While there is no way you would ever find me quoting scripture (I’m wholly unqualified), I did grow up with some of the vernacular of the church-goer. So forgive me these post titles.
Came across an interesting note in the New Yorker on the style of reporting/storytelling used in chronicling the Great Migration: that massive movement of rural ‘folks’ from the rural world of the South to the urban world of big Northern cities like Chicago and New York. The piece, a book review by Jill Lepore, entitled “The Uprooted” appears in the September 6, 2010 issue. (I’m blogging from my phone or I’d provide the links). It’s worth a read; my familiarity with the topic comes mainly from my study of the history of jazz, while in college. The form of jazz morphed as it migrated, taking on local flavor via exposure to other musical forms, ethnicities, and tempos. I am left also with a memory of finding ‘Invisible Man’ nearly impenetrable as a 16 or 17 year old, but knowing that loss, separation, disenfranchisement were central (I often find the emotion of a story comes through even when I have no idea what a story is about).
So, definitely worth a read, if only to direct my attention to books that deal with the Great Migration in depth.
But a passage stood out:
Wright expressed, in vernacular, an argument of the Chicago School of sociologists, who, beginning in the nineteen-twenties, had been studying the Great Migration, crunching the numbers, calculating averages, compiling reports… about black life in the Urban North. “Perhaps never in history has a more utterly unprepared folk wanted to go to the city,” Wright wrote. In the Chicago School argument, the folk, in the city, crash into modernity; uprooting means loss, especially loss of community, an argument that has long been debated, and that Wilkerson doesn’t so much take on as steer clear of. Her folk don’t crash; they struggle, they study, they strive and even thrive. More to the point, she doesn’t call them folk, and for all that her work shares with Wright’s, her project has less in common with the documentary populism of the nineteen-thirties, which, like Chicago School sociology, was always about the collective (if you could just talk to enough people, take enough photographs, conduct enough surveys, you could, finally, record what it meant to be human), than with the new narrative journalism of the nineteen-sixties, which was always about the individual (if you could just find the right person to talk to, and it had to be an ordinary person, you could write the story of everyone). Wilkerson’s work, in other words, is more novelistic than documentary…
It seems that as brands struggle with observation, understanding, listening, and insight mining, it is struggling less with market research trends and more with journalistic ones. Brands must chronicle the lives of consumers, one assumes, as a means by which they will understand those lives. But there is a constant tension of method. We must talk to many people and canvas their attitudes and perceptions because then we will know what it means to be this consumer segment. Then we must find the right representatives of this consumer segment to help us write the story of everyone within that segment. When those stories don’t mesh, when so-called outliers appear, or worse, speak up, it feels like the foundation of the narrative wobbles, or worse, teeters and collapses.
I have a solution. Accept the work of the strategic planner (in concert with market researchers) as being as rigorous as is possible when there is an unreliable narrator and an unreliable reader. Furthermore, accept that the work of the creative brief or the segment portrait is novelistic rather than documentary. And finally, accept that the role of most marketing is not to present the world as it is, but rather to present a profoundly (and this is not about size or scope but impact/depth) altered model of the world, predicated on idealizations, simplifications, archetypes and aspiration. Verifiable accounts of how “the consumer” spends her day are only useful in juxtaposition to how she believes she spends her day, how she wishes she spent her day, what she wishes her day would mean for the day after, and what she wants that day to mean.
Then there is that next step I will always promote: the part where some smart person, some creative imagineer, puts forward an idea about some other, new, more fulfilling day, presented in an undeniably true, deeply affecting way.
So, not just novelistic, but theatrical. That’s the sweet spot. Might be helpful to discard the veneer of science and focus on the performance and persuasion. Also. might be more fun.