The Brand Strategist's Guide to Desire

How to give consumers what they actually want

A. Simpson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137351821
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

This is a guide to help brand strategists consider what people really want in order to enhance their lives, and think about the role of their brand in responding to these desires. It offers a new framework for understanding desire, based on some of the things that are really important to us: our family, friends and community; the desire to explore, learn and grow; how we experience the world through our senses; our appetite to live life to the full; and what we set out to achieve. Brand strategists are the link between a commercial proposition and the lives it means to touch. They can talk to the people the company wants to reach, and – more importantly – listen to them. A brand which both enhances people's lives, and nurtures the resources on which they depend, will prove more resilient, win trust and achieve better results.

chapter 1

Community

The desire to be among other people is manifest throughout human history. There are, of course, cases of sought-after solitude: Sybil in her cave, Jesus in the desert, Siddhartha by the tree. Yet these celebrated figures used their time apart to develop insights which later helped them perform revered social roles, as a seer, prophet or teacher. Even the introverts among us come together in shared solitude, quietly appreciating the presence of others in libraries or centers for retreat.

Community defines many aspects of society the world over. We celebrate our connections to each other through cultural rituals, often sharing food or drink with symbolic associations. We read stories or sing songs to reinforce shared understandings of our history and the values we share as a society. Narrative and representational art has played a role in community culture for as many as 40,000 years, and perhaps more. A recent exhibition at the British Museum displayed sculptural representations and engravings of people and animals that have endured since the last Ice Age.¹

During the Islamic month of Ramadan, Muslims come together at sunset to break their fast together by observing Iftar, a shared meal often comprising dates; these emulate the way in which the Prophet Muhammad ended his own fast. At Epiphany, French Catholic families share the Galette des Rois, a cake in which a small porcelain figure, the feve, is hidden; whoever finds it is named the king of the feast, recalling the search of the magi for the new-born child. In Japan, the cultural concept ichi-go ichi-e – that each meeting should be treasured as it may not happen again – is expressed through the Way of Tea, a ceremony which can last up to four hours, depending on the season, the degree of formality and the number of guests.

With such strong traditions and varied practices to celebrate the role of community in our lives, what can brands bring to the feast? Skeptics of the positive role businesses can play in society may respond to such a question with cynicism. But why should it be a bad thing for brands to offer people something they can really value, as opposed to a seemingly endless supply of disposables and invaluables? There’s money to be made, of course. Think of the considerable sums people pay to be a member of a club, where they can find people with similar socio-cultural anchors.

The assumption of skeptics is that if you pay to be part of a community, then your experience of it will be less authentic and less satisfactory. This isn’t necessarily the case. The money spent is for the context and time in which the relationships can be enjoyed, as opposed to the social bonds themselves. All relationships and communities require some infrastructure: a space to meet (be it physical or virtual), activities to pursue, and ways to recognize each other – from a scout’s uniform to a football club scarf.

The important thing is that a brand proposition adds value. To enhance the role of community in people’s lives, a brand needs to ask them what it is they are looking for, and in what respects they might appreciate a helping hand. The following four sections offer some prompts, by focusing on some elements of community that attract people: belonging, exchange and identity.

Belonging, not just belongings

People like to belong, and theories abound as to why. Many take natural selection as a starting point, emphasizing our competitive nature, driven by the need to survive, find food and attract a mate. Marketers have made this a self-fulfilling prophecy, appealing to status – and particularly sexual status – in order to market their wares, from deodorant to cars to shoes. The products certainly sell, but whether they actually make us more attractive, or even help us to feel more attractive, is debatable. Do they help us to feel we belong? Perhaps, as the child compares his toys with others in the playground, or the freelancer exchanges a nod with another tablet-user in the café. But is this really what we are looking for when we feel left out?

It’s not just belongings that are sold on the basis of status. Marketers also appeal to status when they want to sell the sense of belonging, through VIP packages to “exclusive” clubs, or hard-to-win entry to member-based organizations. The belief that status drives much of our behavior is common among business strategists and philosophers alike. The French philosopher René Girard argued that the desire a person experiences for an object is always influenced by a third party.² They feel this desire, Girard argues, because they hold another person who possesses it in esteem; the object becomes a symbol of that esteem. For example, your desire for a particular perfume comes from an association of that perfume with someone you esteem: perhaps someone who wears it, or the brand itself. Girard’s theory dates from 1961, but over 50 years later, similar arguments still carry weight. Communications expert Solitaire Townsend, co-founder of the consultancy Futerra, makes status the heart of her thesis in a recent paper, “The Naked Environmentalist”. She writes: “The fight for status, the desire to look desirable, and wanting to be well thought of are the secret motivations which drive a great deal of our behavior, as well as taking up a great deal of our daily mental attention.”³

The contemporary essayist Alain de Botton takes the role that others play in determining what we desire a step further. He argues that, in contemporary Western culture, we are only able to appreciate our own wellbeing through comparing it to that of other people and finding ourselves better off. It’s a rather depressing perspective.

Whatever the extent to which the desire for status drives our actions, it is possible that we latch on to it mistakenly. We may seek out exclusivity and popularity when what we really want is social interaction. Ramon Arratia, Sustainability Director at the global carpet tile company Interface, described to me very eloquently what he values in relationships:

When you speak, people listen to you; people call you to ask you for things, which shows you that they value your opinion. It’s about quality of relationships – not just quantity. At the moment, we have a society where things move so fast and people know so little about you that they just look at you for a second. They look at your clothes and then at your business card. We need to move into a place where you aren’t just your looks and your job title.⁴

Nonetheless, Arratia is doubtful that the desire for status will ever become less attractive. The way forward, he argues, is towards more meaningful ways of attracting the interest of others – for instance, through developing skills in sport, becoming an amateur historian, or playing an instrument. These are extremely expensive ways to set yourself apart, he concedes: hence the business case for promoting them.

For Townsend, the fundamental driver behind all of this is sex, with procreation as the aim. Like Arratia, she believes that the desire for social status needs to be met, and that it could be done more effectively through a new model. She argues that status could be completely dissociated from wealth, through “an entirely new, totally transformative mechanism by which human beings compete, sexually display and build status virtually, rather than through material consumption.” This, she argues, could lead to radical dematerialization of the economy. Signs of virtual status symbols are already emerging: people pride themselves on their extensive Twitter following, and even earn money for tweets, or enjoy perks accorded by social influence rating agencies like Klout.

But is status really all that important to us? In my experience, few people would say they desire it, even if they are happy to admit that it sometimes influences some choice or other. Arguably, it is an assumption that social status is somehow “worth it” that has driven many Western societies to prize economic growth per capita above wellbeing per community. The results aren’t impressive. The new economic foundation’s Happy Planet Index – which measures the reported wellbeing of populations across over 150 nations – found that nine out of the ten top-ranking countries were not in the neoliberal West, but in Latin America and the Caribbean, with Costa Rica taking the first place two years in a row.⁵

There is an irony in the understanding that we will pay a high price to belong to a community, only in order to set ourselves apart from other people. A promising counter-theory comes not from any denial of evolutionary theory, but from a new interpretation of it, in which collaboration plays as great a role as competition. David Sloan Wilson, Distinguished Professor for Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University, New York, talks about a new “science of cooperation” which is emerging as a result of new research by evolutionary biologists. It’s a mistake, Sloan Wilson explains, to consider that society can function on the basis of competition alone: we also need to collaborate: “One thing that’s very encouraging for people in cooperative movements is that small face-to-face groups have emerged as a natural human unit. We have developed a set of instincts, which we think of as our moral psychology, and which cause us to function very well in small groups”.⁶ A new understanding of our desire for belonging, based not on difference and competition but on mutual appreciation and companionship, could inspire new behaviors – and new roles for brands. Richard Sennett, the renowned Professor of Social Science at LSE and MIT, argues that cooperation is one of the key skills we need to sustain everyday life. It “oils the machinery of getting things done”, he says, adding that the process of understanding and responding to each other is a “thorny” one, “full of difficulty and ambiguity”. Ritual, he explains, is one of the ways in which society has sought to balance competition and cooperation, giving a structure to social exchange.⁷ Brands can shape social rituals: they can set the rules in defined contexts, and make certain behaviors more acceptable than others. They could do more, nurturing collaboration and offering new contexts in which cooperation is both expected and rewarded. As Sloan Wilson comments:

If you have a certain set of ideas that causes you to see the world a certain way, then this governs how you behave. Our current narrative emphasizes individual self-interest. If we can adopt a different narrative, then all of a sudden there’ll be new possibilities, new solutions that we can trial. Let’s think about what could actually improve our quality of life. Let’s implement it.⁸

Health professionals and social policy makers are already developing new strategies based on evidence that the sense of belonging enhances mental wellbeing.⁹ It’s time for brands to take the lead.

CHALLENGE YOUR BRAND

– Do you offer a sense of status, or a sense of belonging?

– What can you learn from other community hubs, such as sports leagues and youth centers?

– How could you promote cooperation between small groups of people?

Exchange, not just trade

Wander through the terraces of any sunny street, pop into any beauty salon, scroll through any online forum: it’s hard to deny the pleasure people get from exchanging their ideas and perceptions. It doesn’t take long for this pleasure to become associated with the places in which they experience it. This is because exchange depends on trust: we need a safe space to develop the confidence to offer our opinions or skills or belongings to other people, knowing how they will be received, and what we can expect in return.

As Nancy Lowery, President of the Hayden Chamber of Commerce in North Idaho, writes:

Some of my fondest memories include the shops and restaurants that I visited often [in the area in which I grew up]. There was a safety in shopping and eating in places where they knew me and looked out for me. I developed a strong connection with my hometown, in part because of this. To this day there is a Facebook page for those who grew up in that area where routinely members are posting things like “Do you remember the little corner candy shop” or “Is the Lamplighter Restaurant still around?”¹⁰

When Lowery joined the board of the Hayden Chamber, her goal was to build and strengthen business in and around Hayden. She discovered that she had something “incredibly powerful” to tap into: community. Economies depend on strong associations. It is through trust that economies thrive, developing shared concepts of value that form the foundation for the exchange of all sorts of commodities: time against wages, wages against food, food against services, services against hospitality, and so on. Brands are the safeguards of trust in these economies. Their reputation can not only be used to build to their own business, but to offer a foundation for all sorts of exchange.

As Lowery observes:

The very idea of community comes into being because people like to cooperate with each other. We share our work and this … leads to our dependency on other people working in different roles. For example, the cobbler repairs shoes for us, the barber cuts our hair, the tailor stitches fashionable clothes for us, the butcher cuts meat for us, the baker prepares biscuits for us, engineers make houses for us, etc. All these individuals fall into a community, without whom our lives would be very difficult.

Lowery’s insights are drawn from her experience of a community formed on the basis of a shared location. The rise of online platforms means a similar sort of exchange now occurs between people who have never met or even spoken to each other in real time, who live on different continents, and even in communities with little shared understanding. If trust and reputation are the basis for exchange, it would seem unlikely that local economies could be transferred to a virtual realm. And yet eBay is just one of many brands facilitating exchange between people who have nothing in common other than the services they can render each other. I asked Alan Marks, Senior Vic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A guide to desire
• 1 Community
• 2 Adventure
• 3 Aesthetics
• 4 Vitality
• 5 Purpose
• Afterword: Desiring change
• Notes to the text
• Further Reading
• Index