April 24th, 2006 by admin
What can philosophy teach us about marketing? In one word - Lots.
As an exercise, I examined the Dialectical Hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer to see if his theory could shed any light into how brand popularity spans cultures, age groups, and socio-economic strata. In the end, I came up with a helpful new maxim: To the extent a brand’s message shares a fusion of horizons with different social groups is the extent that the brand message can effectively travel between them.
Most successful brands such as Starbucks and Netflix started off with a niche group of consumers such as coffee addicts in Seattle and independent film watchers. Over the years, Starbucks has been able build brand presence to the point now they can move into nearly type of neighborhood and be reasonably certain the store will be successful. The marketers at Netflix have achieved similar success with its customer base. The other day, I participated in a Netflix focus group whose members ranged from an 18 year old college student to a 78 year old man who lived in a nursing home. Netflix brand message resonates positively with each. The question is Why?
I found an answer in Gadamer’s writings. Gadamer teaches that to the extent people understand one another is the extent that they share the same conceptual sphere, or fusion of horizons. At the most primitive level we are all humans and experience the same human emotions. Geographic distance, cultural values, social mores, and age diffuse this horizon.
For example, if you placed two culturally isolated people together such as a Kalahari Bushman and a native from one of the outer islands off of Papa New Guinea. They would understand each others basic human emotions such as happy, sad, and angry, but little else. If you placed one person from Europe and one person from the United States together, they would understand a great deal more because of cultural overlap. Two people from the same country share a greater overlap, same city greater still. On down the road until you get to coffee addicts in Seattle.
Here is where most marketers make a mistake. They wrongly assume that since people speak the same language such as English and live in the same location they understand the same things. The closer two groups appear to be social and culturally similar the more this assumption is made and the more it backfires.
Marketing history is filled with glaring examples of wrong assumptions. A classic one is the case of the Chevy Nova. To the branding department in Detroit, the word "Nova" spoke of stars, space and the unknown. In the Hispanic communities of Southern California the car was mocked as the one that meant "No go" in Spanish. Although it is an urban legend that sales faltered, the fact remains that GM would have rather not had the cultural misunderstanding. (If you want a good laugh take a look at the Chevy Nova Awards).
So, the question remains: How did Starbucks and Netflix, borrowing a phrase from Geoffrey Moore, cross the chasm of cultural horizons? The answer is that they centered their marketing messages on ideas or horizons that had a fusion between cultures. For example, Starbucks’ success may attributable to many things, but the least of which is its coffee quality. If coffee quality were the focus of Starbucks’ message, then the brand would still be regulated to towns and locations with coffee snobs such as Peet’s Coffee and Tea. Instead, Starbucks focused on the sensory experience. The brand flourished because its conceptual framework was based on primitive sensory experience which easily spans cultural horizons.
How did Netflix do it? Instead of creating a single common transferable horizon, they created a product that had many different benefits and let the cultural niches come to them. To a immigrant from India, Netflix has the largest selections of Bollywood movies available anywhere. For the independent film buff, Netflix offers the best recommendations based on her own personal idiosyncratic viewing history. For the man in the rest home, Netflix represents freedom. Now he has access to any movie he wants. He no longer has to wait for a ride to the local rental store. For the college student, Netflix represents simplicity.
Over the last two years we have seen Apple’s Ipod cross a similar chasm. How did they do it? One way was that they chose to make dance the focus of their advertising. Rather than showing all the great features of the ipod or its ease of use, their advertisements simply showed someone’s silhouette dancing to their favorite tunes. It is difficult for me to think of a more pure expression of human feeling than dance. Apple picked a perfect vehicle to cross cultural horizons.
Learn from the examples from Starbucks, Netflix, and Apple. To effectively expand a brand presence find a fusions of horizons.
This statement might sound cold and calculated, but I’ll say it anyway. If you want to get promoted within a large corporation, the last thing you want to do is get so good at your job that the higher ups believe no one else can do it. As marketers rise through the ranks, they need to show proficiency in all aspects of marketing. They need to show that they are awesome generalists not specialists.
