I’ve been thinking about what to write for my first article for 2022.
I launched this space a year ago with ambitious intentions to write feverishly about the various social issues that, well, bother me — rest assured that the number of things that piss me off daily, epically exceeds the amount of writing I’ve managed to get done here.
But alas, I won’t turn this piece into an endless rant — I find solace in that I have a lifetime to stone society to death with my musings. At least, I hope.
For now, I’ll unpack just a few of my year-start thoughts — mostly marketing-related.
First, let’s get this out of the way.
It’s January 23, 2022, Rona has now brought along some bad company by the name of Omicron. And the only thing we can universally agree on is that we’re all slowly but surely losing our bloody minds.
Next.
Things are getting real — virtually speaking.
It appears that the universe failed to meet all of humanity’s needs, so we’re now entering the metaverse. Did all that talk about finding our center make us realize that what we need is to *decentralize*? Seems so. And what comes after (or meta, as we say in Greek) web 1 and 2? Web3.
For any innocent souls still unfamiliar with the term, we’re referring to virtual reality and all tie-in things like crypto, blockchain, token-based economies, decentralized autonomous organizations, decentralized finance, etc. Yes, we’ve been talking about this for a while. But have you taken stock of what’s happening as of late?
Adidas sold more than $22 million in NFTs in one afternoon alone on December 17, 2021.
Nike acquired RTFKT (a company that makes digital sneakers valued at $33M) for an undisclosed amount.
On January 14 Selfridges announced to be the First Retailer to Sell NFTs Over the Counter.
Ethereum’s become a popular word — people on twitter have gone as far as updating their profile name to have the .eth extension, and Twitter Blue has recently rolled out NFT profile pics.
Just google metaverse and NFT, and you’ll be overwhelmed by all the recent news.
You see, the need to acquire things in the physical world wasn’t enough, you must now want to acquire things in the virtual world as well.
I suspect that we’re seeing the beginnings of an economic revolution — or confusion, depending on how you look at it. Whether the powers that be will let all this swim or force it to sink, remains to be seen. But, while mulling over the probabilities, might be sound to bear in mind that smartphones, social networking, and influencers blew past all initial scrutiny leaving skeptics and critics lagging in the dust.
Though, when I read headlines like “Investors are paying millions for virtual land in the metaverse”, makes me wonder if the word “Investor” here is being used as a cameo term for corruption — similarly to how “work in construction” is sometimes code for mobster (both scenarios depending on the context, of course).
From a marketing and tech standpoint, all this is pure genius, or ingenious — again, relative. We perfected the art of selling the sizzle and the steak, and now we’ve also literally (or rather virtually) mined a way to sell you a unique piece of digital content. It’s what we like to call: next-level immersive consumer experience.
As an artist, I love how this serves up a new way to monetize our digital creations and products.
This considered, have artists raised concerns about the risk of misappropriation? Absolutely.
Have these concerns been properly addressed? Not sure yet.
Has all this metaverse business raised moral, ethical, and socio-economic concerns? Yes.
Have potential behavioral, mental, and psychological effects been sufficiently considered and studied as consequence? Doubtful.
That said, I’ll have to table this topic for now as I’m still familiarizing myself with the milieu but am admittedly excited about the prospect of plunging myself into the art NFT orbit. Opensea here I come!
The 4 new Ps — when the world at large knows that ultimately, the only P that matters is: Profit.
For the love of marketing — PLEASE STOP.
Here are the original 4 Ps for those who don’t know:
Product
Price
Place
Promotion
Simple, yes. But there’s an entire work-back that takes effect to get to these four points. Not surprisingly, the said work-back includes all the suggested four new ones.
Here are the suggested new 4 Ps:
Process
People
Platform
Performance
Or
Privacy
Permission
Personalization
Performance
Or
Passion
Purpose
Platform
Proposition
We’re not yet aligned on the new four. Likely because they’re all important and none are new. It’s also ridiculous how we speak of these Ps as though they’re of service to consumers. Professionals everywhere posting with no reservation as if to announce we’ve done something incredible.
If you feel the need to advertise it on your brand’s social platforms slating it as part of your renewed DNA, you’re in essence admitting to your inadequacy to discern what matters to consumers — you’ve missed the mark.
You essentially sound like you’re saying:
“We’re now more conscientious and considerate of consumers’ concerns. We now know to tell you, that just like you we’re passionate about privacy and purposeful about stuff like climate change. We stand for things like diversity and inclusion. We’re also very people-centric and focused on elevated personalised customer experiences. So, please, purchase our sustainably premium-priced products from anywhere at any time, at your convenience…even if we’ve provided you with no viable proof that we’ve changed anything other than our empty promises to you. Thank you. And we’ll be sure to check in with you until you check out, and then some more.”
Anyway. Bravo to any brands advertising that they are only now guided by these fundamental marketing principles. And kudos to any marketer that recites them aloud and proud in conference rooms as though they’re noble, novice, and ground-breaking.
But the true applause goes out to the brands that have consistently done right by these p-p-p-principles even before it became the cool thing to do.
A word to the wise: you can’t conceal a cough. If your brand cares about people, privacy, and has purpose beyond profit…it shows without you having to blatantly shout it from the platforms. Your product, service, and people speak for themselves.
Spin terms: on high speed ’til clean.
Whitewashing
Rainbowwashing
Pinkwashing
Straightwashing
Pridewashing
Greenwashing
Causewashing
All this *washing* to paradoxically describe an increasingly filthy world.
But at least, by calling things out, we’re now laying out the dirty laundry for all to see — because, yes, folks, too many people weren’t (still aren’t) sensitized to all the injustice.
Let’s carry on with this movement. It’s a good one.
Personal branding. (Pause. Deep breaths. Here I go.)
This has been a thing for over a decade now. But it’s tragically picked up pace in recent months.
Everybody wants to be somebody — as if we were all a bunch of nobodies before social media.
It’s become commonplace to carefully curate your online content to reflect a polished persona comfortably confined within the walls of your fancy fence.
We’ve been weaned on beauty and fame ideals for centuries; it shouldn’t come as a surprise when we edit our online lives to match the ones we’ve magnificently manicured in our heads and become eager to display them for others to see “just how great we are”.
Validation is an essential human need. Thus, prying on people’s insecurities is a lucrative business.
Are people noticing how we’re being used to expand the pockets and interests of the very few people that dominate the domains; occasionally rewarded with a small piece of the pie to ensure we keep going? And in the process, we incessantly remain absent from the present moment and disconnected from our authentic selves — which isn’t good for our brains and nervous system.
If we need to claim our content as authentic and filter-free, it’s clear that the alternative is the rule and not the exception. And that’s a red flag.
We should be asking ourselves:
How do we gauge someone’s personal brand success? Who decides what?
Are the deciding parameters free of algorithm and unconscious bias?
What content makes headway and why? Who gets the sponsorship contracts and why?
Could it be that it’s a game rigged in favor of those with the most disposable resources, time, cash, and connections? Does it favour a certain age group, gender, lifestyle?
If the determining metrics by which we measure the success of someone’s personal brand are followers, likes, RT, and comments, then all we’re doing is engaging in a popularity contest that pits the “cool kids against the uncool ones”, and feeding into the “never good enough” narrative that has lead society astray.
If we want to stop being slaves to the algorithm and exploited for profit, we shouldn’t be rewarding toxic systems or behaviours.
This isn’t to discount anyone who’s managed to build a successful life for themselves through sound personal branding and robust social media presence — there are many whose work has merit and deserve the reach and clout Social has made accessible to them.
This is to lend awareness to the fact that, as a rule of thumb, WHAT ULTIMATELY COUNTS, is distorted, and its gravity is merely magnified by social media — especially as influencers and fandoms have increasingly become *normalized* rulers of the realm.
Speaking of which, an enforced influencer code of conduct is overdue, but judging by how long it’s taken for the revenue agency to crack down on the influencer revenue stream, I suspect we’ll have to wait a while longer…
Look, I’m not naïve to expect this issue can be resolved by a series of good deeds — it was complex to begin with, and every passing TikTok adds a new layer of complexity.
Ignoring it, though, would be denying it, and that would lead to more of it — which undoes all efforts of addressing it. So, what I hope to accomplish, is to provide solace to anyone reading this who might otherwise feel like they might’ve been enough if society wasn’t telling them otherwise.
I’ll end with this excerpt from “The Dance of Anger” that expresses it poignantly:
“But in our everyday lives, who determines “the truth” about the relative importance of our talents, interests, and skills? Who decides whose work and experience is worthy of attention and economic reward — and whose is not?
All of us internalize the dominant group’s values, transmitted through family and culture, about who and what count. We may, to take just one example, question our intelligence without asking who has defined “intelligence”, who benefits from this definition, and what other definitions are possible. A particular view of “the truth” — created by a specific group of people — is presented as representative of the whole, or as relevant to all humankind.
In my mother’s generation, for example, I watched countless women discount their remarkable intelligence (or question their “IQ”) because they never asked, “who says”?
Who says that a man is brilliant when he solves mathematical problems but fails to notice that someone in the room is crying? Who says that the ability to grasp the nuances of a social interaction is a lesser measure of “intelligence” than the ability to grasp the principles of engineering? Who says that the complex skills women traditionally excel in reflect “intuition” rather than intelligence?
Intelligence comprises more factors than we can ever begin to quantify; it includes such complex skills as the capacity for friendship, for empathy, for being perceptive, caring, alert, and emotionally present in the world.
But the construction of standardized intelligence tests, like the construction of much of our reality, tells a different story — one that reflects racial, class, and gender biases. There are no universal, ultimate, or fixed “truths” about what constitutes intelligence. Nor can individual intelligence ever be captured by so arid a concept as IQ.
How then do we expand the possibilities of knowing what is “true” about ourselves and our world? Only by recognizing how partial, subjective, and contextual our “knowing” is can we even hope to begin to enlarge it. Only as we understand that a very small group of privileged human beings have defined what is true and real for us all can we begin to pay attention to the many diverse voices (our own, included) that we have been taught to ignore. Only by viewing human behavior in context, by placing ourselves in new contexts, and by trying out new behaviors in the old context, can we begin to move toward a more complex truth about ourselves and others.” — Harriet Lerner, Ph.D.
Originally published on Jan 23, 2022 on https://www.zanthology.com/articles/virtual-reality-the-not-so-fictional-world-anymore
