Made to Stick
I have spent the first third of my life generally refusing to have anything to do with the nebulous discipline of marketing. If you had asked me to define it last year, it would have looked something like this:
"The process of getting people to want things they don't need."
I was mistaken.
Just as I would not reject out of hand a system of analysis, say radical feminism, because it sometimes produces things I don't agree with, say abolitionism, I would be a fool to reject any system of analysis on that basis.
So, I decided to embrace marketing by starting with Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath.
Their premise is that ideas all have a degree of stickiness, and, starting with an urban legend, they talk about how someone could go about deliberately crafting or recognizing sticky ideas.
Their ideas about what makes a sticky idea are pretty sensible - simplicity, clarity, concreteness, a degree of unexpectedness and story-telling all come into play. It gets quite gimicky - down to a SUCCES acronym to remember their checklist and all sorts of cornball stories about corporate success.
That said, a very useful manual for evaluating and fine-tuning our communications, and one I feel should be read by many an anarchist out there. Not just to help us better communicate our own ideas, but also to help us inoculate ourselves against sticky ideas.
Because here's the thing - the Heath brother's techniques privilege immediate emotional reactions over thought out responses. They are trying to identify techniques that short-circuit people's analytical frames of reference. They provide a good schema to analyze the reasons why certain political messages play better and drive people's actions more effectively than others. While the Heath brothers focus on the positive uses of their techniques, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see how their stuff could be used to foster fear-based reasoning as well.
Which won't keep me from using their approach.
Getting back to the start of this post, when I ascribed to marketing the intention of giving people unnecessary desires, I don't think I was totally wrong. I think buried in that emotional appeal is this very intense way of thinking of other people as potential consumers of your stuff. But ultimately the techniques themselves don't presuppose those goals. There are lots of ways of doing bad things to people - I already subscribe to the thesis that it right and ethical to use violence to the end of self-defense.
Surely effective communications is a lesser evil than kicking someone's teeth in.
