…I am lying to you right now, with this cheerful snarky blog post that purports to tell you all about the magic trick I’m doing, and that you shouldn’t fall for it.
This blog sells absolutely nothing but my intermediate abilities as a writer and artist.
But there’s a good chance that, if I were marketing something other than the reading of this silly post, I’d have convinced at least a few of you into checking it out by the ending paragraph.
Marketing should be the simple announcement of ‘this product does this very well, and you should buy it and try it for yourself.’ But since humans are rather contrary and complicated creatures, marketing is actually the art of lying carefully and creatively, to make you think you’ve told yourself to buy that product.
Marketing is fantasy harnessed to finance. Perhaps the writer C.S. Lewis (of Narnia fame, but should be known for much more) was right when he called myth-making and fantasy ‘lies breathed through silver’. Almost nowhere is the myth more glittering than in the beautiful, wonderful, terrifying world of social media marketing. (The hands-down winner is probably politics.)
Okay, I didn’t mean to write a second post on marketing, it just happened that way. I like marketing, even when I hate it.
See, I stumbled across this article by Dr. Bob Deutsch. It’s brilliant. It’s creepy, in that it is so terribly accurate for at least 90% of the successful social media campaigns I’ve watched over the last fifteen years. The tagline alone is worth reading:
“For success in social media, conversation is not enough – you need narrative.”
The article is also a fairly good primer on how to teach yourself to use and be aware of new trends in social media marketing. According to Deutsch, social media marketers have to learn to tell better lies.
Marketing, he warns, must move beyond engaging readers as passive consumers of social media, or even commentators on it. Marketing has the best chance of success when it can insert itself into consumers’ self-narratives.
Every good beer and car commercial does this. Apple has done this brilliantly, to the point that anyone can reasonably say they ‘get’ the stereotype of the average Apple customer.
On the flip side, doing this too blatantly can result in a backlash your competitors will happily exploit. Android’s new commercials highlight the idea of many unique consumers, each pursuing their own goals, with the aid of the Android operating system and peripherals.These commercials deftly mock Apple’s ‘we are all the same’ motif, which has developed over the last 20 years. (And does anyone else find this going back full-circle to the infamous 1984 Macintosh commercial? As I said, creepy.)
I’m going to paraphrase some key passages from Deutsch’s article, for emphasis and analysis.
He points out three areas where a social media campaign has to engage with readers: familiarity, appeasement, and power.
Familiarity: the campaign must be so recognizable to the viewer that it meets them halfway emotionally, and sets a personal identification strong enough to create a sense of relief and sympathy. This is the illusion of ‘They are like me, therefore they understand me.’
In crime, a similar tactic is often called ‘affinity fraud’, which I’ve detailed in my Filigree’s Rule posts. Affinity fraud uses social engineering ‘codes’ and symbols to create an illusion of trustworthiness that bypasses a victim’s natural distrust with social ‘others’.
Appeasement: not only must the social media campaign give the illusion of understanding certain things about viewers, it must convince them their point of view is valuable. ‘They understand me and like me!’ is the underlying whisper creating a deeper sense of trust.
The Dale Carnegie classes, while appearing corny and old-school now, teach this kind of social engineering incredibly well. They work from a simple foundation: convincing others that they are more important than you on the social scale, and that you are there to help them.
Appeasement works because only a few human beings can handle being told, ‘Your opinion does not matter. You do not matter.’ We are social creatures. We want to be wanted, necessary, and important. We want to have agency and effect in the world, even at the smallest levels.
Familiarity and Appeasement allow a marketer to confirm and affirm an audience, Deutsch writes. Gaining a ‘deep and rock-solid emotional attachment’ requires a marketer to somehow challenge that audience’s self-narrative. Only in that way can a marketing campaign progress from passive viewing, to active commentary, to outright endorsement and enduring loyalty.
Deutsch calls this third aspect of marketing Power.
Here, I have to quote him, because this paragraph probably contains all you may ever need to know about selling a book, a car, yourself, or a religion:
“A person must perceive your product or brand as different from them and sense that in that difference you can help them be more; with you as venue, a person feels that you can help them make manifest something that is already in them (in their self-story), but latent. Your product or brand become a vehicle for a person’s felt sense of self-expansion, their familiar is reconfigured.
This is the underlying structure of narrative longing, and of social media marketing success.”
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Books, like marketing, are subjective in detail. Readers may respond in many different ways to the nuances, while their reactions may track almost exactly the same across the broader story. As writers, we can never quite know what parts of our story will resonate most with our readers. We can dial it in, with experience and a lot of luck – but books made too completely by focus groups are often books crafted at the lowest common denominator. They might make some money, but they’re less likely to be perceived as the highest forms of their craft. The Simpsons has a hilarious take on factory-farmed books: The Book Job.
How many times have we heard the ad campaign or the review: This book changed my life’? Often told, seldom achieved. I can think of some books that changed my self-narrative: Tolkien’s ‘The Silmarillion’ even more than ‘The Hobbit’ and LotR. Patricia McKillip’s ‘Riddlemaster’ fantasy series. Tanith Lee’s ‘Flat Earth’ fantasy series. Diane Duane’s ‘Door Into Fire’ and its sequels. David James Duncan’s ‘The River Why’. In non-fiction, the works of Carl Sagan. My family’s fifty-year collection of NatGeo Magazine, and Time-Life photography and humanities reference books. My first cookbook purchase.
Sir Terry Pratchett is probably the writer who does most, consistently, to both challenge and re-align my self-narratives and worldview – with his science books as well as his Discworld satires.
I bring Pterry up last, but certainly not least, because he’s probably one of the best marketers and word-wizards around. He lies in his books. He tells us, his readers, that he is lying, how he’s doing it, and why. And we read every word knowing the lie – and still loving it, and seeing the truth hidden carefully inside
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So how the hell does that relate to social media marketing? The illusion of truth cuts both ways: it can bolster the truth, or drown it.
A friend of mine was canned from a Fortune 50 job in the last decade, for rebelling against then-current marketing ideas of ‘perception is more important than reality’. My friend made the mistake of pointing out that a failed product infrastructure was not going to be made better by changing advertising about it – that was going to require expensive engineering. (That company is now on the ropes, mostly for continuing their head-in-sand attitudes.)
For decades, real-world apple growers foisted the bright-colored but dull-flavored Red Delicious apple on American consumers, as result of market forces favoring color and longevity over taste – until consumers tasted varietals like Honeycrisp and the Fuji apple, and began to demand better apples.
How did that happen? Back in the three-TV-channel days of the 1960s and 1970s, no one in my small town questioned why the store-bought apples were generally awful. We bought them, or we looked for local orchards for different apples. Through the power of modern interactive media, consumers shared information about apples, markets, and suppliers. Grocery chains and growers started paying attention. Social media has taken small-town networking practicality and gossip, and turned it into a worldwide juggernaut.
Apple-marketers couldn’t rely on passive consumers any longer. They had to understand the consumers’ viewpoints, value them, and craft a product that better fit the consumers’ changing wants.
If you’ve read this far, you’ve done exactly what I wanted you to do. However you respond, the post has done its job. You may or may not have clicked the links I wanted you to click. They’re not malicious. At least, I hope Wiki and the other links haven’t been corrupted by the time you read this. But they and the post itself form a sort of psychological test for both of us.
I hope we both pass. In the meantime, I’m going to go eat a Honeycrisp apple, because I can freakin’ taste it now. Damn marketing…