Individually Wrapped

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We are what we buy, in other words. Why else would marketers be pitching that belief so directly now? Marketing the products of mass culture (think highway billboards and 15-second Superbowl spots) was largely a matter of volume. A national ad campaign wasn’t much more than a cold-call on the entire nation at once. Marketing to Boutique Individuals, by contrast, is about forging personal connections, about putting a sales transaction on the same intimacy level as a relationship.

Consider Proctor & Gamble’s “buzz marketing” initiative Tremor, involving a quarter million teenagers paid to covertly talk up select products with close friends and family. Or “neuromarketing,” where brain scans are used to fine tune the warm and fuzzy impact of an ad. Or “immersive marketing,” which kids’ site Neopets.com uses to weave sponsor messages into its online characters. As Business Wire reported: “NeoPets.com Inc. [sic] reports that results for major corporate sponsors over the past six months… are broadly exceeding expectations.” No wonder. If I’d been playing with an online pet for two hours a night as a kid, I probably would have responded too if it started suggesting, I don’t know, Orange Crush.

If these techniques seem sneaky, it’s not entirely fair to blame marketers. The recent bestsellers Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist make the persuasive argument that microeconomic incentive analysis can explain how the world works. People act in response to financial, moral and social incentives – out of self-interest, in other words. And marketers, who are no different in this respect, may be thought of as meeting a demand that the new Boutique Individual has revealed to them.

Niedzviecki argues that this need has arisen because of how popular culture has replaced spontaneous folk culture. “We no longer communicate with one another directly, meaningfully,” he warns. “Our stories and myths, articulations of deeper meaning and purpose, are now owned by corporate entities and produced for profit.”

Nothing addresses that point more succinctly than the rise of “corporate storytelling,” a hot new marketing tool that involves unpacking a company’s dusty Mission Statements, Brand Promises, Statements of Value and Commitment and re-packing them into a compelling narrative.

“The shortest route between two people is a story,” says Dianna Carr, a senior storyteller at Envisioning + Storytelling, one of the world’s most successful story management consultancies. We’re in the kitchen of the E+S offices in West Vancouver, a place of recycled-timber beams, high open spaces, walls of books and lots of Aboriginal and folk art. The kitchen smells great. Cookie dough and coffee, I think, though this might only be the story the country-kitchen table is subconsciously telling me.

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