We now live in a world where almost everything is abstracted and over-processed to the point of barely being real.
Take hamburgers, for example. What once referred to a thick, juicy slab of minced beef flavored with regional spices now typically refers to a thin, frozen, mass-produced wafer of meat, flour, textured vegetable protein, trimmings, and other filler material. The “new normal” is an almost comical parody of the original.
Money’s another interesting example. If I got to the store, I pay with a piece of plastic, which represents numbers in a database, which represent promissory banknotes, which used to represent–but no longer does–some amount of a precious metal, which in turn was precious only by social convention. That’s a lot of distance between me and any actual value.
With society so completely buried in these feelings of illusion and fakery, most consumers have a deep, continual craving for anything real. They may not even realize how much they crave it, but it’s always there.
While the traditional marketing mentality was about putting on a great-looking show for the customer, the effectiveness of this approach has fizzled as our distance from reality has widened and our ability to sniff out frauds has increased.
What really impresses consumers now is reality. Reality resonates. Reality makes people notice. Reality is remarkably different. Reality can’t be ignored.
So, how can your brand get real?
Great post. I have always said that being real was vitally important… how do you brand for companies and markets that are genuinely fake? Is that possible? (Kate Perry?)
Well, the easy answer for a company that’s genuinely fake (i.e., not really what they’re claiming to be) is that we *don’t* brand them. We only know how to find and express the real nature of a brand, so we’re not really qualified to fake it. :)