If the future isn't digital ... what is it? (Part 5)

HOMO SAPIENS, MEANING AND THE NEW TRIBES

‘Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had wak’d after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again.’
                Caliban, The Tempest, 3.2

Mankind, the meaning animal

Homo sapiens has been defined, distinguished from the rest of the animal kingdom by our thinking, our feeling, our use of tools, and so on. I argue that, perhaps above all, we are creatures of meaning. We can look back and see many examples of how, when deprived of that meaning, a “Lord of the Flies” model creeps in to fill the vacuum: we move towards destruction.

We looked earlier at the sensations that meaning manifests in the human mind and body – the weary draining of entropy at one extreme, the surge of identity, organisational attachment and direction that is energy.

Meaning is also experienced as completeness, as an increase in our biologically essential sense of unity. Kafka’s Josef K, Orwell’s Winston Smith, Camus’s Meursault, all are marked by not only a deadly (literally) absence of meaning. They are all terribly isolated, utterly alone, despite being often crowded cheek-by-jowl with their fellow humans. And of course, they are excruciatingly separated from themselves, fragmented, broken men.

How many times in a week – a day - do we see this state of being acted out in front of us? And ask yourself, how much does the network increase that exposure to this fragmentation, this aloneness, this vacuum of meaning?

The tribal dynamic

So, it’s not hard to see why, and to suddenly recognise where, many go in the search their own Grail, seeking the return of something they may never have had in full, but that they know they lack.

They migrate – a great, dramatic paradox – along the very pathways that have sucked the last vestiges of true meaning away, to find new fellowship, identity, reassurance, structure, contact, and communication on the network.

It’s networked tribes that will drive concepts like The Touchstone into being. And it’s to networked tribes that people are turning for meaning, to replenish their depleted stores.

How on earth can brands learn to dance with tribes, if tribes are indeed where people are finding the meaning that business must connect to?

Understanding the tribal dynamic

A brand community is defined as " a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relations among admirers of a brand...These brand communities exhibit three traditional markers of community: shared consciousness, rituals and traditions, and a sense of moral responsibility."

"Members feel an important connection to the brand, but more importantly, they feel a stronger connection to one another."
Brand Community (Journal of Consumer Research, March 2001), Profs Al Muniz and Thomas C. O'Guinn

What really matters to people? The individual passions that define them, their world and their dreams.
What really matters in tribes? Shared concerns or interests? No. It’s actually the shared passions, the meaning, of the people that belong to them. 100,000’s of them.

What’s the real promise of the Internet? Shared information? No again. It’s shared passion. In other words, energy. Take a look at any group of people enjoying themselves together. When individual energies combine, they produce tribal, or community energy. Energy shared is energy grown – exponentially and more or less infinitely - to the power of n.

Why isn’t this already working for brands?

"The tightrope a company walks is between nurturing and smothering. A brand community needs to have a true, authentic consumer voice that isn't censored. It also needs resources to be successful and a commercial entity can provide those without scripting the consumer discourse ... All brand communities are unique in the way they manifest, and how each one functions day-to-day differs, so they work best if they form on their own. Creating (a community) where one doesn't exist is tough."

           

Brand Community (Journal of Consumer Research, March 2001), Profs Al Muniz and Thomas C. O'Guinn

Instead of taking that energy and supporting it, growing it and serving it, most marketing campaigns (on- or off-line) ignore, dilute, or at worst, try to divert or block that energy. They create entropy.

How to understand tribal meaning

First of all, look around at the tribal activity, the shared meaning that are all around you. Understand that this energy is a resource into which you can plug your brand, to light it up like a huge Xmas tree, to supercharge it in fact.

Recognise that, far from needing to be created, this energy is already there. And it’s boundless. (And by the way, you do want it inside your tent, rather than outside …)

Think of enhancement, where before there was dilution. Think of less talking and more listening.

Listening to passionate people connecting with each other, ramping up the energy all the time. Think of enabling this process rather than distracting from it. And think of, sometimes, adding value by just getting out of the bloody way.

eBay and Friends Reunited

Both of these poster girls for online success are businesses that have made a success of enabling, or facilitating communities, each of which were, prior to activation, very powerful latent communities that only needed the addition of infrastructure, communications and protocols to come to life and grow exponentially.

Another way of looking at it ... who has in fact grown eBay and FR? Is it Meg Whitman or the Pankhursts?
Not at all...it's the communities that they've enabled, and the connections, the shared meaning produced by those communities. These two visionary success stories have simply ridden the wave they spotted coming into shore, earlier and faster than the competition.

Isn’t this just another form of sponsorship?

That’s the one thing it isn’t. Why? Meaning needs careful nurturing, otherwise it drains away, just like vitamin C. This is an active, non-interruptive nurturing role. Not a parasitic one.

Think beehive …

Think about this little metaphor for a while. When you’ve finished, you’ll understand precisely how brands need to align with tribes.

Why do bees matter here?
1)    Because we like honey, we don’t know how to make it, and we can only get it from bees
2)    Because when bees get pissed off, they sting: this can also happen in bee teams, if you manage to piss off the whole hive.
3)    Because we realise that bees can and do communicate very effectively among themselves, but we don’t yet know how to join in.
How do we need to behave then?
4)    To get honey, we can only broadly influence bee-haviour, mostly by enabling the beehive and doing it on the bees’ own terms, using our very limited understanding of what makes bees happy.
5)    Most important of all, when bees go about bee business, they carry bee-type messages to and from the hive ...
6)    ... and this is the behaviour brands want to learn to influence, within and between tribes.