MEANING AND THE EXPERIENCE OF BRAND
The very minute bids thee ope thine ear.
Obey, and be attentive. Canst thou remember
A time before we came unto this cell?’
Prospero to Miranda, The Tempest, 1.2
A Tesco epiphany - Energy and Entropy
The scientists call it entropy. It means an inevitable pull from order to chaos, or a loss of energy.
Entropy is what I experience when a politician makes another promise, when I’m on hold with a mobile phone operator’s call centre, when I read any annual report, or when my kids demand chocolate cereal for breakfast. And about another 2,500 times a week. It’s a panicky sinking of the heart, a draining of energy.
What about “brand energy”? Five years ago, Tesco and the rest were into their stride with loyalty cards. Clearly, no matter how much data they collected, it made no difference to them, and none to my experience. They were more or less paying me to shop with them, and I was busy collecting my points.
Late on a Thursday I was finally at the checkout, exhausted, cranky, trolley packed with a week’s worth. My cashier was a tiny Asian girl, hugely pregnant, equally weary. I’d forgotten – disaster! – the bloody milk, which, this being a super-mega store, was 200 yards away. I grunted this despairingly to her, and a rare brand epiphany unfolded …
Building meaning
She – angel of light – hopped hefalump-like off her seat and exclaimed: ‘I can get it for you!’ I insisted no, she must sit down again. We sent someone else off for the milk. We basked briefly in our new feeling of connection and goodwill.
I don’t need to say more, do I? This tiny (massive) event did more for my jaundiced bond with the Tesco brand than ANY OTHER EXPERIENCE with the brand I’d had. What exactly did that girl do? I’ve thought about it ever since. She built Meaning. She built, to be precise, what I call a ‘platform of meaning’ between me and her brand, Tesco.
Most of what I experience however - service, communications or both - creates the sinking feeling of brand entropy. The already flimsy threads of meaning that connect me with the brand are further frayed, that familiar gap between the promised service and the delivered experience tells me again and again that, well … we just don’t understand one another at all.
Hopeless? I don’t happen to think so. I think that the people who lead these firms can take on this notion of “managing for meaning”. They can start by replacing that old silliness about missions and visions, with the construction of shared platforms of meaning.
Understanding Meaning
Meaning is treated here not as an attribute of information, but as a crucial part of human experience, a component of belonging, sharing, understanding, perceiving, associating, finding relevance, feeling inclusion and trust, seeing value, engagement, attitude, belief, acceptance, receptiveness, expectation, and often attraction and desire.
It’s the starting point, the platform, for most things good. Its absence or reduction precludes or undermines safety, understanding, organisation, trust, communication, leadership and management, compassion, identification, community, social structure, confidence and trade. And of course, enjoyment and fulfilment.
Meaning in 20th century culture
The nightmares that Franz Kafka articulates so uniquely, in works like The Castle, The Trial and Metamorphosis, are all defined and linked by their vacuum of meaning. Meaning has been surgically removed from his protagonists’ worlds. And look at the human experience that remains. Note that it is an obsession with information, manifested as an insane bastion of bureaucracy, that keeps meaning away.
The Gallic shrug that was existentialism was an attempt, by Camus, by Sartre and colleagues, to come to terms with, to make sense of, to create useful coordinates for, this same vacuum of meaning.
The terror evoked by Orwell’s 1984 is derived far more from the vacuum of meaning he describes, than from the comparatively cartoonish Room 101. And here information is used to do more than keep meaning at bay. In 1984, information, the currency of betrayal (surely the absolute reversal of shared meaning), is a killer.
How we experience meaning
Meaning seems at its root to be about connections: between individuals, between groups of individuals, and, also, within individuals, in that it can be experienced powerfully as new or better links between previously disconnected internal bits of us. A powerful sensation, this reduction in personal fragmentation. And of course, we also experience meaning as new or better connection between hitherto disparate ideas.
Meaning is, while rooted in the isolated experience of the individual, shared socially. What’s more, it seems to increase when shared, as we can see at a football match, or in a group therapy session. Whether energy or entropy, positive or negative ... both are accelerated, deepened, profoundly impacted by tribal connections. It can go well, it can go very badly.
We are understood, validated, a previous transaction or service encounter is remembered. We are heard, seen, acknowledged, our needs are intelligently anticipated. A spark of recognition is ignited unexpectedly. A feeling of increased personal or group energy marks new meaning.
Meaning is lost when you do one thing, having said another. When you fail to deliver on a promise. When you ask a question and turn your back on the answer. When you fail in authenticity. Most importantly perhaps, when you don’t listen, ignore, when you fail to respect. When you scorn, put down, render invisible the cares and concerns of other humans. We experience this as entropy. This loss of meaning, increasingly, is our experience of brands. Why can’t you just walk the talk, we ask.
So, what happens then when meaning is under attack? We lose ... almost everything worth having.
How we got here
The decay of Meaning is the culprit for an awful lot of the bewildering issues facing the human race, not merely commercial, but also political, environmental, social, emotional, spiritual and religious.
Why is this such a challenge now as opposed to earlier in history?
It’s information again, but information now massively distributed, pushed into every corner of our experience, by the new networks.
Dissonance, the direct experience of the little betrayals of which the world was always so forgiving (or at least ignorant), happens so rapidly, so tangibly today. Promises are made and visibly broken within a short period. Service expectations - ramped up most memorably by the Amazons spawned in e-commerce - are sky high.
We know so much more. And what we see is, so often, disappointing.
Information (as networks and data) both supplies the necessary platform for, and, with the evident reaching of its limitations, sets the stage for the next scene, an intense focus on meaning.
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