Reflecting vaguely Simmons’ Marketing to postmodern consumers: introducing internet chameleon (European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 42 pp. 299-310, 2008). As the headline of the study suggests, Simmons provides an introduction of Internet as changing marketing tool. He approaches the subject from brand consumption's point of view. He sees that Internet is a marketing tool that reconciles the tension between individualism and social brand consumption.
Marketers are challenged by the ever fragmenting markets that are dispersing to smaller and smaller segments. In addition to the worry over coming across masses, is the need to win over that one consumer, too. Postmodernity in consumption can also be seen as fragmentation of experience consisting of a series of interrelated ideas, preferences and representations of selves. Thus the self is essentially decentred. Fragmentation is along side with shallow realm the two positions representing postmodern consumer.
Postmodern consumer – a puzzle
Simmons notes that much of the media (television, music and film) increasingly resemble each other, presenting collages of fleeting moments that excite senses yet rarely connect to a central theme or focus. He further states that these collages of fleeting moments fit to postmodern consumers’ loss of commitment to any single lifestyle or belief system. This kind of detachment promotes their identity jigsaw consisting of various representations of selves even when approaching same product category.
The second position defining the postmodern consumer is the world they live in: superficial and shallow reality, a world mediated by simulation and hyper-real experiences. Postmodern culture has created a partly disinterested nostalgia but also prestalgia, the longing the moments already in advance. The representation of an imagined past or future in the present, focuses postmodern consumption on the ‘right here, right now’. Consumers’ perception of time of is fragmented as they experience themes, tastes, sounds from the past and the future in the perpetual present until they move to the next exciting experience.
These fleeting moments and the concept of time dimensions come down to attention. Consumers are drowning in information and marketing messages for which attention has become most scarce resource of information economy. You can’t store attention for future use, you can’t allocate it nor can you measure it properly. But can you predict it? What drives consumer's attention? The answer is obvious: me, myself and I.
Brand consumption
In attention economy, intellectual property, arts and letters, virtual text are the power how attention allocated. Even letters have to compete with video and images. So the question is, how does brand consumption fit in to this kind of attention economy?
Lanham states that if attention is the center of the economy, so is style as the devices that regulate attention are stylistic devices. Postmodern consumers has become obsessed with appearance, where style is a ready and heady substitute for identity, and presentation is viewed as having much more kudos than essence. Consumption/brands is used as means of appropriate and construct self-images that allow consumers to become more desirable and/or likeable in various social contexts. They can switch images and utilise consumption to liberate them from monotony and conformity.
According to the postmodern manifesto, the meanings of objects are no longer fixed and linked to their functions, but are free-floating and individually defined. Thus, it’s the relationship that what matters to the consumers, not the actual object. Brand is a relationship that the consumer utilizes and modifies with one’s meanings, the product/service itself is secondary.
‘Never have there been so many neat cars out there, so much new and useful engineering, so many marvelous roads to drive them on….. Yet the felt center of the car business has gravitated to design and the brand recognition that design can create. […] And you don’t buy car anymore – you lease it like a piece of software that wears out its welcome in three years.’ (Lanham 2006)
Style’s role in consumption also means that brands are more and more mediated through digital graphics. The real world becomes a printout through digital graphics and design, and we more and more live in synthetic reality from TV to games and university lectures (Lanham 2008). Style penetrates all, and thus we ought to ask what is the relation between style and substance within and cross different contexts.
Being individual together
There have been arguments that today’s culture of building highly individualized identities through consumption is alienating. This crisis is not new, though. Lanham notes that Western culture has been confronting a crisis of self-consciousness ever since the Renaissance which has only accelerated after Darwin and digital era. To come terms with self-consciousness is accepting the kind of being we are. In this different identities and representations of self through consumption. Or letting go of the stigma of seeking individuality and consumption.
But rather than disappearing, the forms of socializing are reforming. Neo-tribes, networks of people gathering homogeneously together for social interaction, especially around consumption and brands are growing in the web. Spinning social bonds occur now on personal self-exhibition in front of other consumers through marks and rituals linked to brands. It seems that people do not want to build up their identities and representations of selves in isolation but with communities.
This need is essentially seeking for attention. Individuality calls for reactions. Lanham discusses Hawthorne Experiment as an example to demonstrate the efficiency behind attention: observation is the key. When you share ‘your thing’ with others, you socialize it. This way the individuality becomes more real, more interesting and worth to aspire. For example, in all sorts of performance programs at work places, more attention makes people work harder. Lanham calls this theatrical self-awareness.
What else is blogging or participating in social media than attention - theatrical self-awareness? Observation, audience, reaction or whatever you want to name it, is the driving force behind the need to show individuality publicly. Building identity and representations of self can be seen as circle of attention, as consumers use these fleeting moments and manifest them to and with others.
Few words on Internet as Marketing Tool
The overall challenge is how to engage postmodern consumers individually and communally. Simmons states that marketers need to empower postmodern consumers to become marketers of their own self-images. Postmodernity calls for experience-based marketing. Marketing techniques need to allow consumers to construct for themselves different styles, forms and types of the same product, to utilize in their representations of different self-images in different situations. Internet enables this and the social aspect of it as Internet allows direct, real-time, individualized interaction with consumers on one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many basis to assure consumers’ objectives.
In user-controlled online environment, the brand proposition has to be highly compelling in order to initiate interaction. The idea that companies can utilize their brand websites to create consumer communities, is not dead yet even though entropy is taking over the social web, too. Creating consumer community is far more complicated than providing a virtual platform as Simmons suggests. Of course ideally, marketers would like to have all the information needed from one place, however nowadays web is so fragmented that a brand needs to be crossmedia and preferrably transmedia. Transmedia is the essentially providing these fleeting moments discussed above over and around a brand for people to build up their own collages.
Personally I don’t like the Internet as tool –thinking because it hinders realizing the goals of online or social media marketing. You can use marketing tools within the Web, but the Internet itself must be comprehended on a broader way than as a tool or technology. Internet is not separate reality; rather people are connected through it every day.
Even though the headline is outdated, Simmons touches many important issues yet to be explored: postmodern consumerism and experience-based marketing as discussed earlier but also collaborative customization. The Internet is really taking this to a new level as the voluntary front-end of RD is getting bigger and bigger when enthusiasts and professionals combine their interests independently or with corporations.
Sources:
Lanham Richard A. (2006) The Economics of Attention: style and substance in the age of information. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Simmons, G. (2008). Marketing to postmodern consumers: introducing internet chameleon. European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 42 (3/4), pp. 299-310.
