affect our understanding of marketing. Many of these ideas try to adapt to or leverage how people socialize thus making the marketing artifact a part of a social exchange or even a form of social currency. Examples include:
   - Brands creating Facebook profiles and groups
   - Amazon’s recommendation engine: “people who have liked X have also liked Y.”
   - YouTube’s embed function
   - Anything created to be viral such as Mountain Dew’s “Do Your Own Adventure with Sue Teller”
   - Google making Gmail “invitation only” during its launch
   - Nike+ online runners community
   - Nike Soccer’s Joga Bonito
   - CareerBuilder.com’s Monkey Mail
   - Pherotones – the ringtones that make you sexually attractive
   - Corporately sponsored enthusiast groups: Land Rover Outdoor groups for example.
   - Anytime marketers try to get celebrities to use their product or wear their clothes.
   - Roving Budweiser girls buy people beers at bars.
   - The "tabloid campaign" that had the Burger King King dating Brooke Burke
   - The bar-like atmosphere and design of Apple Stores. It creates a socializing affair where you can approach and “talk” with products that catch your eye.
   - Penguin’s “A Million Penguins” which allowed several thousand people to co-write a book with each other.
   - Heroes ARGs, RPGS and Wikis,
   - All of Lost’s entire surreptitious marketing efforts

These trends draw on how the everyday world works. In doing so, they marketing they create is more relevantly, seamlessly and richly embedded into our daily experiences.

But most importantly, these trends reveal how interactivity is much bigger than customization and personalization. To think of interactivity as just a way to customize and personalize is to think of the computer as just a way to write a document.

The bigger picture is that interactivity is about continuously adjusting marketing to the way we think, communicate and behave so it intertwines itself into our daily activities. Like a magician, interactivity morphs marketing from pest to equipment. Interactive marketing can offer, and in some cases is currently offering, usefulness in two ways:

1. As equipment to attain an understanding of a company, a product and/or the world.
2. As equipment to act through in accomplishing a task or goal.

This post is about interactivity and the philosophical shift it is causing in marketing.

DESCARTES INFLUENCE ON MARKETING

Marketing is founded on a doctrine called Cartesian Dualism. When Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am,” he argued humans think then do.

Cartiesian Dualism argues the conscious mind (the rational decision making part of our brain that creates mental models the body can act upon) is separate from the physical external world (a bunch of objects for us to observe and manipulate based on our internal models). In other words: mind and matter are separate things. Meaning is created in the mind and the physical world is acted upon in response to that meaning. Therefore, thinking leads to action.

The adherence to this doctrine is easily seen in traditional marketing. Brands, for example, are abstract representations:

1. Of the company (“Our brand represents the customer-focus, innovative and approachable characteristics of our company.”) The belief is that if you can understand the brand, you can understand how to act as a company.
2. Of people’s opinions (“Consumers think we are a brand that represents America and toughness.”) The belief is if mental models can be understood, they can be shaped. If they can be shaped, then marketers can engineer a desired behavior in people. This is why ad content tends to be so rational. Infomercials, problem-solution advertising, comparison ads, testimonials and product demonstrations are all presentations of information compelling the viewer to think differently in order to act differently.

Again, the belief is that thinking leads to action: “If I can get you to think X about my product then I can get you to buy it.”

Let’s call this type of traditional marketing what John Grant calls it: Image Marketing.

But there is a problem with all of this. As anyone who has fallen asleep during a two-hour-long presentation that laundry listed data knows, meaning is not inherent to information. Just because I am seeing charts and graphs does not make it meaningful to me. This reveals that perception does NOT lead to understanding and therefore, thinking does not precede action.

This is pure speculation, but maybe that is why advertising campaigns require so much money, time and repetition – often with poor results – to change people’s minds about transacting with a company: it’s not how people process the world!

If marketing’s philosophical underpinning - thinking leads to action – is false, then how should marketing engage and influence people?

Nineteenth century German philosopher Edmund Husserl offers an interesting answer.

EMBODIED MARKETING

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries a man by the name of Edmund Husserl was frustrated that science and mathematics were increasingly conducted on an abstract plane that was disconnected from human experience and human understanding. He felt science increasingly dealt with idealized entities and internal abstractions a world apart from the concrete reality of daily life.

Freudian psychology is a perfect example. Ids, egos, superegos, babies wanting to sleep with their mother and kill their father, death instincts, vagina envy, Oral, Anal, Phallic, Latency and Genital psycho sexual stages…I mean hell, talk about huge abstractions with huge disconnects from real life.

It’s generally agreed the purpose of science is to explain why things happen in life to expand our understanding of ourselves and our world. But Husserl believed it had wandered so far away from everyday experience it's ideas were no longer practical and applicable. He basically called out science for becoming one big circle jerk.

[Side note: I think much can be said of marketers and brands: ultimately brands are one stepped removed from the two things we are really trying to affect: people and companies. Marketers who talk about changing the brand to improve the company are like teachers who talk about changing their class syllabi to improve their class. Brands, like syllabi, are oversimplified, abstract representations of real things. If you want to change the class, don’t change the syllabus; change the damn class.]

To resolve this disconnect, Husserl established a science focused in the reality of everyday phenomena: experience. This new science explored the nature of the human experience: how it affects us, how we understand it and how we find meaning through it. He called this new field Phenomenology.

“Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy principally concerned with the elements of the human experience. In contrast to philosophical positions that look for a truth independent of our own experience, phenomenology holds that phenomena of experience are central to questions of ontology (the study of the nature of being and categories of existence) and epistemology (the study of knowledge.)”
~ Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is

In other words, phenomenology proposes experience is inextricably linked to and drives how we perceive the world. This is why, when people talk about their perceptions on a certain subject, they often lead with the phrase, “Well, in my experience…” This set-up is a subtle window into the mind revealing that experiences drive perceptions. As you remember, this is the polar opposite to the Cartesian Duality view that thinking drives action.

Phenomenologists believe we encounter artifacts (both physical and informational) in the world, interact with them and understand them all at the same time. A great example is a kid who buys a new video game. When he gets home, he doesn’t read the instruction book before he plays (as Cartesian Duality says he must); instead, the boy pops in the game and starts playing. While he plays, he is learning everything written in the rule book. Had he read the book before playing, he probably would have forgotten it all before the game even started.

The boy’s engagement with the game is something Paul Dourish, Associate Professor of Information and Computer Science at UC-Irvine, calls embodiment:

“Embodiment is the property of our engagement with the world that allows us to make it meaningful.”

In other words, the boy learned the game’s rules and meaning because he discovered them through context and use of the game.

But there’s one bold fact we need to address at this point: we can’t interact with everything in the world. There are an incalculable number of artifacts (physical or informational) offering interaction opportunities. So the question is:

How does a person choose what to interact with?

Phenomenologists have a practical answer best said by, of all people, adman Howard Gossage:

“People read what they like…sometimes it’s an ad.”

Gossage offers a very phenomenological point of view: People read what they like, or in phenomenological terms, people read what they find useful.

Phenomenologists believe we encounter the world to understand it AND to act through it. In other words, we interact with artifacts to both understand them AND to use them to accomplish our goals. A few Christmases ago my mother gave me a crock pot. I’m not a cooker so I had no clue what I was looking at. But I interacted with the box. I read the packaging and pulled out the appliance to play with it. After a while, I figured out what it was and how it was to be used. In other words, I interacted with it to find meaning in it. But my next question was, “Will I ever use this?” While I interacted with the artifact to understand it, I had to figure out its usefulness to determine if I was going to continue to interact with it (i.e. cooking with it.) Eventually I determined it would be useful to me and, since that Christmas, have made many crock pot dinners.

The exact same could be said of information. Math students always protest, “But when am I ever going to use this in my life?” They may understand all the concepts they’ve repeatedly practiced on worksheets, but they don’t see a reason to retain it. I’m hard pressed to think of a time in my life when I’ll need to FOIL binomials.

So in sum, when a person encounters anything in the world, they seek to answer two questions through interaction with the artifact:

1. Is this meaningful to me?
2. Is this useful to me?

When those two questions are answered with a "yes," something happens to those artifacts: they change from artifacts we’ve simply encountered during our journeys through the world into what phenomenologists call “equipment.” Equipment are the meaningful and useful artifacts we incorporate in our daily lives to create, manipulate and share meaning in the world. This intertwining of useful artifacts into everyday life creates a specific kind of interaction Paul Dourish calls Embodied Interaction:

“Embodied Interaction is the creation, manipulation and sharing of meaning through engaged interaction with artifacts.”

I want to make a clear distinction here: interactivity is the umbrella term representing the continuous exchange of information between at least 2 parties. In other words: a feedback loop. Embodied interactivity is a type of interactivity. It is interactivity that is intertwined with normal human behavior. In other words, my Xbox is interactive, but my Wii is embodied interactive. My Wii responds to my body movements: if I punch, my avatar punches; if I swing, my avatar swings. And so on…

So what does this all mean?

When I opened this long-ass post, I discussed how tangible marketing and social marketing trends are causing the field to adjust itself to the way we think, communicate and behave to intertwine its self into our everyday activities. It is no longer about forcing fitting a billboard or TV ad into our day. That is essentially the equivalent of a baby forcing a cube into a star shaped hole. Instead, marketing is becoming more graceful in the way it engages people.

I believe this overall trend represents the rise of, to use Paul Dourish’s term, a new type of marketing: Embodied Marketing. Embodied Marketing is marketing that moves beyond the message to create interactions that are meaningful to people’s lives and useful in accomplishing their goals.

I should note that I’m not decrying the end of Image Marketing. People said TV would kill radio. But it didn’t. Radio simply found a niche. I’m certain Image Marketing will do the same.

But what I am comfortable claiming is this:

If advertising was the core discipline of Image Marketing, then transformation design is the core discipline of Embodied Marketing.

Transformation design, as I hinted in a previously posted definition, is the discipline of embodied interaction. It seeks to create systems that gracefully intertwine companies into the lives of people in a meaningful and useful way.

Through transformation design, Embodied Marketing fulfills the fundamental purpose of marketing: to create strong emotional and transactional connections between people and companies.

And it does it better than Image Marketing ever could.

Discuss…