Uneven Distribution.

Cultural Integration

July 12th, 2008

The quickest way to stop noticing something may be to buy it. - Alain De Botton, Status Anxiety.

That’s somewhat of a generalisation, but for a broad spectrum of consumer products today there is at least some truth in it. There is an undeniable decrease in the excitement of owning a product after you have bought it. This is essentially due to advertising, and in the past this is principally how brands created much of the value in their products (particularly premium brands). But in the digital space, this aspirational marketing is not as effective.

The iPhone launched yesterday, a product for which Alain De Botton’s statement certainly doesn’t apply. After you’ve bought an iPhone, you won’t stop noticing it, rather it will become a central part of your identity.

In these cases, we are purchasing the intangible element of the product as much as the product itself. We are essentially buying an extension-pack for our personal cultural identity.

Marketers need to start paying more attention to these intangible qualities. There is no longer a need to talk about product benefits, consumers go elsewhere for that (and the last place they would go is to the brand). The strongest and most easily created intangible is the myth of your product. What marketers (and their agencies) therefore need to be doing is creating cultural significance in their products.

At the extreme of this cultural significance, your product attains celebrity status. While a few have come close to this, the iPhone is really the first product to attain celebrity status in western culture. But that sort of celebritism is immensely rare, and a large portion can’t be created through advertising and marketing. What is possible, is using advertising to make your product a small part of culture. Give your product it’s 15 minutes of fame.

The first, and hardest, way is by becoming part of the cultural vernacular through direct association. Apple did this with the iPod, and now the iPhone. Somewhat easier to execute are ideas like Sprite Truth Hunters, and Will it Blend. These feature often tenuous links to the product, but an idea that can become ingrained in culture nevertheless (and I can see the insight which got them to that point). And finally we have those completely random ideas that manage to achieve super-meme status regardless of the dissonance between the idea and the product (Mentos + Diet Coke, and more recently (and brilliantly) Sprint’s Sell Out).

What made all of these examples successful was that there was a sticky idea that was unique to the product, but not necessarily linked to the product. In some cases the idea was ingrained in the product’s function or benefit or a consumer insight, but in other cases the idea is a long way from any logical relationship with the product. This is important because a logical relationship simply doesn’t matter. The consumer doesn’t care. If your idea is cool, they will pass it on. No one visited Subservient Chicken and then thought to themselves “I would love to pass this on to my friends, but I just don’t see the connection to Burger King’s brand values or the unique product benefits, so I won’t”.

Make your product culturally significant, and suddenly you’ll find you stop shouting at consumers. And they’ll stop wanting to punch you in the face.

Postscript: The advertising industry over the past few years has been all about ‘integration’. To a lot of people, this simply meant bolting a digital component onto their agency. Integration is in fact far more about creating advertising across all channels that generates cultural significance for whatever you’re advertising. The reason digital is often mistaken as the key to integration is because it is digital that enables those culture-creating communications.

Title photo by Hugh McLeod of Gaping Void

Comments

Good article. Though there sure is a big difference between a product being culturally significant, and an advertising campaign which becomes famous. Apple distiguish themselves presicely because they don’t need to use advertising to sell iPhones, they’re just better than anything else on the market.

I think the danger with so much viral marketing, is that once you get past the entertainment value, what’s left?

But if agencies can keep convincing clients to spend money on ads, instead of spending their money on R&D to develop better products or service, then all power to them.

Hi Carl,

Good points, and while I wrote the entire post with reference to the iPhone, I could have written it with reference to Stride’s sponsorship of ‘Where the Hell is Matt?’.

This campaign is the complete opposite end of the spectrum, but the idea of cultural integration still works. If I was standing in front of a shelf of 5 or 6 different gum brands, there is a good chance my choice would be affected by the intangible rather than any real product benefit. And that intangible would be the feeling of community, fun, and general warm fuzziness that I felt when I watched the latest video. Absolutely nothing to do with the product, but the deciding factor nonetheless (and no doubt a campaign with a huge ROI compared to their TV campaigns).

Gavin Heaton has a great post on the dancing matt phenomenon over at Servant of Chaos, definitely worth a read.

>> Apple distiguish themselves presicely because they
>> don’t need to use advertising to sell iPhones,
>>they’re just better than anything else on the market.

I disagree. iPhones may be cooler than anything else on the market, but they arguably lack some very useful features that make competitors products better to many people.

The fact that statements like the one above are so common is evidence of just how good a job Apple’s marketing people do, especially in selling the brand image over individual apple products.

A few thoughts:

In defense of Carl… what the iPhone seems to do better than the rest is the interface. The touch and multi-touch approach makes the digital experience quite tangible. It doesn’t have the technical features (MMS, high resolution camera etc etc) but it breaks down usability barriers and permits the device to live in quite a personal space.

The iPhone suggests that your life is interesting. It is Facebook incarnate.

Unfortunately it doesn’t make you more photogenic, pre-populate your address book or imbue you with good taste in music. But that doesn’t really matter because most people will never ask for proof.

And to digress… I also often reflect on the celebrity status of the Harry Potter books. How often do people line up to buy books… on a world scale? Probably not since Madonna’s ‘Sex’ book. Whether these items can be categorised with the iPhone requires more thought… not to mention the differences (and similarities) in the above two literary examples.

Agreed that ‘Integration’ is misunderstood. These days I’m of the opinion that really the only goal that we have is to create content with viral appeal. Viral is key. Communicate key brand messages and values in a culturally significant fashion and fame will follow.

thanks for the responses to my post guys, my central point still remains, that companies without anything to clearly differentiate their products, need to rely more on advertising.

i disagree that Apple’s marketing guys are the ones making their products so desirable. the ads are the product, nothing more, nothing less.

i like Yves Behar’s quote from his TED talk: “Advertising is the price companies pay for being unoriginal”

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/yves_behar_on_designing_objects_that_tell_stories.html

>>i disagree that Apple’s marketing guys are the
>> ones making their products so desirable.

What about the “Hi, I’m a mac / I’m a PC” ads?
The brilliant iPod and iTunes campaigns?
All of the beautifully crafted TV spots for iMacs over the years?
The prominent product placement of apple products again and again in carefully selected tv shows and films?

Apple’s marketing runs deep and broad across a variety of traditional and non-traditional channels, placing an emphasis on aspirational lifestyle and brand over individual (and admittedly very photogenic) products.

None of which is to deny the quality of design beauty of most Apple products. But I disagree that the “ads are the product.” The ads give the product and brand visibility and a particular set of cultural signifiers, and without those the iPod is just another MP3 player.

I think what both of you (Gil and Carl) have proven here is that Apple have executed perfect cultural integration of the intangible essence of their products.

Ask someone what makes an iMac/iPod/iPhone so immensely cool, and they actually can’t define it. It’s intangible

As Gil points out, functionally Apple products are often lacking. But to Carl’s point, Apple marketing never set out for this global ‘cool’ to happen. The initial cultural seeds were planted by die-hard Apple fans, what Apple’s marketing has done brilliantly is pick up on this point, and spend all of their efforts on continuing to promote the one feature of their products that can’t be replicated: the coolness.

And the coolness is actually something that no marketing department can ever create. I’m not aware of any other cultural signifier as ubiquitous as the iPod. In certain tribes AirForce1’s or an Aeron chair or a GT-R Skyline may be the ultimate, but in any western(and most eastern) cultures those white earbuds instantly make you that little bit cooler.

And while Apple’s marketers helped make that happen, they were only partially responsible. All those advertising campaigns simply piggyback on the cultural integration that a grass-roots following has created for Apple.

What i find most interesting is the way that some companies have managed to turn grass roots following into mass market dominance and still found a way to represent themselves as the nice guy. Massive juggernout companies such as Apple and Google have beautifully capitalised on their initial underdog/alternative status and still trade on it today despite the fact that they are huge multinational companies.

This must be thanks in part to the ridiculous size and ubiquity of Microsoft. Even the biggest of competitors and businesses operating in the same space can manage to come off looking like plucky little upstarts - the defiant alternative that sticks it to the big guys. And don’t we all just love to support that?

Surely at least part of Apple’s brand coolness hinges on the simple fact that they aren’t Microsoft. The I’m An Apple/I’m a PC ads directly reference this — as much as they highlight the coolnees of Apple product and brand, what they really do emphasise that they are not Microsoft and not Windows.