Do You Trust Your Audience?
One evening last week I found myself deep in an internet rabbit hole anxiously researching symptoms of obscure medical conditions and dredging my memory to recall whether I had ever experienced any of them. I couldn’t fall asleep that night. My mind was spinning over vague sensations and painting what-if scenarios of premature aging, catastrophic vitamin deficiencies, disease and death.
Ironically, my mental tailspin was inspired by a wellness product that my friend recommended to me — some supplements that she said were making her feel great. She sent me the link to the product website and I took a quiz to “see which formula was right for me” — everything went downhill from there.
I relayed the story to one of my mentors, who noted that, when she was considering writing a book, she spoke with an agent who said the key to selling self-help books was to tell people that something is wrong with them and then promise that your book will help them fix it.
My fellow baby Marxist anarcho-syndicalists will be familiar with ideas about manufactured desire and the history of diverting the fears and discontents of the masses from revolutionary action into the desire for more kitchen appliances. In “The Century of the Self,” documentarian Adam Curtis compellingly describes how the modern public relations and advertising industries are rooted in the post WWII belief that the latent desires of average people were, in the aggregate, antisocial, violent and destructive.
“A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick.”
In the simplest terms, most products and services have been marketed based on an underlying story that we are at best incomplete and at worst, downright dirty, ugly and alone — that is until we buy the right car, night cream or breakfast cereal!
As an entrepreneur in the branding and communication design space, I think a lot about the assumptions that underlie messages and visual design. I am as vulnerable to fear-based marketing as anyone else, but I also believe that we can enroll each other to take action by cultivating mentorship, compassion and vision. It is possible that this approach cuts down on impulse buying/voting/reposting, but perhaps it also fosters more durable long-term relationships and more conscious choice.
This ethos of conscious choosing requires us to trust our audiences. In an era of loneliness and more social media than human-to-human socializing, I believe that trust (in self and others) is a secret currency of our day. How much trust are you cultivating in your life and work? How do you discern when and to what extent it is safe for you or your organization to be transparent or go public with your story?