It’s ok, they hate me too. I can tell that marketers hate us because
they are constantly attempting to distill whatever demographic we
belong to into simple slogans, product lines, and ad campaigns. To
them we are merely consumers: giant wallets with tiny brains and no
free will; sheep, to be herded into groups and manipulated en masse.
Case in point is Calvin Klein’s new fragrance for hip twenty-year-olds called CK in2u, which I read about in the New York Times
last week. CK in2u is the successor to the wildly successful CK-1
which was popular in the mid 90’s. Calvin Klein is courting a
demographic they call the technosexual. It’s a self-serving label.
Sex is easy to wrap up and sell. Calvin Klein has access to beautiful
models and can capitalize on the implicit promise that if you use CK
in2u, you’ll get some.
According to the New York Times, "A typical line from the press
materials for CK in2u goes like this: ‘She likes how he blogs, her
texts turn him on. It’s intense. For right
now.’" This is fantasy and the DIY generation, the "technosexuals",
won’t buy it.
Technically
savvy twenty-somethings are just too well informed for such an obvious
and insulting ad campaign. They can learn about Neil Postman with a
quick search of Wikipedia and corporate viral ad
campaigns are old news. They will not have their consent manufactured by ads
featuring gaunt teenage models. They want to think, not to be thought
for.
Mostly, though, they want control–control over the
product, the style, and the message. This is something that we will
talk a lot about in this blog. The technically savvy are all about
control. It’s not about group or demographic ownership, but personal
ownership. They blog because they want to get their voice out there.
They think they are unique. Their community participation is bottom-up
whereas ad campaigns like that of CK in2u are top-down.
How you
open up a fragrance line, I don’t know. I write software and in
software it’s easy (open source and public API’s for example).
However, one way to get started in both product categories is to be
less hostile towards the purchaser. Treat them more like producers
than consumers. Don’t distill their motivations into sex and only
sex. Let them create their own real groups instead of joining some
make-believe idealized club. Finally, don’t hate the people who you
want buying your products. They know all the tricks and they can smell
the hatred a mile away.
