Title: Memetics – Problem Circle – Poul Goldschadt 2002
It has become a problem. The logic of society is equated with the internal logic of organizations: the pursuit of profit and competitive advantages. The logic of society and community is abolished, the logic of financial capital, the irrationality of the liberal market, overrides and prevents criticism.
Reality is a constructed simulation, an imaginary circus and marketplace where everything is available, for sale, here and now. Reality has turned into the market, humans into consumers, desire machines in motion. Society as reason and progress toward something better, Hegelian historical optimism, the phenomenology of the spirit is canceled. The demythologization has turned into a new mythology.
The individual as a citizen and consumer is constituted through identity choices: lifestyle, social class, cultural horizon. Needs, desires, motives, and behavior dissolve into pure form, covered with products and services. The population is kept on the outside, terrorized to identify with the aggressor, i.e., the secure bases. The ethnocentric cage-men.
Market communication Market communication – press, advertising, and entertainment – is, as is well known, organized as language games! and it is these language games that can form the basis for analyses of the conditions – not the products. This applies to the relationship between product/service and consumer. Symbolic relations, commodity fetishism, value abstraction. Violence fascination.
On one side, the industrial mass society with mass-produced brands sold on monopolistic mass markets, multinational franchise chains. And on the other side, the last decade with the transition to the post-industrial society, or the “data and information society,” cyberspace – is abolished and supplemented in an extremely complex “demassified” market, consisting of a large number of smaller, highly specialized submarkets.
It is especially the proliferation of the Internet, data and information technologies, (cognitive psychology), and thereby the tremendous proliferation of mass media, such as films, TV series, radio, and magazines, that over the last twenty years have created a globally almost uniform work and consumption pattern among the more educated segments of the populations, especially in the Western world: Europe, the USA, and Japan. Sociologically, there is a uniform pattern of development characterized by an increasing number of divorces, double-income households breaking up, declining birth rates, changes in behavior and morality between generations. Increasing social costs, an aging population, and massive unemployment, also among skilled workers.
We have experienced significant social and cultural mobility and progress, but at the same time, a contradictory breakdown of previously narrow culturally conditioned hierarchical structures, family, work context, and religion, group affiliations, and personal identity. In the future, national borders and/or ethnic peculiarities seem to be simply dissolved and blurred – towards identical groups with the same consumption patterns, interests, and opinions. Products like video, MTV, jeans, walk-man, fast food, ketchup, cola, cosmetics, cappuccino, espresso, pasta, sushi, world beat, rainbow movements, work-out are universal and known and accepted among large parts of the youth and the educated middle class.
Even language usage is common, especially English phrases have slipped in as if they were national. This also applies to education with orientations towards “American” business education. One can popularly say that today the vertical difference between age groups (generation gap) is greater than the differences found within the same age groups in the three areas, i.e., a punk or yuppie in Denmark has more in common with the same in Japan and the USA than with the “fisherman in Hanstholm” or the “farmer from Nysted.” The products in use are the best guidance and praise. Who dares to break conventions? The system’s cement is the fear of breaking out, being different. Who dares to escape his mother’s love? The products are not consumed just because their practical function is exhausted. The products are part of a coherent sign system, neuro-semiotic. The seemingly random innocent appearance of the products conceals a core of imaginary use values and a specific logical structure, and it is evil.
Reality has become a supermarket! The shopping centers are the collective sacred gathering places. The concrete utility values that the objects/products may have are today more than ever assigned a number of imaginary libidinous utility values. The staging of gender, sexuality produces repressions, compulsions, and frustrations. Through this, the Western individual becomes more easily manipulable, permanent dissatisfaction prevails and produces neurotic wage-slaves. Utility values are replaced by symbolic values. Satisfaction of needs does not take place through the concrete product but through the daily symbolic intake. The consumer moves from one product to another, from the product to the image of the product, from the image of the product to the product… to a conversation about the product… from the current product to the next.
Today, goods are produced largely with a view to satisfying the needs for product symbolism. The previously oversensory has been demystified and made sensual and enters all stages of product calculations, although this is not transparent to individuals.
The deceivers are responsible for the interventions: only and solely through information, advertising, and the commercial creative design of communication between producer and consumer does everything come about, and what’s more – these changes correspond to the expectations of the individual consumer, who willingly lets himself be seduced. Some even present themselves as standard-bearers for products and ideologies. Blinded by the imagined welfare and the miracles and functionality of the products. The logic of the system is opaque. It is a common consumption consensus – not only induced by advertising – that pleads for a specific social model – the global market economy. The great freedom is translated into the freedom to choose between identical products, and the individual’s happiness depends on the “right” choice. The system determines and values – not the citizens as consumers.
The Mutants’ Paradise Previously, researchers perceived “reality or the market – out there” as the subject of their studies. In the future, the marketplace lies between the ears of the consumer. The consumer’s consciousness (the inner market) is the battlefield where market shares are won and lost. The analysis of the individual, the consumer’s narcissistic conscious and unconscious needs and desires, lifestyle, and shopping behavior, advances today and has imposed a new need on multinational organizations, including modern qualitative communication analyses – dynamic psychosemiotics. The reverse black box.
The historical development went from the “merchant’s drawer commodity,” the generic product (craft and manufacture), to industrial mass production that necessitated mass sales, which could be accomplished through advertising, to the invention in the 50s and 60s of “brands” and the “age of products” with many technological improvements. The 50s and 60s were the growth period of mass marketing. Different brand names and “Unique Selling Propositions” were hammered into consumers’ consciousness using simple means. Repetition and repetition of the same brand and slogan. Hit the mostest, with the mostest, for the longest time. The most common tools were simple exclamation marks and exclamation marks.
The multinational brand companies built up global markets in mass markets. The logic of mass advertising was to create a uniformity in the consumer’s unconscious or consciousness through overstimulation of the senses. Something that in part succeeded in creating mass markets. The world would be one big market – with the USA as the symbolic center. The growth and power of the multinational corporations in a vertical and horizontal direction became a reality – a small number of companies dominated the world market in most commodity groups. They also expanded into the mass markets and created a vertical monopoly. In the 70s, however, the major oil crises were replaced by commodity crises, and increased competition led to the breaking of the dominance of a few major companies. New companies took over the role and challenged the old dominance. Mass marketing went from the “age of products” to the “age of brands.” From generic products and interchangeable commodities to brands, products with strong signals and connotations. One then went from simple mass marketing to targeting marketing – and here the new era in the 90s began, the transition to lifestyle marketing – lifestyle vs. brand.
Marketing theory and methods were redefined and began to be based on research in consumer psychology and a holistic approach to the consumer. No more attention was given to static sales targets. Instead, the marketing strategy was planned with a view to increasing the customer’s brand loyalty. This period is characterized by the transition from mass advertising to micro-marketing – from the mass market to the mass niche and from mass marketing to micromarketing. While mass marketing aimed at attracting a large group of consumers to the same brand, the lifestyle marketing strategy is designed to draw attention to the small differences that distinguish one brand from another.
Lifestyle The market dynamic, characteristic of lifestyle, arises when symbolic goods are exchanged. This is where the secret and the power of lifestyle marketing lies. The goods must be symbolically meaningful, rather than functional. What is crucial is not whether the product is the best, but the product must have symbolic connotations – must be part of a narrative, a story that the consumer is willing to enter into. What is essential is not that the product satisfies a real need – but that the product has symbolic values that satisfy the consumer’s desire for symbolic meaning. Lifestyle goods are “metaphysical” values and are grounded in a system of imaginary values and symbolic meaning. Lifestyle goods are signs that stimulate and symbolize meanings. It is precisely the symbolic value that is essential for the goods, for the commodity. It is precisely this value that characterizes lifestyle marketing. It is the symbolic exchange value of goods that is the core of lifestyle marketing.
The market dynamic, characteristic of lifestyle, arises when symbolic goods are exchanged. This is where the secret and the power of lifestyle marketing lies. The goods must be symbolically meaningful, rather than functional. What is crucial is not whether the product is the best, but the product must have symbolic connotations – must be part of a narrative, a story that the consumer is willing to enter into. What is essential is not that the product satisfies a real need – but that the product has symbolic values that satisfy the consumer’s desire for symbolic meaning. Lifestyle goods are “metaphysical” values and are grounded in a system of imaginary values and symbolic meaning. Lifestyle goods are signs that stimulate and symbolize meanings. It is precisely the symbolic value that is essential for the goods, for the commodity. It is precisely this value that characterizes lifestyle marketing. It is the symbolic exchange value of goods that is the core of lifestyle marketing.
Conclusion
Lifestyle marketing does not satisfy real needs but creates needs and desires. It is a system of imaginary values that creates a desire for meanings. The goods function as symbolic metaphors and are part of the narrative about the good life, the good life. This explains the great success of the Coca-Cola brand, the Walkman, the Nike brand, the Calvin Klein brand, etc. Here, the brand is not just a brand. The brand is a symbolic, metaphysical, and imaginary sign that creates a desire for meaning. The brand is a narrative, a history that the consumer is willing to enter into. The brand is a myth.
Lifestyle marketing takes place in a universe where the market is dominated by sign exchange value and where a great deal of economic activity is involved in creating signs and symbols. Lifestyle marketing takes place where products are not only symbolic, but where products create symbols and meanings, where products are symbolically meaningful.
The commodities, goods, are a result of a long, intensive, and highly advanced semiotic work that has been invested in creating the symbols and signs that make the goods desirable. Lifestyle marketing takes place where the consumers are willing to accept being manipulated, willing to accept that the goods do not satisfy any real needs – except the need for meaning.
The market dynamic is created through the exchange of symbolic goods. The market dynamic arises when symbolic goods are exchanged. This is where the secret and the power of lifestyle marketing lie. The goods must be symbolically meaningful, rather than functional. What is crucial is not whether the product is the best, but the product must have symbolic connotations – must be part of a narrative, a story that the consumer is willing to enter into. What is essential is not that the product satisfies a real need – but that the product has symbolic values that satisfy the consumer’s desire for symbolic meaning. Lifestyle goods are “metaphysical” values and are grounded in a system of imaginary values and symbolic meaning. Lifestyle goods are signs that stimulate and symbolize meanings. It is precisely the symbolic value that is essential for the goods, for the commodity. It is precisely this value that characterizes lifestyle marketing. It is the symbolic exchange value of goods that is the core of lifestyle marketing.
