Thoughts on Today’s Speed of Marketing
Efficiency & speed have become almost self-sufficient values in our fast-paced marketing world of today. As part of this development, communication is changing to faster channels as brands are trying to communicate to consumers more and more in real-time. As part of this development, buzzwords like ‘hyper-relevance’ are indicating marketers’ ambition to tap into the needs of our here and now, delivering a stream of personalized offers to us by way of an algorithm-driven just-in-time supply for everything we hunger for at each given moment in our life.
As consumers, we have also grown into expecting more and more goods and services to be delivered to us instantly - so to speak ‘in a click’. With the increasing digitalisation of our consumption, we have learned that everything we want can be obtained by a mere twitch of our index finger. With the same speed we are consuming digital content faster and faster, tripping into an ever increasing spiral of minimally reflective interaction with a gargantuan flood of endless stimuli.
A frequent reflex and obviously incompatible coping mechanism of consumers for this overabundance of branded stimuli is to in turn increase the speed of consumption of goods as well as of the informational bow wave that today’s marketing is producing for them. In consequence this leads to a general strategy shift of the way today’s consumers are processing information: instead of keeping a clear focus of attention, consumers are now more and more conditioned to take up whatever bits and pieces of information they get thrown at in the digital and social channels they have subscribed to, quickly scan them for novelty and short-term instrumentality for their current goals. If a piece of information is neither new nor instrumental to reach their current goal, it is mentally dropped without further processing.
Biologically speaking, this strategic shift can be expressed with the simplified Verhulst model of population dynamics, which depicts the change of the population N to the current population size and expresses the effect of the two parameters r (growth rate) and K (carrying capacity).
This model is supposed to mathematically describe the selective pressures that drive evolution either in the direction of an r- (high reproduction rate) or K- (high maintenance / quality) reproduction strategy.
The analogy here is that the evolutionary forces for our (digital) behavior are currently clearly driving us towards an r-strategy of informational reproduction where we become quality-insensitive ‘content-ragpickers’ that are more and more conforming to the automated and fast paced production of over-recycled content-detritus that is delivered to us by branded entities that behave like social ‘spambots’.
Unfortunately, this development is not only completely unnecessary but also driven by a huge misunderstanding. Because r-strategies do only apply to unstable or unpredictable environments in which our (intellectual) offspring has only a very low probability of surviving to adulthood. While the metaphor of “digital darwinism” is implying that this is in fact the case, its application to our very own intellectual activity in the digital sphere is misinterpreting the critical substrate in question when it comes to the correct understanding of the digital ecosphere. Harvard’s David Weinberger has correctly stated that “the internet is not the medium: WE are the medium.”
So by lowering our own quality thresholds of communicative interaction - assumedly in face of the increasing terror of the ever-increasing pace of automated low-quality content - we have effectively lost sight of the much more important fact that the actual informational battle is not being fought against the seemingly endless information-technologies of Facebook, Google & Co. but only against our own intellectual capabilities and our willingness to drop our quality standards of digitally shared thoughts and conversations. In that light, we are dealing with a highly limited resource - clear, precise and original thinking - which is worth all the effort in the world when it comes to the question of whether or not to invest some more time in an original thought of yours.
Therefore, this blog-post is - in remembrance of the cluetrain manifesto - meant as a digital manifesto in favor of applying and upholding our quality standards of digital communication, of actively and consciously choosing an informational K- over the always impending r-strategy. Don’t succumb to the menace of social spambots, don’t become a bot. Stay human, even in the face of an inhuman marketing. Thank you @dweinberger, @RealJaronLanier! If you need some time to think ‘outside the box’, go detox, put yourself on an informational diet. Don't just 'consume & reproduce' information, think!