Can We Sell Feelings and Ding Dongs?

I found several of the statements in the Cluetrain Manifesto 95 Theses compelling and close to home.

My generation grew up online and is constantly written about. We don’t do this and don’t do that. We are DIY and resistant to mainstream techniques. This got me wondering about just how I make my decisions about products. The answer is blogs and buddies.

I rely on conversations by people that I have come to trust by reading their blogs to help me make decisions about where to go on a Friday night, what movie to see, what new drink I should order, or where the best take out is. Instead of listening to mass advertising to tell me where to go to dinner, I turn to hyperlocal sources like LAist to give me ideas. Even though I am not a gentrified hipster like they tend to be, I’d rather check out a place they recommend than go to The Olive Garden again. Granted, I usually end up eating a sandwich at home, but if I could afford to go out, I’d do it that way.

There is an odd obsession among my peers for the mom and pop stores and the hole in wall eateries. It doesn’t exactly feel like nostalgia or a search for authenticity because we’ll take a well done knock off. It is an odd phenomena of surface obsession. It would seem that my generation wants to feel like they are buying from a market with locally grown produce even though they are at Ralph’s Fresh Fare and that they are sticking it to the man (and saving the environment) by using reusable grocery bags that just so happen to have giant logos on the sides. Not that I really disapprove of any of this, it just seems to present the oddest of challenges for marketers. How do you reach an audience that just wants to feel like they are doing one thing when they may in fact actually be doing the opposite?

The 95 Theses reading suggests that it is about the conversation. I find this particularly compelling because if you can create the right buzz around something, it would seem that my generation will try it just because someone told them it was awesome. It doesn’t seem to take much to get me to do something once the right people have told me to do it. Infiltrating these networks proves to be the hardest part. Who decided that Ralph’s Fresh Fare in downtown LA was better than the one on Vermont and Adams? My friend did. She said they had a cool salad bar and wine tasting etc. While it has some definite perks above my usual Ralph’s (like a meat counter, which I can’t actually afford to buy from most of the time, but it is there), it lacks other things in its quest to be hip. This negotiation is the most interesting part of what is happening to a lot of mainstream stores in their quest to reach out to my fellow twenty-somethings. They will build us a fancy grocery store with organic produce sections, wine cellars with sommeliers, and gourmet salad bars but they won’t sell us a Hostess Snowball prepackaged treat.

In the end, space is finite. And the choice was made that Hipsters and Fancy Ralphs don’t do Ding Dongs.

-e
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