Last day, as I was crossing one of the most touristic streets of Barcelona – the famous Rambla – my eye got caught by all the very expensive photo gear the average tourist were carrying on. Usually, that’s the kind of thought that burst out of my mind 5 seconds after it just popped, but this time, I got home thinking : “How come the typical tourist got from recyclable 24 shots cameras to the 2000€ DSLR (for digital single-lens reflex) camera and two additional lenses hanging by his neck in less than 15 years“? Cost or technology could seem to be the main explanation, but as we’ll see, there’s a whole forest hiding behind the tree.
Demand in general, and social habits in particular seem to pull the strings of industrial revolutions in our history, such as personal cars with Henri Ford in the 30’s, cell phones in the 90’s or the Internet in the 2000’s.
Understand and anticipate those changes is what marketing is all about.
Experience Vs. Memory
Looking for more opinions on this very topic, I came accross the work of Daniel Kahneman, an Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel laureate in Economics for his work in prospect theory. This professor has an interesting way to put happiness, and the way we pursue it, in a perpetual quandary, or dilemma if you will : our experiencing selves and our remembering selves do not perceive or even conceptualise happiness the same way, therefore, making someone happy is a bit more complicated than we thought. It has of course lots of implications in economics and marketing since it’s a critical step in decision making. The whole point of Daniel Kahneman’s work is to state that you can have a great experience and leave with a bad memory of an event, and have a very normal experience but remember it with passion. And he leads us to think that we are nowadays more “memory-driven” than we were in the past. This divided conception of reality has a lot to do with the way the two human brain hemispheres work, as cleverly shown by Iain McGilchrist in his talk The divided brain.
the 70’s Vs. the 90’s
And then I thought : “Of course. Look at us now, and look at us (or them) back then! “. As I try to think about the early 70’s, what first comes to mind is the experience empire, literally. The hippie movement, the Jimi Hendrix Experience band, drugs and open sex… It was all about experience: Surf, beach boys, consumption society, all those “clichés” drive to the same representation : life is not about tomorrow, but more about an eternal present. Then came the oil crisis, unemployment, difficulties to have a home, start a family or just make ends meet. And with a more conservative way of life, came logically a very capitalistic and still up-to-date concept : Archiving.
This is by far what our society will be remembered for : archives. We build on-line participative encyclopedia, while Google scans almost all books available over the world, and the UNESCO lists the valuable sites of our planet. From an ever-spending society, we came to a conscious society, not only around environmental issues, but in general. With new ways of life, and larger distances, came the necessity to share with the ones that are “missing” the moment. Face Time, Facebook, twitter, instant messaging give us more opportunities to record, photograph, share and archive our lives, changing our behavior while we are at the movies, concert or on a trip.
the applications
So who gets to take advantage of this? Well first of all, those who manage to get both of our two selves happy : The experiencing self, and the remembering self. In one of his talks, Daniel Kahneman states that someone came across him one day and said that he attended a great concert, absolutely fantastic, until the very end, when a dreadful sound “ruined the experience” he have had. What is critical to understand, is that what this person is referring to is not his experience, since the disturbing noise came at the very end of the show, but the way his mind will always remember it. His remembering self took over, as a lot of ours did, and now remembering becomes the key to happiness. More mobiles phones in the air every concerts you go? Nobody actually sees anything but they film anyway? Remembering selves at work…
So when you prepare your next event, wine tasting or product launching, do not only provide an incredible experience, but also a memorable moment. Because pleasing the remembering self seems more accurate every time and the ideal client, or consumer, isn’t the happiest one?
Get a bit further:
Watch the Video from Ted.com